Ok, I know some of you guys have probably had this interface for the past couple of weeks already, however it has only just appeeared for me and I’m kinda annoyed that it has. I can understand why there have been some design changes, but the first thing that really struck me was the similarity between the new Google results page, and the existing Bing results page. Like seriously, of all search engines, you go and copy Bing….
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Google Launches Real Time search, Time to say goodbye to Twitter Search
I guess we all saw it coming, it was really only a matter of time before Google invests in having real time search results at a click of a button like Twitter. Ofcourse, the difference between Twitter search and Google is that Twitter only shows tweets where as Google shows actual quality results (including tweets). Come on, we all know Twitter is dead, its really only a matter of months before people realises this.
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Google Knol – A wikipedia competitor but will it win?
Looks like Google has finally decided to launch a user generated encyclopedia (pretty much Wikipedia but owned by Google) called Google Knol. Already having stiff competition on the playing field, which consists of Wikipedia, Scholarpedia and Helium, will Google Knol really make that much of a difference?
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Google’s second search bar helps users teleport!
Google has recently (Yesterday to be exact) added a second search bar within the Search results page to help users fine tune their results. This is in hope that users can get more specific results for a broader topic. This is what Google calls “Teleporting”.
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Website Delisted from Google – Wonder why hmm
Well, I’ve been shamelessly promoting my new educational websites in previous posts and everything was going fine until today. I had a quick health check on two of my international websites – Learning How Germany and Learning How Italy, and to my surprise both of them have been delisted from Google.
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Microsoft Live Search upgrades in hopes to gain market share in search
Microsoft has finally decided that they don’t want to be number two (or three or four for that matter) anymore when it comes to search and has supposedly matched Google’s search relevancy as well as surpassed Yahoo’s search relevancy. As with many news that comes out of Microsoft, you need to take it with a grain of salt and hearing that they have beaten Yahoo at their own game (which mind you they have been doing for 13 years) over night seems like a bit of a stretch to me.
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Ad placement formula change for Google Adwords
Seems the guys at the plex have decided to updated the way Google text based advertisements are being displayed and organised. This change should help improve the way ads are promoted to the top position on Google search engine result pages.
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The Age says that Most search engine optimisation companies are ‘unethical’
I hardly ever read The age, however I was lucky enough to read Aaron Wall’s seo blog which pointed to an article regarding search engine optimisation firms with in Australia. It turns out that recently, a well known SEO firm Found Agency, was penalised by Google for ‘unethical’ methods for their ranking. The Age took up this opportunity to quote anonymous ‘reliable‘ sources to bad mouth the SEO community in Australia.
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Stop wasting link authority on low quality pages
I have recently noticed that most of my tag pages are supplementary results on Google, which basically tells me either those pages just don’t have enough links for Google to trust them or they are just crap (or duplicate content). It has always been wrongly implied that the more pages you have, the better the chance of you getting found. To an extent its true, however if 80% to 90% of your pages are rubbish, then you can kiss your Google ranking goodbye.
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Scrapers abuses your sitemap.xml
The relatively new Sitemap.xml protocol has been readily accepted by webmasters around the world as the best way to help crawlers navigate through your website. However, being as useful as it may to search engines, the Sitemap.xml protocol has also helped content thieves and data miners by providing them the necessary data to scrape a website.
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Google finally launches an their Australian blog
Seems like Google has finally started taking notice of Australia by starting their official blog based on Google news, product and industry announcements within Australia. I’d probably add Google’s aussie blog to my blogroll just to show some Google love. You can check out their first post or just head over to their blog which is currently very empty.
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The usefulness of a website being XHTML compliant
Countless webmasters stress over the issue of the need to be XHTML compliant, for both search engine optimisation as well as to decrease cross browser issues. In a way being XHTML compliant is like providing a guarantee to your users that the site they are visiting is top notch. However is there really a need to goto such extent to get your website XHTML compliant?
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Google Search within results option
Is it me or has Google launched a new tool which allows you to search for things within the results of something you have already searched for. I hardly ever scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page but when I ran a “site:” function on my blog site to check how many pages were indexed, I noticed the “Search within results” option. Right next to that there was the good old language tool for the compulsory searches of japanese animation and gaming information I run on a daily bases.
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Google URL Removal Tool now in Webmaster Console
So here is the situation, you have a spiffy website with heaps of great content, maybe a few personal blog posts regarding people or companies you do not like. One day, you get a phone call for some lawyer threatening to take your website down and you with it if you don’t remove one or two of your blog posts. Like most bloggers, you get scared and remove the posts, but unfortunately the post still lingers as a cached copy on Google’s index. Well, its time for you to use Google’s URL Removal tool.
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Google updates Page rank on 1st of May 2007
Well well, a Google Page rank update and almost all my websites are up to a PR3 or more. Pixel Square Production website is now officially a PR4 and my previously owned website LiveHouse.com.au is now PR5 (I haven’t really done anything to it for 6 months). Have a look at your websites, you’d be surprised at the change, that is of course assuming you have already done a lot of SEO work to it already. Overall a good day for me..so far.
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The importance of branding and marketing online
As a search engine optimiser, I spend most of my time performing tasks to help websites rank higher on Google Serps. These tasks include link building, content creation, on page optimisations and creating link baits. Although these tasks can directly affect the position a website is placed on the SERPs, it does little to establish an active relationship with potential customers. This is when branding and general online marketing comes into play.
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Page titles, the most important on page optimisation
It is undeniable that page titles are the most important on page optimisation as well as the easiest to implement. Unfortunately, a lot of webmasters tend to forget the existent of such a tag in their html, hence completely forgetting to alter it to something other than the dreaded default “Untitled”.
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Top reasons why websites don’t get index and how to fix them
Question: My website still haven’t been indexed after a month, what can I do to help speed up the process of the website being indexed by Google?