SEO by the Sea

One of the challenges that search engines face during searches can involve returning and expanding results that include given names and nicknames for people.

With a given name of William, I usually go by the name Bill, and people rarely refer to me as William (especially people who know me – with the sometimes exception of my mom). I will use William on official government documents, resumes, and in other places that seem to call for a formal use of my name. Searches on my name at one of the major search engines will return some results refering to me as Bill, and a lesser amount that refer to me as William. It would be nice if they included both, regardless of whether my search query used “Bill,” or “William.”

What can make searches for nicknames more challenging is that a nickname of Bill might refer to a given name of William, Wilheim, Wilfred, Guillaume, or Guillermo. Someone with the given name of William might also commonly use a nickname of Bill, Will, Willie, Billy, or others.

Can a search engine help a searcher find results for a person whom they only know the given name for, or whom they only know the nickname for?

Continue reading How a Search Engine Might Handle Nicknames and Given Names

Imagine Google offering a rating system where you can ask experts, or authorities, to provide ratings for pages on the Web such as scientific articles, tutorials, news stories, or editorials, or products and current movies. It’s something that we might see from Google in the future, if they follow through on a process described in a patent granted to them earlier this week.

How might it work?

You log into this evaluation system and present what you want rated, and you’re provided with a list of primary authorities that you can choose amongst to rate your page or product or movie.

For example, you’re interested in learning about Diabetes, and you run across an article that tells you about how a version of vitamin B1, Benfotiamine, may potentially be useful in fighting off some of the damages that high blood sugar might do to your body. You’d like to know what some experts in the field might think about the article, and you’re shown authorities in the field listed as authorities on the subject, such as the American Medical Association, the Harvard Medical School, and the American Diabetes Association. You select those three organizations to provide ratings.

Those authorities, and people whom they’ve delegated some of their authority to, provide ratings for the article in a manner like you might see in Amazon.com or Slashdot.

Continue reading The Evolution of Google Ratings (Experts Delegating Authority)?

SEO and Keyword Matching

I don’t recall clearly when I first started calling what I do SEO, and I really didn’t have an official title at my first inhouse SEO position back in 1996. I thought of that role as a webmaster, marketing manager, IT department, technical consultant, and did whatever else needed to be done. A friend’s sister worked at Digital Corp, and she sent us an email about a new service they had started called Alta Vista one day.

That’s probably when we first started thinking seriously about search engines, and their potential to help or to harm businesses. When Google came along, we became a lot more serious about search.

Back in the days just before Google started gaining any popularity, when the leading search engines counted amongst their ranks Alta Vista, Excite, Infoseek and Lycos, a paper titled What is a tall poppy among web pages? by Glen Pringle, Lloyd Allison and David L. Dowe explored the possible decision trees that those search engines used to try to decide how pages might be ranked by search engines.

Continue reading SEO is Undead Again (Profiles, Phrases, Entities, and Language Models)

If you have an interest in how Google addresses duplicate content on the Web, today’s been an interesting day.

Google was granted a patent this morning that describes how Google might identify duplicate or near duplicate web pages and decide which version to show in search results, and which ones to filter out. It’s a process possibly close to what Google has been using for a while.

But…

Identifying the original source of content can be a pretty hard problem to solve on the Web.

What if Google had a smaller search vertical, where they carefully screened and identified all of the web publishers involved, and could convince them to help identify which content is original, and which is copied or duplicated?

Continue reading Google on Duplicate Content Filtering and News Attribution Metatags

Some changes to search, and search engines are easy to spot and see and understand. Others are highly visible, but their actual impact is less transparent. Still others are somewhat mystifying, and there’s little information about them published by any of the search engines. Some others aren’t very visible, and the search engines are fairly silent about them.

Last week, Google launched a new feature on search results pages called Google Instant Previews. If you click on the magnifying glass that shows up next to a search result, you’ll see a preview of the web page in the right column of the results.

In some results, where snippets are taken from the content on the page (as opposed to those from meta descriptions), the area where that snippet text appears on the page is highlighted, and magnified for viewers.

A number of reactions online note that these previews will harm SEO and Web Design, or will transform both in ways that are burdensome to SEOs and designers. The opposite is probably more likely true – sites that follow good SEO and Design practices stand a good chance of getting more click-throughs because of Google’s Instant Previews.

Continue reading Son of SEO is Undead (Google Caffeine and New Product Refinements)