Category Archives: Google - Page 3

The question of a white hat or a black hat

Just came from a session at the SES called Black hat/White hat “Unconferenced” hosted by Matt McGowan, Publisher & head of U.S. Incisive Media and Mike Grehan, Global VP Content, SES/Search Engine Watch and ClickZ (believe they are merging). Everyone that came to this session was offered a white hat or a black hat to wear, in my case I got the black.

Not that I am a black hat in the sense that I use under the radar none ethical tactics when marketing online, nobe more because that the size of the black hat fitted my head better. Great session that taught me black hats have bigger heads than white hats or that Matt and Mike did not order enough hats for people with big heads, either way fantastic session and great fun!

JD Sports in the UK comes up in the US but does not have the product

I was recently traveling on the US, speaking at the SES in NY. My eight year old daughter asked me to buy her a pair of shoes, to be exact Apple Bottoms. As I went to Footlocker to buy them I realized that they did not carry them anymore so I decided to Google and see what came up.

First when I searched Footlockers internal search nothing came up and as I have learned through the years Internal search on big sites can by quite faulty so I tested if Google found something but no results. But what happened was that JD Sports came up as a PPC result. JD was most likely not targeting me as I was in the US at the time with my Icelandic keyboard. But as I was searching on Google UK JD came up, with a nice ad saying

Apple Bottom at JD
Get the new line of Apple Bottoms
Women’s ware quick and easy at JD!

When I saw the add I tough to myself well if I cannot buy it in the US I might as well when I am next over to London. But when I clicked on the ad I got nothing, that is I got a page saying “Sorry, we have not been able match anything to your search” it was not a 404 page it was a search result page with no results. Still not sure where to buy the Apple Bottoms for my daughter.

SEO guidelines for big sites

Firstly what is a big site? Is it 10.000 pages or 100.000 or even 100.000? My experience is that sites that more than 10 .000 to 15.000 pages start to show the same symptoms, the main problem in most cases is the WCMS (web content management system), how it is used to manage the sites content.

This can be how templates are designed to show and possibly reuse content. Little problems within sites that contain millions of pages can occur again and again and grow from being a minor glitch in being a huge disaster that prevents search visibility. Read more »

Better website search powered by Google

During a lunch break at the SES NY Nitin Mangtani, Senior Product Manager, Enterprise Search,  Google is telling us about their new site search services. The idea is to improve search options on sites. According to a research done by Google around 90% of those that have search options on their sites are unhappy with the results it brings.

Internet and gaming rehab for Brits with addiction

pc-rehabI was travelling in the UK recently and saw on the front page of the London Evening Standard news about the UK being the first country to open up a rehab centre for Internet and computer game junkies. What was shocking (but not surprising) was how young the kids were that needed to go into rehab because of their Internet addiction.  As stated in the paper children as young as twelve will need to go “cold turkey” in a residential unit to help them fight their addiction and to help them take on the world again they will be taught face to face social skills.

So now we will have people going to IA and GA meetings as recovering Internet/Gamingholic. Good luck!

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77% of all Internet users read blogs

According to the blog search engine Technorati, around 77% of active Internet users read blogs; ComScore claims this figure to be around 346 million people. However, if Internet World Stats makes any sense this figure should be close to 1.3 billion and the percentage of active users should be closer to 20% rather than 77% if ComScore is correct.

Either way it’s a big number! The bottom line is that everything is being talked about and companies deciding not to take part in the talk need to at least listen and react.

Twitter to start an advertising program this spring

Twitter social chart-tweets-per-day3_x460networking and blogging messages are known as tweets messages.  These tweets posts are text based statements consisting of up to 140 characters, displaying related searches on Twitter.

Twitter users are twitting on news, education, political campaigns and simple daily things one wants to share with others. Twitter usage is on the rise with around 74.000.000 users in January 2010 worldwide; a sharp 8% rise from December 2009.

Nielsen Company announce top U.S Search Providers

The American marketing and advertising research company, Nielsen, provides an up-to-date understanding of consumers and markets worldwide with the Top U.S. Search Providers report for January 2010.

The total number of web searches conducted during January 2010 was 10,272,099. Nielsen Online estimated a total of 8.1 billion web searches in comparison to November last year, which also indicated a 9.6% increase in overall web searches during the same month in 2008. Read more »

NetApplications says Google Chrome now as around 4.4% marketshare

Last December NetApplications reported that Google Chrome had around 4.4% marketshare, according to the data I can see throug the web analytics on my sites this sounds about right, for International sites it is around that figure but for my home country it’s little less, or around 4%

Is the speed of your web page an important ranking factor for Google?

Fast-Loading-WebsiteA few weeks ago, Google announced its new focus on fast loading pages as part of quality involved in the searching experience. This means that Google´s ranking algorithm may take into consideration the speed of a web page.

Since Google’s ranking algorithm isn’t 100% clear, the points below are rather a theory that may improve your website ranking in Google.  Experiment if you can and share your results, here are some easy to make changes: Read more »

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