The Maine SEO Blog

I admit it, I’ve been positively ignorant of the fact that there’s another search engine out there willing to trifle with the power of Google; you’ll have to excuse my hesitation, it’s just that we’ve seen it before.

I put it out to the people, and here’s what I got:

What people like

• “I love the Travel Search feature Bing has.  It has a cool Price Predictor which tells you whether to buy now or wait for a better price. Imports prices from all over ” – @ccmaine
• “Love how Bing lists its videos.” – @sarah_wallace
• “I’ve had really good luck with it when search for something in the form of a question or multiple word descriptions.” – @MeRAbiz

What people don’t like

• “Nothing special (I’m kind of partial to Google though)” – @musicsGF
• “Like Chrome, adequate, but no compelling reason to switch” – @JMunk
• “I don’t think the search itself offers much new; some of the media type searches (images, for example) are good alternatives” – @justinrussell
• “Like the Cashback and Live ID integration…not a huge fan of the results or auto-suggestions really” – Justin Cox
• “To be honest I haven’t even compared it’s functionality to ever awesome Google, I’m too distracted by the pretty background pictures!” – @kwallace2

There you have it, folks. There are of course the negative reviews and (somewhat) positive ones. But what it really comes down to is…what do you like the best? It looks like that Google is still king.

Nicki Hicks
I guess I can’t complain I rank #1 on bing

I recently watched the Searchology Webinar about all of the new Google products – some of which have already been released - and others, like Squared, are just now live.

Let’s get right into it, shall we?

First off – what is Squared good for? Well, topics you’d normally have to do multiple searches for. Essentially, Squared creates a spreadsheet of like information and compares similar results for your query.

For example, I did a Squared search for “large dogs”, as I’ve been looking for one of late.

You’ll see there is no Labrador Retriever – the breed I decided on – included in this Square. So what can I do? Click down at the bottom of the first column to add an item, type in my addition and bada-bing-bada-boom, there we go:

Likewise: the cocker spaniel? Not a large dog. Simply hit the X and that row is gone!

You can also add and remove columns. I don’t care as much about the country of origin, but I’d really like to know more about the dogs’ coat lengths or dispositions. I simply add those columns!

How about changing values? The Collie’s weight is listed in kg, and I’d like to compare all of the weights in lbs. Simply mouse over the square, and choose “other values” and find what you’re looking for!

There are still kinks to work out – where some searches don’t work out well. But, for the most part, Squared helps reduce the number of searches you need to make in a given category.

Nicki Hicks
Save time and square it 

Thanks to Barry Schwartz and Keri Morgret from Search Engine Roundtable for taking the time to live blog many of the SMX West sessions!  Here are a few of my notes from Thursday, Day 3…

Ask the Link Builders

(Archived version on SE Roundtable)

• How to stay whitehat when link building:
  - Stay away from things that go against SE guidelines; don’t be obvious
  - Follow Matt Cutts’ blog and only do things he would suggest
  - Have great content
• Personnel involved need to know the niche area, social network(s) in area, research fees involved, etc.
• Good to have in-house link building – good, quality links take time to develop (difficult to have a bronze, silver, gold package for link building)
• Stay away from people who guarantee a certain number of links
• Link building = relationship building
• StrongestLinks.com, DirectoryCritic.com, ISEDB.com – other directories besides the “dreaded” DMOZ
• Niche directories are better
• Panel’s favorite link building tools?
  - Aaron Wall’s suite of tools
  - Linkdomain operator at Yahoo
• Link building forums:
  - Webmaster World
  - Aaron Wall – private forum
  - Digital Point

Ask the SEOs

(Archived version from SE Roundtable)
(Ask the SEOs from SMX East)

• If reDEVELOPING, submit your old URLs and spiders will see your 301 redirects
• keywords in URLs aren’t THAT important – don’t consider renaming everything after the fact
• Use dashes not underscores in URLs
• Title tags are about readability

(more…)

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speaker: Nathan Buggia, Live Search Webmaster Central, Lead Program Manager, Microsoft

• AJAX/HIJAX – Down-level experience, don’t use javascript for links, use <noscript> tags
• CSS – can improve performance better by separating formatting from content, has been abused by Spammers to hide links and keywords

Speaker: Sharad Verma, Senior Product Manager, Web Search, Yahoo!

• 3 pillars of 2.0: experience (last.fm, youtube.com), participation (tagging, reviews, comments, wiki, blogs, yelp), community (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• 2.0 Tech: RSS, CSS
• External CSS is better than regular CSS – efficient crawling (makes pages light, reduces file size, etc.)
• To do w/ CSS: don’t disallow CSS in robots.txt, don’t hide text using CSS (white on white, display:none, etc.)
• Are you a web site or web application? Search engines have a difficult time crawling javascript, AJAX content (Can’t be linked to, can’t be bookmarked, can have poor link juice and hence poor rankings, can’t be read from screen readers and text-based browsers)
• SEs can index flash
• Problems w/ flash: Most flash rendered with javascript, no deep linking → less link juice, one URL for the entire flash movie → bad user experience
• RSS  – More visibility of your content on the web (users, publishers), more links and traffic to your site → higher rankings
• Best bets: alternative navigation and content in HTML, submit sitemaps, robots.txt (don’t exclude CSS, javascript)

Speaker: Tony Adam, SEO Manager, Yahoo!

• Think about user experience
• Content controlled by javascript is not search engine friendly

Q & A

• Do SEs use h1 tags? (Live and Google: uses h1, Yahoo: doesn’t use h1)
• Submit sitemaps
• Use short, concise URLs
• Keywords in URLS!!!!

NOTE: These notes are the major points of the presentations, and do not include every point the presenter made.

What’s the difference between a search engine and a directory?

–Searching in Scarborough?

Dear Searching,

Search engines and directories are both tools people use to find information on the Web. The difference is in how they get and organize their information.

Search engines use little programs called spiders or bots that scour the Internet, follow links, and bring back this information to the search engine’s index. When you use Google you’re not actually searching the Web, you’re searching Google’s index of the Web. Search engines use complex algorithms to determine which Web pages are most likely to answer the questions you pose and return these pages on the search engine results pages (SERPs.)

Directories, by contrast, are human-powered. Site owners submit their sites to directories (sometimes for a fee, sometimes free) and human editors determine the value of the site and whether it should be included in the directory. Directory visitors can search the director or drill down to the appropriate category, i.e., Arts & Humanities > Museums, Galleries & Centers > Modern & Contemporary.

Although directories have fallen out of fashion (even Yahoo’s directory is now hidden at Yahoo.com under the “more” tab), there are still benefits to being listed there. Being listed in an important directory helps your search engine visibility because it counts as an incoming link, which is one of the variables in the search engine’s algorithm.

Rich Brooks
Maine SEO