SEO Blog

Yesterday was sort of a write-off. Like many others, I spent a valuable day watching history unfold in stunned disbelief as over $1.2trillion dollars was written-off in losses. The day was full of fear and like an infectious virus, that fear went pandemic. The troubles are real and though the sky is not actually going to fall, something wicked is most certainly coming this way. So now what? While many are searching for a plan, the search marketing community has been planning for this phase of search.

Stuff Happens
Here is the obvious part. There is going to be enormous pain felt around the world no matter what happens in the United States later this week. Everybody is going to feel it in one way or another but that pain will not be shared equally by all. Some businesses will cease to exist and some businesses will fare better than their peers. Some might even see benefits on a horizon that appears bleak to other observers.

Sometime in September, Google turned 10. The exact date would have been September 4 however Google choose not to commemorate that date and since Google is the unofficial arbiter of all that is true online, their official birthday falls on whatever the heck day they want it to fall on. Me, I figure with the month of September rapidly receding, today is as good a day as any to commemorate.

Eleven years ago (Sept. 15, 1997), two Stanford university students registered the domain name Google.com/. Those students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had devised a tool that sorted web documents based on the number of links pointing to one document from a variety of others. They called it Backrub.

Encouraged by the founders of Yahoo!, Stanford alumni Jerry Yang and David Filo, Page and Brin started showing their search engine around Silicon Valley. In August 1998, they received their first investment from Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, who wrote a cheque for $100,000 to a company that didn’t even exist, Google Inc. Two weeks later, on September 4, 1998, Page and Brin incorporated their new business under the name Google, opened a bank account and deposited their first six-figures. Ten years later Google is arguably the most important online application.
(Google Ten Year Timeline)

Just a quick post to note today, Sept 24, is the 15th anniversary of the first major CD-Rom based game, Myst. Developed in the Pacific Northwest, the company that produced Myst, Cyan Worlds, based their programming, animation and sales divisions here in Victoria BC. Myst was, at one time, the most popular video game on the market. It eventually sold over 6-million units, a record it held until the Sims surpassed it in 2002.

Myst’s contributions to the gaming and computing worlds are numerous. Graphically, Myst went beyond what anyone at the time had ever seen. In order to produce such clarity, Myst relied on what was then a rather exotic computer component, a CD-Rom drive.

As time moved on and Myst’s popularity faded in the face of more intense video games, the offices and technologies housed in Victoria were sold to Disney Interactive and soon after moved south to California.

15 years ago today, the first disc of Myst was released. Cyan Worlds and Myst can be credited with jump-starting the IT industry here in Victoria BC. The rest is history.

Most webmasters and search marketing specialists view the guidelines posted at Google Webmaster Central as “the rules” outlining techniques acceptable to Google. The Google guidelines are in fact the only actual written rules universally recognized through-out the SEO sector though they tend to be regarded more like municipal bylaws than federal, state or provincial legal code. Nevertheless, Google makes the rules for how their search enigne works and breaking those rules can have far reaching consequences. Given the extreme importance of Google to our clients, SEOs tend to respect Google’s civil bylaws.

Two guidelines SEOs perceived as being among the most important to Google have recently changed. The first covers duplicate content, the second covers dynamic URLs.

Duplicate Content
From canonical issues and poor website architecture to outright content theft, dupe content is rampant on the web. Sometimes it happens by mistake and sometimes it is copied and republished on purpose.

For Google, duplicate content presents a number of potential problems. When Google perceives several documents containing the same content, it has to determine which of those documents is the most relevant to search-users’ queries. It also has to decide which incidents of duplicate content have value to web-users and which incidents are not useful. News and information posts, for instance, are often replicated from site to site with good reason and honest intent.