The Search Engine Blog
News and Tips From The Search Marketing World
Who is King?
Google has been receiving a lot of criticism regarding the quality of searches. Yes, spam content sites have been an issue for months causing many to jump ship to Bing for research (including me). Google finally woke up and has released a few statements across the boards that they are beefing up their elimination of spammy sites. It’s long over due. They have been adding new features and providing some good tools, but temporarily forgot why they were in business. To Google we say, don’t forget your primary business…..delivery of quality content. To web site owners we say, don’t forget your primary business….creating quality content. Yes, content is still king.
Google Reading Level Search
Google’s Advanced Search page now let’s you specify your reading level and will attempt to only provide content that you are able to read. There is a discussion on the Google forums here. Turning on this feature let’s you filter content by reading level and will show you how much content is within each level using a helpful bar graph. I would think it beneficial for younger students doing research.
Google Product Listings Error
Google product listing ads are not properly tracking conversions. Google is aware of the issue and has posted it on their help desk. A fix is in the works.
News Corp on Bing Only?
News Corp wants Google to pay for indexing their news content and serving it on Google news pages. Google says, tell us not to index it and we won’t. News Corp, says you took it now pay. You get the argument from there. It’s the War of Standstill Hill.
Now Microsoft sees an opportunity and offers to pay News Corp to index their material if they do de-list themselves from Google. Microsoft’s Bing would be the only source of News Corp information?
Do you think that information should only be available if you search multiple sources? Is this the start of a slippery slope?
There’s a discussion of the good and bad of this at Microsoft and News Corp To Consider Web Pact?
Sculpting PageRank
For those of you using nofollow tags on your site to control PageRank and the flow of link juice, Matt Cutts of Google has written a very short article explaining why Google doesn’t want you to do this.
If you don’t personally check the links on your site (e.g. blog comments), it appears that it’s still a good idea for those links.
PageRank sculpting
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