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In the WebmasterRadio.fm chat, we were talking about what was what was the strangest thing we accidentally ranked for. So how about it - what is the strangest thing you rank for?
I rank #3 for ‘‘. Now - fess up!
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In the era of Web2.0, we are seeing the advent of AJAX technologies to drive web pages and applications. Which is good, for the most part - AJAX is a great tool. AJAX-powered pages and applications are often quicker and more responsive than their predecessors, since they don’t require full page loads for every possible operation, opting instead to reload and refresh only those parts of a page necessary.
On the flip side, AJAX can cause problems for search engines. Since the browser does not necessarily move to a new URL to display new data, much of the data and text content on an AJAX-powered site may not be accessible to search engines. Search engines will not submit forms or otherwise interact with the AJAX-powered sections of a site to cause page updates to be triggered, causing much of the content of an AJAX-powered site to be missed.
This is an issue for SEOs everywhere - as AJAX becomes more prevalent, client demand for this technology will continue to increase. So how do we deal with AJAX from an SEO perspective?
Rich McIver of SoftwareDeveloper.com emailed me yesterday to inform me of their latest feature article entitled, ‘‘. The article goes into some detail over techniques and best practices to help make your AJAX application search engine friendly. Some of the information is pretty standard (’submit a sitemap containing static copies of the fragments returned through AJAX’), while some of it deals with the problem at a more design / technical level, such as a presentation on ‘Hijax’ model of AJAX web design.
The article also goes into some common ways of handling AJAX for SEO purposes, and shows the shortcomings of these approaches.
How have you handled AJAX in your web pages / applications? Anything you would add beyond what the linked articles suggest?
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What would you suggest for this one? Hope the guy’s girlfriend / wife doesn’t use Google Street View!
For more detail and zoom, !
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Perhaps Google’s algorithm isn’t as difficult as we all think?
No, I haven’t been sitting in front of the microwave for too long again. Before you rip me to pieces, give me a few seconds to explain myself!
Possible Technology Limitations
Now, we all know that Google has one of the largest server farms in the world, estimated upwards of 250,000 individual servers spread worldwide. In spite of this fact, many people lost sight of the fact that Google only has a finite (albeit large) amount or resources.
If we estimate that Google crawls 100 million+ new pages per day, they are likely to encounter a billion or more new links on a daily basis. I think it is plausible that given the ‘100 factors’ supposedly composing the algorithm, Google may find itself running short on server power while crunching all the incoming data. For example, many of the ‘factors’ which are assumed to influence an outgoing link’s value are dependent on characteristics of incoming links. This could continue recursively back through many layers of the page heirarchy. Links are only one example of hard-to-crunch data; undoubtedly there are more costly factors to take into account.
Additionally, one needs to consider latency times to transmit data between server farms located on all different continents. For instance, data transmitted from Eastern Asia would take likely 100ms to reach the Continental US. Since page information is likely distributed among the various server farms, there could be signifigant transport delays involved in obtaining the data for a larger algorithm.
Remember that a certain proportion of Google’s server farm is not dedicated to their ranking algorithm; much of their hardware contains the finalized results which they serve out. Not only that, much of the hardware contains duplicate information: for instance, there are numerous data centers serving out identical information to search requests in the United States; a similar situation is seen in most foreign countries.
Geniuses and ‘Good’ Algorithms
Cringely’s recent article on PBS once again brought to the forefront one important fact: Google is composed of genius engineers and computer scientists. Every computer scientist knows that the ‘best’ algorithms are the ones that solve the largest number of potential cases in the least amount of steps, in the simplest fashion possible.
A well designed algorithm conveys a sense of beauty to a computer scientist; there is nothing like taking a huge, ugly algorithm written quickly to solve a problem, and refining it into a short, effective, and quick piece of work. A simple but effective algorithm has an elegance around it that is recognized by all who work with it.
Conclusions
As a result of the makeup of Google’s employee body, I would suspect work is constantly being done to simplify the Google algorithm while maintaining the same level of effectiveness it currently has, and I believe it is quite possible that the algorithm that is currently in place is much simpler than we have been led to believe. There is financial benefit to using a ’simple’ algorithm: by cutting down on machine time, Google would be able to get better use out of its machine time, which has obvious financial implications.
What are your thoughts? Personally, this is just a theory: until we know better, I am just going to continue with my mental picture of the ‘big’ algorithm, and all the various on-page and off-page factors we traditionally assume they look at.
I don’t know if this has been posted anywhere before, but I have just noticed that if you ask for directions between two places on opposite sides of an ocean, such as , the directions tell you to ‘Swim across the Atlantic Ocean - 3462 km’. Kinda difficult, in my opinion. This is direction #23 in the screenshot to the left!
Who would have guessed that one of the best ways to spam Yahoo would have been spamming Google?
Earlier today, Barry Schwartz posted on Search Engine Roundtable about the phenomena where Google is ranking well in the Yahoo UK SERPS for the phrase “Buy Viagra”. Sure enough, when I checked the results for myself, in the Yahoo UK SERPS, for ‘Buy Viagra’!
A little deeper research into the matter indicated quickly where the source of this is quickly apparent. Perform a quick search on Yahoo for the phrase ‘buy viagra’ while constraining the search to the Google.com domain.
The first thing you will probably notice about the 37 SERPS returned is that there are a bunch of pages written up in full of pill-spam. These notebook pages are full of non-nofollowed links pointing to further spam sites.
This is extremely ironic, considering how Google pushes the NOFOLLOW tag to be used for user-generated content. Perhaps they should look at what they are allowing people to post on their domain?
Examples:
Secondly, there are a number of attempts to gain links through Google redirects, which are indexed by Yahoo!. This generates more non-nofollowed links on the Google.com domain. Again, ironic lack of NOFOLLOW tags on Google’s part…
Examples:
Lastly, there are various other pages linked in there, such as the Zeitgeist, a CSE for viagra purchases, and a link to Google trends.
Now, I highly doubt that there are thousands of sites out there linking to Google with the anchor text ‘buy viagra’. As a result, I don’t think it would be a stretch to suggest that the main thing propelling Google near the top of the ‘buy viagra’ SERPS in Yahoo would be these keywords on Google’s sites.
Building off of this, I would suggest that Yahoo places an unbelievably high value on the Google.com domain. Since the fact that those keywords only appear on 37 seperate pages on the Google domain was enough to push Google.com quite high in the Yahoo.com SERPS, I suspect that if one was to load as many pages on the Google.com domain (thinking of Google Base and Google Notebook, in particular), it would be possible without too much effort to rank for competitive terms in Yahoo.
I await your thoughts on the matter!
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One of the most useful plugins I have on my blog is Dax Hererra’s Referral Feed plugin for Wordpress. I’ve used it since last fall on my blog, and totally love watching the different incoming search queries show up live.
At any rate, I just saw a rather disturbing search query come in which led to my site. Seems someone performed a search for ‘‘.
I’m not sure what surprises me more - that there is some anger-ridden kid out there who wants to knock off one of their MSN ‘buddies’ or the fact that my site is ranking high for that…
Edit: Aaron from the City of Angels Children’s Home in Tijuana informed me that Google offered him a list of ….
Google is so weird some days…
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