‘Google’ Category Archive

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: Niels Bohr said, “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” I feel that this also applies to the field of search engine optimisation also. It is not an exact science. At best, it can be compared to economics or sociology. Data is noisy, there are lots of theories and everyone has their own opinion. It may be worse, since unlike economics or sociology, how search engines work can be changed without notice. While you cannot argue with results, there are many roads to Mecca. So how…

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: One of the best ways to tell Google about your website is to submit a sitemap. It is usually one of the things that your SEO service should do to for your site if it has not been done already. Essentially, it is a list of urls that you want to be crawled by Googlebot. The most common type of sitemap is an XML file. However, Google supports  sitemaps for their other services including: XML Sitemap files for web pages – Use these files to submit all of your web pages (this is the preferred format for web pages). While not…

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: On 31st December, Matt Cutts confirmed the latest update to toolbar  PageRank. SEO the Game has gone up to a PR-4 from PR-0, however, this is only for the first page. While we are very pleased at the rapid rise in toolbar PR, it is a very poor metric for the importance of a page and now seems a good time to go over common questions people often ask about this misunderstood number. The Toolbar Meter For those that have never seen the toolbar PR meter, it used to be displayed in Google search results as a green bar which can take values…

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt:

[/caption] If you run a popular website and it needs to be taken down for maintenance for a few hours you could lose your listings if a search engine robot comes to visit and the page is unavailable. You don’t want to send out a 404 page cannot be found error. This is obviously a worry, especially for large e-commerce sites, as any large site needs the occasional maintenance to update software or backup a large database. Fortunately, there is something that can be done. The answer is the return code 503 to the search…

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: Introduction The PageRank algorithm is a global ranking metric used to determine the overall quality of a page. The Hilltop algorithm determines the quality of a result based on the relevance to the query term. The original paper is available. The algorithm overcomes problems with broad search terms which return large sets of documents that have to be ranked by checking them against expert sites are derived from the terms in the query. An expert site is be one which has many one-way links to other expert sites. Affiliated sites are discounted. (Sites are deemed affiliated if they share the…