Larry Page and Eric Schmidt take the stage at Google’s Zeitgeist. We havent heard much from Larry Page since taking the CEO job at Google. It seems as though he lacks the public speaking and charisma of Eric. Shame!
Yioop! is an awesome free search engine product. Yioop is open source and its a search engine built with PHP and MySQL.
Yioop has many amazing algorhythms and it can even be set to crawl at any rate or page. Additionally, Yioop can be used in a similar way to Google Custom Search and only run with certain URLs.
A standard setup can crawl and index millions of pages per day and this number can be increased by running more crawlers. Index also supports many files types including HTML, PNG, DOC and more.
Here at Crenk you may have noticed a lot of changes in the past month or so. Crenk has gone back to the old theme we had on the site, so we can keep the quality of articles at a high. Crenk was previously allowing articles to be publish by anyone within the community. We have had a few issues with this model and we have had to put it on the back burned. We have also removed a huge amount of low quality content from the site with the aim of helping how Google ranks our site. However, Google seems to have not noticed the changes!
This morning we wrote an article about Wibiya being acquired by Conduit. The article has been quite popular and I wanted to just check how it was being ranked in Google.
As you can see from the above screenshot we seem to be ranking 4th with our original article. This would be quite good, but it seems as though the sites ranking above us are just scraping our content! Google why haven’t you sorted this out yet!!
Someone please explain to me why this is happening. Im not an SEO expert, but I understand Google aren’t providing good quality results.
Yesterday Google announced the launch of Google+ their social networking project. A lot of people were talking about the slick design of Google+ and that it was developed by an ex-Apple employee. Now, Google has decided to release this design principle across their search engine worldwide!
As you can see from the image everything has been simplified and pastel-ised from a colour point of view. I’m a big fan of the design as it makes everything a lot more appealing to the eye and draws away from the ugly blue links for every entry.
What do you think?
Google is an amazing search engine service, but there are many other options if you would like to use a search engine on your site or computer.
SearchBlox is a great search tool that allows users to search shared drives, feeds and more.
SearchBox amazingly searches your server and can index all of your documents, PDF files and more. SearchBlox is completely open source and is available in 37 languages.
There are thousands of blogs that have been effected by Google’s recent Panda update. After viewing the 3,300 comments on this article via the Google Help Forum it seems as though they dont caremuch about feedback on their results.
I wanted to write a quick article here on Crenk to show how Google’s Panda update has hurt our site. I’m hoping that someone from Google actually reads this article and notices that there is still a big issue here!
Yesterday one of our authors wrote an amazing how to article titled: How to Download and Burn Hulu Movie to DVD.
The article is completely original, it’s over 400 words in length and provides a detailed step by step guide. This article is the epitome of original content!
I wanted to see where this article was actually ranking within Google for the keywords: burn hulu movie to dvd.
I would have thought that the original Crenk article would have been in the top 50 at least. However, after searching the top 100 article we didn’t appear. Bad times!
Then, I discovered that 4 websites scraping our content are ranking within the top 100, one even ranks just outside the top 10. How is this providing good search results?
It would be great if someone from Google could please take a look and let us know why this is happening!
Topix has just partnered with Blekko to power their in-site search functionality. Topix is a very large and well established local news aggregator, so this is a great with for Blekko. Blekko is a new player in the search market and any partner of this size is really going to help in their fight to gain some market share.
Blekko has already gained a few other big partners including StackOverflow and Merchant Circle.
As a web developer I want to build each website to be as stable as possible so as it looks the same across all browsers while remaining accessible and validating to W3C requirements. There are a lot of hoops to jump through and with a large build some of the finer details can slip through the net if you’re not careful. Images are used extensively on many websites with some contributing to design and some contributing to content. When it comes to optimising images for SEO purposes it’s the images in the content you need to concentrate on. Google image search has the potential to bring in a fair amount of traffic to your website, and as such optimising your images can have a positive affect on your visitor numbers. In this article we will explore some best practices for SEO image optimisation.
File Type
File type can be a subjective matter. Site speed has become one of the many ranking factors in the Google algorithm. As such, the larger file types should be avoided. Gifs will offer you a small file size but at reduced quality. They are perfect for background images, gradients, shadows, etc. However, for larger images such as logos and images that accompany the main content they are not ideal, in these cases a jpeg is the better option. If your designer is a little fussy then he or she may want images to be in PNG format to support vector images. Compromise is the key in this instance.
Image Size
Once again, with site speed being one of the many ranking factors, image size can play a huge part in reducing your websites load times. Avoid using unnecessarily large pictures and use the appropriate file type for the images. Using the ‘Save For Web’ feature in Photoshop can also help toward reducing file size. From a user experience perspective, unnecessarily large images may contribute to a bad user experience. If a larger image is needed, consider linking from a smaller image or employing a JavaScript / jQuery light box plugin.
Image Location
Avoid placing images in the root folder of your site. It’s always appropriate to have a folder called ‘images’ in the root of your website and to locate all of your images there. You may also find it useful to have category folders within the image folder for organisational means. Avoid saving your images to an eternal location, this will increase the load time for your site.
Image Naming
It is good practice to name your images appropriately. You can use your targeted keywords to name images to give an accurate reference to what’s in the image. Avoid using generic names such as ‘photo1.jpg’ or a non-relevant structure ‘catpic22356.jpg’. As an example, if you are naming a photo of a car, a naming structure of ‘manufacturer-type’ is appropriate. E.g. ‘volvo-saloon.jpg’
Alt Tags
The alt attribute is a key element to accessibility and is there to give end users who have images turned off or who use screen readers an accurate description of what that images depicts. As such the alt attribute should be used correctly. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t include a couple of keywords to the description.
Content Placement
Once you have your image in place on your page, placing relevant text before and after the images is essential. This can be a perfect opportunity to target long tail key phrases, the traffic obtained from long tail phrases will be much lower than a glamour term but you will find that the conversion rate from long tail traffic will be much higher.
Robots.txt
Finally, insure that your robots.txt file it not excluding access to your image folders.
Guest post by: Alex is a dolphin trainer and swimming pool owner who loves swimming pools and replacing swimming pool filters. You can find him on Twitter here @harvey1dash8.
It seems like Google has just started a very interesting experiment. Google is pushing a new feature called “+1″. +1 works in the same way as the Facebook “Like” button. If you find search results that you like then you can click +1 and it will let everyone know that you like that search result.
Previously, with the last search algorithm update Google added a remove button, which helped to weed out the terrible content on the web. Its great to see that Google are offering more customisable results to the world.
Starting Wednesday, users who opt into the +1 button experiment in Google Labs will start seeing a +1 icon next to each link in Google search results.
Beyond showing up in search results, Google plans to offer to publishers a +1 button that lets readers +1 something without leaving the publisher’s site. Facebook has a big head start here with its Like button — some 2 million sites and counting have it installed — but Google’s button will instantly have a lot of appeal, given the company says +1 data will directly influence its market share dominating search rankings.
Microsoft and Bing have just partnered with Rovio and Angry Birds. Bing will have search integration between the game and the search engine.
Angry Birds will also feature search integration with Bing providing over a hundred clues to speed you through the levels and help squash the porcine thieves. Featuring Bing Image Search, Bing Maps, and Bing Shopping, the videos show Angry Birds fans how they can advance in the game, featuring the lovable Angry Birds characters.
For some reason Angry Birds has over 200 millions of minutes played by gamers all across the world. Thus, Microsoft is very happy to get that dedicated user base interacting with Bing in any way shape or form.
