As the major search engines compete to dominate the web, users are looking at ways to improve their search experience. Recently a blogger caught one of Google’s impressive new features being tested. Google is known to test some of its new features amongst a random subset of users. One such user doing a web search noticed his results page was appearing as he typed and would change as additional letters were added or subtracted.

I imagine this will only work with high-speed, low-latency Internet connections as there is a lot of back and forth from the web page to the server going on in the AJAX.

From the looks of the video however, it seems pretty effective (even faster than my Mac desktop Spotlight search!) and could see a broader rollout in the coming weeks/months. Microsoft’s Bing would need to play catchup on a feature like this.

Google announced that you can now verify your site in Webmaster Tools with a Google Analytics JavaScript snippet.

“Nobody likes to duplicate effort,” said Google software engineer Sean Harding. “Unfortunately, sometimes it’s a fact of life. If you want to use Google Analytics, you need to add a JavaScript tracking code to your pages. When you’re ready to verify ownership of your site in other Google products (such as Webmaster Tools), you have to add a meta tag, HTML file or DNS record to your site. They’re very similar tasks, but also completely independent. Until today.”

“If you already have Google Analytics set up, verifying ownership is as simple as clicking a button,’ he says.

Google notes that this method of verification only works if you’ve migrated to the newer asynchronous version of the tracking code. The JavaScript has to stay in place on your site or your verification will expire. You also have to remain an admin on the Google Analytics account that the code is associated with.

If you’ve verified your site, you can add additional verified owners via the verification details page. The verification page has a new interface as well.

Read more here http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/08/verification-time-savers-analytics.html

Now that you’ve done the work to get your site ranked in Google it’s time to take a look at where Google is sending your customers once they find you. Do they provide a link to your site? Is it accurate? Does it take them to the most effective page on your site? These are very important questions that you need to be sure you have the answers to and continue to check in on.

First of all, go to Google and do a search for your business name.

Take a look at the results. Under your business profile there should be at least one sitelink, that is one or more links to various pages within your Web site. If there isn’t at least one link then your site navigation can’t be parsed by Google. This is a sign that you need to alter your site navigation and provide Google with a better sitemap. The more simple and well formatted your site, the more likely Google is to include a sitelink with your business results. The more sitelinks the higher the likelihood a user clicks into your site directly to the page of their choice.

It may be time to dust off your site and be sure you’ve got the basics down. Here’s a great article showing you exactly how to structure your site to be as search engine friendly as possible. A Professional SEO’s Cheat Sheet for Building a Search Engine Friendly Web site for 2010.

Modifying your sitelinks

If Google did provide a sitelink with your business results make sure that it takes your customers to the page that YOU choose. If it doesn’t, then you need to make sure that your main page is clear to Google. Again, simple navigation and good backlinks should clear things up and get your desired sitelinks showing up in Google.

You can block any irrelevant link that falls into the reasons below:

Bing has just launched a completely revamped version of their Webmaster Tools for our SEO and webmaster enjoyment and it looks OK, if not quite perfect. Bing’s Eric Gilmore spoke at SMX Advanced earlier this summer about having hit the reset button and started with a blank sheet of paper and really having listened to their forums; building a modern and more simplified architecture. But a quick glance at the various comments on Bing’s community sites shows that they have missed out or lost a few key features.

The new toolset is supposed to offer a simplified and easier to use interface than before and they are focusing on three main topics, Crawling, Index and Traffic data.

During our review of the new toolbox, we were left with the impression that the main reason for the update was to show off their new Silverlight 4 features rather than give webmasters an impressive toolset. Most lacking is the ability to export any of the data for further analysis. However, the tools do allow you to peer into how the spider is crawling the site, and what pages are getting indexed.

Unfortunately, Bing decided to remove the Outbound links and Backlinks reports which did provide some useful information. They also removed the Robots.txt validator which really was a bad move with the upcoming change to their robot name from MSNbot to BingBot. Domain score was also removed, which we won’t miss as it really didn’t mean anything, nor did the Page Score values – good riddance to those tools, we won’t have to scratch our head wondering what they meant.  See what – Anthony M Garcia, Senior Product Manager, Bing Webmaster Tools had to say

Finally we are also missing the language/country information that helped you define where your site should show up for different countries. We’ve used that in the past to help get sites in the correct search results when they were hosted in a different country than the business was located in. Another fail for Microsoft on taking that feature out.

The features they did keep and improved on in some cases are worth using. Here’s a look ath what we now have..

Crawl Data

The crawl section allows you to review up to 6 months of data which lets you see how the BingBot is spidering your site. The Silverlight graphs are admittedly real nice graphs, with easy to use sliders to view the data quickly.

The Crawl Details is an important report that shows you what URLs BingBot is having problems with, or URLs you’ve told BingBot not to index and those they believe to be malware infected.

Index Summary

The Index Summary is a new chart that displays how many URLs of your site were indexed on a day to day basis in Bing. The numbers can be a bit worrying, especially when you see a drop in URLs indexed – however sometimes that can indicate that some problems have been solved, such as duplicate content issues.

It is common to have somewhat large surges in the numbers of URLs indexed, for example the domain in the above screenshot did not implement any changes over the timespan when two thirds of its URLs dropped out and we’ve seen similar drops on other sites during the same time period. You may also find interesting that the site in the example did NOT see a traffic drop during that period with a large dip in indexed URLs. In other words, remain calm if you see a massive dip or gain in this report and be sure to study what you’re seeing.

Index Explorer

Index Explorer is just a fancy way to view what URLs from your site Bing has in its index. It’s also a tool to make it very easy to block a URL, or block the cache for a URL or entire directory. This one looks like it’s going to lead to trouble for some, read on to see why we think so…

Traffic Summary

You will need to validate your site to be able to use these new features. Go to http://www.bing.com/webmaster

There are two large threads that started over the weekend at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums with discussion around the Yahoo Search results.

The thing is, I have never seen such a large influx of buzz around Yahoo Search results, at least not for the past 3 years or so. People are reporting huge, I mean huge, shifts with Yahoo’s search results.

At first, the folks at WebmasterWorld have called it a bug but some are now suspecting this has to do with Yahoo testing Bing results. Yes, as expected, Yahoo should begin testing the Bing powered results on Yahoo Search any time now. Maybe this is the first signs of it?

Why would Yahoo spend the time drastically revamping their algorithm? Either this is a huge bug or Yahoo has let some people into a bucket testing of the Bing search results.

The thing that kind of makes me feel this is more of a bug than a Bing powered Yahoo is the results. I tried to personally match up Bing and Yahoo results and they are different. Some said in the forum that the results “looks like a mix of bing and google.” But honestly, when Yahoo begins Bing powered results, the results of the organic listings, the ranking and order, will be exactly the same as you see them on Bing. Yahoo may throw more visual results at the top, middle and so on, but the organic result should be exactly the same.

Maybe I am not in this bucket test and maybe this is Bing on Yahoo?

What do you see?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Source: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022484.html

Always consult an SEO Consultant to work you through as a defined process that works.

We’d like to highlight three best practices that address some of the most common problems found when crawling and indexing video content. These best practices include ensuring your video URLs are crawlable, stating what countries your videos may be played in, and that if your videos are removed, you clearly indicate this state to search engines.

Best Practice 1: Verify your video URLs are crawlable: check your robots.txt

Sometimes publishers unknowingly include video URLs in their Sitemap that are robots.txt disallowed. Please make sure your robots.txt file isn’t blocking any of the URLs specified in your Sitemap. This includes URLs for the:

Playpage
Content and player
Thumbnail
More information about robots.txt.
 

Best Practice 2: Tell us what countries the video may be played in

Is your video only available in some locales? The optional attribute “restriction” has recently been added (documentation at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80472), which you can use to tell us whether the video can only be played in certain territories. Using this tag, you have the option of either including a list of all countries where it can be played, or just telling us the countries where it can’t be played. If your videos can be played everywhere, then you don’t need to include this.

Best Practice 3: Indicate clearly when videos are removed — protect the user experience

Sometimes publishers take videos down but don’t signal to search engines that they’ve done so. This can result in the search engine’s index not accurately reflecting content of the web. Then when users click on a search result, they’re taken to a page either indicating that the video doesn’t exist, or to a different video. Users find this experience dissatisfying. Although we have mechanisms to detect when search results are no longer available, we strongly encourage following community standards.

To signal that a video has been removed,

Return a 404 (Not found) HTTP response code, you can still return a helpful page to be displayed to your users. Check out these guidelines for creating useful 404 pages.
Indicate expiration dates for each video listed in a Video Sitemap (use the element) or mRSS feed ( tag) submitted to Google.
For more information on Google Videos please visit our Help Center, and to post questions and search answers check out our Help Forum.

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/06/google-videos-best-practices.html

New features rolled out by Google, both the soft 404’s and the new feature under News have raised a number of concerns.
Google announced they added “soft” or “crypto” 404s to their “crawl errors” report in Google Webmaster Tools.
Soft 404s or crypto 404s are page not found pages that return the server response code of 200. Technically, 404 pages should return a server status code 404, which means page not found. Sometimes webmasters make a mistake by creating custom not found pages but forget to return the server status code of 404, to help the search engines know that this page is a 404.
Google’s new report helps you locate these errors and shows that Google clearly understands that some webmasters set 404 pages as 200.

Google said, “Soft 404s can limit a site’s crawl coverage by search engines because these duplicate URLs may be crawled instead of pages with unique content.” Google added tips for 404 pages:

1. Check whether you have soft 404s listed in Webmaster Tools
2. For the soft 404s, determine whether the URL:
a. Contains the correct content and properly returns a 200 response (not actually a soft 404)
b. Should 301 redirect to a more accurate URL
c. Doesn’t exist and should return a 404 or 410 response
3. Confirm that you’ve configured the proper HTTP Response by using Fetch as Googlebot in Webmaster Tools
4. If you now return 404s, you may want to customize your 404 page to aid your users. Our custom 404 widget can help.

Another interesting feature under the Crawl errors section are the issues encountered when crawling Google News, this will only appear on your webmaster tool if you have your content included in Google news.
The errors observed by the crawlers are grouped into 2 main areas; In Sitemap and News-specific. I will be writing about this feature in detail in my next post.

While  most of the factors have decreased in relevance, the concept of domain trust is having a greater importance than ever. What do we mean by domain trust and how can you get search engines, especially Google to Trust your domain?

The terms “domain trust” and “domain authority” are bandied about a lot by search engine optimization services today. Domain trust is an expression that’s commonly used these days in SEO circles. Widely recognised as being of significant importance few people are able to offer a clear definition of domain trust and how it can influence search placements.

Here’s an explanation of domain trust, what it means and what you can do to build it. But let’s first have a look at the meaning of the term “trust” ..

The search engines work tirelessly in the pursuit of relevance. The name of their game is to match queries with the most suitable returns. The better they are at it, giving people simple stress free online search experiences that deliver the goods, then the more people will use them. In other words, the more value search adds to users’ lives the more value they add to their market price.

Google runs hundreds of tests against websites and checks numerous signals in order to establish relevance. One of the most important qualities that a web site can exhibit is domain trust.

The more domain trust you have the better you rank.

Domain Trust – Who links to you?

To a large extent domain trust is down to proximity. Google loves high quality websites. Well designed, well structured web sites bursting with great content and blessed with large numbers of satisfied visitors – these are Google’s trusted domains.

The closer you live to trusted domains, in other words the more direct links your site has from trusted domains, the more trust you gain.

Sites one link removed from the trusted domain network will generate 0.01% web spam. Two or more clicks from the trusted domain network and you are moving in circles that deal in unacceptable levels of spam – levels of 1.2% or more.

Domain Trust – Who you link to

It also matters who you link to. If you link to low trust sites, expect this to damage your domain trust. You’re in bad company. Link to trusted sites to boost your own domain trust.

Reciprocal links directories? Don’t do it. Why would any credible website link to a site that spams? It wouldn’t. Google is wise to this.

Domain Trust – Registration information

Google has been official registrar since 2003. Why? So that it can look under the web bonnet and access important web registration information. Being able to identify the owners of websites  means Google can spot themes. If you own 100 sites and Google spots that 75 of them are spam sites then expect this to be reflected in search placements  through

Domain Trust – User Data Signals

Google collects huge amounts of information about what users do on the web – through Analytics, through the tool bar, free wi-fi and through third party relationships. Signals reveal how naturally a domain is behaving. If the data signals are unusual the domain might well be penalised. Normal behaviour indicates a trust.

Follow Google guidelines, prioritise quality design and quality content and allow domain trust to grow naturally.

• Domain Age – it takes time to build trust and the past history of a domain may effect domain trust.
• Link Profile – essentially looking at the range of sites that you link to comparing the good links compared to the bad links.
• Domain Trust of other sites in a PageRank type relationship.
• Social networking (not yet but maybe in the future)
• On page information such as stop words?
• Links from a white-list of sites which is periodically checked by hand for quality? A list of manually checked sites that are unlikely to become untrustworthy overnight, Wikipedia (this rules out being correct as a factor), BBC, CNN, etc.
• Contact information on a page.
• Rate of link growth, natural growth – number of links grows as  a function of time and the number of pages in a site. More content should mean more link growth.  Is there a natural rate of growth for links depending on site size?
• Duplicate Content – a site that steals content from another site would be more likely to be dodgy.
• Bounce Rate – noisy but could be a secondary factor. It has certainly been touted as a possible ranking factor for a long time. A good site would satisfy the needs of its users but this could still be acheived in one page-view.
• Link distribution – how are the links distributed on the  site. Are there any deep links or is the entire link structure concentrating on the home page?
• Long-tail rankings – sites that appear for many long tail search are more likely to have good content than simple web sites.

Top 21 SEO DOs:

1. Make changes that benefit users. Focus on the user and all else (including rankings) will follow.
2. Create and maintain sensible and consistent navigation paths.
3. Be continually aware that each and every page on your site is a potential customer entry point. Think laterally.
4. Label each and every page clearly; describing its content in words your users would most likely employ.
5. Pay attention to detail. Google takes hundreds of factors into account when ranking web pages, and so should you.
6. Continually create content that your users will find beneficial.
7. Inform the search engines of new pages added to your site by submitting sitemaps and providing spider paths.
8. Use text to qualify or augment non-textual content such as images or videos.
9. Continually educate colleagues and collaborate with them in regard to SEO techniques.
10. Continually use data to analyze the impact of SEO techniques.
11. Streamline your code to make it as lightweight and elegant as possible.
12. Ensure there’s one page that is a champion for each of your most important keywords.
13. Pursue direct links from relevant sites aggressively.
14. Insist on site map diagrams and wireframes when developing or reworking templates, sections or sites.
15. Utilize hierarchal structures whenever possible, from individual pages to folder nesting to site navigation.
16. Use CSS liberally and JavaScript sparingly.
17. Be patient. Good rankings take time; quickly-won rankings almost always evaporate.
18. Be transparent with your results: there are no bad rankings, only opportunities for improvement.
19. Remember that everyone associated with your business is a potential link partner, including your customers, your affiliates and your advertising partners.
20. Take the time to read blogs, participate and forums and stay on top of developments in the SEO world. Search engines are dynamic.
21. Research,Research and Research.

Top 21 SEO DON’Ts:

1. Don’t make changes for improved search rankings that negatively impact a user’s experience. The user comes first.
2. Don’t duplicate content, knowingly or through technical carelessness.
3. Don’t use parameters that become part of a page’s permanent URL structure.
4. Don’t create a page that is not linked to an appropriate parent page.
5. Don’t knowingly let a page 404 (file not found). Redirect dead pages to new pages relevant to that old page.
6. Don’t use Flash when HTML can achieve the same user experience.
7. Don’t make your users search for categories: provide a click path.
8. Don’t give away your link love without good reason (i.e., a benefit).
9. Don’t put pages in competition with one another for your most important keywords.
10. Don’t use gray- or black-hat techniques that could put your search engine rankings at risk.
11. Don’t deploy SEO improvements en masse. When possible, roll out changes incrementally.
12. Don’t rely on top-down navigation to direct users to content. Think laterally.
13. Don’t put content in pop-ups.
14. Don’t use splash pages.
15. Don’t use coding techniques that are less than optimal for SEO just because they’re easy.
16. Don’t trust vendors about SEO issues. Their intention is to sell a product, not to improve your search engine rankings. As often as not, vendor SEO “solutions” cause SEO problems.
17. Don’t panic when your rankings take a hit. Rankings fluctuate, and if your rankings don’t bounce back quickly, a considered strategy will work better than a band aid.
18. Don’t take the search engines’ advice at face value.
19. Don’t rely on anecdotal or even expert advice in making keyword selection choices. Use data.
20. Don’t put off until tomorrow what should have been done yesterday. It takes long enough to rise in the search engine rankings, so any delay is amplified.
21. Don’t say “I do SEO”.

Reference : SEOSKEPTICS.com