Is your site geared towards people in your country, you have a non-country specific domain extension and your site is hosted on a server outside your region? Having trouble ranking on country-specific Google search, or perhaps even just getting listed?
It's a common problem; but this new feature from Google may help you out.
It seems that Google is currently experimenting with new robots.txt commands. If your robots.txt file accidentally contains one of the new commands, it might be that your robots.txt file tells Google to go away.
Can you imagine if Google was around in the 50's when television was in its infancy or prior to that when radio came across the airwaves? We all know that Google dominates online advertising with their Google Adwords program (a pay per click program where advertisers/webmasters can create their own ads and bid on placement for their chosen keywords) and their Google AdSense program (a contextual advertising solution to web publishers/site owners that delivers text-based Google AdWords ads that are relevant to site content pages. You earn revenue by showing ads that are relevant and targeted to your website's content.).
This week Yahoo unveiled a new feature. It doesn't really change the search game that much in terms of competitive functionality. If anything, it's another case of Yahoo catching up with the competition. But it may have dramatic implications from a user's point of view. To illustrate that point further I'd like to share a couple of stories with you.
There is a substantial amount of online speculation being generated around the question of where Facebook is going and will it beat Google? John Battelle is currently drafting a list of questions, including those two, to run past Facebook co founder Mark Zuckerberg at the Web 2 conference.
At first glance, asking if Facebook can beat Google is a bit like asking if a penguin could beat an aardvark. Beat it at what? What's the contest? Or, perhaps more appropriately, asking whether your neighborhood can beat your table saw. Talk about comparing apples and oranges (at least those are both fruit). Facebook is a community and Google is a tool. But the question may not be as farfetched as it seems, because undoubtedly, as each grows and explores new monetization opportunities, more common ground will emerge between the two.
Widgets continue to be all the rage on the Internet. The popularity of them is pretty amazing and the viral spread of widgets is pretty impressive as well. Widgets are kind of like Gremlins, you don't want to get water on them or feed them after midnight. For those who don't know what a widget is, a widget is simply a piece of embeddable code that can be found on one site, and embedded in another that can be used to promote your own site, blog or brand. We have discussed widget marketing a number of times in the past. We've touched on the fascination with widgets and the importance of widget marketing in the near future if not already.
Although most professional search engine optimizers agree that the green PageRank display has little to do with the actual performance of a website in Google and other search engines, many webmasters still focus on websites with a high PageRank when it comes to link building and website promotion.
If you target international markets then it's important to know which search engines are used by European web surfers.
Google has a large market share in the US. Astonishingly, Google's market share seems to be even bigger in Europe. Here are the numbers from Germany, France and the UK.
Tricking the search engines just does not work. The search engines do not look kindly upon webmasters who attempt to deceive the search engines about the content contained on a webpage.
"A system and method for evaluating documents for approval or rejection and/or rating.
The method comprises comparing the document to one or more criteria determining whether the document contains an element that is substantially identical to one or more of a visual element, an audio element or a textual element that is determined to be displeasing."
The document describes how Google might analyze text and audio files. For example, Google might use optical character recognition tools and pattern matching against image and sound databases.