SEO/SEM News

Google seems to make the SEO’s life easier. The webmaster tools has grown from just the submit-my-xml-sitemap-feed to a good SEO diagnostic tool. You can see how often you are crawled by Googlebot, check the validity of your robots.txt and sitemap feed, top keyphrases you rank for and also top keyphrases that actually get clicked. And just a few days back, the nice break down of pages for the inbound links were added. And even more recent, now Google shows the anchor text data. You will find it under:

Statistics > Page Analysis > In external links to your site

I like it, but I will still use other backlink tools since it did give you the anchor text, and webmaster tools also gives you the backlinks. And now all it has to do is put those two together so you can see side-by-side what are the anchor text in the links from the sites that link to you.

Check Google Webmaster Tools and give it s spin.

One of the interesting discussions on the previous podcast of The Pulse hosted by Barry Schwartz with Chris Boggs, and Ben Pfeiffer were talking about the Google Personalized search results. So as you are logged into any of Google’s services, like the very common Gmail, and you do a search on Google, you may be seeing different search results than as you were logged in. Barry, Chris and Ben share their views on it, and based on Barry’s opinion, the SERPs are based on whatever behavior Google has gathered from your account but your behavior does not affect the ranking in general to the point that it will be an additional point in the general ranking algorithm. This is not a direct quote and this is just how I remember it while listening to the podcast while driving to work. Anyway, they have a complete story on it on the SERountable blog, that includes a screenshot as well of the difference in search results for the keyword: “seo” when logged in and logged out of Google.

Now assuming 2 websites having everything else equal and are both on the same page on the SERPs on page 1 and are right next to each other, when a certain person clicks always on the same one, over time will this mean when logged into a Google account, the site that he clicks on all the time will soon rank higher? I know there are a lot of factors that could be involved, but if this was the case and assuming everything else was equal, then what strategy do you need to get someone more hooked up to your page than the other? Perhaps better titles and meta descriptions that make the link more ideal to click? And maybe a better looking page and well written content so once people go to it, they are not hitting the back button and stays on your page. If this is the case, then I guess it is not really something to worry about since making good title, descriptions and having a better looking page and content is basic Internet marketing stuff anyway.

Google always comes up with creative holiday logos every since the early years of Google. This Valentines day 2007, Google seemed to misspell Google as Googe. The “L” seems to be missing.

Well the strawberry and chocolate may look like a “G ” but the strawberry stem does not seem to qualify as an “L.” They seem to be too merged together.

The funny thing is, the Google brand is just so strong already, everyone recognizes it, wrong spelling or not. It was Gio Castro that first pointed this out to me, telling me if I noticed the Google logo having no “L.”

UPDATE: Right after I learned about this, from Gio, and get a 2 Diggs, this dude got Dugg 1,000+ times! And here comes Google’s official statement.