Google Location, the best of results, the worst of results

Google announced on their official blog a couple of days ago that location was the new black.  Enhancing search results by allowing the surfer to rank results 'nearby', or pick another location by name.

This is just a continuation of the direction on-line technologies have been moving with social media leading the charge.  Services like foursquare giving people their constant location fix.  Twitter has even gone local allowing you to share your location in 140 character chunks.

"How did Google decide our website was not near Colorado?"

Up until now the only real down side of this location hungry trend has been the exact same thing touted as the benefit of telling the world where you are. Namely that the world knows where you are. Privacy concerns are rife...

Posted By Chris Hellyar on 28-Feb-10 10:12 | Permalink | 0 Comments | Tags: , , ,

So much for a Search Engine Race

I've just finished watching a re-run of the BBC's Top Gear. Richard Hammond took on an RAF Eurofighter in a Bugatti Veyron in one of their classically contrived races.

The Eurofighter came in first, but the Veyron wasn't too far behind. It was a race of sorts, give or take. I only wish I could say the same for my attempt at search engine spider racing.

Google came in first by a country mile, with a complete indexing done in about 84 hours. We're 10 days, a full 240 hours, into the race now...

Posted By Chris Hellyar on 21-Oct-09 18:36 | Permalink | 0 Comments | Tags: , , , ,

Bing and Yahoo slow off the mark

Well, in my humble opinion it’s been a very poor showing from Bing and Yahoo in my search engine race so far. Google has now spidered, and indexed pretty much the whole site, but Bing and Yahoo have failed to fully index even the home page despite visiting the site a couple of times.

Yahoo is coming in runner-up as it has made a start on the process, with their site explorer showing the new <title> tag from the site. That’s a clear step up from Bing which still shows URL’s which have not functioned on the site for a number of years.

Searching for site:trash.co.nz on Google shows me 35 listings, which includes...

Posted By Chris Hellyar on 17-Oct-09 10:29 | Permalink | 0 Comments | Tags: , , , , ,

Huston, we have a winner in the search engine race

The race is in its final stretch now, with Google coming in the winner sometime over night NZ time. The new content of a few of the pages is up there, and searchable.

Not only that but if I cherry pick some phrases from my blog posting from last night I’m hit number one and two which re-enforces some of the basic precincts of search engine optimisation. What’s also interesting is that the content snippet that Google presents under the title is different for a given page depending on what you searched for. Hmmm, SEO theory #321 out the door. The meta description is not always...

Posted By Chris Hellyar on 15-Oct-09 05:51 | Permalink | 0 Comments | Tags: , ,

Content presentation vs link ranking in Google results

As part of the search engine race to index my new blog site that you're reading now I've noticed some interesting behaviour from Google.

It's pretty well known that Google calculates a page rank for every website it indexes, and that the page rank is a complex beast created from an aggregate score of a whole bunch of things. Link popularity, keywords, content, meta tags, the phase of the moon.

Millions of words have been written about the mystery box that is Google page rank, and all I can say definitively is that it exists, and SEO 'experts' can only guess at exactly how it works because the people at Google in the know are keeping their lips tightly sealed under non-disclosure contracts and the pain that only...

Posted By Chris Hellyar on 14-Oct-09 16:42 | Permalink | 0 Comments | Tags: , ,




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