Category Archives: Google

Aaron Wall's interview with Matt Cutts has Matt talking about SEO apart from host of other things. Here is a brief excerpt from the Interview:

Is all SEO spam? Absolutely not--I need to do a post about this on my blog sometime. Lots and lots of search engine optimization is white-hat and not spam at all. Things like making a site more crawlable, tweaking the words on a site based on what users type in or what you see in your server logs, and gathering links by coming up with creative ideas or services that make people link to you naturally. To me (and Google), spam is search engine optimization that is outside our quality guidelines--things like hidden text, hidden links, doorway pages filled with gibberish words that do a sneaky JavaScript redirect, and so on.

You can read the complete interview here.

I had expected a much simpler UI of Google Reader. I guess it just takes time getting used to. I am still to understand the interface well. I don't even know how I know if a feed has been recently updated without actually selecting that feed first from the left? Well, I guess Google Reader might see some updates before it moves from Beta to a Graduate of the Lab.

Description tag may not have much say in SERP ranking evaluation of a website, but it sure is not redundant. I personally feel that description tags should be utilized for what they are - brief description of the contents of the webpage. It does have a bearing on how search engine users will react to a listing (yes, description tag is still displayed many times in SERPs). If that isn't important then ranking high in SERPs is useless. A webpage is just not doing justice to the SERP space if its distastefully optimized.

The website was finally indexed by Google on September 8th. The site has yet not been picked up by MSN but I think this should happen soon now.

Another feature of organic search results from Google which is quite interesting is the additional links for the top ranking website! You may or may not have come across this because it doesn't seem to be common for all keywords. Try searching for [Mambo], [Forbes], [Mckinsey], [Adidas] or [SEO]. For every top ranking (organic) site, Google displays additional links from the website!. Here's a snapshot of results for the keyword [Mambo]: The question is why only a few keywords? Do these keywords belong to a specific category? Someone on SearchEngineForums suggested Google Sitemaps. Whatever it is, its a great feature. Ideally, these should be the commonly visited pages of the site because people would most probably be looking for them. I don't really think this is the criteria as of now.

Have you noticed the organic results from Google recently? Try searching for [add url] or [submit a site] in Google. After the top 5 organic search results, you'll see inserted results for [add url to google] or [submit a site to google]! The image below is a screenshot of the the organic search results from Google for [add url]. It seems that the searches are being refined to include search terms that could be more relevant. Now try searching for [add your url], [submitting a site] or [adding url]. No additional resuts are being inserted. For those interested, see more examples and discussion threads at different forums like WebmasterWorld.