Google

As the end of 2007 approaches it seems like a perfect time to recap our most popular and commented blog posts:
7. More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About Linking

How much are certain links worth? Are directories valid? Should you pay for links? How do you measure your linking success?

6. Microsoft Jumps in the Ad Company Buyer’s Club

Now Microsoft jumps to prove they’re not out of the online advertising game with a whopping $6 billion purchase of aQuantive in a move to expand their breadth of paid opportunities on web sites, Internet television, video on demand, and other places online.

5. The Human Element of Search

Take a look at your homepage. What does it say? Does it give you a clear sense of personality… say, clean-cut professional, serious business or funky casual?

4. What Happened to my Google Page Rank - SEO Audio

Were you one of the thousands of web site owners crying foul this week? Or maybe you hardly know what a PageRank is, but want to know the kind of thing that gets bloggers from coast-to-coast, time zone to time zone gossiping and ganging up on Google

3. Blogging your way to The Top of the Search Engines in Minutes

Although Google’s search ranking methods are usually shrouded in mystery, we can assume from these two examples, that Google may be using its Blog Search feature in collaboration with its general search to retrieve the most up-to-date information on any given topic.

2. Is Your Website Ready for Cyber-Monday?

With online holiday sales expected to hit 39 Billion dollars, it is essential to make sure your e-commerce site is in tip top shape.

1. Thinking about Buying or Selling Paid Links? Think Again…

Webmasters have been aggravated for weeks because of Google’s more aggressive policy, with most of the drops in PageRank a few weeks ago blamed on a penalty to sites perceived as buying or selling paid links.

Regardless of whether you think that search is a popularity contest, for years Google categorized the web in terms of “haves” and “have nots” by creating two indexes — the normal, regularly crawled results, and the supplemental results, those slightly off, unpopular, ugly performers who, try as they might to hang with the cool kids, still got put in the corner.

Of course, if this happened to your website, it was a pretty big bummer. And for larger sites, some pages almost inevitably sank down to the dusty corners of Google’s index, blamed on a variety of things from duplicate meta tags to limited content to low page authority.

That was all abolished a couple of months back when Google announced the end of the supplemental results, though SEOs have speculated as to what exactly HAS happened to all of those pages… after all, Google can’t possibly search the whole web on every query, can they?

Well, last night’s post on the fate of supplemental results certainly suggests they can. It’s a mind bogglingly massive operation, which requires, as they say, “some truly amazing technical feats,” but is promising for all of those poor pages who didn’t quite make the A-list cut (which makes me wonder who it’s a victory for: small businesses with poor SEO skills or the legions of web spammers).

Many were happy to see the supplemental index go — after all, it was the kiss of death for web rankings — but with it went an important indicator for diagnosing a site’s quality in Google and SEO best practices on sprawling, content-managed sites. With the new system, there is renewed life for all of those pages… and the double responsibility to ensure your content is keyword rich, unique and readable.

One nice thing that always follows major conferences is the AV brought home by the different companies in attendance. While you can never recreate the exact feel of being somewhere, often it’s the conversations that are the most valuable and exclusive, hands-on interaction with some of the biggest people involved with the search world. Matt Cutts, as the champion of open-Googleness, posted a bunch of audio-video featuring him throughout the conference. While I can appreciate him clearing up issues about sub-directories and subdomains (also talked about today in the Natural Search Blog), one thing I think is a great primer on this whole search marketing thing is his SEO tips for small business owners recorded by Reachd.com.

Now video is not a good quick reference, but sometimes it’s great to have someone just explaining something in natural language (provided you at least have a basic understanding of robots, URLs, keywords, etc.). In a surprisingly information-packed ten minutes, Cutts touches on the founding principles of SEO (good user-focused content, crawlable navigation and keywords) as well as touching on local search, sitemaps, and video.

A worthy use of a few minutes, whether you’re being floored by these shocking truths or pleasantly reminded that you’re doing things the right way.

We thought this one was already a closed case, but apparently the question of META tags still gets asked to Google engineers frequently. So today on the Google Webmaster blog, there’s a nice article on what META tags Google uses and which they do not. The META keywords is quite notably omitted, with love going to the often neglected META description tag and the SEO’s favorite tool, the Title tag.

Again, no thunder bolts of lightning here, but nice to hear that Google’s hands know what the others are doing. And another nail in the coffin for META keywords, MSN notwithstanding…