TW Blog :: Entries for SEO

Search Engine Roundup

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The Search Engine industry has been buzzing with activity the last couple of weeks. Tuesday 14th saw the launch of the A9.com engine from Amazon. It has come a long way from the beta version I tested back in April. John Batelle discusses the multipanel interface and click stream (or search history) tracking in detail. On the negative side CNet illustrates the challenge of retrieving images straight from the Google engine.

Also focusing on a personalised search interface is the beta release this Tuesday of MyJeeves from ask.com. MyJeeves also archives search history while providing flexibility to categorize results into separate folders - excellent for research purposes.

Meanwhile, LookSmart announced yesterday that it has acquired Furl.net - the archiving tool for text equivalents of web page content, which provides a great repository for future search and retrieval.

While recent Google hype has revolved around the GBrowser rumours, the potential for exploitation of Google SERP's has been further illustrated by results cloaking with 302 redirects.

Currently, most of my experience with the Search Engines is for SEO, but I have found myself using Vivisimo Clustering more and more for reasearch. As well as providing meta-search for Lycos, MSN, DMOZ and other engines, the logical groupings of clustered results saves considerable time.

Posted on Sep 24, 2004 at 10:50:27. [Comments for Search Engine Roundup- 0]

Google Flashback?

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While performing some SEO on my mate's longboard skates site earlier this evening, I decided to have a quick play around with the -nonsense exclusion parameter on Google to see what it would bring up. This was a familiar technique during the early fallout of hurricane Florida to see pre-Florida results, which Google reportedly disabled prior to Christmas of last year. The following search phrase certainly bought up a different set of SERPs:

longboard skates -abcd

I took this further adding additional exclusion parameters to see if the SERPs changed. The surprise came when I hit eight parameters (giving the maximum 10 words allowed in a search query):

longboard skates -abcd -abcd -abcd -abcd -abcd -abcd -abcd -abcd

The top 20 results looked very familiar to the pre-Florida results for longboard skates when Still Stoked had maintained top placement for a considerable period of time. (And rightly so being not only the home of the Landsurfer, the world's longest production longboard skateboard, but also one of the first dedicated longboard skates companies in the UK.)

The recent rebuild of the site had actually been in response to the dramatic demise of the site following Florida - disappearing altogether from the top 100 results. It is satisfying to see that by following the guidelines for Web Standards and Accessibility the site is working its way back up the SERPs with each new visit from the Googlebot.

Since I am discussing Google hacks, why not have a look at Google Hacking Mini-Guide to learn some of the ways hackers can exploit Google's service.

Posted on May 22, 2004 at 00:30:52. [Comments for Google Flashback?- 0]