Testing Google Alerts
July 8th, 2006 by Sarah KingA couple of days before the launch of WDANZ I thought I’d use the opportunity to analyse how effective Google Alerts are. I wanted to test the breadth of indexing and how quickly the reactions of bloggers might be picked up.
In the table below you can see how Google indexed the sites talking about this breaking news item.
Curiously, the reports seem to be out of date – the ComputerWorld example is the best – by the time the alert comes through the story had been buried in the archives.
This doesn’t spell doom for Google’s alerts – where they can direct you to a permalink – but it does render the homepage alerts virtually worthless. Read the rest of this entry »
Guaranteed Google in 7 days
April 19th, 2006 by Sarah KingA common question in the forums is
I’ve had an email from a company saying they will guarantee my sites will be indexed by Google within 7 days. Is this a good deal?
that would be from a company saying things like
Based on our research, G-Submit ensures that the vast majority of web pages will be included in the main search engine results pages of Google within 7 days of service completion. And the good news is that G-Submit is totally within the guidelines of best practices set out by Google, so you won’t be penalized.
Bollocks! Ofcourse it’s within the guidelines, but should we pay for it? No Way! Read the rest of this entry »
Making Adsense Ads relevant on a blog
December 7th, 2005 by Sarah KingI received this email today from a blogspot user
Sarah, I’m hoping you have advice for me about my Blog. On my “homepage” Business & Technology Reinvention the adsense ads have low relevance to the content on the page. But when I open an individual post the adsense relevance is excellent (for example Winning Against Big R&D Spenders)
Given that most of my traffic comes to my home page I’m concerned that the low relevance ads dilute the focus of my Blog. Do you have any advice or suggestions to improve?
David
Google, via it’s MediaPartners bot and Googlebot, are very effective at reading a page, nutting out the essence of it and returning the correct ads.
They seem to have a blindspot, though, when it comes to blogs which use Blogger or Blogspot blogs – as these seem to attract more than their fair share of ads for other blogging systems. Read the rest of this entry »
Google Sitemaps – the end of the compromise?
June 5th, 2005 by Sarah KingGoogle has decided to use a sitemap concept (XML) to assist it to index files. This is a long overdue initiative to replace Freshbot, it’s original indexer. Read the rest of this entry »
