Welcome ot another edition of ‘7 Days of Search and Social‘ – I hope you are well and getting well into another week in the trenches. As is the case with most conferences, things were a bit slow out there as the PubCon effect was in full swing. ut have no fear as they’re always good for an announcement or two (Matt had a few interesting ones). Over the last week he spoke about Cafeine going live, page load speed as a ranking factor and the web rchive block as a spam signal (kinda WTF on that one in this corner)
Anyway, let’s get on with it shall we?
Catching a buzz in the new year
This week it was a stand off between Matt Cutts…and well, Matt Cutts, for the story of the week (for me at least). While news of page load speed being a new ranking signal did pique my interest, methinks that news of Cafeine going live in the new year is more comment worthy for the moment.
Here’s the thing, people are always talking about this ranking change, that indexation level change…which has been more than a little irritating. For the more seasoned among us, there is a long list of major named changes that you’ve already been through; some more influential than others.
This is much more relative to the Big Daddy update which was more about infrastructure than search quality really. With this one, it is best to keep in mind that it is mostly about the processing power.
Think about the new signals such as social search, deeper personalization, crawling upgrades, greater spam detection and the like. Any changes we see that affect actual rankings/referrers is to be seen in the near future; ENALED by the upgrade. Don’t start looking for immediate affects…this one will be long term (Matt posted about it here – and for those that missed it, the original Matt interview on it)
| Quick Nav Links – Talk of the Town – Geek Central – Social Search – Local SEO – Videos – Tools – SOSG Alerts – Patents – |
Talk of the town
| SEO Dojo voted #1 Training Community – ok yea, I am gonna toot my own horn on this one, but hey it’s not everyday one gets to see such a passionate response from the gang. Not only did we actually get some free bootie from Lee… but the outpouring in the comments of the original poll were wonderous and humbling – my Dojo geeks rock! |
| Site speed may soon affect Google rankings – WTF? This is a VERY interesting development that we’ve been talking about over the weekend in the Dojo. Oh, and before peeps go crazy, this really can’t be a heavily weighted signal, so don’t get anal – m’kay? (also on SEL) |
| Calculating The True SEO Costs Of Major Site Changes – looks at the many problems that can arise from major site changes. While it seems second nature to most SEOs, I can tell you that MANY of the problems I inherit are from clients that lost rankings due to site changes… so it’s always worth highlighting once more. |
| Rich Snippets: A Golden but Missed Opportunity to Enhance Search Engine Listings – is a post from Paula Allen (via BC) which once more looks at the world of microformats. If you remember, that was our top story last week. Start learning this stuff my friends.. their value continues to grow for a balanced program. |
| The Disproportionate Value of Deep Links – was an interesting post from Eric Enge which puts forth a hypothesis on the value of deep links. It is an interesting idea that was worth thinking about. If I had to find any flaw, it would be the assertion of using the ‘original PageRank model’. One thing we DO KNOW… is that the current one is a far flung cousin of the original PageRank; much has changed in the last 10 years. |
| Top tips from PubCon 2009 – yes, it is true that we didn’t talk much about PC this week, but I generally don’t find much from conferences of real interest. That being said, this short round up has some goodies for those that missed it. |
| Why Some Sites MUST Block Archive.Org – is a post from Michael that is a must read as I was also kind of taken aback by Matt’s comments. In the end, while still kind of sketchy, they are now saying it is a secondary factor once a spam bot digs deeper. Still, kinda odd… |
| Using Noarchive to Remove Your Cache; What’s the Impact? – is from (one of my fav white coat SEOs) Richard Baxter who decided to muck about with the NOARCHIVE tag to see what effect it may have on site rankings… Want to know what he found? Then be sure to go read it… hehe… |
| The most sexy browsers screw your analytics – was from everyone’s favourite mystery man Sebastian X. It seems that both Chrome AND Safari aren’t passing along referrer stirngs… which as U might imagine, can be a nightmare for your analytics (especially as adoption of Chrome rises). Spread the word and help Seb fight the good fight wontcha? |
| Quick Nav Links – Talk of the Town – Geek Central – Social Search – Local SEO – Videos – Tools – SOSG Alerts – Patents – |
Search Geek Central
| Quick Nav Links – Talk of the Town – Geek Central – Social Search – Local SEO – Videos – Tools – SOSG Alerts – Patents – |
Search Patents
| Microsoft
Look ahead document ranking system Providing search results for mobile computing devices Document clustering based on entity association rules Query-based snippet clustering for search result grouping Method of speech recognition using hidden trajectory Hidden Markov Models
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| Yahoo |
/end SOSG session
| Quick Nav Links – Talk of the Town – Geek Central – Social Search – Local SEO – Videos – Tools – SOSG Alerts – Patents – |
‘7 Days of Search and Social’ is a joint effort from Search Engine Journal and the SEO Training Dojo to bring you the latest in SEO and Social Search news. Each week (on Tuesdays) we’ll be posting the highlights of the most recent (SEO Geeks) newsletter here on Search Engine Journal.
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