“Web 2.0″. You hear it everywhere, from blogs and websites to TV shows and newspaper articles. Wikipedia describes it as refering to “perceived or proposed second generation of Internet-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.” To simplify it a bit, it represents what we are experiencing nowadays all over the Internet: blogs, widgets, social networking websites, and so on.

Throughout the change of the internet one thing has apparently remained the same: the way we search for information. And one name imediately pops up as an ever-changing company that seems to lead the way in this area: Google. But, as Google expands, it appears that its “Default” function hasn’t changed much. The logos have come and gone, but the way we use Google’s search engine has basically remained the same over the years. I’m not saying this as a bad thing, though, but there are cases when Google’s apparent “rigidity” makes its presence known. With SEO techniques have enabled websites to deceive users in some cases, by offering illusions to be shown in the search engine, you can waste up to hours chasing the information that you need. One short example is the one that almost anyone has encountered in Google: you type in your search, and the first answers are websites that have little or nothing to do with what you typed (even pornographic websites). Read the rest of this entry »

Every webmaster wishes to have his site listed as high as possible in web searches and search engines, but not all of them are playing fair in trying to achieve their goal. I am going to list out the most common 5 tricks that you should NOT be doing if you still want your site indexed. Most of these below primarily apply to Google, but can be easily translated in other search engines as well.

1. Cloaking
Cloaking is when you set up your website to display different pages for the search engines than for the real surfers. The adepts of this method are claiming that it’s useful for absolute optimization of the content for search engine crawlers. The people against this method state that it’s an easy way to misrepresent the content, to trick the search engines. If you are interested, more details and different perspectives over cloaking can be found here, here and here.

2. Hiding text
Also called fontmatching, it consists in hiding some text within your pages. For example, if you put text with the same color as your background, the text will not be visible by human readers, but it WILL be visible for search engines. Therefore, it’s misleading.

A common derivation of fontmatching is text stacking, or keyword stuffing. The second consists in putting multiple copies of keywords in a very small font on the page, or putting keywords not relevant to your site in your META tags. Google’s policy for example is something like “You can do anything you want to with your pages, and we can do anything we want to with our index, such as excluding your pages.”

3. Using doorway pages
Doorway pages, or gateway pages, are pages on a website that practically gather links to other websites, also gathering relevant keywords. This kind of pages are rather annoying to the regular user, and search engines often choose to exclude you from their indexes. You may find more information regarding doorway pages here and here.

4. Checking your rank with automatic queries.
Shortly, don’t. You don’t have to check your rank every X seconds. It’s just a waste of time and resources. This is not what the search engine was built for anyway.

5. Linking to bad websites
This is probably one of the most important. You can’t control the reputation of the pages that link to you, but no one forces you to link back to pages that have questionable content. Some of these websites have set up link farms (pages that exist for the sole purpose of gathering links) and search engines demote that.

As you can see, search engines drastically punish those who are trying to improve their rankings in other ways than the accepted ones. We encourage you to help Google fighting this mechanism if you spot any page that doesn’t comply, located in their index. You can send an email to spamreport@google.com or fill out the form here.

We all know the Google Advanced Search page that lets you refine your searches and find what you need faster. But how many of us understand the complicated URLs the search engines generates?

Well I am not saying that I’m some sort of expert but here are some information regarding the URLs generated by Google. Let’s start by looking at one such URL:

http://www.google.com/search?as_q=nintendo+wii&hl=ro&num=10&btnG=C%C4%83utare+Google&
as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=

You don’t understand much and it looks quite long but it doesn’t have to be this way. Many of the variables included are not even used in the query. Here are the basics:

What you should know is that you always start with: http://www.google.com/search?. This tells Google it’s an advanced search and that there are some variables to come. Besides, remember that all the variables must be connected with ampersands (&; ex. as_q=nintendo+wii&hl=ro) and if you want to use more than one search terms just use ‘+’ (ex. nintendo+wii) between them. Speaking of variables here are the most important tags you can use:

as_oq -> This tells Google to find pages in which at least instance of nintendo OR wii is found
as_q -> This means that you look for nintendo and wii in the same page
as_epq -> Google translates this as a Google search of “nintendo wii”, searches the exact phrase ‘nintendo wii’
num -> The number of results you want displayed, it ranges from 0 to 100. If you set num to 0 you will get the ‘No match found” message
safe -> If you set this to active the Google Safe Search is on and the adult material will be filtered
as_eq -> Use this to exclude a term from your search
as_qdr -> Shows only results that have been updated in the given time interval. Possible values: y (year), m6 (6 months), m3 (3 months).
as_sitesearch -> Limits the search to a specific domain or TLD (.us; .gov; .co.uk; .ro; etc)
as_occt -> This is set by default to ‘any’ but if you change it you can search in: title, url, links

The goal of this article is not exactly for you to use from now on hand-made search URLs but yo better understand how the Google search engine works and if you please to create some URLs for yourself.
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As I was telling you in the first part of this article, I am glad that we’ve got over the basics of Google searching so now we can look into more interesting search options.

First of all there is a part of Google’s syntax that allows you to tell it where exactly to search. This comes in handy when you know part of a URL or maybe a title but you can’t find the exact page.

You can use ‘intitle:’ to search only the titles for web pages, as many of the other functions that are to follow ‘intitle:’ has a variation, namely ‘allintitle:’ that includes all the terms that follow in to the title search:

intitle:”Santa Maria” boat -> searches in title for Santa Maria and does a search on the term boat
allintitle:pirate ships treasure -> searches in title for all the terms

I think you’ve got the idea so here is a list of syntax words that work the same way:

‘intext:’ works the same way only restricts the search to the body of web pages, excluding URLs or titiles
‘inanchor:’ a anchor is the description for a text link: <a href=”http://our-picks.com”>Our-picks</a> here Our-Picks is the anchor.
’site:’ here you can use bot hosting and domain;this works well with the main page of a site (ex: cars site:co.uk)
‘inurl:’ searches the URL for sites, including subdirectories, it is highly recommended that you remove the ‘http:’ prefix before the search
‘link:’ this one is interesting since it shows you the sites that point to a specific URL, any page of the site not only the main URL
‘cache:’ returns the page from Google’s cache as it looked the time, useful when you want to find something on a page that changes frequently
‘filetype:’ works great with other syntax elements when you need a particular file type, like ‘.pdf’ or ‘.doc’ etc. (ex: planes filetype:pdf)
‘related:’ returns a list of pages that Google considers are related to one another
‘info:’ returns links with more informations about a given page, works well only if the page was indexed by Google.
Read the rest of this entry »

Car Insurance Guide

The same way you clean up your house before your guests arrive, the same way you should get your website ready for Google’s crawler, as this is one of the most important guests you will ever have. According to that, here are 10 things you should double check before submitting your website to the index. If you want, you can view this article as the correction of the top 10 mistakes made by webmasters.

1. If you have a splash page on your website, make sure you have a text link that allows you to pass it.
I’ve seen many websites with a fancy flash introduction on the index and no other way to navigate around it. Well, Google can’t read into your flash page, and therefore it cannot bypass it. All you have to do is put a text link to your website’s second index, and the deed is done.

2. Make sure you have no broken links
I know this is kind of obvious, but you’ll be surprised to find out how many errors is the Google crawler experiencing daily due broken links. Therefore, you’d better check and double check every internal link of your webpage before submission. Don’t forget that your links are also your visitor’s paths to your content. It’s not all about Google, you know :)

3. Check the TITLE tags
Since you are able to search in title tags on Google and since the title tags is displayed in the top of your browser window, I’d say this is an important aspect you need to check. This doesn’t mean you have to compile a >20 keywords list there. Instead, make it a readable sentence since it’s viewable by both crawlers and surfers.

4. Check the META tags
Rumors about Google not caring about META tags are not 100% correct. Google relies on these tags to describe a site when there’s a lot of navigation code that wouldn’t make sense to a human searcher, so why not make sure you’re all in order and set up some valid KEYWORDS and a valid DESCRIPTION. You never know.
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Yes, it is cool, despite the fact that it doesn’t rely on gadgets, and stuff that we seem to rely on nowadays. The only bad thing is that it’s not real, yet. It is the product of an ingenious designer called Rune Larsen. If the name rings a bell, he is the same person that designed the Tiny phone - the one not much larger than a toothpick. But, despite the earlier version, this is much more realistic when it comes to building it. There’s much more room for the battery, microphone, antenna, and the other essential stuff you can find inside a phone.

According to the inventor, the phone is equipped like a 1996 one (I wish I had one of these back in 1996). It is 5.5 centimeters tall closed, and 9 centimeters open.

In a world dominated by the arrival of the iPhone, I must say that, given the choice, I’d buy one of these in a heartbeat, just for the fun of having it. Here are some other photos of the older phone (Tiny Phone), and the Eclipse Phone. (click to enlarge).

We all use Google every day, quite a few times a day even and most of us are very pleased with it. But are the results to your searches always that relevant!? Often you find irrelevant results and it takes you longer than it should to find what you want. But is this because of Google’s faulty search algorithms or is it because sometimes our searches can be ambiguous?

Well whatever the case after the Gmail search article I decided to expand the subject a little. I know some things you will find here you already know and some of them might be new for you. Anyway you can consider them as a reminder of what searching on Google really means.

I will start with the basic syntax that I am sure all of you know, but it’s the basis for further more complex syntax. For example:

You can search whole phrases by using quotes like “Rose Chappel” instead of plain Rose Chappel. The first query searches for the Rose Chappel and the second searches for the words Rose and Chappel.

I presume you also know about word exclusion, when you want to exclude a certain term from your search: PS3 -price. This will exclude all the results that contain the word ‘price’. You can do this with phrases also: PS3 -”technical specifications”. Note that there must be no space between ‘-’ and the word to exclude.

What you must know is that Google excludes by default some common terms like I, of, the, etc. If you ever need to make Google include a given term all you need to do is put a ‘+’ in front of it: +the tower. Note that, when words like these are included within a phrase search they are automatically included like: “the tower”.

Now lets talk about some more complex searches whit ‘AND’ & ‘OR’. By default Google includes all the terms in the search but you can specify that one word OR the other should be searched. To do this insert the capitalized OR in your queries: expensive (red OR green) dress. You can also replace the OR with “|” the so called ‘pipe’ symbol. Needless to say that you can use OR with exact phrase searches: “complete idiot”|”total idiot”.

Speaking of synonyms you can ask Google to search synonyms of a certain word you search by using the ‘~’ key. For example: ~wood is going to search for both wood, woods, forest, etc.
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