Underscores vs Hyphens and an apology

If you read my blog via an RSS reader you probably noticed at few odd goings on earlier today. I changed a few things on the site and all of the posts going back to last year appeared as new again, even if you'd read them.

Sorry 'bout that, but there was a method to my madness, or at least a method to my fiddling.

Although it's not entirely obvious, one of the main reasons I started running this site was to mess around with search engine optimisation and try out the theories of various experts who also run a blog but with a great deal more focus that me.

To that end, I've re-written the code that generates my rss feed, and included some in line formatting to make it easier to read.  Now when you read the blog from a feed reader it should look a bit more like the website, give or take. Well, more give than take.

While some of the changes were purely cosmetic, I also changed the URLs for all my blog posts.

The new URLs is the bit that caused them to pop up as new posts in at least feedburner and Google reader. The change to the URLs was to remove the....

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Google, bing and yahoo race to index my blog

I'm not much of a racing fan normally, but I thought it'd be entertaining to see how long it took the big three to spider and index my new blog after submitting a valid xml site map to their respective webmaster tools pages.

This domain, trash.co.nz has been around for a fair while. It used to have my web services information on it back when I had pretensions of being a small time ISP. However.......

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