The webmaster tools of Google have been absolutely helpful in determining the crawl rate of your web sites. The customizable options presented by the web master tools of Google, helped the users to increase the crawling rates of their web sites which in turn, provided supreme assistance in getting high approachability and accessibility of web sites by different search engines.

  But, there were some recent reports and postings from various users around the globe that those customizable options were not optimally working. The easiest way to do it was after signing into the web master tools of Google, after clicking on the “setting” tab, desirable options to increase or decrease the crawl rates can be selected.
 
      Users reported that, this option was not accessible for them from the web master tools. Some had the concern about the minimal functionality of web master tools which dint enable them to fix the rate to a desirable value. Some other felt that they only had the option to drop down the crawl rate value, which is obviously, a contradiction to the basic principle.

   Google has come up with answers saying that, the users won’t be able to up the rate if their servers do not support that rate. The answers were sensible as Google said that they have assigned appropriate crawl rate to the sites which can be supported by respective servers.

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We all know that link building is a dreary, but vital part of any SEO campaign. High ranking or high PR pages that are relevant to your site and linking back to you is always the bomb. But, contrary to what some people will have you believe, those same kinds of sites that aren’t related to your site can be just as worthy of your attention. Recently, some of the most sought after back links are those that come from the majestic .edu websites; Google loves them.

I see a lot of people, though, that go after .edu links almost exclusively. Given, these are often the same guys-n-gals that think that Google Page Rank is the most important thing in the world. Yes, they’re great to get back links from, but I don’t think anyone should be dropping the majority of their link building efforts into searching for .edu’s.

Yes, Google see’s them as royalty. Yes, getting those kinds of back links is awesome. However, how many .edu sites have you seen that are, well… plain crappy. I’ve come across many that don’t offer much at all, while I’ve also seen some very informative and helpful ones. The question in my mind is will Google start to realize how very non-helpful many of these are? Will Google start to notice the trend that everyone and their grandma is focusing on getting these back links? If that happens, and you spent all of your precious time seeking these back links, what is going to happen to the value of your website?

What do you think? Do you think their authority and importance are here to stay or do you there’s a possibility of change coming any time in the near future?

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Twitter, Twitter, Twitter… it’s been quite a while since a day has gone by without hearing something about Twitter. If you don’t twitter, you just aren’t up to snuff. At least that’s what many people seem to believe, and they aren’t afraid to put in your face day after day. I admit that it can be a powerful tool for any website owner. But, I haven’t got too caught up in Twitterland. (Go ahead, I’m bound to have my hand smacked here and that’s ok with me!)

Sure, I joined and was active for a short period of time. Trying to make time to Twitter and keep up with the tweets is an awfully big task that takes up too much time, though. Sure, there are a few automated systems out there. Maybe once I find time to get my hands into those, I’ll get back on the Tweet-wagon.

But are you a chatty little tweeter? If so, you may be able to borrow some instant credibility from an authority figure in your field. There are likely many of them out there using Tweeter and hopefully you’re chirpy friends. If so, you can try to get re-tweets of your messages containing links to your website, blog, offer, etc…

This is something that Dan Zarrella talks about in detail on a new post at Copyblogger. The post has some nice information about stats of re-tweets. This method may be able to bring you a decent amount of traffic if done correctly and you actually get a few good re-tweets. But how easy do you think it really is to get those high-profile tweeters to do it? Have you ever tried this? What’s your success (or unsuccessful) story?

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A recent patent application from Google describes the way they make use of previous query for influencing the advertisements that pop up during a search.

The patent describes the ways in which the search engine decides the relation between a current and previous query. This is used to determine whether they should encourage ads that support both queries.

The patent clearly describes the way they expand the search query for matching with various advertising keywords. This happens when there is no previous query from the searcher. In such a case, the search engine will look for related words and will perform query broadening.

Ads are shown mostly based on the words which relates to the particular query. This is obtained through getting information through clustering tools and various other systems.

This patent describes how search results could be expanded through a web search. This indicates the instance during which there are no results for any query entered by the user. Google will also look at various overlapping words in those queries which happened during the search, for displaying results to users. Previous queries in this way will relate to the sponsored links which are highlighted on the top of the pages which are shown as results.

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Many webmasters spend entirely too much time stressing over their page’s Google rank. Unless you’re only building the site in order to flip it to the highest bidder, then more than likely you’re stressing yourself out over nothing. Google page rank is not the miracle solution that it is hyped up to be.

If you have an e-commerce site, for example, do you think your potential clients are looking for a high page rank? Or, do you think they’re looking for a good deal on what you’re selling and for a site they feel they can trust? Chances are that a good percent of them don’t even have the Google toolbar, or know what page rank really is. I really doubt that if you have the right traffic finding their way to your site, that you’re losing any sales or revenue by having little or no color in the PR bar!

Some SEO “experts” even fall into this trap. Of course, if the client is dead-set on increasing their page rank, then sometimes they have no choice but to strive for that. But, the true SEO star knows that page rank isn’t everything. More importantly, work should consistently be done to improve the quality, traffic, and in some cases the security, of the site.

I agree totally with what SEOabc said… “Get back to the basics: Great content + On page factors + Links. PR will usually follow after”. Notice that linking is listed last; I’ve seen sites that have very few back-links receive an increase in Google page rank. Making sure your site offers something of value to your visitors, and not ignoring those tedious little things like meta’s, titles, and page structure should always be the first concern for your SEO efforts.

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This New Year, Yahoo brings something special for their readers and users. A team member from Yahoo has come up with a new category of search engine which is specially designed for the purpose of searching news. This was mainly intended at bringing a new innovation in the search world.

This is expected to bring more recent and latest news for the users of Yahoo. The earlier search engine of Yahoo will post news on the basis of the time when it as posted. This is done by stacking the news in a timely manner and displaying according to the latest news. The new search engine overcome all the difficulties due to this and comes up with a new method by which the old news could be updated at any time.

The TweetNews, as this is called will bring matching updates from Twitter tweets and other relevant news from Yahoo news. This will be combined and displayed to the users. This will act as a unique and attractive platform for both Twitter as well as BOSS. This can also act as a ranking signal and can be used to check and confirm the freshness of the news. This is expected to hit the market with great expectations.

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Google is trying to expand the language search. The recent patent from the search engine giant describes the expanded language search engine. This will enable us to search for those pages in various other languages which could be done through the translation of the queries searched with.

This patent is expected to help users to receive various additional results in the user’s language. Users can also search for anything in their traditional language. The search engine will look for results, when these are specified by the searcher. They also return such results in other languages, based on various other factors including the popularity of the language, attributes of the users etc. Search history of the users, subject matter of a query and its relevance, the character type given as input by the user etc will also be considered when displaying results in languages for the users.

The language setting of the browser, search engine domain, user input etc all will be considered by the search engine for determining whether results have to be displayed in other languages. The search engine has to be set up to expand various languages used in selecting the results. This patent is expected to help Google to bring a large number of users.

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A recent patent from Yahoo describes in detail how people or users can help in the crawling of web pages. This patent is known as the automatically fetching patent and will come up with details of how a user or site interaction could be used to help the search engine crawling program.

The activities which are involved and addressed include the webmaster training the crawler of how to find out the pages which are indexed in their website. A human reviewer is teaching the crawler of how to find out the pages. The content subscriber will show the crawling program, the information that would be subscribed to and updates will be sending about it.

As per this patent, the search engine will allow people to teach the web crawling program. This will help in the navigation of pages of the website. This will be particularly more useful in accessing web pages which have java script links and those pages which are accessible only through various selections. Pages which are accessible through inputting text into forms can also be navigated with the help of this patent implementation.

The patent find application when search engines find difficulties in crawling pages which could be due to java script links.

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If you’ve done keyword research in the past, which I’d assume you have since you’re reading this blog, then you have probably used Google’s keyword external tool. It’s free and gives you a pretty good idea for search volume. I’ve never relied on the competition graph that they show, though. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve manually checked for competition and found it to be way off from what it shows.

Google now has an enhanced search tool for all your keyword research. It is supposed to take your website’s keywords and compare them to the volume of searches that are actually done. Ideally, it gives you ideas for keywords you’re not already using.

The Google Sktool was featured by BestRank.com as a must have research tool. So, today I was playing around with it, and I have to say I have big doubts about how accurate this new tool is. I’m seeing some very large variations between the traditional keyword tool and the new, search one. Take this for an example… I picked out a travel blog that had a post about Seychelles in it. Google’s Sktool gave me the following results:

Well, that’s not too shabby. It suggests “north island Seychelles”, which has over 1,000 searches on average every month and I didn’t come up with a crazy number of possible competitors. However, now I head to the good old, basic keyword tool. Here’s what it says for the exact searches on average per month:

What the heck? I don’t know about you, but dropping from over 1k searches to just over 200… that makes a difference to me. So I guess the question is which of Google’s keyword tools are more accurate? Sure, there were other comparisons I did that were, at least within the same ball-park. But there were many that were nowhere close. Have you used the new tool? Have you compared them?

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If you’ve done keyword research in the past, which I’d assume you have since you’re reading this blog, then you have probably used Google’s keyword external tool. It’s free and gives you a pretty good idea for search volume. I’ve never relied on the competition graph that they show, though. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve manually checked for competition and found it to be way off from what it shows.

Google now has an enhanced search tool for all your keyword research. It is supposed to take your website’s keywords and compare them to the volume of searches that are actually done. Ideally, it gives you ideas for keywords you’re not already using.

The Google Sktool was featured by BestRank.com as a must have research tool. So, today I was playing around with it, and I have to say I have big doubts about how accurate this new tool is. I’m seeing some very large variations between the traditional keyword tool and the new, search one. Take this for an example… I picked out a travel blog that had a post about Seychelles in it. Google’s Sktool gave me the following results:

Well, that’s not too shabby. It suggests “north island Seychelles”, which has over 1,000 searches on average every month and I didn’t come up with a crazy number of possible competitors. However, now I head to the good old, basic keyword tool. Here’s what it says for the exact searches on average per month:

What the heck? I don’t know about you, but dropping from over 1k searches to just over 200… that makes a difference to me. So I guess the question is which of Google’s keyword tools are more accurate? Sure, there were other comparisons I did that were, at least within the same ball-park. But there were many that were nowhere close. Have you used the new tool? Have you compared them?

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