Search Engine Optimization News Blog

Still not sure if you should worry about search engine submission to Bing and other, smaller SEs? Nielsen just released the latest search market share numbers, and the Redmond company’s definitely in the running with their latest search engine revamp.  Bing’s market share in February was 12.5%, which represents an all-time high. Bing has grown continually since it launched last year (except for a brief dip in December), and February’s numbers are a solid 15% increase from its January market share.

Google, on the other hand, had worse luck, with two straight months of falling market share.

Google is actually in worse shape no than they even were in November. Yahoo as well has seen a steady decline.

It’s time to stop ignoring the fact that while Google may be monarch, it’s definitely not of all the internet surveys. Get a search engine submission service to properly submit your website not only to the big three, but to the innumerable smaller SEs that just might bring you some of your best traffic.

Especially if you serve news, you should make sure you can be found elsewhere than Google. In fact, Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism issued their State of the Media report showing how people search for news:

Google comes in 4th on Hitw2ise and 6th in rank on Neilsen:

Stop thinking Google is the end all, and make sure you are covered in many different search engines for better coverage!

Matt Cutts, the go-to guy for all things Google, did a great interview with Eric Enge about – among other things – PageRank; and how it can affect your link building efforts if you use redirects too freely, bleeding away your hard one Link juice and associated PageRank.

(Page Rank Diagram)

Matt has commented heavily on PageRank before on his own blog:

(RE: sculpting) I wouldn’t recommend it, because it isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.

For example, it makes a much bigger difference to make sure that people (and bots) can reach the pages on your site by clicking links than it ever did to sculpt PageRank. If you run an e-commerce site, another example of good site architecture would be putting products front-and-center on your web site vs. burying them deep within your site so that visitors and search engines have to click on many links to get to your products.

There may be a miniscule number of pages (such as links to a shopping cart or to a login page) that I might add nofollow on, just because those pages are different for every user and they aren’t that helpful to show up in search engines. But in general, I wouldn’t recommend PageRank sculpting.

Now, Matt tackles PageRank and redirects with Enge:

Typically, the 301 Redirect would pass PageRank. It can be a very useful tool to migrate between pages on a site, or even migrate between sites. Lots of people use it, and it seems to work relatively well, as its effects go into place pretty quickly. I used it myself when I tried going from mattcutts.com to dullest.com, and that transition went perfectly well. My own testing has shown that it’s been pretty successful. In fact, if you do site:dullest.com right now, I don’t get any pages. All the pages have migrated from dullest.com over to mattcutts.com. At least for me, the 301 does work the way that I would expect it to. All the pages of interest make it over to the new site if you are doing a page by page migration, so it can be a powerful tool in your arsenal. (Matt later verified that a small amount of PR is lost through 301 redirects.)

What about 302 redirects? Matt says they are temporary, not intended to be permanent, and shouldn’t flow PageRank or link juice.

Bottom line? Have a reputable SEO firm help you correct links on your site and don’t depend on redirects unless you want to lose your link juice!

Will Google China be no more?

In January, following the hacking of several Gmail accounts, Google said:

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

According to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal, China isn’t budging:

At a press conference Friday, Li Yizhong, Minister of Industry and Information Technology, was asked by a reporter how China would react if Google does stop censoring Google.cn. “I hope Google can respect Chinese rules and regulations,” responded Mr. Li, whose ministry is one of several that regulates China’s Internet. “If you insist on taking this action that violates Chinese laws, I repeat: you are unfriendly and irresponsible, and you yourself will have to bear the consequences.”

Reports noted here earlier last week indicated that scientists felt a China without Google would cripple research, but the general public was more than happy to use Baidu instead. It looks as though China is calling Google’s bluff, and Google in turn is calling China’s – a report from the Financial Times seems to indicate Google will make good on their threat to pull out altogether:

Google has drawn up detailed plans for the closure of its Chinese search engine and is now “99.9 per cent” certain to go ahead as talks over censorship with the Chinese authorities have reached an apparent impasse, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking.

In a hardening of positions on both sides, the Chinese government also on Friday threw down a direct public challenge to the US search company, with a warning that it was not prepared to compromise on internet censorship to stop Google leaving.

The signs that Google was on the brink of closing Google.cn, its local search service in China, came two months after it promised to stop bowing to censorship there. But while a decision could be made very soon, the company is likely to take some time to follow through with the plan as it seeks an orderly closure and takes steps to protect local employees from retaliation by the authorities, the person familiar with its position said.

Wow. If Google really does shut down Google.cn, it could have a huge effect on the balance of power in China – those not satisfied with Baidu would likely turn to Google competitor Yahoo or even Bing.

Rich snippets appearing in Google are now supported in three versions or languages; formerly, Google offered microformats and RDFa support, and has now added support for microdata, which is a part of the HTML5 specification.

In May of last year, Google first announced rich snippets on their Custom Search blog, with a lot of restrictions:

At this time, Rich Snippets attribute information for Custom Search is only returned in XML (via <PageMap> tags), so you can use your own customized presentation controls. We’re looking to make this easier for you in the future. Indexing of the rich snippets information can have unspecified latency, as some pages are indexed and refreshed more frequently than others, and PageMap attributes may not be indexed from all webpages… If you are getting results back via XML, then the custom attributes are returned in the results within the PageMap tag, as shown below. You can parse the DataObjects within the PageMap tag and provide customized presentation of the relevant attributes.

This meant that XHTML verification was highly important.

Now more options are open. From the Google Webmaster Central Blog:

Today, we’re happy to announce support for microdata for use in rich snippets… By using microdata markup in your web pages, you can specify reviews, people profiles, or events information on your web pages that Google may use to improve the presentation of your pages in Google search results.

Here’s an example:

The blog goes on to exoll the simplictity of the system, and to warn that rich snippets are not guaranteed, but requests for inclusion can be submitted:

Microdata has the nice property of balancing richness with simplicity. As you can see, it’s easy to add markup to your pages using a few HTML attributes like itemscope (to define a new item), itemtype (to specify the type of item being described), and itemprop (to specify a property of that item). Once you’ve added markup to a page, you can test it using the rich snippets testing tool to make sure that Google can parse the data on your page.

It is still a good idea to get an XHTML validation service to check your site and ensure that you get all the perks you can!

Google has done it again – streamlined yet another sector of tehir offerings to make them more accessible. According to the Google Blog:

Today, we’re making it easier for these users and software providers to do business in the cloud with a new online store for integrated business applications. The Google Apps Marketplace allows Google Apps customers to easily discover, deploy and manage cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps.

The Apps include:

• Zoho CRM (a business management solution for organization-wide Sales, Marketing, Customer Support & Service and Inventory Management.

• Concur Breeze, designed to help small businesses easily handle expense reporting, reducingb wasted man-hours and increasing productivity

• TripIt, a  travel plans organizer that works with all travel bookers and takes organization to the next level

• FreshBooks, the online billing and bookkeeping app that lets you send, track and collect payments quickly.

• Intuit Online Payroll, the easy payroll solution integrated smoothly with Google Apps:

According to TechMeme,

Every day, thousands of businesses choose the cloud.  More than 2 million businesses have adopted Google Apps over the last three years, eliminating the hassles associated with purchasing, installing and maintaining hardware and software themselves.

With the Google Apps Marketplace to help streamline y0our business, and a solid SEO firm to handle your website content and linking needs, you can build your online business into a power to be reckoned with.