As the number of Twitter users continues to grow at pace, it’s no surprise that new ways of searching the content continue to be developed. Whether real-time search will eventually overtake regular search is debatable, but the number of new sites providing a method of searching and filtering Tweets is impressive. Of course, Twitter Search itself is growing in popularity, but there are a couple of new kids on the block beginning to make a name for themselves.
One of the newcomers is Twazzup, which provides a list of related tweets on the left of the page, and on the right has sections for the most popular tweets, the Top Trendmakers whose accounts are driving conversation, related photos from Twitpic, and the most popular links that are included in tweets related to the keyword. Like Twitter Search, there appears to be quite a lot of ‘noise’, and the user needs to skim over a lot of entries to find what they’re looking for, but the most popular links section can be very helpful. The most popular tweets section needs a little work, for some of the searches I used to test the engine with spammy tweets appeared. Apart from that, the experience is quite good, and the layout easy to deal with, and overall it should prove to be a decent addition to the real-time search engine field.
Perhaps a little more interesting is One Riot, a real-time search engine which indexes tweets, locates the embedded links within them, and then indexes the content that is linked to. This is designed to remove the ‘noise’ and provide the user with much more relevant results. Their algorithm filters spam, checks for relevance, timeliness, and a factor for URLs that are being talked about a lot in recent tweets. Content is the focus - the URLs people are discussing and sharing on Twitter. Each result includes a reference to how recently the URL was shared on Twitter, how many tweets mention it, and who first found it on Twitter.
As we all know, the Google ranking algorithm is never static, and is constantly being tweaked and altered. Over the past few weeks, we have noticed some changes that are clearly visible to anyone using the search engine, changes meant to improve the quality of results for searchers, but how might they affect your own site?
One change you might not have noticed is that Google is now showing local results based on your IP address. If you search for Chartered Accountants you will likely notice that many of the results in the middle of the page are more or less specific to your area, these results being based on your IP address. The same search made from a different location will bring up a different set of results. How might this affect you? Well, the first thing is that it is now easier to rank for competitive keywords for some local searches, depending on the size and population of the area you are based in. You can use this to your advantage by taking a few simple steps. First, make sure you submit your site to Google Maps, then ensure your location is included in both the title tag of your site and also in the meta description tag. It won’t do any harm to include it in your meta keywords tag as well.
The next change is a lot more obvious: Google has made the length of the snippet that makes up the description under the link title a little longer, for queries that comprise 3 or more words. The idea is that multiple-word queries tend to be quite targeted and the usual short snippet may not have contained enough detail. This might impact on your site by providing searchers with the exact match to their query without them having to check through many sites. Also, if your site was ranked in a position just above the fold before, now it might be pushed beneath the fold due to the extra space required to display these longer snippets, which means you need to be ranked that little bit higher to guarantee being seen at first glance by the searcher.
The final change Google has made is that they are now displaying more related searches at the bottom of the page of results. And occasionally at the top too. For example, a search for “evolutionary ideas” will now display related terms such as “jean baptiste lamarck evolution”, “stephen jay gould evolution”, “ernst mayr evolution”, “theistic evolution”, “punctuated equilibrium evolution”, and many more. This shows the importance of optimising your site for as many different keywords as are relevant to the site’s subject matter. Don’t concentrate on just the one obvious keyword, but instead develop the content to include a wide range of relevant keywords so Google better understands that your website is relevant on a particular topic.
This debate will probably never end, at least until the semantic web takes hold, with both camps fairly certain that they, and only they, are right. The truth lies somewhere in between: links are always going to be important because links are still the only connector on the web, and quality content is always going to be important because that is what the searcher is looking for. The following is a clip from Matt Cutts on the Google Webmaster Channel where he answers the question “Is it better to have exceptional links and mediocre content, or exceptional content and mediocre links?”.
Personally, I still hold with favouring content over links, or as Jill Whalen might say “Content is King”, but am not such a fool as to forget about searching for good links. One thing is certain, if you provide good content you are more likely to find other sites willing to link back to it.
It being the day that it is, I’ve been wasting some time this morning looking for news spoofs to amuse myself, and been mostly disappointed. The Guardian had an article claiming that they were giving up on print and from now on all news would be reported via Twitter, amusing enough but not actually convincing. Perhaps I expect too much. Perhaps I’m spoiled because I can still remember the BBC documentary about harvesting spaghetti in Italy, but I want my April’s Fool pranks to, well, fool me. At least for a moment.
This one didn’t fool me, but what a great way to spread a viral marketing message. Well done Laptops Direct, I can only guess at how many people will view this today and then tweet about it - I’ve already seen it tweeted by 6 people, and I don’t really follow that many
Matt Cutts put up an interesting video on the Google Webmaster Central Channel on youtube, where he answers some questions on the link: operator.
He is quite evasive on the nofollow question, but once again hints at the importance of using the tools available at Google Webmaster Tools. If you really need to check out who is linking to your competitors then you can always use the same link: operator in Yahoo Search, and then filter the results by removing the internal links.
There was a recent post over on the MSN Live Search Webmaster Centre Blog outlining steps for first discovering whether your site has been penalised, and then how to go about getting things fixed. The good folk at Live Search believe that most webmasters are going to know why they have been blocked, summed up here: “They’ve used a myriad of overly aggressive (and often outright malicious) SEO techniques to try to egregiously manipulate their website’s position in search engine rankings. They often go to extraordinary lengths in an effort to game the system rather than do the legitimate work necessary to compete fairly for their page rank.” ( Note: Live Search Page Rank??? Is there such a thing? Apparently, yes).
The blog post is not concerned about the black hats, but is directed towards “those folks who were working hard and trying to do what was right for their businesses by innocently but actively optimizing their sites who got dinged.”
The first step is to discover whether your site has been penalised, which will require the authentication of the site, is to go the Webmaster Center and check the site status in the summary section. If it says “Blocked - Yes”, you’ve got trouble. Having confirmed that the site is indeed blocked, you can now check to see if the problem has been caused by malware.
“In Webmaster Center, check out both the Crawl Issues tool (review the Malware infected issue type) and the Outbound Links tool (select the Show only outbound links to malware option) for possible malware issues. If any malware issues were detected, clean them up immediately.”
If not, then you have more than likely got a lot of work to do. You’ll have to review the Webmaster Guidelines, where special attention should be paid to the bullet items listed in ‘Techniques that might prevent your website from appearing in Live Search results. These are the basic rules, and breaking any one of them can cause your site to be penalised. Once you have identified and fixed the problem, you can go to the Live Search Support page and request re-inclusion. Your request will then be reviewed, and your site scheduled to be re-crawled. If the crawler determines that the issues have been resolved, your site will be added back into the index.
One part of the post I particularly found informative was the bullet list of things the penalised site may have done to warrant exclusion, especially as each point begins with the correct way and moves through all the gradually worse techniques.
There have been a couple of developments in Social Media over the last month or so, neither appearing terribly important at the time, but when looked at together may prove a pointer to the future of social media. The first was the widely reported acquisition of Summize by Twitter, leading to a powerful search tool on Twitter itself. Previously, Twitter had offered the service “Track”, but this hadn’t be a success, possibly because it didn’t work. Often. A number of news emails arrived in my basket, and a number of them referred to articles suggesting that Twitter would become a main rival of Google. I’m not 100% convinced, to be honest. I’m not what you might call an avid tweeter, possibly because I doubt too many people care if I’m stuck in traffic, or not having a donut with my coffee. I am an avid reader of tweets, possibly because other people lead more interesting lives. But mostly because people like Matt Cutts, Robert Scoble, Tim O’Reilly and Jill Whalen are keen tweeters, and a link in one of their tweets has a very good chance of teaching me something new.
So, although I don’t post too often there, I pop in regularly, and am a part of that tweeting community, yet I don’t see how Twitter is going to have too significant an impact on Google in the near future. This is for one main reason: the different search facilities will be used for different reasons. Twitter will search all it’s own community for the terms entered, and filter results accordingly, but it requires that whatever being searched for is already in the Twitter world. Of course, as more and more users join that community, the greater in size it’s index will become. Twitter is a microblogging platform, which means that each tweet is restricted to 140 characters, and must link to an external site if more information than that needs to be given. I can see how it will develop as a search tool for very recent news (the Hudson plane crash appeared on Twitter before it appeared on any online news source), and for recent product or service news, but as a general search engine for information it will be hard to match the sheer size of the Google index. I doubt Google are too worried at present, but I expect they will be keeping a very close eye on developments there.
The second bit of news to grab the attention was the changes made in the Facebook layout. Essentially, Facebook decided to mimic Twitter, and reformat the home pages of all its users to display, a la Twitter, the news feeds from friends in each user’s network. Facebook has seen some incredible growth since its inception, but has nevertheless struggled to find a means to match profitability to its growth, and this might be a first step in that direction. One of the main changes is that Facebook now allows the user to update their pages with their Twitterfeed, more proof if any were needed of the intertwining of development in social media applications.
A busy weekend here at Chez Avatar meant that I was delayed in getting up the monthly guide to what’s happening in Barcelona, but it’s up now. And once again it leaves me wishing I could pop over for a bit, especially for the week around St. Patrick’s Day where El Feile has the strongest line-up they’ve ever had. Stephen Garland must be one of the hardest working promoters out there, so kudos for putting together a line-up that includes traditional legends The Dubliners, punk icons Stiff Little Fingers, as well as up and coming artists like Duke Special and the Garrett Wall Band, as well as host of other cultural events. This year the festival has a strong Northern Ireland flavour, in keeping with the UN International Year of Reconciliation. Stephen has been bringing a wealth of international comedy stars to Barcelona and Madrid over the past few years through his Comedy in Spain shows, and, in keeping with El Feile’s northern focus, this month he’s managed to bring Colin Murphy over for what should be a couple of unmissable nights of hilarity. More power to him.
Someone added a comment to one of my posts this week, asking if I knew how to deal with blog spam as they were getting “thousands of spam comments” on their blog. Bizarrely, the email address supplied was a spam address, in that it didn’t exist and was just a bunch of random letters in front of @hotmail.com. The site mentioned was one of those parked domains for sale, and there was no blog to be found. In short, it was itself a spam comment.
I get spam all the time, I’d say 99% of all comments are spam. I usually delete them, but for one IP in Russia (you know who you are, you tedious git) I hit the spam button. Doesn’t seem to make the slightest bit of difference, 10 minutes later I’ve got another couple from the same IP. I had hoped that by hitting the spam button that all comments from that particular IP would be blocked by WP, and perhaps it’s something that they’ll do in the future, but for the moment I might as well just shout at my screen for all the use it does.
I’d love to add comments to the posts, but unfortunately nobody seems to know how to comment. Simply writing “Nice post, very informative” isn’t enough. I have no problems linking out to other sites, but for chrissakes write something interesting!
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