Hitwise reports search engine traffic breakdown… Google is Killin’ it!

Google - 67.9%; Yahoo - 20.3%; Microsoft - 6.3%; Ask - 4.2%; Other - 1.4%

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch has reported that Google will launch Friend Connect on Monday. Like Myspace’s Data Availability and Facebook Connect this will allow users to bring their social profiles, friend lists, and away messages with them as they visit different sites. The “walled gardens” of social networks are breaking down.  Social networks will become ubiquitous with launching your internet browser.  Who will be the first to provide the service that is most conducive to allowing this social internet to thrive? My money is on Google? What do you think?

I’m only a few pages into The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, by John Battelle, and already my world has been turned upside down. Read the following two sentences and tell me your not just a little disappointed:

“It’s seductive to think of crawlers as tiny little robots wandering the vast halls of cyperspace, but the truth is a bit more mundane. Crawlers are in fact homebodies, siting on their own servers and sending out vast numbers of requests to pages on the Internet, much as your browser does.”

On some level I think I always new this, but to not think of search engine spiders as actually crawling from link to link, well…that’s just no fun. Ultimately its important to understand how pages are actually indexed, but I think I’ll always envision Googlebots with 8 little legs, and explain to my clients that search engine spiders crawl the Web drinking link juice and eating good content… How do you explain the inter workings of search engines to the novice client?

“Our entire site is flash…How do we SEO our site?” This is a common inquiry of many clients.  Walking the fine line between cloaking by providing a mirror description of the flash in html has always been the response. 

Google has begun to use the Macromedia Adobe Search Engine SDK tool to extract textual content from Flash files. In  Stephan Spencer’s recent interview with Matt Cutts, Google engineer and director of their webspam team, Cutts said the following:

It used to be the case that we had our own, home-brew code to pull the text out of Flash, but I think that we have moved to the search engine SDK tool that Adobe/Macromedia offers. So, my hunch is that most of the search engines will standardize on using that search engine SDK tool to pull out the text.

Cutts goes on to encourage Flash users to use the Adobe SDK tool to determine if your Flash is readable.  So, it sounds like they aren’t quite there in regards to being able to read Flash content as easily as HTML, but they are heading in the right direction.  Read some more of Spencer’s articles to get a better understanding of the topic: Flash alternatives blessed by Google, Progressive Enhancement is Good for SEO.

The information provided by Google Webmaster Tools once you verify ownership of your website (or client’s website) is extremely valuable.  Any self-respecting SEO should know the ins and outs of what Google Webmaster Tools have to offer.  Here is an abbreviated breakdown of the information provided, and what you can do with it to improve your search engine rankings:

• Web Crawl Erros - Make sure your internal linking is being optimized via PageRank scultping
  • HTTP errors
  • 404 Not found
  • URLs not followed
  • URLs restricted by robots.txt
  • URLs timed out
  • Unreachable URLs
• Content Analysis
  • Title tag issues - Google webmaster tools reports your pages that are missing title tags.  This can be extremely useful when conducting site audits for clients that frequently drop tags.
  • Meta description issues
    •  Duplicate meta descriptions
    • Long meta descriptions
    • Short meta descriptions
• Links
  • Pages with external links
  • Pages with internal links - find out which of your pages have a lot of links pointing to them, and which have few links pointing to them.  Then, in a way that makes sense to the user, anchor text link relevant keywords from high linked pages to low linked pages in order to steer your PageRank in the right directions.
• Tools
  • Analyze robots.txt
  • Set geographic targeting
  • Enable enhanced image search
  • Set crawl rate
  • Set preferred domain
  • Remove URLs

Once you have launched a new website your very first SEO related tasks should be to upload the Google Webmaster tag, verify that you own the site. Then create an XML sitemap to sit on your site like so, yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.  You will then submit this URL to Google Webmaster Tools in order for Google to crawl your entire site faster than it normally would without the submission. Happy SEOing!

Its pretty much an accepted fact among SEOs and SEO minded web designers that the search engines, especially Google, have a soft spot for the Wordpress blogging platform.  We all know that the easily updated nature of blogs keep the search engine spiders frequently coming back for fresh content, but what exactly is better about Wordpress compared to Blogger or Typepad, or any other blogging software.  Something to do with the ease in which pages can be tagged with appropriate keyword labels…right?

Does anyone have a more precise explanation for this?  I was recently asked by a web designer colleague if I new of any studies or proof of Wordpress being fundamentally ideal for optimization.  He is in the process of perfecting a comprehensive web site analysis package that takes into account everything from user experience, to SEO, to conversion optimization.  The company that effectively incorporates the principles of Wordpress into their web design efforts will present a very marketable product…. Any thoughts?

Google has announced the very early stages of an online platform for the contribution of knowledge, similar to Seth Godin’s, Squidoo, launched back in 2005. Google’s new tool is called Knol, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Its goal is to allow authors to write articles on any topic in hopes that the article will become an authoritative resource of information. Each article will contain images, references, reviews, questions, and additional content.

While Knol’s model is extremely similar to Squidoo’s, it appears that Google is taking more a scholarly approach to the dissemination of information. Squidoo encourages any and all to create “lenses” about their passion, while it appears that Google is hoping that already established doctors, scientists, and authors will put their name on the line to give the “knol” authority from the start.

Godin appears to welcome the Big Gun into the space, stating in his blog “The nature of the Web, though, seems to be that because of the very openness of the system, imitation is the highest form of endorsement.”

Although, in response to Udi Manber’s posting about why Google is launching Knol ( “We believe that many do not share that knowledge today simply because it is not easy enough to do that.”), Godin did turn the sample knol into a Squidoo lense, stating “It didn’t take very long.”

Its hard to blame the guy for being a little perturbed. After all, Google will make sure that Knols more than sprinkles the search engine results, which will eventually cut into the growth of Squidoo. With that said, Godin is one of the smartest marketers/2.0 thinkers I have come across, and there is not doubt in my mind that he will give Google a run for their money.

Thoughts, comments, disagreements are all welcome…

When you first create a webpage, say your homepage, think of it as an empty container. When an external webpage directs a link to your homepage, think of it as them attaching a tube from their container to your container. Within that tube flows a one way current of liquid, or “link juice,” that pours into your container. When you build out your website with additional pages linked from your homepage, the link juice flows from your homepage through these tubes and into these containers (pages). By receiving more links from external pages you are increasing the sources from which you are getting your link juice, which you then pass internally to other pages within your site. By linking outside your site you are essentially leaking some of your juice with each external link. This leaking of link juice is not, however, a bad thing as long as you link to pages relevant to the topic of your site. What does hurt your link juice supply significantly, however, is having your links point to dead pages (404 Not Found). When you link to a dead page your juice is spilling out of your containers, and effectively diminishing your link juice.

A commonly practiced SEO tactic to ensure that your flow of link juice is not being directed to useless or hurtfull places is called PageRank sculpting. This is the use of the rel=”nofollow” attribute in the html code when linking to another site, or to an internal page of lower priority, like a privacy or terms and conditions page. Here is what the tag would look like in the page’s source:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.site.com/page.html” >Visit My Page</a>

So think about your links as tubes with valuable juice flowing through them and hopefully this whole linking thing will make a little bit more sense. You are welcome add to this discussion by describing ways that help YOU better visualize linking and other structural website concepts.

A cool way to get an idea of what kind of sites the search engines like to crawl is to see where your name comes up in the search results.  Create some profiles on a few social sites, comment on some blogs, and submit some original articles to free article submission services.  Then do a Google search on your name and watch what comes up.  The difficulty level of getting yourself on the first page certainly depends very much on how common your name is.  Be sure to search on your name and “your name”. I myself, Will Fleiss, am currently competing with my distant cousin Heidi Fleiss and Mike Fleiss, creator of the reality tv show The Will.  Admittedly, I am lucky enough to have a rather uncommon name, however if you test a few things out I think you will find that its not that hard to get your 15 minutes (or rankings) in the Google Search spotlight. 

The spammers on Squidoo have hit the trip wire, and Google has begun to penalize a lot of Squidoo pages. Jason Calanis cites a few examples of the spam.  We’re talking real -  free rington, porn, viagra - spam, not spam like my client creating information rich lenses, that could actually be useful to someone moving to Charlotte. Ed Dale’s blog TubbyNerd.com, sites several reasons for Google penalizing Squidoo’s ranking, non of which have anything to do with spamming.  Either way, Squidoo has lost a lot of its initial zazooo given to it by its high rankings on Google, so it appears it will be necessary to build some backlinks to your Squidoo pages if you want to see them rank.