A custom category consisting of the 100 most visited Google-owned web properties in the UK accounted for 36.55% of upstream traffic to All Categories of websites in the UK during March 2008, up from 30.19% in March 2007.
Considering the domination of Google in the UK, the recent trademark changes to Google Adwords, could seriously damage traffic levels to brand websites, he goes on to discuss.
Wowsers… interesting developments on Google image search over at Techcrunch:
Google is now talking about using computers to analyze the stuff in photos, and using that to associate it in a ranked way with keyword queries. In effect, they’re talking about PageRank for images.
I loaded Google custom search engine on The Escape website in March - why not use the best in the business? Business edition starts at $100 per year, so for just £50 per year you can include a killer search facility on your own website.
Not only does custom search improve the user experience but if you integrate it with your analytics account, you can analyse what people have been searching for to further improve your site…
This video explains something that I find myself trying to explain to customers with websites, their hosting and their country audience… Over to Susan Moskwa of Google.
It’s also important that search engines can actually access your content. Don’t take my word for it though when it comes straight from the horses mouth at Google Webmaster Blog:
One of the most frequently asked questions about Accessible Search is What can I do to make my site rank well on Accessible Search? At the same time, webmasters often ask a similar but broader question: What can I do to rank high on Google Search?
Well I’m pleased to tell you that you can kill two birds with one stone… critical site features such as site navigation can be created to work for all users, including our own Googlebot. Below are a few tips for you to consider.
One website feature I have been seen a few of times over the past couple of years sees data fed from an external database to dynamically create web pages, with search drop down forms to access them.
The problem in the past is that Google wouldn’t perform those form functions to access the data pages so they never got indexed unless you had hard coded link throughs to them.
This looks like it could be changing - Search Engine Land. Worth a read…
When I am creating meta descriptions and meta titles for new web pages, I often wonder what they will look like in a search engine result page.
I mentioned it a couple of weeks ago to our web team and they built me this neat little tool for checking your meta tags for search engines. So, I thought we’d share it with you too… The Better Meta Checker!
A story from stateside via Search Engine Land about a court ruling on a company using a companies trademark in their ‘meta data’:
North American Medical Corp. v. Axiom Worldwide, Inc. docket number 06-01678 CV-JTC-1 (PDF) doesn’t specifically say if the trademarked terms were in the keywords meta tag, description meta tag or some other meta tag. But the ruling is that Axiom, who used North American Medical Corp’s trademark in their meta tags, is in violation of trademark infringement.
The story comes from Eric Goldmans Blog which finishes off with a sentiment that sits with me…
If you are going to use keyword metatags, you must ensure that competitive trademarks do not appear in your keyword metatags, period. It’s just not worth it. They don’t buy you much juice with the search engines anyway, and it will leave you exposed to irrational judicial freakouts about keyword metatags if ever tested in court.
Back in 2001 we had to settle with a client who wouldn’t pay his bill because his website didn’t come number one in search engines for a one word search phrase, basically because the judge did not have a clue about what was being placed to hime and at the time I couldn’t be bothered to fight it. Not that I let it grind, even now after seven years, but the client also counter sued for lost earnings based on all the work he wasn’t getting for not being number one!
