Archive for March, 2009
SEO Experiment Part 3 - Update
Following on from our SEO Experiment we’ve been conducting over the past month, we’re excited to bring you the following update
- Our experimental site was crawled by Google within hours
- The site was indexed in Google and ranking at the top of page one within 2 days for it’s key-term
- Crawled by Yahoo, MSN & Ask within the first week
- Indexed in MSN & Ask SERPs within two weeks
- Indexed within Yahoo! SERPs within three weeks
This was achieved with standard on-site SEO Practices, and minimal off-site SEO including a single link from a reputable website.
This demonstrates the power and value of Search Engine Optimisation, the benefit of using a domain name that matches your search term or topic, and how implementing a few of the simple recommendations by Google Webmasters can help your site rank well in the Search Engines.
Now our focus is to take the site to the next level by adding further content updates and some additional on and off-site SEO, and ranking for a range of other related keywords.
Stay tuned at Search Engine News for the latest on this SEO Experiment, and further updates on Search Engine News and Developments.
Yahoo-Microsoft-Bid-Update
In the ongoing saga of Microsoft’s continued attempts to buyout Yahoo!, Steve Balmer, CEO of Microsoft has come out publicly saying he still wants to buy Yahoo’s search company.
In a recent interview by AllThingsD with Balmer at this week’s 2009 Media Summit this week in New York, Balmer has said that Microsoft has made a significant investment in Research & Development into Search, which is something Google has clearly led the way in, but he believes Yahoo isn’t in a position to make such an investment.
Balmer believes that by combining Live Search with Yahoo’s search, the company will pool it’s resources, customers and advertisers together to add scale, and he seems to think therein lies the real value of merging the two businesses, with a goal of holding 15-20% of the search market in the next few years.
Balmer declined to comment on the new Kumo Search product, but did go on to say that search was updated at Microsoft every 9 months.
Latest Google Bomb: Gmail Down
It has been the topic of much discussion recently on news websites and forums: Gmail was down and allegedly exploited by porn sites this week.
Google was in fact experiencing technical difficulties this Wednesday, and given the large number of subscribers, many users were searching for answers to explain why.
In the most recent public case of Google Bombing, Search Engine Optimisers were fortunate enough for Google to be offline long enough for users to start searching for ‘Gmail Down‘..
It seems those opportunistic folks who were triggering the search term and setting up groups in Gmail forums, were directing visitors to pornography sites which has outraged many, and led to some interesting, and perhaps misinformed media coverage.
Google Bombing is a method of black-hat SEO, whereby hundreds of website create text links (or anchor text) of words you want Google to rank contained within a hyperlink, and therefore anyone searching for that particular keyword in Google; or any search engine whose algorithm is similar to Google’s, will list the destination site at the number one spot in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
One of the most popular Google Bomb references is the search term ‘miserable failure’ which directed searchers to the White House (USA Government) profile page of George Bush. An ‘I’m feeling lucky‘ search would instantly take the user to the site, causing some hilarity and ridicule as the ‘trick’ of displaying the page spread through the web.
Either way, it seems Gmail’s service has been restored, and a few people giggle over the incident, but it reminds us that email services aren’t bullet-proof, even those supplied by someone as big as Google, and with a little black-hat SEO, you can still get to the top of the search engines, although we highly recommend against this.
SEO Experiment Part Two
Earlier this week, we initiated an SEO experiment on a brand new domain name.
The goal was to see how quickly it would take to for a new website be listed in the SERPS, and how long until our began to rank for a competitive search phrase.
Within a few hours of listing the domain in Google and preforming minor off-site search engine optimisation and moderate on-site optimisation, the page was being crawled by Google’s bot and several other non-common search engine spiders.
Within 2 days, the domain is listed in Google’s results and is in number one position (Google Australian Search) amongst 164 million results, albeit no advertisers in this select term.
We are yet to attract attention from Yahoo, MSN or Ask.com Search Engine Spiders, but in our view this is quite an amazing result to achieve in two days, and we’ll be interested to see what more will come of this SEO experiment.
Stay tuned.
Search Engine News