Duplicated content

January 22nd, 2009

Duplicated content is actually not a new issue and every SEO should know about this problem. The best example of how content may be duplicated, is www-problem. If you don’t have a 301-Reditect of domain.de to www.domain.de, then the your website is reachable on both addresses. A result of this problem is a great quantity of same pages with the same content. Although we think that it is unimportant, Google, MSN and Yahoo have a different opinion. Therefore it is essential to solve this problem and not to ignore it.
But there are cases where it is inevitable to solve this problem on the way that I described. For example, if a web site offers a “Print Preview” or “view for mobile devices”. Previously, it was so that Google could decide which of the pages with the same content it takes into the index.
This is now different. The largest search engine operators have understood this problem and offer a remedy for webmasters who can’t avoid to use duplicated content. Now you can use the link with the attribute rel = “cannonical”. That means that you tell to a search engine that this link has more priority than other with the same content.

Source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/

SEO Starter Guide

December 16th, 2008

SEO Starter Guide is the name of an English-speaking, Google recently published 22-page document where you will find the main Google search engine optimization basics and get explained the big mistakes that you should avoid if you want to be found though the search engine.
Although this document tells only the “old wisdom”, the publication of this document, from my side, very welcome, because there are always people that don’t follow these simple rules.
The publication of this document is also a sign which shows that not only webmasters depends to Google, but also to Google needs us, webmasters. Only close cooperation between Google and webmasters on both sides could bring the desired success. I hope that Google understand this fact and takes it very seriously and will take it so in the future, so we all can benefit from cooperation between us.

Google Chrome

September 30th, 2008

If I tell you that Google Chrome is a new browser from Google, I say definitely nothing new. The speed with which news about a new browser from Google spread was so great that even the users of Internet Explorer 6 found out about it.
The impression that leaves Google Chrome is user to user very different. Some people find the new look of chrome great, the other – shit.
As for me, I was thrilled. The design and usability liked me so much that I seriously thought, to use it as my default browser. It would be a great browser for my netbook, because the design of chrome uses not much space and it is very important because of 10.2 ” display of my netbook.
But I found a very important problem. It is a privacy problem, because of very dubious features, which are hidden under the hood of Google’s new browser. It generate a unique ID for earch user, at the first installation of Chrome taking place. This fact would not be so bad if Google would not offer any services with help of which, a person could be identified. But because Google offers many such services (such as Gmail or Google Analytics), it is a very serious privacy problem. In addition, Google offers a suggest feature for address bar. To be able to offer this service, Google is logically need to save all inputs from the user on the server. While Google swears that these functions are only for certain purposes, I would heartily recommend to avoid the Google Chrome. Finally, the staff of Google are only humans and they are equally exposed to any seductions, like any other human being.

Cuil – the largest search engine in the world

July 31st, 2008

Is it possible that we will soon optimize our websites not only for Google, but also for a new search engine called Cuil?
Cuil is a new search engine. The authors of this search engine formerly worked for IBM and Google. This means that these people have insider knowledge, and are able to build a new concept, or as they claim, they built it already. The makers claim that their search engine has three times more information than any other search engine.
That sounds very confident, whether it is true? I don’t think so. I tried to find out different keywords, such as city names or vegetable species in 4 languages (2 Western and 2 Eastern European languages) and a part of these simple words, were not found byCuil, although all of these words are available in Wikipedia.
In addition, I find the design of Cuil very disgusting. The black background appear to be depressing to me and I have no desire, to visit this page every day, what I do now with Google. Unfortunately, many functions, which I find as essential, including the possibility of filtering of search results by language are not offered by Cuil. Perhaps these functions will be implemented in future, but I got another bitter taste of the empty promises and now I’m a bit sceptical about Cuil. I think that there are many people who thinks like me. To work on Google or IBM, certainly not enough to convince me that Cuil is much better than any other search engine and the test results are the best example of this thesis.

Yahoo Search Monkey

June 30th, 2008

SearcMonkey is a new tool from Yahoo, that is intended for developers. This tool makes it possible to develop your own search applications to customize the search result visually so that a user of the application could see except header information and description also useful additional information such as related links or images. The best search applications, if the developers wishes, will be put in the gallery of Yahoo. The users would be able to select these applications so that could make influence to their search results.
With the publication of Search Monkey, Yahoo tried to make web search more transparent for users. The trend is really gratifying, but because the popularity of Yahoo as a search engine in Germany is relatively low, Search Monkey would be interesting especially for internationally operating companies, especially if they are present in the U.S., because Yahoo have a much greater significance here. It must be noted that the application allows only the optical customization and have no influence on the search results. This may change, however, at any time. Search engine market is very large, as well as the competition between the big internet companies. I can imagine that Yahoo opens this interface, which certainly would have a positive resonance. It could also be that the competitors take this idea earlier and implement it. In any case I am quite sure that the developing in that direction in future will only increase.

Flash vs. search engine optimization

May 25th, 2008

Adobe Flash is a popular method to develop the websites. Not only design agencies or photographers using it, but even reputable institutions such as banks, don’t want have only pure graphics and HTML sites. This is also OK, so long as you do not exaggerate and use flash in the places where it is needed. A purely Flash-based site will disapoint you if you try to optimize it for the search engines. The reason is the most of search engines were developed under the assumption that the target page is written in HTML. Major search engines such as Google are already able to extract text and links from a flash file, but because the text in flash does not have the structure, the search engine can not see whether it is a title, a quote or another part of the document. This means that the search engine is not able, to determinate the importance of the text section and to sort the results by relevance. In HTML, on the other hand you can use H1-tag to label the heading and the other text sections in conjunction with the appropriate tags. This problem with assessing the importance of the results is a reason why the search results from a flash site, almost never shown by the search engine. Only if you explicitly search in Google for flash files, you get the right results.

What must be done to minimize the problem?
The fact is that we can no longer simply renounce the flash. We must therefore find a way to satisfy both the visitors, as well as the search engine with the result.
There is more than one way to Rome, but not all are good and without threats.
The most commonly used method is to create two separate web sites, as a purely flash-based file and other – in HTML. But I think that this solution is not optimal and it would be rather to use a combiation of flash and html. It is advisable therefore to use an HTML site with embedded in that flash at appropriate places. There is an opinion that it is good to use JavaScript to show a flash-based site for a genuine visitors and a text-based for a search engine. I find this method more than questionable, since it so easy to get deleted from the search engine index.

Google Translate Tools

August 7th, 2007

It seems that Google developing now a translate tool. The name of this tool will be probably “Statistical machine translation”. It should offer a very efficient translating system. Google Translate will be able to translate big texts automatically and very quickly.
The highlight of this service is a new technology. This technology can analyze expert translations and learn of it. The quality or the translations depend on the quantity of translate examples. The main source of those examples should be EU and UN documents.

Google Codesearch

June 9th, 2007

Sometimes it is very useful to check google labs more often. Today I found a new tool. Its name is “Google Codesearch”. With this tool you are able to search for code fragments of any program language.
The link to Google Codesearch:

http://www.google.com/codesearch

Google Analytics

May 7th, 2007

Google Analytics is a very powerful solution to analyze traffic of a website. It offers highly detailed reports. The main goal of this solution is that Google offers it for free. At this time you can use Google Analytics with 50 different sites with one account.

Keywords

April 5th, 2007

There is no a secret that if you would like be found with specific keywords, you must have them on your page. A little tool from Overture can help you to find right keywords for your site.
You need to enter a keyword and the tool will find many similar keywords and keyword combinations.
Here is the link: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/