Technical SEO

Google Webmaster Tools newly-announced Search Analytics brings with it a rescue from the dreaded [not provided] debacle of the past 3 1/2 years.

Google's talking about "more precise data" etc. in the new Search Analytics report--referring to the massive data issues in the old Top Queries and Top Pages reports in Webmaster Tools, where often the numbers were totally hallucinogenic, attributing 10s of thousands of clicks at a time to the wrong landing pages and many other errors.

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Google is now showing a little pulldown to the right of the website URL in their search results. When you click the pulldown, you get a synopsis of the company or organization.

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While doing keyword research for a client, I spotted a longer than usual set of results. REALLY longer. So I counted them. 100 organic results for “vinyl fencing”. Redid the search, back to the usual 10. Here’s the screenshot of the page compressed as much as I could…so at least Read more

Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz debunks 10 common myths about search optimization in this video: (more…)

This is from a presentation I did for SEMpdx in November of 2011. (more…)

In probably the most important search ranking news in 2010, Ben Hendrickson of Moz announced his findings yesterday at the SEOmoz PRO conference in Seattle. (more…)

BACKGROUND: Google Mini is essentially an appliance, a mini version of Google that they ship preconfigured on a cheap rackmount webserver, with a light version of Google installed. You can configure it a little to look like your site, and get it to catalog just your site's pages, and then integrate a search box into your website to implement site search.

At TheBigDay, we bought a Google Mini box. It lasted a little less than a year before biting the biscuit. So, Google shipped us a new box as it was under warranty. I sort of expect that a webserver would last more like 3-5 years at least, but whatever...they replaced it, so let's move on, right? Not real happy about all the extra time I had to put in, but at this point I was OK with the support.

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