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Written by Administrator
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Friday, 08 August 2008 15:06 |
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Keyword value in URL MYTH!
Does Google Award Value for Keywords in a URL? The short answer is technically: MAY BE. Practically: NO! Many SEO companies preach the importance of placing keyword in a URL or domain. And domains which contain keywords are a highly sought after price. There is no shortage of SEO commentaries on the subject – all professing the value of keywords in a domain or URL. But in reality, the story is quite different. Here is the proof. What does Google Say:Matt Cutts of Google is reported to have commented on the subject here: http://www.seo.com/blog/google/matt-cutts-does-domain-roundtable/He said keywords in the domain carry weight with users, and for this reason, Google also gives some weight to a keyword in the URL and/or domain name.
Based on this comment and the overwhelming support for this theorem, one would suspect that the case is closed. Not so fast…..
A few simple experiments will reveal the reality of this theory. Try this query in Google “4192594” (without the quotation marks). I know it is not much of a search word, but it does illustrate the point. Now, among the nearly 300 reported results, find a listing that only includes the term 4192594 in the URL. Then click to see Google’s Cached page and observe Google’s comment:
These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: 4192594
Does this mean that Google is ranking the page because the term was found in the URL? NO. According to Google, the page received rankings because the term was found in the anchor text. Here is the quote from Google’s page (emphasis added): http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=427. Sometimes Google includes pages in your search results that don't contain the word or phrase you searched for. This can occur even when you perform a phrase search. In evaluating the merit and relevance of a page, Google looks not only at the content of the page itself, but also at the anchor text of links that point to the page. If links pointing to the page contain the phrase you searched for, Google may return the page as a match for your query. When this occurs, our cached copy of the page displays the message "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page:"
In every case I checked, Google’s cached page had this line indicating that the only reason the site was reported in the SERPs was that there were backlinks with the term in the anchor text. There were no pages listed that either:
- Did not have the term somewhere in the body or title
- Did not have the qualification statement “These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: [term]”.
If Google were awarding value based solely on the value of a term in a URL or domain, There would be at least one ranked page with this condition. After examining many listings for different terms, I can make only one conclusion: In and of itself, placing keyword terms in domains or URLs has no ranking value. Google may record them; they may be awarding some value, but it does not appear Google is awarding ranking value.
Indirect Value:
But can so many SEOs be wrong. Can Matt Cutts be wrong? No – they are not wrong – they just are not telling the whole story. A domain or URL that includes the keyword does have value – just not for the reasons most think.
Depending on the circumstances, some webmasters use the target href as the anchor text. And if the target href happens to have the keyword in it, Google will see the keyword in the anchor text and count it as link reputation. That is exactly what Google is reporting in the Cached pages for our “4192594” query. Somewhere, some Webmaster decided to copy the href and use it as their anchor text.
So it may be more correct to say that keyword in a URL or domain have indirect value. |
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Written by Administrator
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Monday, 28 July 2008 10:12 |
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Cuil.com - A New Search Engine  A new search engine has entered the seen: www.cuil.com (pronounced "cool") that promises to shake things up.
Cuil has been designed and developed by X-Google engineers and backed by $33 million in venture capital. The new search engine bostes an index of 120,000,000,000 (120 billion) web pages and claims to have better relevancy than Google.
After testing the search engine, we found several short comings.
- The search engine index appears to be aging. The new Position Research website went live more than 6 weeks ago, but Cuil.com continues to index and rank website pages that no longer exist.
- The search engine Preferences seem to be rather primitive allowing for just a few user options: Safe Search and Typing Suggestions.
- Search results are displayed in either a 2 or 3 column presentation with a thumbnail graphic. The graphic may or may not be representative of the website. It appears that ranking order is across the page, then down.
- The length of each listing is about 12 lines of text. This means only 2-3 rows of listings are visible before the vertical scowl bar must be used to view more listings. This page topography may be uncomfortable for some users.
- When comparing page one rankings for a few keywords with Google, the results are completely different. There was no overlap at all. Further testing will be required to establish Cuil.com's relevancy.
On a positive note, Cuil.com does have a nice "Explore by Category" option that appears for keyword phrases cuil.com believes are alternative or sub categories. The option allows users to choose alternative keyword phrases by category.
There is no doubt that cuil.com will continue to improve their index and rankings. With their strong pedigree funding, we expect to hear more from cuil.com in the future.
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Written by Administrator
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Tuesday, 01 July 2008 12:36 |
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Google announces improved indexing of Flash
Google announced on July 1st, 2008 via the Google webmaster blog that it has improved the indexing of Adobe Flash Files. This information is very intriguing as many Webmasters/SEOs knew that Google could read into some Flash movies, but as to how far they did remained a mystery. Here is what Ron Adler and Janis Stipins (software engineers on Google’s indexing team) had to say regarding the algorithm update.
“We've developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can't tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm's effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe's new Searchable SWF library.”
What effects will this have? Ultimately, This will mean that the size of Google’s index will increase. This may also mean that in some market spaces there will be site’s that formerly were not indexed. In rare cases, these flash site’s may compete for your market space’s keywords.
We will be watching the effects of this algorithm closely in the upcoming months and keep our clients abreast as to any changes that need be committed to maintain top rankings.
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Written by Blog Editor
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Thursday, 05 June 2008 08:28 |
Google continues with "Live Testing"
Within the past month, many webmasters have reported anomalous conditions within Google’s SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). One condition in particular is that Google is keeping pages in their index that no longer exist and is maintaining these pages in their cache (an archived copy of a web page for the search engine’s and user’s reference). Others report that Google's cached pages are not current.
 Last month, Position Research gave reasons why we believed Google was conducting live testing. These new observations seem to support our hypothesis: Google is testing website/keyword relevancy. It makes good sense that Google would need to control their test conditions (SERP titles and descriptions) in order to maintain the integrity of their test results. In this case, Google may be "freezing" title and description updates by not updating their cache page, during a test cycle (which can take several weeks per keyword space).
Ultimately, we believe this experiment will have a positive result on our client’s rankings as non-relevant sites are demoted. But during Google testing, we will continue to see large ranking fluctuations.
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Written by Blog Editor
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Thursday, 29 May 2008 18:25 |
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SEO NewsGoogle - Update Matt Cutts, an engineer on the Google Spam team, has gone on record last week saying that the Search Engine Titan is currently conducting a major experiment, code named “Dewey”. Webmasters in the SEO community have observed that pages with little or no PageRank, which have never shown up in the top 100 SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages), are now displacing other sites that had 'page one' rankings for more than 5 years. Others observe that site rankings fluctuate +/- 30 positions at different times of the day. Some have been reported ranking fluctuation of more then 50 positions within the same day. In addition to these observations, Google has conducted a public PageRank updated that is visible in their browser toolbar.
Position Research has been observing these conditions for several months, although they seem to be more intense now. We speculate that Google is performing live testing similar to the tests described in a recent white paper titled "Search Engines that Learn from Implicit Feedback". The premise of the paper is that Search Engines can determine website relevance by analyzing what listings users do not click. This testing requires that Google bring websites that may not otherwise deserve high ranking into a top position for a short period of time in order to record user behavior. We continue to monitor Google's activity and will keep our clients apprised of any new developments.
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