Google Webmaster’s Tools: Top 5 Uses

SEOchat.com posts a decent reminder in importance and prioritizing. Using Google Webmaster Tools will only help if you get data that tells you what to do, though. As with all tools, use the data incontext and not as dictation. 1% SEO for the little things, 99% SEO for everything else.

Chat Man

The Five Most Important Things You Can Do with Google Webmaster Tools

Rating: 5 stars / 3

2009-08-11

Table of Contents:

# The Five Most Important Things You Can Do with Google Webmaster Tools

# Finish Verifying the Site

# Second and Third Important GWT Tasks

# Fourth and Fifth Important GWT Tasks

via The Five Most Important Things You Can Do with Google Webmaster Tools.

Caffeine Update – Moogle Insights

Matt posts a quickie to inform the masses that the Caffeine Update is not, directly, a SERP change, but more of an update to the chassis of Google Work.

Although, there may be some SERP changes; so you should check ‘em out at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/.

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

More info on the Caffeine Update

August 10, 2009

in Google/SEO

via More info on the Caffeine Update.

Have You Bing Crawled?

A post on the Live blog goes into discussion of the MSNBot and crawl delay.

My professional opinion leans toward not setting a crawl rate, at all. SEs will gauge the ‘crawlability’ of your site and will crawl at a frequency that is best suited for that site.

However, I do find it rather useful to have dynamic pages, such as news, blogs, and the like, to a more frequent setting so that the SEs are aware of and can find new, fresh content.

Crawl delay and the Bing crawler, MSNBot

Should you set a crawl delay?

Many factors affect the crawling of a site, including (but not limited to):

* The total number of pages on a site (is the site small, large, or somewhere in-between?)

* The size of the content (PDFs and Microsoft Office files are typically much larger than regular HTML files)

* The freshness of the content (how often is content added/removed/changed?)

* The number of allowed concurrent connections (a function of the web server infrastructure)

* The bandwidth of the site (a function of the host’s service provider; the lower the bandwidth, the lower the server’s capacity to serve page requests)

* How highly does the site rank (content judged as not relevant won’t be crawled as often as highly relevant content)

The rate at which a site is crawled is an amalgam of all of those factors and more.

via Bing – Crawl delay and the Bing crawler, MSNBot – Webmaster Blog – Bing Community.

Gleaned Insight from Google Patents in 2007

Tedster over at webmasterworld.com made some pretty astute observations of Google’s 2007 patent: Document Scoring Based on Link-Based Criteria.

The post discusses how often certain ‘areas’ of the page, such as footers, switch-out links to better detect paid linking. Many sites have relegated paid linking to footers and other segments of the page that seem natural.

The ambiguity of whether or not a page’s content should be updated on a regular basis is touched on, but is left just as ambiguous as ever. I think it’s common sense: If you have a news page, it should change quite frequently. If you have a statistics page, it should change as often as stats are measured. If you have a resource/reference page, then it should be updated ONLY as often as authoritative information changes.

I’m, personally, delighted to see that ‘partial indexing of pages’ is being given serious focus, if only briefly.

We all know, and have for some time, that the more inter-related terms a page ranks well for gives it better ranking for these terms, across-the-board.

I do, however, find that what is discussed about ranking ceiling, traffic throttling, and the yo-yo effect has some solid basis – as opposed to just giving SERP watchers something to complain about.

Enjoy!

Chat Man

clipped from www.webmasterworld.com Google’s Patent on Backlinks – many interesting clues from 2007 tedster With the current update apparently doing “something different” with backlinks, I went back for another reading of the 2007 patent application Document Scoring Based On Link-Based Criteria PAGE SEGMENTATION and RATES OF CHANGE Not only the back link juice itself is weighted differently, whether it changes is also given a different weight, depending on where the link appears on the page PAGE CHANGES CAN IMPROVE OR LOWER RANKINGS …it all depends on the query terms! PARTIAL INDEXING OF PAGES search engine may store “signatures” of documents instead of the (entire) documents themselves to detect changes to document content. RANKING FOR SEVERAL SEARCHES RANKING CEILINGS, TRAFFIC THROTTLING and the YO-YO EFFECT Google may allow a ranking to grow only at a certain rate, or apply a certain maximum threshold of growth for defined period of time.

8 Tips to Power Packed PDFs!

Sharon Housley of feedforall.com breaks down the important factors of PDF visibility into eight simple ‘to-dos.’ Keep these in mind when you publish your PDF to the web.

With my own experience of good, ‘ol fashioned trial-and-error, I also learned the following:

— Keeping text, especially Title Text and directional/decorated text, in its own PDF field is important. If you do not ‘field’ these items, you may end up with a jumbled mess of characters instead of a solid, spiderable, keyphrased title or header.

— Gain more keyphrase weight by reflecting/repeating keyphrases found on pages that link to your PDF and those pages that your PDF links to. (Only if this worked for HTML pages, too… Darn!)

— I don’t recommend archiving PDFs. Establish a URL and leave it!

— If you go through the trouble of publishing a PDF, at least get some credit for it by using in-copy linking with clean links.

— PDF Document Properties are also categorized and indexed. Not taking advantage of them is like not using alt text on your images.

— Use ‘outline’ formatting where possible to auto-generate heading tag formatting.

— Don’t publish a photo without having something relevant to say about it. Use event names, dates, branding, etc. Avoid: “Joe at the bar.” Use: “ABC’s Summer Picnic 2009: Joe’s Drinks.”

— If you think about file naming, logically, then picking off any minor visibility issues with ALL file names can only enhance spiderability.

If you have any tips of your own, leave a comment!

Chat Man

clipped from www.promotionworld.com Search Engine Optimization for PDFs by Sharon Housley July 31, 2009 1. Text Based the most important thing involves how the PDF file is created. 2. Optimize Text Text contained in a PDF file is very similar to web copy 3. Link Depth links to the PDF files that you wish to have indexed by the search engines should be on a web page that is frequently spidered by search engines. 4. Add Links 5. Document Properties this is done in Adobe Acrobat. Details: File -> Document Properties Advanced – > Document Meta-data 6. Bold Heading Use H1 or H2 tags to make headings and sub-titles bold. 7. Caption Under Photos search engines will index the image captions just as they would the “alt text” on a web page image 8. Name Of The PDF Use related keywords in the actual file name for the PDF file.

I said this a year ago….

Almost a year ago, exactly, I made comment that the landscape was changing. Now, with Yahoo! and Bing teaming up, it seems that the front-runner, Google, will no longer be the only big, bad dog to put up a fight….

clipped from seochatter.wordpress.com I’ve noticed a severe and drastic change in the landscape of search from just a month ago. Even if you’ve really been watching, you’ll be surprised to know that, in the past 3 weeks: Google data scrapers stopped working – SERP structure changes broke many SEO tools Google Chrome – The omnibox All indicators are that Google has not monopolized its browser Yahoo! BOSS – A whole new ability to “foster innovation in the search landscape” Yahoo! SiteExplorer new features Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update Yahoo! SearchMonkey – Yahoo!’s new developer platform that uses data web standards and structured data to enhance the usefulness of search results Live Search Webmaster Tools – All new look at Live’s indexes IE 8 – All indicators are that Micro$oft has not monopolized itsbrowser For that much activity across all search engines, within such a short period of time, one could only reason that competition is getting quite fierce!

How to Guarantee Noticeablity

Seth’s newest post has encouraged me to beef up the About Chat Man section of SEO Chatter. The plain and simple fact of the matter is that I am doing it differently: I want potential SEO clients to know what to ask their clients and what kinds of answers should be expected. 

Many thanks, Seth, for reminding me to remember *why* I do the things I do and undertake the projects I start.

clipped from sethgodin.typepad.com But you’re not saying anything Posted by Seth Godin on September 18, 2008 big companies didn’t want the logo to be part of their story, they just wanted it to fit in with all the other big company logos same thing goes on with pricing. If you price your products like the competition does, you’re not saying anything with your pricing. “Move along, there’s nothing to see here.” Marketing storytelling is not about doing everything differently. You do many things the same, intentionally, because those ’same things’ aren’t part of your story. It’s the different stuff where you will be noticed, and the different stuff where you tell your story. If you’re not telling a story with some aspect of your marketing choices, then make sure that aspect is exactly what people expect. To do otherwise is to create random noise, not to further your marketing.

Rumors with Foresight

I don’t know if there’s any truth to this particular post, due to questionable sources, but recent developments have made me think that this may be something in the works.

Afterall, it only makes sense for Google to acquire potential competition before rolling out ‘audio-to-text’ searching across the board.

clipped from www.searchenginejournal.com Rumor: Google is Set to Acquire a Company Named Valve September 17th, 2008 by Arnold Zafra Industry watchers are speculating on the reason behind Google’s decision to buy Valve (if indeed, the well placed sources leaked info is correct) Some are even thinking that Google maybe entering the video market, but no words have came out yet from the Google camp.

Is Query Reprocessing the Next Big Search Advancement?

The semantic web is difficult to index. With many enduring thanks to heteronyms, proper indexing of the web is still a good way off. Either we need to change the structure of language, globally (Yeah, talk about unrealistic), or someone has to devise more effective method of semantic disambiguation. Will Query Reprocessing be that method?

I think it may be a step forward, but does Query Reprocessing have the ability to tie in the contextually relevant words, as well? Hmm… Well, it can be done with ‘cars,’ what else can they do it with?

I think Query Reprocessing, if it advances and is embraced by the masses, will be highly effective at filtering malware/spam pages.

With that said, check out the post at SEOChat.com

clipped from www.seochat.com A Different Way to Search – Query reprocessing This approach, implemented by sites such as Hakia and Powerset (recently purchased by Microsoft), attempts to subject search queries to logical analysis in order to better determine the intentions of the searcher. Categorization This is the subdivision and display of short – often single-word – queries in categorized form to help the searcher distinguish between various interpretations of the search. Parallelism This feature enables certain terms in the search query to be dynamically replaced with others that have the same meaning in order to expand the result set. Hakia provide the example of “cure” replacing “treat” in a health query Generalization A typical search engine query contains general terms that if treated literally artificially limit the result set. Hakia’s generalization function will show results, for example, that contain the names of specific car manufacturers in response to a query that contains the word “car.”

Googleopoly Conspiracy Theorists with Programming Expertise Needed!

I begain touching on the concept of the Googleopoly with so many current advancements from SEs and the recent release of GChrome. Believe it or not, from those seemingly tangential writings, I was headed in a very specific direction; and the release of audio-to-text searching pushed me to share some speculation on my part.

(disclaimer: The following ideas are based on nothing other than my own observation and conjecture. I am not an official source of any company’s information, nor do I engage in conversation skewed toward anything other than open discussion. Basically, I like to theorize and argue; the following statements and proposals should be held in that context, alone.)

I’m not a programmer and I don’t pretend to be, so please grace me with forgiveness for asking what may, very well, be ‘obviously dumb’ questions:

1) Is there any chance that Google is building a crawler based on the technology of GChrome? I just find it intriguing that part of GChrome’s purported advancement is translating JS into in-line, machine readable code (and JS, as much of a ’spidering’ challenge as it is, isn’t going anywhere but up, IMO – look at the use of AJAX – a crawler that ‘gets’ JS is becoming more necessary, every day); and it seems as though this technique could be passed on to a bot’s programming, somehow. Wouldn’t a bot with this kind a capability be far more robust than what we have now? (Or, was it just to boost Google’s search volume? When one searches through the ‘omnibox,’ a SERP from Google is given by default; whereas searching from the address box in IE, the default SERP is MSN or Yahoo!, depending on your ISP; this is another significant detail that I just can’t gloss over.)

2) If Google can turn audio to text, will GoogleBot be able to ‘listen’ to audio captchas, return the appropriate text, and then navigate a site beyond a simple ‘human verification’ page?

I can’t help but ponder these questions; and I hope I’m not the only one who’s considered them. If Google’s ‘bread and butter’ is search, then why would they dedicate so much time and energy developing technologies that don’t work toward that end, directly or otherwise? It’s along the same line of reasoning as why large oil companies haven’t ‘led the charge’ on exploring and developing new energy sources; a good business model enhances the need for its company’s services/products, not the opposite. And, I’m fairly certain that some significant time, resources, and money went into the latest push of Googlervices (Google + services), so I have to consider the motivating factor that’s behind all of this ‘growth’ lately.

I do hope that someone would tell me if I’m on a proverbial ‘goose chase,’ because all of my conjecture leans on the concept that these services (how Chrome handles JS and Google’s converting audio to text), and the technology behind them, could possibly be the ‘outline’ of the GoogleBot yet to come. Seeing as I’m not a programmer, I need that one extra bit of info to gauge wether these ideas are something to consider or just smoke-and-mirrors.

My sincerest thanks to all for letting me ramble on. I do that from time to time…

Enjoy your day,

Chat Man