In case you haven’t heard Microsoft recently launched their new search engine called “Bing” earlier this week.  This is their 3rd attempt at stealing some search market share from Google and honestly I think it’s going to fail…again.

I’m not saying that the new Bing search engine is a poor attempt by any means.  I think it’s a well designed search engine with some great new features.  The user interface is clean and the added features like the hidden flyout on the right side of each listing with site info are a nice addition. Read More

Google recently announced that they will be making some changes to their referral string format which will be rolling out this week.

The old url referral string looked something like this:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search

The new one will look something like this:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw
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Big news in the SEO world folks….Google, Yahoo and MSN have recently announced that they will be respecting and following what’s known as the “Canonical URL Tag”.  This new tag  (if it works) allows you to avoid duplicate content issues by letting the search engines know which pages are duplicate and which are the preferred versions.  This is actually a very big deal for SEO’s since it sort of makes our lives a lot easier…we hope. Until now, we’ve had to play the role of duplicate content evangelists. Part of our job was to create complex webs of 301 redirects and noindex pages to handle duplicate URL’s.  We have been plagued by pagination, “sort by” features like sort by price, test landing pages, and other similar devices that have been helpful for site visitors but create multiple URL’s for the same or similar content.  Now all we have to do is use this tag to avoid a giant duplicate content mess all over the place.

Here’s the technical explanation of how it works quoted directly from Google’s blog: Read More

Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land has posted some new search engine market share figures…Google gained another 6% in search market share in 2008!  What? Are you surprised?

What’s even more interesting is that Google’s profits are rising as well, even in this bad economy.  Microsoft, which has never ever had massive layoffs in it’s history is laying off 5000 employees and Google actually posted an increase in profits in the last quarter of 08. Amazing.

Here’s the story:

Search Market Share 2008: Google Grew, Yahoo & Microsoft Dropped & Stabilized

Just read through all of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and noticed there was no mention of avoiding paid links. Hmmm… Do you think they simply forgot to mention this in their popular guidelines for webmasters? This is the page they tell webmasters to read if they are having ranking problems or for those who have been banned. Seems like it would be logical to mention linking practices that they definitely don’t agree with.

It seems a bit strage that I can’t find much in all of Google’s official documentation against BUYING paid links. It’s more geared towards those sites SELLING and how they should make sure they don’t pass “link juice” to sites that are buying advertising. Here’s some evidence of that…
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In their ongoing quest to dominate the universe, Google has announced that they are coming out with their own web browser called Chrome. Interesting news considering they were so “in bed” with Firefox before. It was a win win relationship for Google and Firefox but now it doesn’t look like that relationship will continue much longer. It sort of makes sense that Google would come out with their own browser. I guarantee that over the past 5 years or so, as FireFox has steadily grown in popularity, they have also grown a backbone and don’t bend to Google’s will as easily as they used to. I was actually kind of surprised that Google didn’t just buy Firefox a long time ago considering they have bought their way into so many other markets. If Google dominates the browser market they can control which search engine a lot of people use since many people use the default search engine that comes installed in their browser.

I just downloaded Chrome and started testing it out. Read More

With all the buzz going around about the new up and coming search engine, Cuil (pronouced “cool”) we obviously had to kick the tires a bit to see how this bad boy would drive. As CNN reports, Cuil was created by ex-Google engineers, and who better in the business to drive the technology behind a search engine than those that helped to create the current market share leader.

While Cuil claims that the advantage of the new search engine over other engines like Google is that the results will be displayed and ordered based on the content of the site more so than the quality of the site and the links pointing to it, it also appears that they took a stab at a new visual layout as well. Unlike search engines that have come before it, Cuil definitely has a different way of showing results with the top 3 (or 1, 4 and 7 in the search results – it doesn’t really say) results spanning the first row of the results with the rest down below. On smaller monitors, this definitely gives a much larger advantage to those that appear in that first row.
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