Steve Johnston
The Google Blog of a Google Consultant
February 25, 2004
A Yahoo directory entry was always an important component in a search engine optimisation strategy, but now it is critical. The importance of Yahoo's directory is much clearer now that the results from Yahoo's own search technology are so conspicuously different to those of Google. Yahoo returns a site's directory entry content (if it has one) above any content from the site itself and sometimes instead of it, so the entry content itself is of critical importance.
As an example look at the following searches for me:
General search site - search.yahoo.com/search?&p=steve+johnston
The content of the first search shows my directory content, not any content from my site, whilst the second result is content from my blog - which I believe only manages to achieve a second place spot because of the importance Yahoo places on my site thanks to my directory entry.
Directory search only - search.yahoo.com/search/dir?p=steve+johnston
The content of this directory search shows that I am the only Steve Johnston listed.
posted by Steve Wednesday, February 25, 2004
February 18, 2004
The big Yahoo! switch has happened! As of this morning, it is official. Yahoo has replaced the Google results with ... wait for it, Yahoo Search. According to the this announcement, released through SearchEngineWatch, Yahoo has not simply switched to Inktomi as many had predicted, but has created a new search product from its pool of recently acquired search talent. Go on, give it a try: search.yahoo.com. In light of the fact that it is not Inktomi or Altavista, we have a shed more to learn, and in the meantime watch the scrabble for more Yahoo directory listings. More comments to follow.
posted by Steve Wednesday, February 18, 2004
February 13, 2004
Google is making friends again. An update is about to propogate, given the name Brandy by our good friends over at WebmasterWorld, the results from which are available off this - http://64.233.161.99/ - Google datacentre. There are improvements in some categories, allegedly, and one or two small improvements to the damage Florida did to one of my clients back in November. Reason for hope? Maybe. Cheer? Not yet.
posted by Steve Friday, February 13, 2004
February 10, 2004
It's happening. My frustration with the current levels of spam in Google's SERPs for commercial terms is driving me into the arms of others. AlltheWeb and Teoma are particularly good, with my old pre-1999 allegiance to AltaVista rearing its ugly head, depsite how old some of its data seems to be. Ho hum...
posted by Steve Tuesday, February 10, 2004
February 04, 2004
Interesting result in the Google SERPs this morning; Eurekster results pages out-performing the featured sites. The example I found was that from the Immediart site. Immediart has had a deep crawl in the last week and some of the modifications we have made to improve the relevance of the title tags on each product page are now indexed and returning really good results, such as Ford GT prints. However, when you then search for our best performing product, the Ferrari Enzo you will see the Eurekster search result in the number one slot (screen grab if the results have moved on).
The optimist in me would say that the blogging of this result in the context of Peter Caputa's idea of a Eureksterbombing at the Eureksterblog is responsible.
posted by Steve Wednesday, February 04, 2004
