‘Analysis’ Category Archive

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Excerpt: Normally, as SEO’s we try to concentrate on getting the search engines crawl and index as much of the site as possible. However, occasionally there might be reasons why you would want to remove content from search engines. For example, if spammers have infiltrated your site and put links to their sites. There are a number of ways in which you can tell the search engine what to do. .htaccess – password protect the content you really don’t want search engines to index. (you have to do this before they index the content.) This is a strong method of protecting the content…

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Excerpt: One of the tools that I have used since version 2 is Mathematica. I even have a Mathematica t-shirt. If you haven’t heard of it before, it is software for doing mathematics, hence the name. But this is so much more than a jumped up calculator. Among the features it sports are: Visualisation – draw graphs and plots Symbolic mathematics – algebra, integration, differentiation Functional programming Arbitrary numerical precision in calculations. It uses a notebook format to express results so the mathematics can be performed from the output of another. However you can also use it like a programming language to define functions and routines….

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Excerpt: I was reading an article by Tom Critchlow on  why we shouldn’t use tiny urls in newspapers. All good stuff, but this got me thinking about how the tinyURL system works? TinyURLs are useful when referring people to sites on Twitter. Clearly we require a mapping which takes a URL and maps it to a unique but shorter URL. Hash tables do this; there is an input and a method of encoding which generates the tinyURL. What could be used? MD5 produces a code that is 32 characters still too long and a usability minefield. Other MD codings are available and MD2…

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Excerpt: Rand Fishkin has written an excellent post about Google’s Ranking factors and how  their weighting has changed over the years. On-page factors have less to do with the ranking. Traditional methods of linking such as  creating as many links as possible have  lost much of their power. Although, I wonder whether this is an artificial just because competition means you have to create more links to compete.  Even the once mighty PageRank is having less of an impact. While  most of the factors have decreased in relevance, the concept of domain trust is having a greater importance than ever. What do…

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Excerpt: One day before April 1st. I thought it would be  interesting to look at the search volume for April Fools day on Google Trends. What better example can you find than this for periodicity in search volume. (Click image to enlarge) It is nice to see that there is a spike every April fool’s day but it also interesting to note the countries that celebrate Aril Fools day. In America it is most searched for but New Zealand are not far behind. They must take it very seriously given their small population. In the UK, we are somewhat more reserved being…