Category: Search Engine Land

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 … Continue reading »

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 … Continue reading »

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 … Continue reading »

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 … Continue reading »

In 2009, Google proposed a standard for crawlable AJAX. A few months later, that standard went live and while I thought it was great Google was providing options to content owners to ensure their sites were indexed well, I noted at the time that “this method doesn’t work for search engines other than Google. So if … Continue reading »

As I noted a couple of days ago, Google has started rolling out user interface changes to many of their products, including search. Google plans to continuing evolving the UI throughout the summer, and in some cases, that includes removing functionality. Presumably, Google is removing features that weren’t used often or are being replaced with … Continue reading »