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By Bill Slawski, on February 8th, 2010
You’re writing a page about a new stadium in your City, soon to enjoy the sounds of crowds in the bleachers watching duels between batters and pitchers, hoping to watch balls batted over the centerfield fence, or shutouts pitched, or the perfect doubleplay.
Your page could simply contain a picture, a street address, and maybe a schedule of games to be played for the season. Or it could include a skeletal list of links to simple pages about the team that will play there, an image of sections where tickets could be purchased, a page to purchase those tickets, and another page about parking and directions.
There’s nothing wrong with delivering just the facts, and providing simple information that fills needs.
But let’s imagine that your goal for the site is to make it more likely that people sign up for season ticket plans, that they get excited about attending games, that they consider driving for a few hours to see the stadium in person rather than kicking back and watching on TV. You want people excited about the new stadium, and you want to show and tell them what’s new. And you want to draw on the history of the players and team to draw old fans and interest new ones.
Continue reading Having Fun with -Onyms in Keyword Research
By Bill Slawski, on January 19th, 2010
Over at the Official Google Blog, Google’s Steven Baker just announced a major change in the way that Google handles search results by including synonyms for some words that may be used in queries, in the post
Helping computers understand language.
I wrote about the change on December 22, 2009, in my blog post How Google May Expand Searches Using Synonyms for Words in Queries, which describes a patent published by Google, Determining query term synonyms within query context, naming Steven Baker as a co-inventor.
I also included in my post an example which showed a change in the way that Google highlights query terms to include terms that Google might consider to be “synonyms.” The Official Google Blog provides some information about the change, including the change in highlighting behavior (which wasn’t specifically mentioned in the patent) and my December post digs more deeply into the granted patent.
Google’s Matt Cutts also provides some advice for webmasters on what this change might mean and how to address it in More info about synonyms at Google.
Continue reading Google Synonyms Update
By Bill Slawski, on January 5th, 2010
When you view a set of search results, sometimes you’ll see some additional links for more pages on a site included within a single search result for a page. This often happens when a search engine considers the query that you used to be a “navigational” query, where the intent behind your search is to find a specific page on a site.
For instance, if you want to visit the WordPress homepage, instead of typing “wordpress.org” or “wordpress.com” into the address bar of your browser, you might type “wordpress” into the search box on a toolbar. Chances are, you are intenting to go to the wordpress home page instead of finding sites that mention “wordpress.”
The search engines don’t always follow the same patterns in delivering you to pages, but there are a number of similarities. For example, searching at Google for “wordpress” will show you the home page for “wordpress.org” at the top of the search results and also provides you with a list of links to pages on the site, including the page where you can download the software, and the support forums. Searching for “wordpress” at Yahoo delivers the home page for hosted wordpress blogs at “wordpress.com” at the top of the results, and offers additional links for different categories of blogs found at the site.
Why does Google show you the software site, and Yahoo show you the wordpress hosted site? Good question. There are many questions about how the different search engines handle navigational queries, and how they determine which site links or quick links to show under them.
Continue reading Have You Ever Seen Delicious Quick Links?
By Bill Slawski, on December 7th, 2009
Some patents from the search engines provide detailed looks at how those search engines might perform some of the core functions behind how they work. By “core functions,” I mean some of the basics such as crawling pages, indexing those pages, and displaying the results to searchers.
For example, last December I wrote a post titled Google Patent on Anchor Text and Different Crawling Rates, about a Google patent filed in 2003 which gave us a look at how the search engine crawled web pages, and collected the web addresses, or URLs, of pages that it came across.
The patent the post covered was Anchor tag indexing in a web crawler system, and it revealed how Google may determine how frequently it might visit or revisit certain pages, including crawling some pages daily, and others even on a real-time or near real-time basis – every few minutes in some cases. While there’s been a lot of discussion in the past few months online about real-time indexing of web pages, it’s interesting to note that the patent was orginally filed in 2003.
That older patent also covered topics such as how a search engine crawler might handle temporary (302) redirects differently than permanent (301) redirects, by noting and sometimes following the temporary redirects immediately (to make a decision as to what page to show in search results), and collecting the URLs associated with permanent redirects and putting them into a queue where they might be addressed later – up to a week or more later.
Continue reading Google Patent Granted on Duplicate Content Detection in a Web Crawler System
By Bill Slawski, on December 4th, 2009
When you search at Google or Yahoo or Bing, you’ll see a set of search results that include a page title, a summary or snippet of the page, and a URL indicating the address of the page.
Often, that combination of title, snippet, and URL will be the deciding factor as to whether or not someone clicks through search results to a page.
The snippet peforms a couple of functions – it gives you a summary of what the page is about, and it shows you the context within which your query terms might appear on a page.
Sometimes a search engine will show you the Meta Description that the publisher of the page has come up with for a page, especially if the Meta Description contains the words found in the query.
Sometimes a search engine will show you a description that isn’t even found on the page, if it decides that the page is relevant for a query but the description for the page at the Yahoo Directory or DMOZ makes a better snippet than the meta description or any of the content found on the page.
Continue reading How a Search Engine May Choose Search Snippets
By Bill Slawski, on November 19th, 2009
Usually, when you click on a link in a set of search results at Google, the search engine will deliver you to the top of a web page. But what if it didn’t? What if it brought you instead to the place on a page where your query terms appeared, or just above those words?
For example, say you searched for [pizza 94043], and the page appearing at the top of Google’s search results included a list of pizza places, including one pizzeria at that zip code halfway down the page. How would you feel if when you arrived at the page, your browser brought you to the part of the page where that pizza place showed up?
A patent application published today from Google explores how the search engine might insert artificial anchors into pages, to deliver searchers to destinations within web pages, pdf files, word files, spreadsheets, and other documents, rather than just to the tops of those documents.
Below the Fold Design Implications?
Continue reading How Google Might Insert Artificial Named Anchors into Web Pages
By Bill Slawski, on November 16th, 2009
If you were to search for [Ronald Reagan Movies] at Google or Yahoo or Bing, would you expect to see a list of movies that the former President and actor appeared in?
It’s more likely that you would see a set of web pages that contain the words “Ronald” and “Reagan” and “Movies,” which might contain the names of films starring the former politician and thespian.
A patent application from Yahoo published last week explores ways to return information directly to searchers, based upon building taxonomies of information about specific people, places, and things, gathered from information found on web pages, rather than having searchers look through multiple web pages to find answers to queries such as “Ronald Reagan movies.”
Both Yahoo and Google do some question answering when faced with certain queries that involve “named entities,” or the names of well-known people, places, and things. For example, search at either search engine for [Babe Ruth birthplace], and above the web pages on the search results pages appears an answer to that question:
Continue reading Search Taxonomies and Search Engines: Answering Questions vs. Indexing Webpages
By Bill Slawski, on November 3rd, 2009
The term “User Generated Content,” often abbreviated as “UGC,” covers a fairly broad range of the words and pictures, images and videos and sounds that you see and hear on the Web.
One thing that tends to distinguish “User Generated Content” from other content on the web is that visitors to a site, possibly including a site’s owners, are the ones who help build the site, and add to it.
User Generated Content can include message boards and forums, wikis and product reviews, public mailing lists and Q & A sites, blogs and blog comments, podcasts, and other kinds of content.
Would you consider twitter to be UGC? I would. When you visit Amazon.com and read reviews of books and music and other content, you’re reading User Generated Content. When you Visit Wikipedia, the human created encyclopedia you see relies upon User Generated Content.
Continue reading How Search Engines May Rank User Generated Content
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