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.

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.

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.

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