Category Archives: Yahoo

McAfee SiteAdvisor, Tip of the Week, Yahoo

Tip of the Week: McAfee SiteAdvisor

This is the first of a new (hopefully) weekly series of posts to help your site in the search engine rankings and gain more visitors. Todays top tip is to submit your site for McAfee SiteAdvisor testing. It’s free and almost instant and gives feedback on whether McAfee, one of the leading online security companies knows of any security problems with your site. Used in addition to Google Webmaster Tools this site can help you to really cover your bases and find out if your site is hosting malware or other nasties, if you’ve been flagged as a spammer and more.

How can this help your search engine rankings you ask? Well those clever folks at Yahoo are integrating McAfee SiteAdvisor information into their search engine results pages (SERPS) as seen on the screen shot to the right. It goes without saying that a safe site will inevitably get more clicks than an unsafe site as the screen shot below for warez (illegal downloads) sites shows. You can clearly see the warning mark from McAfee on the first result in the image below. This was the second page of results, the first page all featured “clean” results.

So this week’s top tip: Show your site is secure, build trust, gain rankings and clicks.

Bing, BOSS, Google, Hook, Kumo, Larry Page, Matt Cutts, SearchMonkey, Sift, Yahoo

SEO News round up

It’s been a hectic week here at Denial Towers so I’ve not been able to blog about this week’s stories so I thought I’d do a quick round up of the SEO news headline.

Microsoft will unveil their new look search next week at the D: All Things Digital conference before going live at the SMX Advanced conference a week later. Developed under the codename “Kumo” there has been speculation as to what Microsoft will call this new search technology. Will it use an existing brand like Live or MSN Search or even it’s codename, Kumo? Or something else entirely new like Sift, Hook or Bing? Sift.com is owned by someone else and Microsoft’s Sift seems to be a mobile search platform, Hook.com is also already taken which leaves us with Bing. Bing.com is owned by Microsoft but Google’s Matt Cutts posted on Twitter that the US Trademark Office rejected the application due to the fact a similar mark is already registered to Bing Mobile Inc.

Yahoo is also getting ready to revamp their search. Apparently they want to get rid of the “10 blue links” and change to a system they are calling “WOO”, or Web Of Objects” instead of the current “Web Of Pages”. WOO is an attemopt to return “a better representation of the “real world” in search results. In other words: more closely aligning user intent with search results and mapping those to real-world tasks.” and will include multi-media elements.

Yahoo have also been singing the praises of BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) and SearchMonkey (which is now 1 year old).

Google are changing the way Google Suggest works (the drop down that suggests queries as you type). See the Official Blog for more information.

And finally Google founder Larry Page is at today’s Monaco Formula 1 Grand Prix as a guest of Vodafone (and by extension, Ferrari who Vodafone sponsor). Maybe Google are looking at some sort of deal with Vodafone or maybe Mr. Page is just trying to score a new Ferrari!

Ask, brawn gp, formula 1, Google, Live search, MSN, ross brawn, Yahoo

Google trumps Yahoo! and Live for speed and relevancy

As an avid Formula 1 fan I’ve been closely following the fate of the old Honda F1 team after Honda announced on the 5th December that it was selling the team and pulling out of Formula 1 due to the economic downturn. At midnight last night ex-Honda team principal Ross Brawn announced he had completed a management buy-out of the old Honda team and was renaming the team “Brawn GP”. What does this all have to do with the search engines you ask? Well the new Brawn GP website was launched sometime in the early hours of this morning and a quick search on the major UK search engines (Google, Live, Ask and Yahoo!) for “brawn gp” revealed some interesting results.

Predictably Google has got it spot on and indexed and ranked the Brawn GP site within hours of it’s launch. It’s ranked third at the moment but expect that to change very soon. The index date says it was indexed around 8 hours ago from the time I’m writing this article. It’s rankings are probably helped by a link from the BBC Sport website’s story about the takeover.

Yahoo has some nice relevant results, mainly news stories about Ross Brawn and a wikipedia entry for him but no Brawn GP website. It’s not even indexed.

Ask similarly returns a glut of news results and F1 related sites but no official website.

Live / MSN fails miserably. There are some relevant news results at the top of he SERPS but the main results are atrocious. For some reason it thinks I typed Brown GP so returns sites for a Chartered Accountant (???!), a GUI Package, Pony Club classified ads and pages about Gordon Brown and the health service. Sigh. Until Microsoft work out that this kind of thing is preventing them from dominating search they’ll continue to stumble around blindly trying to invent the next big thing when all we want is relevancy and speed. Squirrelled away at the top of the page it does say “Results are included for brown gp. Show just the results for brawn gp.” and clicking on this returns some relevant results but again no official site. While Google and Yahoo! both suggest that I may have misspelled something they at least return results for what I’ve actually entered, not what it thinks I wanted. It’s like that damn Office paper-clip all over again…

Google, Live search, Matt Cutts, PageRank, Twitter, Yahoo

Google joins Twitter

Google joins the micro-blogging service du jour Twitter (Twitter.com/google) and just a few hours later has 25,279 followers. The tweets so far are mainly links to the existing Google blogs but it’s nice to have everything in one place.

Yahoo and Live Search also have twitter accounts but far less followers (4,567 and 1,334 respectively) showing that it dominates even this area of the Internet. They still have a long way to go before they pass Stephen Fry in number of followers though (239,321)!

I will be watching with interest to see what nuggets of useful search information they let out. There’s an interesting Tweet by Matt Cutts responding to the question of why the brand new Google Twitter page already has Page Rank. Apparently the account was registered unofficially in 2007 and Google have just taken it over. Wonder how much they paid for that? And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter.

Site Explorer, sitemaps, Yahoo

Yahoo! Site! Explorer! Gets! Makeover!

Yahoo! Site Explorer has been updated with new features and a slightly new look. The new interface now shows more detail about your sites such as number of pages Yahoo! knows about, the number of pages crawled, number of hosts on this domain name (useful for sites on shared hosting), inbound links and outbound links. The whole thing seems to work quicker than before as well which is a welcome bonus.

Below is a screenshot of the new look interface and statistics panel:

My only gripe is that it’s not immediately obvious how to access the statistics from the main dashboard. I had to click the feeds link and then the sub-menu became accessible to me.