Search Engine Musings » Google

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 article [...]

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 Chatsworth, [...]

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 Zealand [...]

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 a [...]

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

Webmaster Tools – new feature lets you exclude parameters

bill — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 11:51:22 +0000

Last night while going over some clients’ accounts in Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools I noticed a new feature which hadn’t been there a few days ago. Under Site configuration / Settings there is now a section called Parameter Handling where you can set whether or not Google should ignore any of the parameters that [...]

Webmaster Tools – new feature lets you exclude parameters is a post from: Search Engine Musings

Localised fallout from bank search

bill — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:52:04 +0000

I often see ads and articles for local SEO that concentrate on getting into the Google Local results that appear for geographically-related searches – usually after the third organic result. While it’s a useful area to cover I do tend to take it with a little pinch of salt because I’ve seen some odd results [...]

Localised fallout from bank search is a post from: Search Engine Musings