SEO Blog

I saw a post yesterday on John Battelle’s site entitled “Fred says: Google is lame” I laughed.

Then today I started playing with their keyword tool. What a piece of junk!

Not one suggestion we tried actually tied into what sites were showing up for in their SERPS. In fact, the keyword suggestions that appeared were tied against variations on one random phrase taken from each page, and all suggestions were variations against those phrases.

For example, for one site dealing in, and showing up well in the SERPS for a stem cell research related query, the suggestion tool came up with “anti stem cell research” and “to stem cell” as the main terms, and proceeded to offer suggestions relating to those terms. Unfortunately, the phrases “anti stem cell” and “to stem cell” do not appear anywhere in their content !

Here’s another example:

Google’s Keyword tool says this page is about; “postcard”, “postcards” and “animated postcard” and all their suggestions relate to that term.

Yet, they get no traffic for that term. Not one hit from Google (or MSN / Yahoo etc…)

Google will begin serving up the entire contents of books and government documents that aren’t entangled in a copyright battle over how much material can be scanned and indexed from five major libraries, via http://print.google.com

The list of Google’s so-called “public domain” works — volumes no longer protected by copyright — include Congressional acts, biographies, novels and other texts on which copyrights have expired.

Copyrighted materials will not be displayed at this time, as Google is involved in lawsuits with the publisher who do not wish their works published, without the opportunity for the publisher to actually earn revenue from the transaction.

Makes sense. I’m not sure that Google’s print strategy of publishing books whose copyrights have expired is not up for debate. After all, would another Napster, which traded on MP3’s which were out of copyright be allowed to operate?

I think that government documents are a no-brainer. They are the domain of the people.

I look forward to the cases with regards to materials presently under copywright being settled.

Tim Mayer posted a note that Yahoo would be doing an index update on Nov 1. He mentioned it would be mild and quick.

It was. Checked a few terms, and the updates seemed reasonable, and more relevant. Overall, it looks good! I read some people complaining about old / dead sites back in. I didn’t see any of those in the queries I checked, but I believe it probably happened. There always seems to need to be sime final quality control updates to every update.

On the Google front “Jagger” just keeps on going. Kind of like Mick First it was Jagger, then Jagger2, The Jagger 3 was to be rolled out, but according to Matt Cutts, Jagger 3 hasn’t started rolling out yet. I noticed a big change in rankings Tuesday night, and things seem to become quite a bit less relevant. None of our clients seemed unduly affected, but I found overall search results to be noticeably lower in quality. It seemed like spam had creeped back in. So when I read Matt’s blog, and saw that Jagger3 was still to come, I was relieved: Wait for the end before judging overall. (kind of like the Yahoo! quality control comment)