SEO Archives - Page 3 of 7

Google Web Search Goes Completely AJAX

January 30, 2009 by Michael VanDeMar

Yes, I know… Google has been offering AJAX driven results through the API and other services for ages, but now they have rolled that out to the main Google Search. It appears to be only on Google US (I tried manually switching to Google UK, and it redirected me from the AjAX version to a static HTML page), but that of course could change in the future.

I noticed this as soon as I started searching for stuff today, from almost the first query I typed in. When I looked at the url, instead of seeing the normal /search?= at the beginning:

I found myself looking at this:

SERPs Scrapers, Rejoice! Matt Cutts Endorses Indexing Of Search Results In Google!

January 21, 2009January 21, 2009 by Michael VanDeMar

That’s right… today Matt Cutts completely reversed his opinion on pages indexed in Google that are nothing more than copies of auto-generated snippets.

Back in March of 2007, Matt discussed search results within search results, and Google’s dislike for them:

In general, we’ve seen that users usually don’t want to see search results (or copies of websites via proxies) in their search results. Proxied copies of websites and search results that don’t add much value already fall under our quality guidelines (e.g. “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.” and “Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches…”), so Google does take action to reduce the impact of those pages in our index.

But just to close the loop on the original question on that thread and clarify that Google reserves the right to reduce the impact of search results and proxied copies of web sites on users, Vanessa also had someone add a line to the quality guidelines page. The new webmaster guideline that you’ll see on that page says “Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.” – Matt Cutts

Now, while the Google Webmaster Guidelines still specifically instruct webmasters to

How To Find The Best Free Image/Photo/Graphics Downloads For Your Blog Posts

January 12, 2009 by Michael VanDeMar

Smile! Adding images to your blog posts can make them much more visually appealing to your readers. This in turn can increase the likelihood that someone will link to that post or subscribe to your feed, which will of course in the long run help to improve your rankings and traffic. The internet is chock full of images, many of which will fit perfectly with that blog post or article that you are writing. The problem is, however, finding images that are both high quality and that you are actually allowed to use.

The Problems

Two internet no-no’s that beginner web publishers often perform, many times without even realizing that they are doing anything wrong,

Google Tries Too Hard To Appear Useful, Starts Making Up New Words

November 18, 2008 by Michael VanDeMar

The Google Search feature that Google calls “Spell Checker” can be very handy at times. You know the one I mean… you type something hastily in the box, manage to inadvertently slip in a typo or two, and Google, very helpfully, asks you “Did you mean: {some other word}”. Aside from putting a dent in the revenue for all of those SEO’s who are cleverly banking on people making common typos, most people (like myself) probably

Yet Another Link Test – Single Source Page, Multiple Links, Nofollowed Middle

November 17, 2008November 16, 2008 by Michael VanDeMar

Last year I performed a couple of tests on what happens if you have multiple links pointing to the same page all from the same source page. Today a reader left a comment from one of the follow-up posts, which had to do with answering the question of what happens if the first link is nofollowed. He asked if I had tested with the second link being nofollowed instead of the first.

Well, no, I haven’t. So…

How To Remove Your Website From Linkscape Without An SEOmoz Meta Tag

October 21, 2008October 21, 2008 by Michael VanDeMar

Over the past couple of weeks, one of the biggest concerns about SEOmoz’s new Linkscape tool (which I recently blogged about in reference to the bots that Rand refuses to identify, and then again due to suspicious additions of a phantom 7 billion pages to one of his index sources) has been the complete lack of a method available for someone to remove their data from the tool. Assuming that all of the hints Rand has been so “subtly” dropping are accurate, and the one bot that they do actually have control over is in fact DotBot, then from the beginning the data was collected under false pretenses. The DotBot website clearly states

How To Block The Bots SEOmoz Isn’t Telling You About

September 3, 2009October 17, 2008 by Michael VanDeMar

Ok, so, looks like Rand and gang finally decided to reveal their top-secret recipe about how they gathered all that information on everybody’s websites without anyone noticing what they were doing. There was quite a bit of hoopla over the fact that when they announced their new index of 30 billion web pages (and the new tool powered by that index), due to the fact that they never gave webmasters the chance to block them from gathering this data. In fact, they never even