On Friday, Google announced that they are rolling out personalization to all. Personalization, aka personalized search results, means that the results that you receive will be based on your searching habits as Google will be customizing the search results based on six months of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser. Personalization of search is meant to provide a richer, more relevant search experience. This “customization” includes searches you’ve done and results you’ve clicked
Google Caffeine is the name given to Google's next algorithm update that is going live after the holidays. It seems that Google Caffeine will be more than Google's regular updates. It will probably be a major overhaul of the calculations that Google uses to rank web pages.
Bing recently published a document about link building. Although it focuses on how Bing deals with inbound links, it can also help you to get better links for Google, Yahoo and other search engines. The most important points of Bing's document can be found in this article.
When you are a company that is trying to organize the world’s information (Read: Google), relevancy and duplication are big concerns. With all due respect to Google’s advertising platform, Google is in the business of Search and all about providing the world’s informaiton to those in search of it. Google’s mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. If you have been in the Search industry for some time, you will of no doubt heard the proverbial “content is king” statement. A bit of a more accurate statement might read “unique content is king”.
Most people think that Google purely ranks websites by using mathematical formulas. Google even has an official statement about the way that search results are calculated:
Over the past week or so, you have no doubt heard of Google’s “infrastructure” update dubbed Google Caffeine which can be accessed via www2.sandbox.google.com. While this is not an algorithm update per se, Google Caffeine is more of a step by step type of update for the search engine’s infrastructure.
You've probably heard about the Yahoo/Microsoft deal. This will have a major impact on the search engine landscape and there definitely will be effects on your website rankings and the number of visitors that your website will get.
Microsoft's Bing search engine has just become publicly available, allowing you to decide whether Microsoft's latest effort has the goods to take on Google. Bing is available at www.bing.com and replaces Live Search.
Webmasters in an online webmaster forum observed an anomaly in Google's results that might indicate a new Google penalty. Which websites have been penalized and could this affect your own website?
Not so many columns ago, I urged Microsoft to do something amazing in search. Last week, they did. But it wasn’t in a good way. I was on the road last week, and I saw three different things land in my in box about Microsoft and their search efforts. With each email, my frustration mounted. Finally, Friday as I was sitting in Seattle airport I couldn’t contain myself any more. I sent an email to the most senior person I knew at Microsoft Search. The gist of the email was “don’t do it”. Yesterday, I got an email back thanking me for my “honest” feedback. Yet somehow, I don’t think it will make a difference.