Search Engine News

You can read a lot about what search engineers want by looking at how the search results change. You can learn a bit more by listening to how they try to guide / influence / manipulate the market while engaging in discourse. And you can learn a lot more by reading their guidelines for how they expect people to rate search quality.

The reasons that the internal communication documents are so powerful are

they do not discuss search from “in an ideal world” approach, but cover the current marketplace from a pragmatic standpoint solving real issuesthe documents may display algorithmic holes that require manual interventionthe documents may show clues as to the hints search engineers give raters to quickly infer quality and relevancythe documents show issues or relevancy infractions that merit a lower relevancy ratingthe documents show how ratings change based on the quality and availability of information on the topichow something that is considered spam in some instances is considered fine if it is associated with a large well known brandhow things that are relevant in some verticals are irrelevant in others if Google runs a competing offeringthe current documents are the result of years of back and forth communication between quality raters and search engineers

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Posted by randfish

There’s so much to cover in the search world this week it’s practically unbearable. Hopefully the weather is terrible and you’re bored so this won’t interfere too much with those pesky weekend plans. I’m personally going hiking Sunday - my first time this year (hooray!). On to the topics:

The “Google hates paid links” story is huge and has been discussed by every blog but ours (we pride ourselves on differentiating content). However, I have to link over to Scoreboard’s How to Turn Google’s Paid Link Reporting Into Profit. A genius plan, Brian. Mr. Dave “F” Naylor put together a remarkably good post on how to trap and identify rogue bots. Brian Clark was on Digg for this story, but I need to contribute to my share of Linkerati-ism and the post on avoiding headline mistakes is worth everyone’s time to read and apply. Loren Baker authored a post on Digg vs. Del.icio.us that I thoroughly enjoyed. He picks apart the logic of why a site with a smaller userbase has so much viral attention pointed its way - I’m thinking about how to apply those same principals to our sites and our clients to earn that same kind of buzz. Richard Zwicky knows what Google’s real market share is - about 78%… Also, check out which portions of Google drive what percentages of traffic. Very good stuff, considering the quality of his datasources. This is what I want for SEOmoz - to be self sustaining purely via the premium content - and to be able to privately incubate great ideas internally. YCombinator has their own developer-centric news site… How did I not know about this earlier - that site rocks! Everyone’s linking to it, but that’s because it’s so good - read Todd Malicoat’s SEO Playbook… twice. You’ve succeeded Jonah - now you just need them to get a mention on the Colbert Report

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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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