Nine By Blue » Search Engine Land

Taking a Closer Look at the Google’s Panda 2.5 “Flux”

Vanessa Fox — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 19:35:43 +0000

On around September 27th, Google launched what’s being called 2.5 of its Panda algorithm. On October 5th, Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted:

“Weather report: expect some Panda-related flux in the next few weeks, but will have less impact than previous updates (~2%).”

Panda-related flux? Indeed, this seems to be the case, with site owners reporting Panda-related changes on at least October 3rd and October 13th. In several cases, I saw sites with Google organic traffic declines on 9/27, recovery on 10/3, and decline again on 10/13.

Read the entire article at Search Engine Land

The Clickthrough Rate Equation In Organic Search

Todd Nemet — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 15:59:29 +0000

When I was in middle school, my favorite book and my favorite TV show were both Cosmos by Carl Sagan. I must have read the book at least 10 times, and I watched the series every time it was on the local PBS station.

One of the most interesting parts of Cosmos that has stuck with me is the Drake equation:

The Drake equation is an attempt to estimate the current number of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way by breaking it down into component parts (such as “f(p), the fraction of stars that have planets” and “f(l), the fraction of planets capable of sustaining life”) and then multiplying them all together.

Read the entire article at Search Engine Land.

Pew Internet: Diving Into How We Access Local News

Vanessa Fox — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:37:49 +0000

In studies of the evolution in how Americans seek out news, the trends tend to be that we use search and other online methods for staying informed. The consistent exception is how we access local news. Despite the proliferation of hyperlocal blogging (my own neighborhood’s West Seattle Blog being an excellent example of how hyperlocal blogs can provide both high-quality journalism and to-the-minute breaking news about every local happening), we turn to TV and print far more often than online news sources and search for local news.

Google Provides New Options for Paginated Content

Vanessa Fox — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 22:47:41 +0000

At SMX Advanced earlier this year, a hot topic was the use of the rel=”canonical” attribute in conjunction with pagination. Maile Ohye of Google noted that the rel=”canonical” attribute was not intended to cluster multiple pages (articles, product lists, etc.) to page one of that series (although it can be used to cluster multiple pages to a “view all” page).

The discussion was fast and furious and we dove into the various pagination issues that content owners encounter. Maile took the feedback to Google and they got to work on some options. The goal? To present some new solutions at SMX East at a panel set up just to talk through pagination issues. Today, be impressed with my multitasking skills as I write this article that describes these new solutions while I moderate the session!

Tricks For Taming Keywords With Regular Expressions

Todd Nemet — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 16:31:26 +0000

So far my articles about technical SEO have focused on how to adjust a site’s configuration or architecture to make it more crawlable and indexable. In this post, I’m writing about the other end of the technical SEO process: using analytics data to analyze traffic and user behavior by keywords.

When looking at keyword data, it’s important to group them by type. Looking at individual keywords is not only inefficient, but it will generally lead to information that is either misleading or worse, can’t be acted on.

The most precise way to group keywords is by using regular expressions. Regular Expressions are strings containing letters, numbers, and special characters that match a specific word or group of words.

Read the article at Search Engine Land.

Google’s Panda Update Launches Internationally in Most Languages

Vanessa Fox — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 18:45:23 +0000

Google has just announced that their “Panda” rankings changes, first launched in the United States in late February and rolled out toEnglish language indices internationally in April, have now launched internationally in all languages other than Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Read the article at Search Engine Land

How To Improve Crawl Efficiency With Cache Control Headers

Todd Nemet — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 19:40:29 +0000

Way back at the end of the last century, I worked for a company called Inktomi. Most people remember Inktomi as a search engine, but it had several other divisions. One of these divisions (the one I worked for) sold networking software, including a proxy-cache called Traffic Server.

It seems weird now, but Inktomi made more money from Traffic Server than it did from the search engine. Such were the economics of the pre-Google Internet. It was a great business until 1) bandwidth got really, really cheap and 2) almost all of the customers went out of business in late 2000/early 2001. (Most of Inktomi was acquired by Yahoo! in 2002, and Traffic Server was released as an open source project in 2009.)

Read the entire article on Search Engine Land.

Google Adds URL Parameter Options to Google Webmaster Tools

Vanessa Fox — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 03:01:54 +0000

In 2009, Google launched the parameter handling feature of Google webmaster tools, which enabled site owners to specify the parameters on their site that were optional vs. required. A year later, they improved this feature by providing an option for a default value. Google says that they’ve seen a positive impact from the usage of those tools thus far.” Now, they’ve improved the feature again, by enabling site owners to specify how a parameter changes the content of the page.

How Twitter’s Technical Infrastructure Issues Are Impacting Google Search Results

Vanessa Fox — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 03:02:14 +0000

In the last few days, several noticed that the Google Toolbar PageRank value for www.twitter.com had plummeted to 0 (it’s now back to its previous 9). Was Google punishing Twitter for how things went down with the feed expiration that temporarily derailed Google’s Realtime search efforts? Nah, Twitter’s website has just been suffering from technical infrastructure issues that are hindering Google’s ability to crawl and index it now that Google is relying on that crawl vs. a direct API feed. This is a great example of how technical infrastructure can make a huge impact in search results and the issues Twitter are experiencing are common to large sites.

4 Ideas To Improve IIS & .NET For Technical SEO

Todd Nemet — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 19:42:02 +0000

In June 2011, I spoke at SMX Advanced about SEO issues that I commonly run in to during technical SEO site evaluations. The part of my presentation that dealt with Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) generated a lot of comments and questions afterward, so this column addresses some of those questions about how to improve techncial SEO on the Microsoft stack.

First, a caveat: The majority of my experience has been with Linux- and BSD-based operating systems, starting with SunOS way back at Berkeley, so I’m definitely not an expert on deploying servers on Windows and/or .NET.

Read the entire article on Search Engine Land