Google Advanced Search Querystrings

Jul 12th

Posted by Paul in SEO

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May not be teaching old dogs new tricks, but here is a quick post about utilising the querystring parameters in Google search. The Google search url is made up of a number of parameters, the & symbol is used to add parameters as shown in the following example: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=football+world+cup&btnG=Search

  • hl=en – this defines the language. en is for English.
  • q=football+world+cup – this is the search query, the + is to replace spaces
  • btnG=Search - the ‘Google Search’ button was clicked to start the search

These are very basic parameter strings, now let’s take a look at how we can manipulate the result set coming back:

  • &num=100 – this will show the top 100 results instead of the default 10
  • &start=100 – this will allow the results to start from a particular position in the SERP’s

Now for a few advanced querystrings: as_qdr=x - Replace the x to one of the following to show when files had been first indexed:

  • d – last 24 hours
  • w – last 7 days
  • m – last month
  • y -  last year
  • m2 – last number of months. m2 wlast 2 months m3, m4 etc etc

So just a few ways to manipulate the results in the Google, for a full list visit the SEOmoz ultimate guide.

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Google May Day Update Affects Long Tail Search Queries

Jun 3rd

Posted by Paul in Featured

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A new algorithmic change has been implemented by Google, affectionately know as the May Day update as it happened around 1st May 2010. Matt Cutts explains that the change is not temporary and the update is looking to improve the quality of the SERP’s that is effecting long tail terms opposed to the head of searches.

Cutts explains that this update is independent to Google Caffeine which is preceding at pace. The update is assessing which sites are the best match for long tail queries. No human involvement in this update and it is purely algorithmic.

Is your SEO affected?

Think about your site, do you have a high quality site, good content and make sure that your site can be viewed as an authority for the search query so not matching off topic queries.

Watch the full video below:

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Google “kaffein” Caffeine now live, or just an April fool?

Apr 1st

Posted by Paul in SEO

1 comment

Call me a cynic but after all the excitement of Google Caffeine update last year is this now live or an April fools joke?

The online world is buzzing about the renamed update going live, kaffein, the German spelling of caffeine, renamed due to Mormons dietry requirements this caused a little bit of upset back in ’09 as Search Engine Roundtable posted.

So with the update now “live” what are SEO’s seeing today?

There are over 100k results and you may notice Google’s search results pages use some interesting units of measurements to estimate how long it took them to obtain your search query: femtogalactic years was used in my search for Google kaffein.

My sceptic mind thinks this is a good old April fool’s joke but i will be watching on to see if it is or not.

Ciao for now!

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Google Webmaster Verification Now Made Easier!

Mar 6th

Posted by Paul in General

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Google have now made the Webmaster Verification process a lot simpler. If you own a site and want multiple people to be able to view the WMT information of your site, you would have had to add multiple html files or multiple meta tags which would make the process quite a lengthy one and also more difficult to manage.

Google are now sharing the verification love which allows Webmaster to simply add a user to the WMT account to view the profile, this has to be a Google account email addres.

Simply login to your webmaster tools account and select the verification details link.

Then click add user and enter the Google verified email address of who you wish to grant access to the WMT account for the domain:

The long and short of it means less hassle for Webmasters!

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Google Products - No links

Google Product Search – Testing Links again?

Apr 3rd

Posted by Paul in Featured

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Has anyone noticed that the product results in Google have been showing images and not directly linkg through to the site?

A post from the Head of SEO  at Latitude, Andy Heaps posted back in December about how Latitude joke about Google’s money making levers – “if profits are down or shareholders unhappy they pick a money generating lever and pull it” highlighted this, and now seems that the same is going on again.

Only today have Google displayed both links and none in their product listings here is the latest of my searches:

Google Products - No links

Google Products - No links

So does this mean that Google are “pulling the levers” again or trying to improve the users exprerience?

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Google PageRank Update

Apr 3rd

Posted by Paul in General

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So it seems there has been a PageRank update this week, finally Organic Search SEO is a PR1 now!

Working on some SEO clients and happy to see that the one of my clients has seen the whole site go from PR2 to PR3.

Has anyone seen any surprising PR updates?

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Canonical URL – A possible solution to duplicate content

Feb 13th

Posted by Paul in Analytics

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Duplicate Content Issues

The 3 major search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, have just announced a new tag that can tell the search engines which URL it should have for the current page.

The issue websites have is duplicate content, the same content is indexed under different URL’s.  This is an issue SEO’s have been trying to solve for a long time.

New canonical URL tag

To help solve this problem, the 3 major engines have declared that it will recognise a new HTML tag, which, if inserted into your web page, will allow you to specify which URL you want to be the “official”, URL for the content.

The tag needs to be inserted into the HEAD section of your web page:

HTML:  <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk/correct-page.html">

XHTML: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.yourwebsite.co.uk/correct-page.html" />

This code needs to be placed in the HEAD section not in the BODY section.

Google will now count the links it has seen to that campaign tagged URL, towards the canonical URL, and not index the campaign tagged URL.

In summary, may be to early to tell if this will help webmasters as it was only announced on the 12th February 2009, but in my opinion this is handing back a little bit of control to the webmaster instead of letting the search engine’s figure out the correct URL.

Disclaimer:  The tag is aonly a suggestion to the search engine. It will probably be used 99% of the time, but they have the right to handle things their way.

Canonical URL plugin for WordPress users now available from Joost de Valk.

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Twestival – Day of the Twitter Festival

Feb 12th

Posted by Paul in General

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So, the day is finally here, Twestival 2009!

Today is in aid of the charity charity: water and the talk on the tweet is that over $1 million is to be raised.

I’ve also read today that the BBC and Sky News are going to be covering the London Twestival, so Twitter is really making it mainstream!

My home city of Manchester is hosting their event at the Living Room and there seems to be a great buzz going round, as well as what should be a fantastic event, there are the following prizes to be won in the charity auction:

  1. A Nintendo Wii – donated by Stardotstar
  2. An iPod touch – donated by Citypress
  3. A champagne dinner for two – donated by The Living Room
  4. A pair of first class train tickets to anywhere on the First TransPennine Express network – donated by FTPE
  5. A beautiful Pandora necklace (RRP £248) – donated by McCann Erickson
  6. Dinner for two at Nui Sicilian restaurant at The Trafford Centre  – donated by the restaurant via SKV PR
  7. Two crates of Tsingtao beer – donated by Tsingtao
  8. An annual pass to the Northern Start up 2.0 (worth £350.00) – donated by @ManojRanaweera
  9. Two fantastic handpainted glasses – Twestival theme, by artist Roz Clark – donated by Realfresh.tv
  10. A pair of 3D webcams (the mind boggles!) – donated by Tangerine PR
  11. Make up and beauty kit  – donated by McCann Erickson
  12. A white North Face women’s jacket – donated by Brazen
  13. A complete ‘love’ kit – donated by Durex
  14. Tickets for two for Chill Factore – donated by Staniforth
  15. Something fabulous from Rags to Bitches – donated by Rags to Bitches

Those that are lucky to have tickets have fun!

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Google PageRank Penalty given to Google

Feb 12th

Posted by Paul in General

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It has come to light over the past week or so that Google.co.jp has been caught paying bloggers to write about them to help improve their hold in the Japanese market as Yahoo are strong in Japan.

Now, as we know Google does not like link buying and has penalized sites for doing this with search ranking penalties.

To my amazement and to be honest this made me giggle, they have given themselves a PageRank penalty for link buying!

The site was previously a PR9 and now is a PR5, I don’t think it will have any real effect but certainly won’t do them any harm.

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twestival-logo1

Twestival meet ups for charity

Jan 25th

Posted by Paul in General

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twestival-logo1On 12th February 2009, there is a worldwide “Tweetup” to raise money and awareness for charity: water.

Twestival is organised by volunteers around the globe to raise moneyy for charity:water, over 100 cities worldwide will be hosting an event, from London to San Francisco.

The Tweetathon will happen over a 24 hour period and will bring tweeters from around the world together. Twestival began over a year ago in a one-off event in London but the power of Twitter enabled the main 40 cities to organise their events in less than 24 hours.

This should be one hell of a tweetup -I might be at the London or Manchester event so maybe see you there!

Here is the latest list:

Twestival Americas

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