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Showing posts with the label Bing

Google+ increasing its reach

Just about a week ago, it was announced that Blogger users may now mention either people or pages from Google+ in the same manner as within G+ itself. This would have been quite useful when I first promoted my  +Mayo Takeuchi Plus  page, which has now accumulated a good body of photographs. However, I cannot seem to cite myself, perhaps because I've linked this blog to my personal Google+ account and it would be self-serving? In the meantime, I've also added more G+ related widgets on this blog, including one that allows me to show thumbnails of people who have circled my personal account. Another button hopefully will encourage more people to circle my aforementioned Plus page. During my "day job" researching I'd also noticed that, although the follower/circle counts weren't up to date, that the PPC spots were also starting to make mention of sponsor pages on Google+. In an article " marriage of SEO and Social Media " (which likens this union

A tale of Wikipedia's dominance

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As illustrated in the xkcd comic above, Wikipedia has had an enormous impact on many web users. A contributing factor to their success in the more recent years, may be attributable to how visible their pages are in organic searches. Google has been long reputed to favour Wikipedia content in their SERPs. However, recently Search Engine Watch established that (albeit by a narrow margin), Bing is even more likely  than Google to return a Wikipedia page organically. Personally, I find it completely unsurprising that Wikipedia articles would dominate organic rankings: Their URLs are easy to hack: I often go directly to the topic I wish by crafting the URL, and they also have extensive redirects in place, allowing me to reach the desired content even if my guess wasn't the canonical term. They make an effort to police their content to minimize bias and conjecture. Many of its pages are updated frequently, again with the power of crowd-sourcing. The writing quality is also mon

Bing's "SEO Fundamentals" are everyone's fundamentals

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  As a followup perhaps to the Bing/Yahoo! quality checklist, Searchenginejournal.com subsequently provided 18 points of what Bing expects web content publishers to implement for SEO . Well, it seems to me that all their advice applies equally as well for those aiming to optimize their web content for any search engine. I think perhaps that there should have been a disclaimer associated with point 1, which concerned the implementation of robots.txt and XML site maps. It's still my understanding that both of these files only provide a set of suggestions for search engines, and their parameters may not necessarily be obeyed by crawlers. Point 8, create an RSS feed, also may imply quite a few additional points, such as that new content is expected to be published with some frequency and that said feed can be easily subscribed to by those who may not know how to hack the URL (via point 11, enablement of social media). In fact, segmented audience studies have shown that the pu

Criteria for "quality" from Bing/Yahoo!'s perspectives

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About a month ago, Searchenginejournal.com published this article on things that Bing have disclosed that they penalize web content for from a ranking perspective. Most of the points they made concerned concision, but the final point on actively discouraging machine-translated text caught my eye. I'd posted in the past about how translation did not equate to localization , so I was rather pleased to imagine that someone was incorporating grammar and spelling checks into the ranking algorithm. However, I also have the following questions: Do they verify that the language attribute found in the HTML matches the body text language that people read? If the language is a distinct flavour, such as English as spoken in India or the Kansai dialect of Japan, is that taken into account during the linguistic quality assessment? Do they penalize on slang, profanities or "text-speak" orthography, or will they process them accurately and take that into account in evaluating the

Another look at my stats: browser use

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Now that my blog has been extant for two months, I thought I'd compare more of the traffic statistics I can glean. Blogger itself provides some basic information (their penchant for only displaying the top 10 entries is starting to bother me), so I've taken a look at the all time breakdown of my visitors' browser choices: Pageviews by Browsers Firefox 480 (49%) Internet Explorer 170 (17%) Safari 155 (15%) Chrome 97 (9%) Mobile 49 (5%) Mobile Safari 19 (1%) Opera 2 (<1%) SimplePie 2 (<1%) Overall, this is what Searchengineland says are the latest stats for browser use courtesy of Chitika, who studied North American usage. IE is (still) just holding the majority of all users: And also from the same article , people who read Searchengineland use these browsers (I'm thinking these numbers represent their global audience, though it wasn't clearly spec

Bing tests mixes of paid and organic results on SERPs

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I was distressed to read in Searchengineland that Bing is testing something similar to Google's SERP structure, where organic result lists are interrupted by paid entries, or compilations of "emphasized" content, often at the "fold" position (4th or 5th place, roughly halfway down the page). Distressed, yes, but not surprised - time will tell whether their trial run reveals that users pay attention to the faint labeling that indicates that a listing is an advertisement, but it seems well established already that the Google practice of placing sponsored links at the very top and to the right hand column in SERPs has led to its users learning to largely ignore the right hand area of the page , along with spending less viewing time on the very top of the main body as well. The presence of "search engine provider-preferred" content at the fold position, also means that listings that fall beneath this visual area are only likely to be noticed by visitor