Search Engine News

There is much confusion out there regarding the rel=”nofollow” attribute despite the fact that it has been around for years. Newbies and hardened SEO-geeks alike are still not 100% sure as to what the value of a link is that contains the rel=”nofollow” attribute. And so we at Beanstalk will be running a number of tests to determine what we can about this tag and any value a link that includes it may pass to a target site.

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Preventing Robots From Crawling Your PagesWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 10 of November , 2007 at 4:13 pm

There might be a time when you do not want the search engines to crawl certain pages. You can prevent them from crawling certain pages by simply inserting the right code in its proper place. Contrary to some people’s thinking, you wouldn’t use the “no follow” tag.

The no follow tag is used to tell the search engines not to transfer your PageRank to the pages your links connect with. That’s a different thing altogether. The search engines will still crawl those links and index the pages you link to. But if you don’t want them indexing the pages on the other side of those links what would you do?

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Why Google Outpaces Yahoo! And MSN LiveWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, 18 of February , 2008 at 11:47 am

Look at the latest stats and Google owns more than 60% of the search market - almost 70%, in fact. Yahoo! has a whopping 20-something percent on any given day. The top three - Google, Yahoo!,and MSN Live - together get 95% of the search business. But Google is so far ahead of the other two that it seems they will never catch up. Why?

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Should companies that claim to vigilantly fight web spam allow people to advertise spam tools on their network and sell the spam tools using their payment processor service?

Google signed a billion dollar ad deal with MySpace, and at the same time recommends people buy friend bots to spam the same website:

What’s among the biggest contributor to blight on MySpace? The leagues of sock puppet profiles and automated friend requests that jamb your inbox. Google — the company that stands on a soap box attacking companies for SPAMMING their index to manipulate search results — is selling keyword advertising for software designed to create fake profiles and send SPAM friend request.

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Why Googlers Google More Than (And Are Outnumbered By) YahooligansWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, 1 of October , 2007 at 8:02 am

There’s a great discussion going on regarding the supremacy of Google vs. the superiority of Yahoo on one of my previous posts. I encourage you to join the conversation.

There seems to be some confusion as to which search engine gets the most traffic. Everyone likes to quote statistics that say Google gets the lion’s share of the search marketing. This is true. Depending on who you believe, the numbers range from 46% of the search marketing to over 60%. Yahoo hovers around the 20% range. But don’t confuse this with traffic. The two are not the same.

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Podcasts Are Not Easily Read, But Easy To OptimizeWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 28 of August , 2007 at 10:08 am

(Source) To start, you need something to record the audio. If you own a Mac, GarageBand is included, and is a great program. Since I own a desktop for podcast, I use Audacity.

Podcasting is picking up speed. It’s easy to see why. Anyone, literally, can do it. If you have the right equipment you can be set up to do podcasting in just a few minutes. All you need to do is record your podcast and upload it to your website then send it out to a few podcast directories for marketing purposes. If you don’t drive traffic to hear the podcast then it doesn’t matter how much time and energy you put into it, no one will hear it.

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Tracking Conversions With Google AnalyticsWriting by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 19 of February , 2008 at 10:26 am

Tracking conversions is one of the most important aspects of running a business online. If you don’t know how your sales pages are operating and how successful or unsuccessful they are then you have no idea on how to improve them. That’s why tracking conversions is so important.

It’s really simple to track your conversions. The difficult part is analyzing your results. Seemingly good results can sometimes be improved upon just by tweaking your sales or landing page a little. One change to your landing page can increase your conversions by a considerable amount, but to do that you have to know what to improve and that’s where conversion tracking comes in.

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Do Churches Need SEO?Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 28 of October , 2007 at 2:02 pm

Does your church have a website? Is it SEOd?

One might be tempted to think that houses of worship don’t need SEO or that faith alone can move search engine mountains. It doesn’t matter how big your mustard seed is, SEO can’t hurt.

I’m not talking about the sleazy kind of SEO that is often engaged in by unethical entrepreneurs who seek a short term advantage over the competition. I’m talking about the tried and true kind of SEO that involves long-term thinking and strategic planning. Sure, your church can throw up a website with a pretty design and all your members can know how to access it to find what they want. But how about visitors? How about those new to town who are looking for a church to join? How about others who are performing religious research and could use the free resources on your church’s website to discover what Christianity is all about?

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I have been noticing with Google recently that if you search for something like seobook video that Google pulls in results for SEO Book video as well. They may have been doing this for a while, but if so it seems like it recently got more aggressive. If you are banking on targeting an unpopular version of a keyword you may actually end up having to compete with some of the most authoritative pages ranking for the alternate more authoritative version.

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Stymiee, a moderator at SitePoint, in a thread about learning SEO claimed:
Read forums and websites dedicated to discussing SEO. You’ll learn more and won’t get only one point of view which is usually a bad thing. Remember, those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.
In the thread they dismiss the -950 Google ranking phenomena as a myth, when it clearly happens to many websites (likely due to filtering and local re-ranking of search results). Misguided group-think lead by an alpha male ogre is a bad thing.

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