Category Archives: SEO

Google settling down again at last

July 21, 2008 – 9:12 pm

Having been away for a much needed holiday I’ve been catching up with developments for the last two weeks with fairly intensive search ranking analysis. Google’s recent bout of volatility in their results finally seems to be starting to even out. Since early May there have been some very strange results being reported on the [...]

By bill | Also posted in Google | Comments (0)

About Us pages

June 6, 2008 – 2:55 pm

Ever since Google started mentioning using rel=nofollow as a possible way of diverting PageRank away from “pointless” pages there have been articles telling webmasters to use it on their Terms and Conditions and About Us pages. The implication being that About Us pages are not important. If any of you have ever read Michael Martinez [...]

By bill | Also posted in content and copywriting | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Was your search really for what you entered?

May 29, 2008 – 10:29 pm

There has been some speculation recently that searches are no longer isolated from each other in Google but that the previous search that you made may influence the current one, even when you aren’t logged in to any form of account. This follows an interview by Danny Sullivan with Google’s Marissa Mayer in April. This [...]

By bill | Also posted in Google, personalised search | Comments (0)

All change in the big three

May 19, 2008 – 6:55 pm

Search rankings have been fluctuating even more than usual recently. First we had Yahoo doing a major algorithm change, so they were changing quite a bit. Then we noticed that MSN/Live had dumped most pages from its index and was respidering everything; and of course that meant that rankings disappeared for a few days while [...]

By bill | Also posted in Google, Yahoo | Comments (0)

Google Webmaster Tools problem

April 11, 2008 – 9:02 pm

And the wider issue of communicating with the search giant For most of the last month or so there has been a problem for some sites in accessing the useful tools that Google makes available for site administrators. This manifested itself as a failure to verify the “ownership” of the sites using either of the [...]

By bill | Also posted in Google | Comments (0)

Web site code optimisation

March 15, 2008 – 4:13 pm

Does valid code matter? You often see that question on SEO forums, and the wide diversity of replies shows how much confusion there is on this. It usually degenerates pretty quickly into an argument between those who fervently believe valid code helps search rankings and those who don’t. This misses the point completely. My opinion, [...]

By bill | Also posted in Coding, Web Design | Comments (0)