SEO by the SEA
Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Research, Consulting, and Services

Search engines often provide an “advanced search” page, where a searcher can define search results they receive in many ways, beyond the simpler keyword search found on the front page search at those search engines.

For example, Yahoo’s advanced web page search lets searchers select a combination of different search limitations, such as:

1. Different relationships between keywords in a search (e.g., “all of these words”, “the exact phrase”, “any of these words”, and “none of these words”),
2. A time limitation on when the web page was last updated,
3. A limit on what top-level domain names to search,
4. A limit based on available legal rights,
5. A file format limitation
6. Country and language limitations.

If someone uses advanced search, they can significantly narrow the number of search results they receive, perhaps making it easier to find what they are looking for. But, most people don’t use the advanced search interface and its many ways of limiting search results.

Read: A Personalized Search Using Advanced Search Operators »

Many web pages contain more than one topical section, or blocks, which may make it difficult for a search engine to tell what a page is about when it is trying to index that page.

These blocks may include such things as a main content area, navigation bars, headings, footers, advertisments, and other content that may refer to other pages on a site, or on other sites.

The Value of Knowing the Most Important Block

Being able to identify a block within a web page that represents the primary topic of that page may help a search engine decide which words are the most important ones on the page when it tries to associate the page with keywords that someone might search with to find that page.

Read: Search Engines, Web Page Segmentation, and the Most Important Block »

What will the search interfaces of tomorrow look like? How might we be presented with information that we are interested in differently than we are today, and how might that information be delivered to us in manners that we find helpful?

On Google’s corporate Quick Profile page, they tell us that their mission is

…organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful

That seems to be a pretty tall offer, and it causes me to think about the many different ways that information might be organized in accessible and useful ways.

A newly published patent application from Microsoft takes an interesting spin on presenting information, pulling together news from a mix of sources to present topics in storylines, and providing ways to have that information delivered to us over computers, smart phones, watch interfaces, and in other ways.

Read: Microsoft on Organizing Information in Storylines »

When you perform a search for images at a search engine, do you ever wonder why some pictures show up before others?

A recently published paper from Google, PageRank for Product Image Search (pdf), provides some thoughts on how the actual content of images themselves can be incorporated into how images are ranked for terms at Google.

A patent application published last week from Microsoft provides another look at the ranking of images in image search, and some of the things that might be considered when ranking images.

It’s not quite as revolutionary an approach as the one suggested in the Google paper, but there may be some surprises in how images might be ranked. The patent filing is:

Ranking Images for Web Image Retrieval

Invented by Hugh J. Williams, Nick Craswell, Nicholas A. Whyte, Julie H. Farago, James E. Walsh, and Carsten Rother
Assigned to Microsoft
US Patent Application 20080097981
Published April 24, 2008
Filed: October 20, 2006

Read: How Do Images Get Ranked in Image Search? »

Google’s Content Network provides a way for advertisers to present ads on content pages of sites whose owners have signed up for the service. Hundreds of thousands of site owners show ads on their sites from Google.

The advertisements displayed are based upon the content shown on the pages of the participating sites, using a method that attempts to understand the content upon those pages, and present ads relevant to that content.

But what ads might the search engine show when there is more than one topic on a content page?

How might Google decide to show certain ads based upon user information collected through a viewer’s Google Toolbar? (And what kinds of privacy implications might that have?)

A new patent application from Google explores how the search giant might incorporate user behavior monitoring and the segmentation of pages by topics, to present ads on ad content pages that contain more than one topic, to viewers who might be interested only in some of the content on those pages

Read: Google Ads Based upon Toolbar Collected User Behavior Data »

One of the technical issues that can cause problems with a search engine crawling a site to index its pages is when the content of pages on that site appears more than once on the site at different URLs (Unique resource locators, or web page addresses).

Unfortunately, this problem happens more frequently than it should.

A new patent application from Yahoo explores how they might handle dynamic URLs to avoid this problem. What is nice about the patent application is that it identifies a number of the problems that might arise because of duplicate content at different web addresses on the same site, and some approaches that they might use to solve the problem.

While search engines like Yahoo can resolve some of the issues around duplicate content, its often in the best interest of site owners to not rely upon search engines to fix this problem on their own.

Read: Same-Site Duplicate Pages at Different URLs »

Imagine that someone types in a query at a search engine, and a page from your web site shows up in the results. In addition to a link to your page, there’s an animation in the sidebar that shows off the services that you offered.

Under a new advertising program, you’ve subscribed to the links from your pages, and can show images, animation, audio, java applets, links to resources, reviews or ratings, and other advertisements when your pages appear in search results. If you include a link in your ad, you might also be charged for click-throughs in addition to the subscription fee.

Or, if you were the owner of a bed and breakfast, you could have your ads show up whenever the results of a search included both the web pages of the town where you are located and a specific travel site.

Read: Associating Search Ads with Links Instead of Keywords »

The order that pages appear in the results of a search at a search engine may be influenced by the number of pages that link to that page, and by rankings of the pages that link to that page.

When a site is linked to by a popular and trusted domain, that link might provide more value (and a higher ranking) than a link from a site that is less popular and trusted.

Ages of Linking Domains

A new patent application from Microsoft adds another twist, by also ranking domains based upon the ages of domains which link to those domains.

Why?

The cost of purchasing a domain has decreased significantly in recent years, and some domain registrars have offered free domain registrations for up to thirty to sixty day trial periods.

Read: Do Domain Ages Affect Search Rankings? »