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Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimization’ Category

Over the last couple years Google has been moving more towards a universal search model that provides searchers more diverse results than simply listings for related static pages on the web.  Over the course of the last year and a half you have probably noticed YouTube videos, Google Shopping results, book results, blog posts and many more different types of results returned for certain search queries.

The most recent addition to Google search engine results pages is related forum posts.  Google introduced these types of results on September 30, 2009.  For certain types of search phrases, you may now find a series of recent (or in some cases not so recent) forum posts.   Read more...

Google announced today that it has added an enhancement to the seach snippet that is displayed to users on search engine results pages.  Prior to today, search snippets were only comprised of the META description provided by webmasters, a snippet randomly taken off the page by Google, or a combination of both.

From today on, seach snippets on results pages can also include named anchors in a contextual text link format to help users jump directly to specific locations on the page rather than always being taken to the top of the page and being forced to scroll through all of the page content in order to locate the desired information.   Read more...

Most folks involved with search engine optimization have had a hunch for a couple years now that Google doesn’t give much weight to the Keyword META tags.  In a recent video by Matt Cutts, Google’s voice in search engine optimization matters, it was stated that Google does not use the keyword META tags at all when ranking pages.

Keep in mind, there are other search engines that may… but it’s highly doubtful that either Bing or Yahoo! places much value on them either.

Here is the video from Matt Cutts:

There is some debate amongst the professional SEO community as to whether or not “first link priority” is or is not observed by Google.  For those of you that are unfamiliar to “first link priority”, it relates to observations made by several SEOs over the past year and a half that claim Google places a higher level of “importance” on the very first link it crawls on a page. (You may notice the anchor text of the first link on this blog is ‘home’…. not exactly what I should be targeting with this blog… but oh well, this is just for fun)   Read more...