SEO by the Sea

SEO Quiz

Bill Slawski — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:58:05 +0000

I thought it might be fun to put together an SEO Quiz.

How many of the following can you get right?

I’ll post the answers later.

1. Stanford University’s PageRank is named after?

a. Ranking Web Pages b. Satchel Page c. Larry Page d. The Palo Alto Gradient Evaluation e. None of the [...]

Apple to Take on Google in Showing Immediate Search Results?

Bill Slawski — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:37:23 +0000

About ten days ago, Rob Ousbey posted a video on his blog showing Google streaming updates to search results as he typed letters into a search box. As he typed out his query, not only did he see a dropdown of suggested queries, but the search results themselves actually changed as he added letters. [...]

How Google May Rank Blogs

Bill Slawski — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 12:10:02 +0000

Interested in finding a blog about a particular topic or place, rather than individual blog posts? A recent change with Google’s blog search is intended to make it easier to do so. The timing of the change interestingly corresponds to the granting of a Google patent on how Google may index and retrieve blogs [...]

Hornet’s Balls and Gold Mining

Bill Slawski — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:34:56 +0000

As much as I love exploring search engines, and how they tick, sometimes its good to get away from behind the monitor, and go exploring outdoors.

I’ve been writing recently about topics such as how search engines might mine data found on the Web, and in their own log files to learn more about [...]

Google’s Affiliated Page Link Patent

Bill Slawski — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 15:23:04 +0000

Might Google rank links to pages differently based a perception of how related or affiliated those pages might be to each other? For instance, if three pages authored by the same person link to a fourth page, and two other pages, each written by other people, also link to that fourth page, should the [...]

Facebook Places vs. Yahoo’s Who, What, When, Where (W4) Communications Network Patent?

Bill Slawski — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 17:41:54 +0000

A new location-based service from Facebook is rolling out this week, known as Facebook Places. The announcement on the Facebook blog, Who, What, When, and Now…Where, describes Places as a way of letting your friends know where you’re at and what you’re doing in realtime when you check in.

The Facebook blog post title [...]

Not Brands but Entities: The Influence of Named Entities on Google and Yahoo Search Results

Bill Slawski — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:21:31 +0000

Does Google favor big brands when showing search results? That question has been bandied about on the Web for a while, but the answer may be more complicated than just a matter of brands.

The question arose this morning on Malcolm Coles’ blog, in his post Google treating brand names in search terms [...]

How a Search Engine Might Interpret Ambiguous Queries through Entity Tags

Bill Slawski — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 14:23:27 +0000

When someone performs a search at a search engine they tend to use only a handful or less words to try to find information about a topic. That presents a search engine with the challenge of trying to find web pages and other results in response and attempting to understand the intent behind that [...]