My suspicion is that Matt Cutts leads a pretty normal existence most times. Matt can probably walk through most rooms without attracting too much attention. But twice a year, when Matt's in a room, Paris Hilton could walk through in a thong and not get a second glance. Every spring and fall, Matt holds court with his people. They are the webmasters of the world, and to them, Matt's a rock star.
Up to this past week, I had never met Matt. I'd heard about him, of course. One of the early hires at Google. The man who fights the never ending battle of the Spammer. The man who reached out to the webmaster community to try to shed some light into the dark corners of Google's ranking algorithm. When I did meet him at Webmaster World, I was surprised. For a man who literally holds the power of online life and death for many webmasters, Matt's just a really nice guy. He's affable, approachable, self effacing and pretty darn funny. This is not the dark Sith overlord of the Googleplex. This is the kind of guy you'd like to grab a beer with.
The other day I was checking search engine rankings for a few of my clients. I was noticing some trends with their results in Google. It seems as if their rankings had gone up for a few months during their peak seasons. Then when their "busy season" tailed off, rankings fell a bit. While this may not seem extraordinary, it got me thinking? Are the search engines smart enough to index and rank websites based on seasonality? What about sites where seasonality is not a factor? Are search engine results seasonal?
So I checked a few more of my clients and sure enough the same trend seemed to appear. It is common sense to think that if your business is seasonal you are going to have a "peak" season and "off" season. Is this the same for search engines? Is there seasonality online? Do the search engines have "peak" seasons and "off" seasons? Well, possibly if you consider that they perform major updates a couple of times throughout the year. This could be considered their "peak" season(s)
Sitemaps are great things. Not only do they provide searchers with a way to easily navigate your site, but they also let search engine crawlers find all your content.
As such, sitemaps have become a regular tool in the SEO arsenal. Today, however, I came across a forum discussing sitemaps. There were many questions on the proper way to use sitemaps such as 'should I limit my sitemap to 100 links as Google suggests? And if so, what do I do for sites with more than 100 pages?' and 'why use a sitemap? Why not just use Google's XML Sitemap submission service?' to name just a few.
So I thought for this article I'd address a couple of these issues and show you what I've found.
The internet has been an interesting place over the last month for people dealing in search engine optimization. Let's discuss Google. When Google makes sufficient changes to be considered an update, just like a huge brewing storm, it gets named. Jagger was Google's latest update. Updates are basically changes to the ways search engines rank web sites. Most usually website owners see drastic changes in rankings whether for good or bad. Jagger was the biggest update ever to take place on a major search engine.
The world of search engine optimization has changed a lot over the past couple years. Matter of fact it has changed a lot in the past few months. Five years ago no one designed their sites to be search engine friendly. Webmasters who did know a little bit about search engine optimization may have added some keywords into the meta tags but this was the extent of SEO. Now days without proper search engine optimization your web site will not get found by the general public. This will be the death of your e-business and you if you rely solely on the internet for your income. Search engine optimization will not happen to your web site over night. Instead it can be a long hard process. Given enough time you will see the fruits come to bare from the effort you put into it.
Web directories are an important component to search engine positioning. Directories come in all shapes and sizes, some are generic, while others are highly specialized. Directories, are defined as categorized topics or collections of information organized into a tree like structure where categories are used to define each groups association.
Google Sitemaps is another way for webmasters to inform and direct Google's crawlers. Google Sitemaps does not help you to improve your rankings on Google. It is just another way to invite Google's spider.
You can find further information about the basic features of this service in the Google Sitemaps article we published in June.
It's been almost 6 months since I last sat down to take a look at how search is doing. At that time I was looking for relevant and timely information on a Tsunami that happened off the California coastline.
Prior to that I had written articles on search relevancy in which I questioned how well the search engines were doing with helping users find answers to their problems.
So I thought I'd address the issue again, since it's been a while to give you my thoughts and feelings on how search is improving.
Let me tell you that in the past 6 to 12 months I'm almost exclusively using Google now. In past articles I said I preferred Google but did use Yahoo! and even Ask Jeeves but now it's all Google.
The growth and popularity of blogs in general has been phenomenal within a very short period of time. Blogs or web logs as they were previously called is where all the action on the World Wide Web is, right now.
It is amazing how quickly web sites have been relegated to the back seat. Actually the role of web sites is rapidly being re-defined but it is clear blogs will be the place where all the traffic will be congregating for a long time to come. What some thought was a passing fad is clearly here to stay and is a permanent development that has already had far reaching effects on communications and the way we transmit and receive information.
Yet most entrepreneurs who have quickly jumped onto the blog bandwagon do not seem to fully understand and appreciate what blogs are really all about. Worse still, many of those who have remained away have no idea what all the fuss is about.