Renegade Search

Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the last few months, you've probably heard of Google+, the search giant's new social media service. If you were interested in finding out more about the service, a logical first step would be to search Google itself for 'Google+'. As expected, the first result for that phrase is http://plus.gooogle.com, the main page for the service. But if you weren't familiar with the exact branding of the service, and typed 'Google +' (note the space) as a search, you wouldn't find that URL anywhere in the first few pages of the results. Strangely, the latter search term is actually seen by the search engine to be exactly equivalent to simply typing in 'google'; the first result is http://www.google.com.

So what is happening here? Why does adding a single space to the search term drastically alter the results that a user sees? Shouldn't Google know that what you really want is the Google+ homepage? Why is it so confused by such a small difference?

While the details are too tedious to really get into here, what ends up happening is that Google's software interprets a plus sign as an operator. In computer science, operators are shorthand ways to give very specific commands. In this particular instance, a plus sign at the end of the word is (correctly) interpreted as part of what you're looking for. But a plus sign after a space is actually translated to mean the word 'and'. So, searching for 'Google+' is interpreted at face vale, while 'Google +' is understood to mean 'Google And'. (Check out the images below to see what this means).

As it turns out, search engines actually scan every search query for special commands. And even though the special command can cause annoyance as in the example above, they can also be extremely useful, if you know how to use them. With that in mind, here are some special commands that can really help you find whatever it is you're looking for:

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Web servers are a lot like baseball umpires: when they're doing their jobs properly, you're barely aware of their existence. Of course, while watching a baseball game, you know that there are umps, calling balls and strikes and determining whether a runner is out or safe. But when the umps are really on their game, fans can safely focus on the players and the action itself. Similarly, I suspect that most web users understand that sites are hosted on some far-away computer, but this fact should never be brought to their attention while browsing the web, which is exactly what happens when error pages appear.

When an umpire blows a call, his presence on (and off) the field is glaringly obvious. Managers and players get ejected. Columnists across the country throw their two cents in. Fans boo. And one of the most common reactions typically sounds something like: nobody pays to see umpires.

And nobody (well, _almost_ nobody), wants to be aware of what's going on with a site's server. On the internet, the 'blown calls' become obvious when users see HTTP error pages. These pages appear when, for a variety of reasons, the server can't figure out how to show the user what they are trying to find.

Neither users nor search engines like to find error pages; they're frustrating and significantly hurt the user's browsing experience. If you own a site, you really do need to know exactly how, when, and why error pages are showing up for your clients. And most importantly, you need to know at least a little bit about what is causing the problem, so any issues can be addressed.

Unfortunately, like a lot of aspects of information technology, error pages weren't designed with much consideration into making them understandable. By default, most modern servers return a page with a cryptic 3-number code, and some jargon about the nature of the error. But unless you have a decent amount of training in systems administration, these messages probably aren't of much use. To help make these codes more understandable for non-geeks, I've summarized some of the most common error codes that you might see on a site, as well as steps that you can take to fix the errors.

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There are numerous facets of on-page optimization that webmasters must consider when constructing a website with the goal of ranking well in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Internal linking is not a new concept. In fact, my colleague John-Henry Scherck addressed the subject earlier this year in his overview of internal linking. With his post in mind, it is also a strategy that I have often seen underused, or misused, leading to issues that can be detrimental to one’s SEO campaign. I will briefly touch upon a few of the benefits of strengthening the internal linking within a site, the importance of the anchor text used to interlink web pages, and where improvements related to internal linking can actually be made.

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If you are a regular reader of Renegade Search and subscribe to our RSS Feed, then you recently read Tim Marco's awesome blog post about optimizing images for search engines. In his blog post, Tim explained the basics of image SEO and gave some great foundational information for anyone looking to bring in traffic through the images on their site. In that same vein, video SEO is starting to gain a lot of popularity and it is strikingly similar to Image SEO.

If you are currently producing original video content for your website, implementing some SEO video fundamentals could help you dominate the search engine results pages with rich video content. Videos are a great way to make your web site stand out, and if optimized correctly, you can get video results in the search engines next to your listing - which will improve your click-through-rate and make your site stand out among the competition.

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We're a full month and a half into the Google+ experience, so I figured that this would probably be a good time to take a step back and look at how the new social media site has been performing. About a month ago, I wrote that Google+ could potentially have a major effect on SEO, but only if the service was able to attract a critical mass of general users. Since then, much of the talk surrounding G+ has focused on a peculiar observation: Google+ is full of dudes.

It would be silly to say that this jarring demographic disparity is going to doom the whole project, but I would not recommend investing too many resources into G+ until this starts to change pretty dramatically.

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