Google

Google Updates Toolbar Queries

Anatoly Lubarsky — Fri, 25 May 2007 06:44:00 GMT

Google updated toolbarqueries (i.e. Google Toolbar information queries) recently.

Overall - Toolbar queries work better and there are many issues fixed, for example canonical site url issue (www vs. non-www), PR freshness and availability. However there are some issues:

Some "Toolbar Features" queries don't return valid responses. Among such queries - Toolbar Title and Toolbar Crawldate queries.
Toolbar Rank query response is trimmed for spaces.

I've updated and fixed Site Rank tool accordingly - so you're invited to check site rankings on Google and Alexa with one button click.

PageRank Update is Underway

Anatoly Lubarsky — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 05:38:00 GMT

I predicted google pagerank update just yesterday - and here we go. Check your site page ranks, since there may be changes :)

My best rank for now - Delicer page gets PR 6 ! All pages at onecone go up one scale (PR 5 on average). My other sites pages all get small positives on average.

I bet I'm among the first on this news.

Google PageRank Update is Close (?)

Anatoly Lubarsky — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 18:54:00 GMT

Some people notice a sudden drop in pagerank these days. What does that mean ?

I noticed that some online PR checking tools that work vs. "toolbarqueries" main XML have problem since this Rank XML nodes all dropped to 0 several days ago. However querying Google toolbar features information (including ranks) still works fine. Google toolbar for internet explorer works vs. featured data, so it should work OK. Don't trust however online pagerank checking tools these days.

Seems like Google's following pagerank update is very close. I bet we observe updates in a week or two. I smell it :)

I recommend Site Rank to check your rankings both on Google and Alexa.

Permanent Redirect, Url Canonicalization with ASP.NET

Anatoly Lubarsky — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 14:16:00 GMT

What is Url Canonicalization

Matt Cutts describes url canonicalization and the importance of 301 Permanent Redirect in his SEO advice:

"For example, don’t make half of your links go to http://example.com/ and the other half go to http://www.example.com/ . Instead, pick the url you prefer and always use that format for your internal links."

"Suppose you want your default url to be http://www.example.com/ . You can make your webserver so that if someone requests http://example.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.example.com/ . That helps Google know which url you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect can be an especially good idea if your site changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.)."

My 2 cents: Google definitely considers "example.com" and "www.example.com" as 2 different sites with similar content - so the site can run into duplicate content issue and loose much of its content to supplemental index...

Permanent redirect for Apache server

Is implemented by .htaccess rule which is like so (just googled it :)):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

ASP.NET implementation

Well, who cares about Apache, anyway ?

The following snippet is ASP.NET implementation that uses global.asax and demonstrates how to configure 301 permanent redirect from inside your code.

protected void Application_BeginRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    HttpApplication app = sender as HttpApplication;
    string domainName = "example.com";

    if (app != null)
    {
        string host = app.Request.Url.Host.ToLower();
        string requestUrl = app.Request.Url.PathAndQuery;

        if (String.Equals(host, domainName))
        {
            Uri newURL = new Uri(app.Request.Url.Scheme + 
                "://www." + 
                domainName + 
                requestUrl);

            app.Context.Response.RedirectLocation = newURL.ToString();
            app.Context.Response.StatusCode = 301;
            app.Context.Response.End();
        }
    }
}

Please note: regular redirect has HTTP response status code 302 (temporary). Happy redirecting :)

Remove Content from Google Index with Webmaster Tools

Anatoly Lubarsky — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 23:13:00 GMT

Google added one very useful feature to their Webmaster tools yesterday. Now site owners can remove content that's already been indexed by Google. One can make request to remove:

Individual Url
A directory
Entire site
Cached copies

I see url removal can be useful to control your site supplemental index and remove pages from it.

Content removal feature comes in addition to querying links to your site which has been available from February 2007. So you can observe all indexed external and internal links to your site. Before "links" the tool was almost useless and misleading focusing on sitemaps service.

Why MSDN and not Google ?

Anatoly Lubarsky — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 02:02:00 GMT

I got a comment for my previous post regarding MSDN library update for Visual Studio 2005:

"Seriously, why? It is about thrice is fast to hit Google and find the information than to go try to use the local MSDN store"

I decided to compile a blog post instead of answering comment directly because I definitely think that MSDN library more organized and Google is less technical today than before. So - here is why:

Google is faster ? May be true for most common searches. For example - aspnet_regiis. There are people who are not tired answering it over and over in forums for the last 5 years :) However when you perform some esoteric search - it is hard to find something useful in Google if at all.
You can easily come across wrong advice in Google. Many examples for that (like deploy WSE). You can come across advice that "works", but sucks...
Google is far more aggressive filtering technical content lately. 2 years ago you could just copy-paste exception message and find it in the forums. However you have to make more work to find it in Google today, than then. When the search term is more esoteric - it is harder to find it.
It takes time for Google to index info. In 2002 there was almost nothing useful in Google .NET related. May be a little bit. If it is something technical and brand new, especially best practices - no way it is indexed.

Google Loses Long Tail in Search

Anatoly Lubarsky — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 04:51:00 GMT

Is it just me or Google consistently loses its "long tail" in search (during last half year or so) ? By long tail I mean stats distribution of more esoteric search terms vs. more common search terms (esoteric terms = long tail - yellow on the graph). Historically being strong in long tail niche is what made it possible for google to make the revolution in search and become #1 as far as overall internet search market share is concerned. Lately I find it more and more difficult to find something in google when you're trying to search for less common term or subject. More and more times I observe blatant non-relevant results on the first page. On the other hand - if I search for something that I definitely know belongs to some common-known niche or is owned by a bunch of people in the community - google is the king.

Yahoo is stronger in vertical search

Yahoo quitely has become stronger than google as far as vertical search is concerned. This happened because:

Yahoo acquired a bunch of web 2.0 companies related to vertical search field such as:
- upcoming.org
- del.icio.us
- flickr
- and counting...
See for example screencast by Jeremy Zawodny Comparing Searching for Current Events (Google vs. Yahoo). Or just check out Yahoo search term post by Rand Fishkin. There are a bunch of people in the comments to his post that are migrating over to Yahoo.
Yahoo developed its own vertical related services like myweb and yahoo 360.
Yahoo always positioned itself as the largest internet portal with numerous services, that take various niches.

Big sites have become stronger in internal search

Sites such as Wikipedia and MSDN have become much stronger searching their own sites than in the past. In order to find some useful info - many times people go directly to MSDN or to Wikipedia to search there instead of googling MSDN or using google search operators to search specific domain. Which had been a common practice just 2 years ago.

Google has become more aggressive filtering content

Google index and policies are much more sophisticated now than 2 or 3 years ago. From one hand it helped them leave live, ask and yahoo far behind in the search market. From the other hand more and more esoteric search terms and sites been filtered or put into supplemental index.

Taking all this into account - is there someone ready to take the lead ? Not really. Right now Yahoo has the largest index and started to eat away long tail gap slowly. So google has to be aware because things can change very quickly.

YouTube Removes Videos Lately

Anatoly Lubarsky — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 04:10:00 GMT

YouTube is aggressively removing a lot of videos lately. Which really sucks because:

Folks that embed videos on their sites now have to think twice before doing that.
Removing content from the web is generally a bad thing. Some videos have comments and conversations around them. Many videos have fan community which is just blatantly gets removed. Technically it is possible to make video playback disabled but keep it online, that's all.

Is YouTube about to change, keeping in mind latest news about company's disclosures of personal information practices ?

I also don't really understand all this copyright buzz about 5 minutes length videos. Mankind invented something called libraries exactly for that purpose - library is "a collection of useful material for common use", which is what YouTube really is.

Update: seems like massive MTV clips removal occurred due to take down request from Viacom.

Google Forces Personalization

Anatoly Lubarsky — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 22:09:00 GMT

A while ago Google has removed personalization notification for search results (via Aaron Wall). Now you have to log out of your Google account to see "real" results.

More than that - did you know that Google collects and saves all our search activity while we are logged in ? Which is really sucks since as soon as I remember there was not any obvious opt-in notification for this service. Fortunately it is possible to opt-out (turn off your search history) and even delete all personal search history collected for years. More details and how-to guide - here (via John Battelle).

Speaking of personalization I just examined adsense ads on Youtube and they appear to be targeted aggressively towards user logged in. It is not just regular adsense ads. For example user location and age are targeted.

January 2007 Google PR Update Is Underway

Anatoly Lubarsky — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 22:02:00 GMT

More details - here. Be aware, since I noticed that many sites are going down... Digg.com - PR0... ( ?? ).

I personally think that it is not too smart to make update in January based mainly on December stats. You know December is a very seasoned-oriented month in terms of traffic. Some sites go up - others go down.

My sites traffic usually goes down on holidays, besides my hoster had hardware upgrades all month long and I had to fight spammer attacks. Yet, until now I don't see dramatic changes.