Google Stop Words Now Indexed

From: seobythesea.com

Not too long ago, if you entered in Google the phrase (without quotation marks) “a room with a view,” you might have received some warnings that your query contained “Stop Words.”

Stop words are words that appear so frequently in documents and on web pages that search engines would often ignore them when indexing the words on pages. These could be words like: a, and, is, on, of, or, the, was, with.

Good bye to stop words?

In that search for “a room with a view,” you might have received results like “a room for a view,” or “room to view,” or other phrases that replaced some stop words with others. That made it less likely to find exactly what you were looking for when you searched for a phrase with stop words in it.

I’m not seeing Google ignoring stop words any more. Last week, Dan Thies asked Stop Words Are Dead! Did I Miss Another Memo?

This newly granted Google Patent seems to hold some answers to the disappearance of stop words, and to potentially a number of other indexing issues from Google:

Document compression scheme that supports searching and partial decompression
Invented by Olcan Sercinoglu
Assigned to Google
US Patent 7,319,994
Granted January 15, 2008
Filed May 23, 2003

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SEO Requires Constant Improvement

It used to be possible to run a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign and then leave it alone but this is no longer the case, an expert has stated.

Matt Hopkins, managing director of search engine marketing firm Vertical Leap, made his comments through his company’s blog, advocating what he calls the Kaizen approach.

“Kaizen is a Japanese term that effectively means continuous, incremental improvement,” he explained, adding that this philosophy is a “large part” of Vertical Leap’s management of SEO campaigns.

Mr Hopkins agreed that a lot of work is necessary at the beginning of an SEO strategy but that a Kaizen-inspired attention to detail and “pig-headed determination” is what creates a successful approach.

SEO company Phoenix Realm also describes optimization as a continuous process and suggests that a methodical persistence will give a marketer long-lasting results.

Furthermore, it advises that organic optimization will protect a website from falling in search engine rankings if the algorithms change, whereas so-called black hat techniques risk detection and a fall in rankings.

SEO can lower costs of PPC

From:  www.directnews.co.uk

Effective search engine optimization (SEO) can help to lower the cost of paid search campaigns, it has been claimed.

International property publication Global edge aims to assist overseas estate agents to derive greater benefits from the internet.

Designing a website with SEO in mind can help to achieve this, the publication asserts.

By incorporating between six and ten keywords into a site’s content, search engine visibility can be improved and paid search budgets reduced, Global edge explains.

“Users will convert at higher rates - and besides, you’ll have done your SEO right at the design phase so you’ll be getting lots of free natural traffic,” the publication contends.

“A good website will inspire your audience and position you as an authority in your chosen niche,” it adds.

In a recent presentation, Global edge advised its readers on the best ways to identify gaps in the search market before optimizing content, as well as how best to strike a balance between site design and SEO considerations.

Wikia Search: Wikipedia Search Engine Review

by Kevin Heisler

Debbie Richman posted two social search engine analyses reviews of Wikia Search that didn’t bash Wales and his Build-A Bare Engine Workshop.

VentureBeat’s Saumil Mehta (product manager, vertical search engine competitor) has the most thorough user review of Wikia Search here that makes others superfluous. Bloggers, If you haven’t reviewed the features yet, wait until the next release.

We say “Wikia Search”, Saumil says “Search Wikia.” Should Wikia Search call the whole thing off?

Jimmy Wales weighed in at TechCrunch where a great debate is brewing. So we’ll give Jimmy’s comments a wider audience here.

After the jump, Eli Feldblum will explain why SEOs (and corporations using SEOs) could make Wikia Search grow exponentially — thru better search results — but may stay on the sidelines, along with hundreds of millions of searchers.

Wikia Search will likely take the advice of Ask exec and former Search Engine Watcher Gary Price: in short, watch out for “manipulation.” (by SEOs? by webmasters of the world? We’ll look for more from Gary since Wikia Search will be a (4th Place) Ask.com Killer before it ever gives Google the Sweeney Todd treatment.

In TechCrunch, Jimmy Wales said: “(Wikia Search) is a project to *build* a search engine, not a search engine … So the comparison to Google on day one is just mistaken. Google didn’t launch a project to build a human-powered search engine, they launched an algorithmic search engine with a clever new idea. So they didn’t have to wait for the humans to come in and start building it. We aren’t even running with a real index yet, just a placeholder index. Yeah, the search sucks today. But that’s not the point. The point is that we are building something different.”

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New Experimental Google Search | The end of SEO?

www.seroundtable.com 

Yesterday I covered the news at Search Engine Land of a new Google experimental search feature that lets you move search results up and remove results from the Google search results page.

The changes you make only impact you - your login and does not influence the overall scope of the search results. But can they? Who knows. We have been seeing Google test remove results features before and then drop the feature.

Google says:

This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made. Note that this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks.

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Google’s Android - New platform for mobile devices

I know you must have heard the Word “Gphone”. It came to us when Google broke the news that they will introduce a mobile device.Its coming but its not a mobile device. But something much bigger then that.It is called Android.

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Link Building 101 Rap

Why Search Engine Marketing is Necessary

From: www.seomoz.org

While many readers of this document may have overcome their skepticism about the need for and value of search marketing (and specifically, organic search engine optimization), it’s entirely likely that others in your organization, company, network or client meetings may have differing opinions. Thus, this section is provided to help explain the need for proactive search engine optimization.

One of the most common issues I hear from folks on both the business and technology sides of a company goes something like this:

No smart engineer would ever build a search engine that requires websites to follow certain rules or principles in order to be ranked or indexed. Anyone with half a brain would want a system that can crawl through any architecture, parse any amount of complex or imperfect code and still find a way to return the best and most relevant results, not the ones that have been “optimized” by unlicensed search marketing experts.

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Balancing SEO and Usability

From: Just Search

SEO and usability are very closely related. Without the proper SEO your site won’t be found by potential customers. However, if your site is performing in the listings but not properly designed for usability, you will struggle to convert your traffic into hard sales.

It is therefore in your best interests to design a site that can cater for both SEO and usability. This will help turn your traffic into purchases and leads.

Search engines are getting more complex and can now collect data about the basic usability of your site. For example if your site is regularly bookmarked in popular bookmarking sites such as del.cio.us, Stumble Upon, and Digg. Search engines can index these popular bookmarking sites and from this information evaluate how popular your site is, hence how usable.

Another factor search engines can look into to evaluate your usability is the amount of high power links you have pointing to your site. Powerful sites tend to only link to articles/pages on your site which present related information and can be easily navigated by users.

You can check usability factors on your site yourself to by analyzing data from Google Analytics, which can provide you with important data such as the bounce rate of your site, and the length of time users spend on this site. A usable site tends to have a lower bounce rate, and users tend to spend longer on the site.

So what can you do?

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More on Google Bowling? Black Hat & Negative SEO

From: News.com

Posted by Stephan Spencer

The term “Google bowling” has been floating around the Internet for a while now. The practice is one of many that can be put under the heading of negative SEO, and while I’m not a proponent of these methods, they are worth noting:

Google bowling: As Google attempted to curb link-popularity exploitation by penalizing Web sites that purchase link ads across the entire site, it also created the environment in which Google bowling came to be. As a form of negative SEO (search engine optimization), certain unscrupulous entities began buying sitewide links for competitor sites, thus causing them to incur the Google penalty. Simple, evil and a very real practice.

Spam in another’s name: This form of Negative SEO is even more simple. If spam gets Web sites in trouble with search engines, then creating spam on behalf of a competitor might lower their search engine results.

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