‘SERPs’ Category Archive

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Excerpt: On March 24th Google rolled out new changes to the way in which it displays search results. These changes have been named Orion (after the company Orion that Google acquired  in 2006 which specialised in associative relationship search technology). Two changes to the search results can be observed. The first change concerns the appearance of snippets. Snippets are portions of content that are taken from places where content closely matches the search query. Depending on the query, a snippet is taken from an area of the content that is related to the queries. Occasionally, snippets may be taken from the meta…

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Excerpt: Cloaking is the practice of showing a different web page to search engine bots than to your visitors in an attempt to distort rankings. The hope on the part of the cloaker is that the search engine can be shown a rich variety of content which contains the keywords they would like to be ranked for. For example a flash site that sends textual content to the search engines. This is practice is considered to be black-hat and if detected would lead to search engine retribution. So how do the search engines detect cloaked websites? When a search engine indexes…

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Excerpt: How does Google decide what is suitable for general audience viewing. The opposite problem is also encountered, how do images that are not linked with adult subjects make it into the Google images only when safe-search is turned off? Matt Cutts worked on Safesearch. It is an algorithmic process. From the Google blog: Google’s filter uses advanced proprietary technology that checks keywords and phrases, URLs and Open Directory categories. It is likely that factors used in SafeSearch would also be useful in determining what is defined to be an explicit image? Despite the advances…

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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…

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Excerpt: When we type a query into a search engine such as Google, how many of us think about what goes on behind the scenes? Any SEO specialist ought to have a basic understanding of how your query gets transformed into a list of results. In the early days of the web, a search engine consisted of a list of a few thousand sites. There were so few websites that it was enough just to list pages of all the sites found by a simple crawler. With the explosion in the number of websites after 1994, the task of indexing the web…