SEO Dance

Google has another special logo for today in honor of Valentine’s Day:

I love that it features what looks to be an older couple still happy after many years together. Hope everyone has a great Valentine’s Day.

Another thing I noticed while visiting Google was a link to Doodle for Google. It’s a contest open to school age children k-12 to doodle on the Google logo. The favorite voted by visitors will appear on the homepage May 22nd. Fun contest. Too bad I’m way past being qualified to enter and the little one is still a few years away from kindergarten. Still it’s a fun idea and a great class project.

Have you noticed the Google logo today? It’s made of Legos, which had me curious as to what exactly was going on today.
It’s the fiftieth anniversary of Legos, so Google is celebrating with a special logo for the day. We are use to various Google logos for holidays. Apparently today’s special Lego logo was created by fans. Google liked it so much that the decided to use it.

Matt Cutts of Google recently answered some questions about the elusive PageRank. Some have been speculating that a lack of an update to us civilians that this might just be the end of Google’s PageRank. Apparently, PageRank is happening at any given moment. It’s just the push of those numbers outside the Googleplex that is taking so long.

Cutts answers are interesting and an education on PageRank. For more information on PageRank, read his insightful answers. I try not to obsess over PageRank but it’s hard when the gamer in me takes over and wants to know how my latest standing. At least with having a few answers about PageRank I can be satisfied at least for now.

PageRank

Google’s privacy policy has been rated worst on the web by a London watchdog group that examined several websites privacy policies including Yahoo! and MSN. Google received the lowest rank possible from Privacy International.

Some of the issues Privacy International brings up with Google is the logging and keeping of all search results and IP addresses for 18-24 months. Through their social networking website Orkut, Google has access to user information like hobbies, addresses, and phone numbers that are included in the user profile.

The report didn’t rate any websites with their highest accolade but Google was the one website to rank in their lowest category. Livejournal and eBay were among websites receiving higher marks for their privacy while websites like AOL and Yahoo! were labeled as having substantial threats when it comes to privacy. The Privacy International report is available as a PDF from their website.

Google, Privacy International

Recently, Google allowed Saul Hansell who is a journalist for the New York Times to sit in on quality meetings. While a lot of what Hansell saw was off the record, his New York Times article on Google’s search engine is a very enlightening read. While the article doesn’t give away any trade secrets, it does offer a lot of interesting factoids about Google like how the company is always striving to tweak its search engine.

It’s amazing when searching Google it knows that Apple is usually used when users are looking for information on the computer company compared to when a search is conducted for apple, it’s most likely a search for the fruit. There are more interesting revelations about Google in the New York Times article.

Google

Google clarified Googlebomb, another SEO jargon for Google search engine gaming. Or is that a redundancy?

What is a Googlebomb?” Technically, a “Googlebomb” (sometimes called a “linkbomb” since they’re not specific to Google) refers to a prank where people attempt to cause someone else’s site to rank for an obscure or meaningless query. Googlebombs very rarely happen for common queries, because the lack of any relevant results for that phrase is part of why a Googlebomb can work. One of the earliest Googlebombs was for the phrase “talentless hack,” for example.

More about Googlebomb via Google Official Webmaster blog

Googlebomb, Google, SEO term

I’ve always preferred Yahoo! Groups over Google Groups for a number of reasons and one of the best reasons is it became more popular a lot faster than Google Groups.

However, with Google’s announcement of Google Groups’ new look and features, my loyalty to Yahoo! Groups might get tarnished soon.

The following features are the recent addition to the Google Group interface:

- Pages. Create and contribute to shared web pages with simple drag, drops, cuts, pastes, and clicks (i.e., no coding).
- Customized look and feel. Select pictures, colors, and styles to express your group’s style.
- Member profiles. See who else is in the group and read their profiles. Personalize your own profile with a photo and other details.
- File sharing. Post documents that anyone in the group can access.
- Easy reading of group discussions. Read easily in a Gmail-style interface.

Read full press release.

Google Groups, Yahoo! groups

Search Engine Roundtable forum members have reported observed changes on Google’s pagerank toolbar. I’ve checked on this blog’s pagerank today and still no Google love for its homepage but the seo tool category and other categories are already showing PR3’s.

So yeah, Text-Link-Ads and other link brokerage services can’t get anything out of this blog yet if one of their requirements is a high PR.

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It has become my habit to check out my blogs’ Akismet’s Spam section. Although I find it a stressing habit, it still is worth my time because if it weren’t for this compulsive Akismetted comment checking habit, I’d lose some of my clients.

This spam checking extends to my e-mail spam inbox or junk mails. And just today I thought I again discovered a gem from my junk mail box because of this e-mail title:

Search Engine of the Year

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Duplicate content penalty. You might have read of that already. But what really is duplicate content?

Duplicate content is blocks of texts that are considerably similar or that completely matches that of another domain’s or even just within a page.

But what if you’re getting all too worried that whatever you write or blog you double-check first using Copyscape?

To get rid of too much stressing over what’s duplicate and what’s not, Google has cleared up the smoke too on what is NOT duplicate content:
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The social networks won the curiosity of most of Google search users. And this is documented by the list of Top 10 Most Searched Terms on Google for the year 2006. Bebo isthe top searched term, which is one lesser-known social network website compared to Myspace, which maybe the reason it’s highly-searched?! Huh?! The second most-searched, Myspace, is the highly sensationalized social network that has even topped Yahoo! in terms of number of searches.

Here is the complete list of Google’s Top 10 most-searched terms.
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Images are getting more known on helping drive traffic to a site. However, aside from writing descriptive alt tags, headings and other textual descriptions, how else do you make sure your site get the most traffic from Google’s Image Search feature?

Google Image Search can be especially beneficial to those with e-commerce sites or are using images for their e-tail business products. But how can you make this Google product help your image get your site indexed?
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Are you using a webcam from Axis Communications?

Owners of Axis Communications’ webcams are able to publish online their streaming webcam page and will have a default URL pattern similar to as follows:

http://www.domain-or-ip-address.com/path/view/index.shtml

Knowing this, a search command can be done in Google called inurl. You can search the following in Google:

inurl:/view/index.shtml

Now you can have the time of your life viewing other people’s webcams or be terrified or whatever.

Uh-oh.

via Ituloy-AngSulong

Google inurl command, inurl command, view webcams, streaming webcam

If you’ve been blogging or running a website that has had a traffic surge, most likely, you tackled topics like:

- celebrities and whatever they flash
- celebrity babies (Suri and Shiloh)
- death of famous people (Steve Irwin, Anna Nicole’s son and recently CNET’s James Kim)
- seasonal preparations (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas)

Yes, they are the most searched topics. Now, here if you’d like to know the top searched keywords on Yahoo! for 2006 and here’s Google’s monthly version of most popular keywords in every theme - Zeitgeist.

keywords, keyword search, social network, zeitgeist, buzz creation

These past few days are full of exploration for the two biggies of the search world - Google and Yahoo. Aside from joining forces for the use of Sitemaps, both are found to be tweaking on their search engine results.

Google is working on adding blog search results from Blogger Search maybe? Here’s a screenshot of the caught blog result add-on.

While Yahoo has been caught redhanded adding some Yahoo!Answers on its SERPs.

Finally, Google and Yahoo are realizing that real answers and fresh information should be given some attention. This will definitely boost the morale of bloggers and hopefully make the blogosphere gain more traction as the bloggers’ effort becomes more recognized by Google. Now, don’t start brewing abuse of these new features, please.

Google, Yahoo, SERPs experiment, Yahoo answers, blogs, bloggers, search engine results