Search Engine Musings » Google

Social Networks and Search – will they just spoil each other?

bill — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 18:38:07 +0000

Social is all over the place these days – even the mainstream media mentions it often, particularly at the moment with Facebook having just announced major changes at F8 and with Google pushing Google+ as a major alternative. Following so many SEO-related blogs and Twitter feeds as I do it’s easy to get the feeling [...]

Social Networks and Search – will they just spoil each other? is a post from: Search Engine Musings

Pressing the wrong international buttons

bill — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 13:10:06 +0000

A Tale of Edinburgh University Press and search engines This weekend I was doing some research for additional content for my Scottish Books site and had occasion to do a Google search for Edinburgh University Press. To my surprise their site didn’t appear in the first page of results, or the second, or the third. [...]

Pressing the wrong international buttons is a post from: Search Engine Musings

More Google site command oddities – and Bing too

bill — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 19:59:06 +0000

A few weeks ago I mentioned I was seeing more and more erratic behaviour in the once-reliable Google site command. Today I noticed more strangeness on this very site. In March I had 163 pages indexed, at the beginning of April I had dropped to 138. Now I’ve dropped again to 113. But the really [...]

More Google site command oddities – and Bing too is a post from: Search Engine Musings

Personalised and real-time search – let me turn them off!

bill — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:08:46 +0000

Call me an old Luddite if you will, but to me – as a user rather than just as an SEO – personalised search is a faulty concept. The whole point of “search” is that I’m looking for something I usually don’t know much about – so why would I want sites that I already [...]

Personalised and real-time search – let me turn them off! is a post from: Search Engine Musings

PageRank Distribution and Navigation Systems

bill — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:27:25 +0000

Ok, this post is aimed at SEOs rather than a general audience, and is something I’ve been mulling over for quite some time without getting round to posting about it. I got the nudge to finally do so from a post on Search Engine Land – PageRank Sculpting Leaves NoFollowed Tags Behind . In that [...]

PageRank Distribution and Navigation Systems is a post from: Search Engine Musings

Google site command oddities

bill — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 15:03:22 +0000

For some time I’ve been noticing irregularities in the results of the information that Google provides through the various commands and through the Webmaster Tools facility. Of course we all know the link command has been hopelessly broken for many years and frankly I don’t know why it’s still there, but the site command was [...]

Google site command oddities is a post from: Search Engine Musings

More Google Geolocation oddities

bill — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:08:24 +0000

Sometimes Google really puzzles me. I just did a search from the UK, using Google.co.uk, selecting UK-only results, for “chatsworth bed”. (I was checking to see how Chatsworth bed was doing against the competition.) The Local results that Google inserted into the serps after the third natural result were: Local business results for Bed near [...]

More Google Geolocation oddities is a post from: Search Engine Musings

Google through the looking glass

bill — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:32:33 +0000

My last post discussed changes in the search landscape but it seems Google is busy changing both the business landscape and the real landscape. A couple of weeks ago we had SEORoundtable reporting on them producing some very strange results in their search engine – searches in Google for “Google Ireland” were producing Google New [...]

Google through the looking glass is a post from: Search Engine Musings

Webmaster Tools drops the pixie dust

bill — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:41:09 +0000

In the last few days there have been some additions and one removal from Webmaster Tools. The removal is in some ways the more interesting for what it might signal for the future – Pagerank is no longer being mentioned. Now it was never much of a feature – they told you if you had [...]

Webmaster Tools drops the pixie dust is a post from: Search Engine Musings

Who’s side(wiki) are they on?

bill — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 11:16:47 +0000

Google have now released something they’ve been beta-testing for a while – SideWiki is a commenting system built into the latest incarnation of the Google Toolbar. Basically what is does is shows a sidebar in your browser where it lists any comments that anyone makes about your site. Systems designed to do this sort of [...]

Who’s side(wiki) are they on? is a post from: Search Engine Musings