Search Engine Optimization News Blog

Reports show that hundreds of sites have issues getting indexed by Google. If you have crawling and indexing issues, you may have trouble ranking for you competitive and non-competitive terms.  Sometime you may need a little help solving Google indexing issues to increase your keyword ranking position. When you solve these problems, you can take full advantage of long tail keywords.First, however, you have to figure out what your starting point is by pulling some data.

Figure out how many submitted and indexed pages you have using Google Webmaster Central. You will have to submit a sitemap to get this data (in fact, if you’re having indexing problems, check this first. An XML sitemap is usually best for Google.) If you don’t have a sitemap, you can still do a site:domain.com query in Google and see the number of pages listed initially. Then run an SEMRush report to measure how many organic top-20 rankings you have, and follow up by enlisting the aid of a crawling program to pull page list from the site. The larger the site, the more problems you will probably come across.

Examine each URL and cross match them to the list of indexed pages, taking note of any that are not indexed.Once you know what is not indexed, rty to navigate naturally to these pages through your site to see if you have unlinked pages or ones with broken connections, or any other issues. Some problems you might find include:

A robots.txt file excluding that page/folder. This can happen during testing, if you forget to  by remove that restriction in your robots.txt file afterward.

Several URLs containing excluded parameters. If parameters contain duplicate content, you can make Google ignore it – but you should leave one copy live!  Check site configuration, settings, Parameter Handling in  your webmaster tools account to see if you accidentally excluded anything.

Duplicate content causing Google to stop indexing. Duplicate content is in many cases inevitable; you just have to tell Google which page you want read by using robots.txt and parameter handling to ‘hide’ them and let bots only get into the page you want them to index easily.

Low numbers of inboud links going to lower pages. If you neglect your deep pages, they may end up unindexed.  Especially if no link to new pages exists on an indexed/cached page, or only have a graphical or button link, you may need to add some regular links – preferably inbound ones- too up juice. Flash can also cause indexing problems. Good websites should always have indexable and contextual navigation links.

Figuring out and fixing your indexing issues should be a top priority, and don’t be ashamed to ask for some help. A Google Indexing Service can help ensure that all your pages are properly indexed.

Whoa. Not even a week old, and Google’s public launch of social network Buzz has people up in arms over supposed privacy issues. Now, in Google’s defense, there is info there that should lead people to make the correct choices on how much info is displayed or shared, but most people don’t even realize the default settings leave them wide open for hours after they initially set up the account.

Danny Sullivan brought up some core issues on how ‘normal’ people could be inadvertent revealing more than they wanted in his post:

Still, I think Google made a mistake in automatically following people and then making those people visible by default. Google tells me there were plenty of warnings this would happen. But for myself, because I first started through the mobile version, I just don’t recall these. The first time I saw my follower list was hours later after my account had been created.

Clearly I wasn’t alone in being confused. I think part of the problem is that this is much different than how things might work for something like Twitter. Yes, at Twitter, your followers will be shown by default. But no one is selected automatically for you — and when you do add someone, you effectively review each and every person.

On lady went wild after finding out that her es husband had been included in the autofollow. Others objected to the autofollow because business contacts and friends cannot be discerned.

Google made the following statement on the Gmail blog:

We’ve had plenty of feature requests, and some direct feedback. In particular there’s been concern from some people who thought their contacts were being made public without their knowledge (in particular the lists of people they follow, and the people following them). In addition, others felt they had too little control over who could follow them and were upset that they lacked the ability to block people who didn’t yet have public profiles from following them… The first time you create a post or comment in Buzz, we ask you to create a limited public profile (at a minimum it’s just your first and last names). We do this so we’ll know what name to display next to your posts — and so the people you follow know who you are. As you do this, we notify you that the lists of people you follow and the people following you will be displayed on your public profile. You can view, edit, and even hide these lists. The lists of your followers/people you follow are not made public on your profile until after you go through this profile creation step… That said, we heard from people that the checkbox for choosing not to display this information was too hard to find, and based on this feedback, we’ve changed the notice to make it very clear. We will roll these changes out to all Gmail users later today.

For those who are freaking out, here’s the shortcut to privacy, courtesy of Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider.

Yahoo has hosted a press event called SearchSpeak trying to convince everyone that they are definitely not out of the search game, due to the many rumours that Yahoo was no longer investing in search and would from here on out be a minor player, concentrating on news. Search Products SVP Shashi Seth was all set to give his presentation but right away the power in the room went out, leading some to comment that Yahoo’s trouble with search wasn’t their only problem!

Seth started his presentation anyway, talking about how Yahoo was NOT going to give up on search, and commenting on CEO Carol Bartz’ recent comments to the press and in conference calls about Yahoo’s future. Bartz has been speaking out about the mistakes Yahoo has made and insisting that the end is nowhere in sight for the company when it comes to search.

Seth continued, saying he would never have committed to coming to Yahoo a month and a half ago if the company wasn’t committed to search. He also said there was a great team at Yahoo.
The power came back on and he showed his slides, admitting that there’s still a lot to be done as per user experience and front end innovation – Yahoo is having to revamp their approach. Seth also mentioned Yahoo’s role in Asia as well as their presence in the global mobile field.

Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP of Yahoo Labs/Search Strategy commented next on how Yahoo feels that people don’t care about the index size anymore; they care about the right information or “answer,” basing this realization on the fact that 99 percent of search queries on Yahoo “have a noun” in them. People are searching for real information about real things, not ‘objects’ (documents), and they want it in real time. This would tie in with Yahoo’s heavy news feel to a lot of their content. Raghavan also pointed out that Yahoo’s search expertise is recognized, stating that the three top texts about search are by Yahoo scientists and that Yahoo also has won top prizes (papers) at all the 2009 and 2010 data mining conferences so far.

Larry Cornett, the VP of Consumer Products pointed out that Yahoo is still rolling out Search based apps and products, including Search Assist, Search Pad, breaking news/Twitter and multimedia search, and offered some glimpses into upcoming tools. He showed “search a sketch,” which will be a mobile search tool allowing users to draw out a custom area on a smartphone map and search within that area. He said that Yahoo wants to provide a more customized experience for mobile users instead of just copying and shrinking the PC presentation.

According to Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land, the Q&A portion revealed more information:

Candidly Seth acknowledged the search share losses that comScore and Hitwise have reported. He attributed some of those losses to toolbar and default search deals that Yahoo no longer had or that others had aggressively grabbed away.

I asked, “many in this audience want Yahoo to be competitive and succeed but remain skeptical that you can.” Larry Cornett responded that he was at Apple during the “dark time” before the return of Steve Jobs, when critics were calling for the company to shut down. He likened the media perceptions of Yahoo Search now to that period in Apple’s history and promised that Yahoo Search would “be back.” He added that many of Yahoo’s innovations were being freely copied by its competitors but in more superficial ways.

Greg also mentioned that Yoelle Maarek, new Senior Director at Yahoo Research in Israel and previously at Google, told him that there was greater openness and “humility” at Yahoo and that she greatly respected the Yahoo Research team.

Will Yahoo make a search comeback? They certain seem poised to do so.

Google is under fire this week for the way the border is drawn on Google Maps between Cambodia and Thailand. According to Reuters,

Cambodia called for the Google Map’s immediate removal because it was not internationally recognised.

Cambodia made the complaint in a letter issued a day ahead of the first-ever visit to the border region by its outspoken prime minister, Hun Sen, a move likely to raise tension between the historic foes.

“(The map) is devoid of truth and reality, and professionally irresponsible, if not pretentious,” Svay Sitha, secretary of state of the Cambodia’s Council of Ministers, wrote in the letter seen by Reuters on Friday.

“We therefore request that you withdraw the already disseminated, very wrong and not internationally recognised map and replace it,” he said.

Both countries have a heavy military presence along the border, where deadly clashes have occurred in the past three years.

Google’s Street View has come under fire numerous times over the past few years, but this is the first major blowup over a Google Earth map… although the issue has obviously come up before. Many Google Maps will show different borders depending on where the viewer is stationed if there is a dipute between 2 countries. Brian form the Googe Maps team says:

It is Google’s standard practice to show all disputed regions around the world on its global properties, such as on maps.google.com. It has been Google’s consistent and global policy to depict disputed regions as per the claims made by the disputing/claiming nations on its global properties. This does not in any way endorse or affirm the position taken by any side but merely provides complete information on the prevailing geo-political situation to our users of global properties in a dispassionate and accurate manner. Products that have been localized to the local domain of a region such as maps.google.co.in may depict that country’s position as per the mandate of their local laws.

See an example here.

According to a hearsay report on Wired,, Jobs thinks Google’s ‘Don’t be evil’ mantra is ‘Bu****it’. According to rumours from those who attended the ‘Town hall’ meeting, Jobs ripped Google and Adobe.

First, he discussed Google’s growing antipathy towards the iPhone and plans to enter the mobile market full bore, starting with the Nexus. According to the account:

We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.”

Then Jobs moved on to Adobe:

They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.

According to Guardian.co.uk, Schmidt isn’t above a little finger pointing himself – at his Davos interview the Google CEO reportedly had a few things to say himself:

His opinion of the iPad? He never commented on other companies. Though he couldn’t quite resist a lateral jab: “You might want to tell me the difference between a large phone and a tablet.” Beam.

Someone asked about competition from Apple and Facebook. Answer: he doesn’t think about them. He only thinks about Google. “Though I noticed you didn’t ask about Microsoft, by the way.”

Can the big boys play nice? Or is Google out for world domination of every pie they have a finger in?