November 30th, 2007 by Dustin Brewer
It looks like Google is playing with an experimental new search system that works a lot like Reddit (or Digg) in that you can vote up or down various search results depending on their relevance to you. It seems like this idea is only going to happen per a user so it isn’t going to be something that can be manipulated as much as it sounds that it could. Although if they do eventually implement something like this I could see part of their algorithm pulling rankings from a system like this to decide on what is worth reading and what is not. (more…)
Popularity: 4%
October 30th, 2007 by Dustin Brewer
Sitemaps have been around for a very long time but it is only recently that the large search engines have begun to support sitemap submission to help towards the crawling of your site more frequently. It can also help to let search robots know where pages that may be hidden can be found. Typically, you want to make sure these pages are accessible throughout the site through organic linking; hopefully you haven’t failed your site in that aspect. (more…)
Popularity: 3%
October 24th, 2007 by Dustin Brewer
It appears that overnight Google has changed how PageRank ranks sites, several very high profile web sites have been affected by this change and lost 2-3 rankings. The speculation is it is directly caused by web sites having paid links either to bad neighborhoods or just having them at all. It seems like Google is going head-strong into a shift towards ranking web sites poorly depending on where they link and if it is paid or not. I have compiled a list from various sources about the high-profile sites that have lost significant ranking.
This move is furthering the shift that a lot of people have been seeing away from not only PageRank, but possible away from Google for everything. Some sites have lost so much ranking they don’t even show up for their names, such as John Chow. (more…)
Popularity: 3%
October 15th, 2007 by Dustin Brewer
It appears as though your robots.txt file that tells search engines what to crawl and what not to crawl is being indexed by Google. This means all those pages/files that you don’t want crawled are available to the general public by just doing a Google search for the robots.txt file. Oddly enough they are even getting PageRanks. (more…)
Popularity: 4%
