SeoblogR

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Google have officially launched the SearchWiki, as announced yesterday on Official Google Blog.

[...]we’re launching SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don’t feel belong.

SearchWiki is available to logged-in users and all your changes are stored in your Google account, so the next time you log-in you will see the previous changes you have made to certain results. The changes you make affect only your results, but you can also see how the community edited the same results that you have performed by clicking on the “See all notes for this SearchWiki” link.

The Google SearchWiki is available in English language for now (at least Polish version is not available yet), but probably soon other languages will also see that feature.

Here is a small video describing the Google SearchWiki features.

What is the impact of SearchWiki on Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimizers, or SEOs, who help companies improve their search engine rankings, should not rush to start manipulating SearchWiki—at least not yet. Ms. Mayer said that SearchWiki comments and re-rankings will have no affect on the Google algorithm and how it ranks sites for the general Google audience. “At this time we aren’t using SearchWiki to influence ranking but it is easy to see how that could happen in the future” she said - NYT.

For now Google does not consider any changes users make to results, but in the future it will change. How will Search engine optimization change when it happens? I’d love to hear you thoughts about that.

Some websites offer a possibility to sort information according to specific criteria - according to the author, year of production, the date of creation, price, title, customer review etc.

For example: http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=1226853323/ref=sr_st?keywords=Toshiba&rs=5 65108&page=1&rh=n%3A541966%2Cn%3A565108%2Ck%3AToshiba&sort=acrelevance rank

and

http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=1226853330/ref=sr_st?keywords=Toshiba&rs=5 65108&page=1&rh=n%3A541966%2Cn%3A565108%2Ck%3AToshiba&sort=pmrank

represent the same range of products within Amazon store, but are sorted with different criteria (according to Relevancy and Bestselling criteria). As you can see those are distinct URL addresses but they serve similar content.

The Similar Page Checker Tool indicates that those two pages have 58% percentage similar content to each other. That means that the overall content on those two separate URl addresses is in 58% similar.

That is a bad sign. Considering the fact that Amazon presents 677 items meeting the sort criteria smaller e-commerce shops (or any other shops with smaller number of items with sorting option enabled) have bigger chances to get even higher duplication percentage number. And the more similar the pages are, the bigger chances that search engines will treat those pages as an attempt to spam indexes.

How to solve sorting option duplicate content issues

I thought of couple of possible solutions to that problem:

• “Noindex, Nofollow” meta tags on all “sorted result pages” except for one - that way you will allow indexation of only one version containing the same range of products and exclude the possibly duplicated “sorted result” versions of those products.
• “Noindex, Nofollow” meta tags on all “sorted result pages” - just in case you have a general page with the range of products and on that page you allow sorting option. If the general (category) page is static, then that page will present your merchandise and will be indexed by search engines and all other “sorted” pages will not be indexed and they will not cause the duplicate content problems.

If you have any other ideas of how to avoid “sorted result pages” duplicate content issues share your knowledge with us.

Google announced that they have decided to shut down Lively platform in the end of his year.

despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we’ve decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year. It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business. Lively.com will be discontinued at the end of December, and everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams - Google blog.

Furthermore:

We will shut down Lively on December 31, 2008. Embedded rooms in blogs and other web pages will continue to show an image, but users will no longer be able to enter Lively rooms and interact.

Between now and the end of the year we encourage you to capture all your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms. Thank you for sharing this experience with us. We’ve learned a lot about how users interact in rich social environments, and we hope you’ve enjoyed your time with Lively - Lively.

Basically it means that Google decided to focus more on improving its search results rather than developing extra projects on a side. As long as it helps users, its the right decision.

Watch this amazing video of Seth Godin and understand the future present look of (online and offline) marketing.

Jerry Yang has quit Yahoo! as Chief Yahoo and CEO. Jerry Yang have been the CEO of Yahoo! since June 2007. After Google-Yahoo! ad deal was broken, many people have expected that Jerry Yang will be held responsible for that. Yahoo! have lost lots of money, time, technology benefits and reputation because of that deal breakdown and now its time for Jerry to step out as Yahoo!’s CEO.

In official statement we can read that:

As you’ve no doubt already read, I’ve decided that I will step down from my role as Chief Executive Officer after my successor has been selected. [...] despite the tough external environment that we face, I truly believe we’ve made tangible progress in bringing our strategic vision to life. Most significantly, we’ve rewired our entire network to create a Yahoo! that has opened its doors to outside publishers and developers.

And now I believe the time is right for us to bring in a new leader –- someone who will build on the important pillars we’ve put in place and who will take the reins on the critical decisions our company faces. As for me, I’ll be returning to my role as Chief Yahoo and board member once my successor is named. I’ll go back to focusing on our global strategy, product excellence, technology innovation, and working with the Board and our executive team to help Yahoo! realize its full potential - Yodel Anecdotal.

What does it teaches us? It doesn’t matter if you created the worldwide company, you can be always exchanged.

What is the biggest difference between Google and Yahoo!? Google knows its strategy and is consistant, Yahoo! have too many strategies.

I can only say this: good luck to the next Yahoo! CEO.

Glync is a new Firefox extension that adds historical graph to the External Links page in Google Webmaster Tools meaning that you can visualize the inbound link growth over the time. It can help you see how many links are you attracting and whether you are improving your sites visibility on the Internet or not.

There are two versions of the extension:

Free- tracks your Google Webmaster Tools links,

Professional - tracks your Google Webmaster Tools links and Yahoo Site Explorer links, displays Google PageRank of all your sub-pages and links pointing to those sub-pages,

Click on image to enlarge.

Its a cool extension that in a easy way presents data from your Google Webmaster Tools and helps you see in fast way what is happening to the number of inbound links pointing to your site: whether they are increasing over time or decreasing.

Google introduced the ability to track Adobe Flash content with use of Google Analytics software.

This new Flash tracking code provides all the rich features of the current JavaScript-based version, including campaign, pageview and event tracking and can be used to track Flash content such as embedded videos, branded microsites and distributed widgets, such as online games.

The documentation of usage of Google Analytics for Flash is available on a special Google Code website, the open source of the entire AS3 code base under the Apache 2 License is available on this Google Code website and finally the tracking libraries for both Flash and Flex are available to download at Google.

I think its great that Google enables tracking of Flash websites or even parts of websites. It is mainly possible thanks to the ability to index Flash files, which became possible earlier this year. Now they want to also track those indexed Flash files and i think its a great idea. After all there are tons of Flash files on the Internet just waiting to be tracked down

E-commerce websites have that in common that they present information in a dynamic way. That means that the content may be served via multiply number of different URL’s with different parameters which may cause a duplicate content issue.

For example:

http://www3.jcpenney.com/jcp/X6.aspx?DeptID=62438&CatID=63100&GrpTyp=P RD&ItemID=14ad0e8&attrtype=&attrvalue=&CMID=62438%7c63096&Fltr=&Srt=&Q L=F&IND=2&CmCatId=62438|63096|63100

and

http://www3.jcpenney.com/jcp/X6.aspx?ItemID=14ad0e8&ItemTyp=G&GrpTyp=P RD&ShowMenu=T&ShopBy=0&SearchString=Secure+Sleeper&RefPage=SearchDepar tment.aspx&s4PageSize=15&CmCatId=searchresults&Search1Prod=True

are the same product but accessed via different way: once by going through the categories tree and another way by searching for that product with build-in search engine. And as you can see those two URL’s have different parameters (everything that follows http://www3.jcpenney.com/jcp/X6.aspx? is a parameter), yet they present the same product (content).

And that is the problem. Visitors can reach the same product, but depending on the route they take, they will end up on different URL address. For search engines it is a duplicate content.

How to fight with e-commerce duplicate content issue

The best solution would be the use of static URL addresses instead of dynamic ones. That would make sure that each URL serves a certain product and that this is the only URl serving the same product.

That is the best solution, but hard to achieve. In reality, a website with tenths of thousands items could not create a static url for each product. Daily changes to the item availability, new products, special offers, limited series and so on would make this task very hard to achieve.

So how to solve it?

• Remove unnecessary parameters - that will lower the distinct number of URl’s presenting the same content and help search engines spider the website
• Create a sitemap - create a sitemap (html and xml versions) and present the URL’s you would like to present your products at. That will help sarch engines determine the “correct” URl address and remove the other possible duplicated URL’s with different parameters.
• Implement mod-rewrite - rewrite all possible URL’s to static ones
• 301 redirect - redirect the duplicated URL’s to one version, so even if visitors reach your product via different ways they will end up at the same URL

How Google handles various parameters causing duplicate content issue:

1. When we [Google] detect duplicate content, such as through variations caused by URL parameters, we group the duplicate URLs into one cluster.
2. We select what we [Google] think is the “best” URL to represent the cluster in search results.
3. We [Google] then consolidate properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL.

Consolidating properties from duplicates into one representative URL often provides users with more accurate search results- Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Conclusion

If you can, do not use URL parameters as it can cause a duplicate content issues. If you must, try to limit the number of parameters you use to absolute minimum. Also create a sitemap with preferred URL addresses to help search engines determine which URL to keep in its indexes and present to users.

The use of different URL parameters causing that different URL’s show the same content is very dangerous, especially to large websites with lots of items. So take it seriously and plan your URl structure before you make the website. That can help you save time and nerves.

Have you ever wandered how do Google offices look like? Now take a look at that short video of Google’s office in New York City.

What do you think of that? Isn’t it simply amazing?