Google changes faster than you can blink right now. Just some buzzwords that will bug you in 2010:

1. Google Caffeine
2. Google Real Time search
3. Google Personalized search results
4. Google Living Stories
5. Google Phone

I could go on like for a while. It’s not my intention to confuse you even more though. I want to shed some light on the near future of Google, search and SEO. It’s a daunting task as I’m overwhelmed as well.

Thus I picked 30 resources on Google, search & SEO changes in 2010 from around the search industry and some main stream sources. Continue Reading »

Some people, even at Google, still think that Google hates SEO. In some cases it really does. At the same time Google loves SEO as actions speak louder than words. Google provides not a few, not several but by now 10 free Google SEO tools everybody should use. I remember the times when we had none of them. Today we have an abundance of data Google allows us to mine.
Continue Reading »

These days it’s hard to keep up with new gimmicks presented by Google. You could spend hours or days just coming to terms with them. Most of these new services and features are in some way connected to social media. Google’s social media strategy seems to be trial and error. Continue Reading »

While searching Google earlier today I was very surprised to notice that one of the listings returned in the top 10 was an FTP site!

Digging a little deeper and I found that there are actually millions of ftp://ftp.domain.com addresses indexed in Google, all of which appear to have read access permissions granted to the folder structure. I admit that I know very little about hacking but surely having this information available is a potential security risk to webmasters?

I assume Google have always indexed FTP URL’s, just without ranking them very well in most cases so I haven’t noticed these appearing before. But seeing that they don’t index file extensions such as .exe or even .0 because these are considered as a risk to users, I would have expected the FTP addresses to be blocked too – this time as a security risk to web servers and hosting packages instead.

These FTP files have obviously been indexed because the URL has been linked to, normally as a document download from within the main site. The URL’s are certainly useful to the website users (which is why Google probably has an argument for indexing these), but webmasters should really be hosting this on an http:// address and I wouldn’t have expected Google to index these URL’s so that they are open to view for anyone searching.

I’d be interested in hearing any other thoughts about this. I expect this is something many people may already be aware of, it might also explain how some people do link building on .edu domains! ;)

Nathania Johnson posted some very interesting stats on SEW yesterday to show how Wikipedia’s traffic has grown 8,000% in 5 years due to search referrals. This is an unbelievable statistic but as mentioned in the article that’s what happens when Google ranks all of your pages as #1!

There’s a mixture of opinions but many SEO’s would agree that Wikipedia shouldn’t appear in Google’s top 10 for searches on nearly every piece of content they have. I think it depends on the specific search term, but in my opinion Wikipedia provides little value when ranking #1 for searches such as SEO and restaurant. Most people performing these queries would be looking for somewhere to eat, or looking for SEO advice, blogs or tools. If they wanted to find a definition a “what is …” or “define:…” query would have worked fine.

Lets take a look at the results for a Google search on holidays:

Surely people know what a holiday is!

And how do you think Wikipedia would perform if they used Google AdWords?

I would imagine an ad like this would be lucky to get a CTR of 0.1% with a low quality score, but it’s not a problem in the organic listings.

Google has become by far the leading search engine because it gives searchers what they are looking for, and there is an argument that Wikipedia mixes up the results to provide a different type of listing, I agree with this to a certain extent but in all reality it’s nowhere near being the most relevant webpage for any of the above searches. Although not all of it’s rankings are unfair, if you search for a footballer, for example, you get quality content and stats from Wikipedia which deserves it’s ranking at the top as it’s useful to the searcher.

How can Google’s algortihm change to prevent Wikipedia’s SERPs domination?
In my opinion the Google algorithm should pay less attention to the strength of wikipedia.org as a whole domain, calculating rankings based upon the inbound links to a specific page instead. If your content is of a higher quality and more relevant to the actual search term this should be out ranking Wikipedia, but how do you compete with 5 million links?

These rankings would be completely different if the algorithm considered that only 2,000 inbound links are relevant, probably less when you consider no-one should really be linking to this! :)

What do you think, does Wikipedia rightfully deserve most of it’s rankings and provide searchers with the information they are looking for? Or is Wikipedia irrelevant for many search terms and ranking far too highly?