iTamer's Keywords

adsense auckland blog blogger bmx cms crime digitalpoint directory dmoz domains email forum forums fraud google googlebot html internet javascript joomla keywords kiwi link-vault London Mambo / Joomla mtb nbo New Zealand odp phishing php property-investment rss scam seo serps sitemap spam submission UK vbulletin viral-marketing wordpress xml

July 8, 2006

Testing Google Alerts

Posted by Sarah King in Search Engine Optimisation

A 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Curiously, the reports seem to be out of date - the ComputerWorld example is the best - by the time the alert comes through the story had been buried in the archives.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.

More »

April 19, 2006

Guaranteed Google in 7 days

Posted by Sarah King in Search Engine Optimisation

A 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!

More »

December 7, 2005

Making Adsense Ads relevant on a blog

Posted by Sarah King in Technical Discussions

I 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. More »

June 5, 2005

Google Sitemaps - the end of the compromise?

Posted by Sarah King in PHP & Web Development, Search Engine Optimisation

Google 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. More »