search engines

I’m sure all blog­gers won­der, “How did others make it to the top? If on­ly some­one would share the se­crets of be­com­ing a pop­u­lar blog­ger.” Summing up and cat­e­go­riz­ing the good and bad habits of high­ly ef­fec­tive blog­gers could be frus­trat­ing; you might be­gin to see that some suc­cess­ful blog­gers have cer­tain be­hav­iors in com­mon, while others ab­so­lute­ly don’t. What does it take, then, to be­come a pop­u­lar blog­ger, to be ac­cept­ed, trust­ed and fol­lowed by many? I’ve dis­cov­ered some in­ter­est­ing (...)

December 9th was the birth­day of American com­put­er sci­en­tist Grace Hooper. Timed to co­in­cide with this is Computer Science Education Week (often dubbed CSEd), an event estab­lished by the Computing in the Core Coalition. However, this year the event has re­ceived a bundle of ad­di­tion­al spon­sors, not the least of which is Google. As de­tailed on the CSEd web­site, the ob­jec­tive of the week is to share in­for­ma­tion on teach­ing about com­put­er science, espe­cial­ly as it is re­lat­ed to K-12 ed­u­ca­tion. (...)

Earlier this week, the Knight Digital Media Center penned a post on the full dis­clo­sure pol­i­cy of All Things Digital. Titled “Trans­paren­cy for Journalists: AllThingsD Shows What It Can Look Like,” it’s a very nice re­view of what we do on the site. “What I like about the­se state­ments is that they aren’t cook­ie-cut­ter corp­s­peak or le­gale­se. They’re hu­man–and even hu­mor­ous–rev­e­la­tions,” wrote Amy Gahran. “Each writer gets to de­cide which topics she or he wants to cov­er, and how. This can get pret­ty (...)

Shiwei writes "While BitTorrent is the most pop­u­lar P2P pro­to­col, it still re­lies on sev­er­al cen­tral­ized points for users to find the files they are look­ing. There have been sev­er­al at­tempts at mak­ing BitTorrent more de­cen­tral­ized, and the lat­est Tribler 5.3 client is the first to of­fer the BitTorrent ex­pe­ri­ence with­out re­quir­ing cen­tral track­ers or search engi­nes. Tribler of­fers some very in­ter­est­ing tech­nolo­gies; the lat­est ver­sion en­ables users to search and down­load files from in­side (...)

In the last mon­th there's been a lot of hand-wring­ing about search engi­nes chang­ing their al­go­rithms, so­cial me­dia sites tweak­ing their pri­va­cy set­tings and other 'game chang­ing' in­ter­net mar­ket­ing ker­fuf­fles. I picked 6 of the al­leged changes that have folks talk­ing, from SEO to so­cial me­dia, and rat­ed each one on my per­son­al truthi­ness scale: SEO: Link an­chor text mat­ters less What they said: Having the ex­act same an­chor text in 75% of links point­ing at your site used to be a good (...)

When it comes to learn­ing about your site's SEO, there are a slew of great tools out there that can provide link lists, key­word anal­y­sis and much more. The prob­lem with most of the­se tools is that they aren't ex­act­ly clear and easy to un­der­stand, espe­cial­ly for those who are new to the con­cepts and ter­mi­nol­o­gy. For new blog­gers, the prospect of wad­ing through Excel spread­sheets filled with links is daunt­ing and, given how dif­fi­cult it can be to make heads or tails of the in­for­ma­tion, not (...)

by Stoney deGeyter Yeah, yeah, the search engi­nes are get­ting smarter about du­pli­cate con­tent... blah, blah, blah. It's no longer the prob­lem it on­ce was... yada, yada, yada. Google will get it all sort­ed out for you. Whatevs. I don't care how smart the search engi­nes are, it's no ex­cuse for lazi­ness. Sure, a maid may clean up your liv­ing room for you, but that's no ex­cuse to ask them to wipe your..., er, mouth, too. The in­tel­li­gence of the search engi­nes is your fall back. Your (...)

This guest post is by Brandon Connell of bran­don­con­nell.com When I first start­ed a blog that I took se­ri­ous­ly, it was to pro­mote an ebook that I had pub­lished on Amazon’s Digital Text plat­form. Initially, I want­ed the blog to be my “au­thor’s head­quar­ters,” but soon after, I re­al­ized what I re­al­ly want­ed to do with my blog. It was far from my ini­tial goal, and I wish I’d made the right de­ci­sion from the be­gin­ning, rather than re­vers­ing course. The prob­lems Changing your blog­ging type after you (...)

Hub & Spoke Content & Social Media Publishing While there’s plen­ty of great Search Engine Optimization ad­vice be­ing pub­lished dai­ly on blogs and in­dus­try web­sites, there’s not as much from a con­tent mar­keter’s per­spec­tive.  Hav­ing been in the SEO game for over 10 years, I know there’s a ten­den­cy to give rec­om­men­da­tions that fo­cus on web pages, code, links and what those things mean, speci­fic to search engi­nes. There’s an in­creas­ing so­cial me­dia com­po­nent to the­se au­dits too. Most SEOs (...)

One of the topics that emerged from Pubcon was “Should SEO’s Focus on Where Google is Heading”, and I’m go­ing to agree with Aaron that fo­cus­ing on short ter­m al­go­rith­mic ­holes isn’t a smart thing for most peo­ple (churn and burn folks–you keep on keep­ing on). I agree that most pub­lish­ers should fo­cus on where Google is go­ing. However, the one thing I think pub­lish­ers need to be aware of and be wary of is Google’s tran­si­tion to be­com­ing an an­swer engine. this rep­re­sents a clear and pre­sent dan­ger to (...)

by Mike Moran Not long ago, there was a lot of dis­cus­sion about whether Facebook was tak­ing over the hearts and minds of the next gen­er­a­tion, where Google has owned the pre­vi­ous one. Much dis­cus­sion en­sued about whether us­ing a search engine to find things would be easier than ask­ing your friends. As usu­al, the fu­ture is more com­plex than we imag­ine, be­cause we have all de­cid­ed that the an­swer be­tween text search and so­cial net­work­ing is...both. It re­minds me a lot of the de­bates of (...)

Sorry for the ab­sence. The Pandia ed­i­tors have been out trav­el­ling (from ex­pe­ri­enc­ing the Korea con­flict in Seoul to tak­ing part in the Online Information Conference in London). Now we are back onhspace=”4″ track, how­ev­er, with a new list of search engine rel­e­vant ar­ti­cles and posts from around the Web. Making Copyright Work Better Online Google Public Policy Blog: We will pre­vent terms that are close­ly as­so­ci­at­ed with pira­cy from ap­pear­ing in Autocomplete. We’ll act on re­li­able copy­right (...)

To find what you need on the Web, your search engine of choice sifts through enor­mous amounts of in­for­ma­tion on your be­half and comes up with a list of search re­sults. Now your job starts: To sift through the search re­sults for the most re­li­able in­for­ma­tion. Depending on your query, this can in­clude wad­ing through not on­ly ir­rel­e­vant sites, but ob­jec­tion­able ma­te­ri­al of fraud­u­lent sites. Here are three search engi­nes that have so­lu­tions to this and some ad­vice on in­for­ma­tion lit­er­a­cy. Duck (...)

This is one of a reg­u­lar series of posts on search ex­pe­ri­ence up­dates. Look for the la­bel This week in search and sub­scribe to the series. - Ed. It’s the time of year when many of us be­gin our hol­i­day shop­ping in earnest. Whether you’re more in­to “Black Friday” or “Cy­ber Monday,” many of us in­creas­ing­ly turn to the Internet and search engi­nes to find the best prices, pro­duct re­views, gift guides and rec­om­men­da­tions. This week, we made a num­ber of im­prove­ments that should help make it easier than (...)

This guest post is by Ben Harack of the Vision of Earth pro­ject. Regarding read­ers as fish, and blog­gers as fish­er­man, might seem strange. Bear with me as I show you part of why I like the idea of blog­ging as be­ing sim­i­lar to fish­ing. Those of you who are fa­mil­iar with fish­ing know that get­ting the fish to bite the lure is on­ly the first step of the pro­cess. A good yank from your end is often ad­vis­able in order to “set the hook”, en­sur­ing that the fish will be less like­ly to escape. A new (...)

You prob­a­bly are like me and tend to watch the amount of vis­i­tors and web traf­fic to your web­site ev­ery day. If you have ev­ery no­ticed a sud­den loss of web­site traf­fic or if the traf­fic has gone down con­sid­er­ably then it’s time to start think­ing about a search engine op­ti­miza­tion au­dit. Even if you al­ready have some­one who is tak­ing care of your SEO for your web­site, it is good to have an SEO Audit done at least ev­ery 6 months to make sure that your web­site is per­form­ing the way it (...)

You prob­a­bly are like me and tend to watch the amount of vis­i­tors and web traf­fic to your web­site ev­ery day. If you have ev­ery no­ticed a sud­den loss of web­site traf­fic or if the traf­fic has gone down con­sid­er­ably then it’s time to start think­ing about a search engine op­ti­miza­tion au­dit. Even if you al­ready have some­one who is tak­ing care of your SEO for your web­site, it is good to have an SEO Audit done at least ev­ery 6 months to make sure that your web­site is per­form­ing the way it (...)

While there are lots of sites that claim that they can tell you where your page ranks in Google, most of them provide flawed re­sults or are even vi­o­lat­ing the Google terms of ser­vice. So, is there any way to find out how your pages are rank­ing in search engi­nes? How do you find out how your pages are do­ing? Do you use a tool? Please com­ment with the tools and tech­niques that you use to track SEO suc­cess. Getting Better Results with SEO and Google How to Check Your Search Position in Google (...)

by Stoney deGeyter Here we are again, two years after What I Want for Christmas from the Search Engines: The Sequel and eight years since the orig­i­nal, What I Want for Christmas from the Search Engines. I'm back with a new Christmas wish list. I smell a fran­chise op­por­tu­ni­ty here! Let's start with some open items from the orig­i­nal wish-list and see how things are com­ing along from 2008: Build your own tech­nol­o­gy, don't just back­door an­oth­er search engine's re­sults in­to your own. (...)

Today’s post is in re­spon­se to a ques­tion that came in via email ask­ing, “How do I op­ti­mize a de­part­ment/cat­e­go­ry page with a lot of prod­ucts?” This is a fair­ly com­mon ques­tion, but it has some sub­tleties and nu­ances to it. I’ll try to ad­dress those is­sues in this post. The first aspect is how many is “a lot?” Is it 100, 1,000, or 10,000? If you have cat­e­go­ry pages with few­er than 200 prod­ucts on them, you can list them all on one page. Yes I know Google rec­om­mends no more than 100 links per (...)