SEO News
Google Tweak Duplicate Filter Algorithm?
ThreadWatch has a summary on what according to speculation from WebmasterWorld members appears to be a alteration (appearing last Friday) in Google's duplicate filter algorithm. At least some webmasters' have experienced dramatic drops in ranking:
Something has been tweaked by Google last week. It has not effected all sites, but has certainly knocked some of my sites that were hit by the last “canonical pages” and “duplicate content” issues at Google.
WebmasterWorld member, Caveman, believes it's more that just a change in Google's duplicate filter:
The dup issue that steveb outlined so well explains some of what I see, but not all of it. There are cases where established site homepages and subpages are holding their ranking for one phrase, but dropping out of the SERP's for another closely related phrase (when the site previously ranked for both) ... and where there is no evidence of dup content filters playing a role where pages dropped out. They've tweaked something else IMO. Possibly related to linking/anchor text/kw patterns.
Behind The Google Interface
(Although this is article is quite old, it's interesting enough that it deserves a mention for the sake of anyone who hasn't read it) Alan Williamson shares some interesting facts behind the user-experience methodologies that drive Google, taken from a lecture with Google's Marissa Mayer. A few of the most interesting highlights:
- The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn't know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Infact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.
- Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked 'Whats up?' to which they replied "We are waiting for the rest of it". To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.
- The infamous "I feel lucky" is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.
- They use the 20% / 5% rules. If at least 20% of people use a feature, then it will be included. At least 5% of people need to use a particular search preference before it will make it into the 'Advanced Preferences'.
- The name 'Google' was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for 'Googol'
See the article for the full list.
Google's Resident Muse
Business Week has a look into the mind of Google's "resident muse," Marissa Mayer. She explains how she intends to prevent Google's from falling into a bureaucratic trap that could kill their so far generally impressive innovation, something which is becoming increasingly difficult as the company -- who had 100 staff 5 years ago, and has 4,200 today -- rapidly expands:
Meanwhile, without ample guidance or support, some engineers can end up feeling lost in Google's sea of techies. "Things have gotten unwieldy over there," says a former Google engineer, who requested anonymity. "I've seen people have months of man-hours flushed because it wasn't clear what [Google co-founders Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] wanted."
Google's 7th Birthday, Schmidt Says Index 3 Times Larger Than Others
Google today celebrates their 7th year as a search engine. In an interview with CNET News on the day of the occasion, Eric Schmidt, Google's Chief Executive, claims their index is now three times larger than any other search engines:
"We're announcing tonight that in terms of unduplicated pages our index is now three times larger than any other search engine," he said, without saying how many pages are in the index.
He also goes on to say that Google will no longer display the size of their index on their homepage, "because people don't necessarily agree on how to count it."
Yahoo! had this response to Google's announcement:
"We congratulate Google on removing the index size number from its home page and for recognizing it is a meaningless number. As we've said in the past, what matters is that consumers find what they are looking for, and we invite Google users to compare their results to Yahoo search at http://search.yahoo.com."
Why Being #1 is Important
Jakob Nielson has an interesting piece on a recent study [PDF] by Professor Thorsten at Cornell University, on search engines.
The main point of interest is the studies findings on the click through rates of the the competing top positions. The study found that 42% of users clicked the top result, and only 8% clicked the second result. They also found that if the researches secretly switched the top two listing, the top listing (which was formerly in second place) still had a relatively high 34% CTR, with the second result still only slightly higher than previously at 12%.
The study, and Nielson essentially conclude this behaviour to be mostly reflection of users' implicit trust in the search engine to serve the best result first, and plain laziness on the part of the user.
Google Accused Of Misleading Statement in Gmail Dispute
Google have been in dispute with the British research firm IIIR (Independent International Investment Research) over the trademark ownership of the Gmail name for the last 15 months. In a Times article, IIIR -- who have threatened to bring legal action against Google -- accuse Google of making "Grossly misleading" statements.
Concerning a statement by IIIR referring to a similar success against Google of a case in Germany, Google stated:
"We can confirm that Pronet has contacted Google and that we have been seeking information on their use of the Gmail trademark but have not received any evidence to establish the rights they have claimed."
In reponse to this, IIIR wrote in a letter to Google's trademark lawyer:
"As you must be aware this is grossly misleading. It misrepresents the degree of telephone, fax, e-mail and letter contact that has in fact taken place over the last 16 months, between our companies directly, between our US attorneys and Google, and between our UK lawyers, myself and Google in conference."
Feedshot - Free Feed Submission Tool
ThreadWatch notes, FeedShot -- a automatic feed submission service -- the service is free and will submit your RSS/Atom feed to the all the major RSS based search engines.
Although most regular search engines will ignore manual and automatic submissions, many RSS based search engines still rely heavily on them.
Syndication is a very sound method of promotion, and one much underused by many SEOs. It's worth checking out if you have any feeds.
Yahoo! Slurp Goes on Ad-Clicking Rampage?
A thread at WebmasterWorld, claims Slurp (Yahoo's search engine spider) has repeatedly been hitting a site owners website thousands of times over a short time-period, the interesting part is that all the hits referred from Overture ads:
On four separate days (all Thursday mornings) we had Slurp bombarding our site for about an hour with over 1000 requests, all of these being referrals from our Overture Ads
At least one other WMW member confirmed experiencing the same issue. Search Engine Roundtable mentions that the ads don't appear to be charged to anyone.