The Raven Archive

Archive for the ‘ Search Engines ’ Category

Yahoo! and Bing Sitting in a Tree, S-E-R-P-I-N-G!

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

“Hey Jon, have you heard? Yahoo! is now using Bing’s index in their search results!!! What is Raven going to do about it?!?” Indeed, I have heard. Thanks, of course, to my stringent policy of not living underneath a rock. And, as usual, we do have a plan, mostly. Our ...

Yahoo! is Recognizing Keywords in Domains That Are Separated by Dots

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

I may be late to the party on this, but I just noticed that Yahoo! is recognizing keywords that are formed using TLDs. For example, I have a website with the TLD of .st – mode.st. That domain is intended to convey the word modest. If I do a search in ...

SEO Weekly Digest – Issue 53

Friday, December 4th, 2009

Google Releases Site Performance Tool As mentioned by Matt Cutts at PubCon Las Vegas, Google may be introducing page loading time as a ranking factor. Right now, it’s not clear just how much significance will be placed on page speed, but the release of the Google Page Speed tool and ...

Bing vs Google: A Comparison Study

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Previous iterations of Microsoft’s search efforts were often met by many with skepticism. It’s not like they haven’t made the effort – Yukon, MSN, Live and now Bing – but they still haven’t been able to make significant inroads to compete with Google’s search engine dominance. With the newly released ...

Google’s New Search Features Offer More Opportunities for SEO

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

While Bing debuted several new features with their updated and rebranded search engine, Google continues to one-up them with new features of their own. Google’s new features are changing the search engine optimization landscape once again, and are also providing new opportunities for Internet marketers that practice SEO. The new ...

Google’s Fast Flip Repackages News Publications with Innovative Format

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

If you haven’t tried Google’s Fast Flip, yet, it’s worth a click. Earlier this month, the company released a “labs” version of its latest product. The web and mobile pages of Fast Flip are designed to allow users to quickly access content from 39 prominent news sources, such as BBC ...

Latest Build of Google Chrome Supports Site Specific Search

Sunday, August 30th, 2009

One of the nicest features of Google Chrome is the single input field for entering URLs or search queries. One of the nicest features of Firefox is that you can search on different sites (search engines or apps) in their search engine input field. I’ve always wanted that feature on ...

How Twitter Almost Sold Me A New Car

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

I’m in the market to buy a new car, so on a whim, I thought I’d try a little experiment. See, here’s the thing, if I’m going to spend $20k or more on one item, why should I be the one who does all of the work? Shouldn’t these dealers ...

How to Stay Safe from Duplicate Content by Using .htaccess and 301 Redirects

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

It’s not uncommon for a site to have mutiple domains and sub-domains pointing to the same content.  For example, you can get to this site using sitening.com or www.sitening.com.  But for on-site SEO it is important that all requests are 301 redirected to a single hostname.  If Google can get ...

Bounce rates affecting rankings? Or SEO for SEO’s sake?

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

Over at SEO Black Hat, QuadsZilla demonstrates correlation between traffic, specifically Google traffic, and bounce rate, claiming that bounce rate is being used to determine quality and factoring into rankings. Except his or her graphs show direct, rather than inverse, relationships between traffic and bounce rate. In other words, in ...