MickMel SEO

When Cuil launched a few days ago, one of the features they promoted is that they don’t store ANY info about searches performed on the site.  Now Google has shot back by making their “customized results” a bit more transparent.

When you search, you might start to see a box in the top right corner that says something like “Customized for…”.  Personally, I haven’t seen one yet so I’ll just have to show you the example photo they posted on the Official Google Blog:

They say the results are based on a few factors:

• Location: Using your IP address
• Recent searches: Not historical searches, but when you search one thing after another.
• Web History: If you’re signed in and you’ve enabled web history, it might use some of that data.

They make it clear that the results aren’t new — just more transparent.  Good move, I think.

There have been arguments about this for months, but Google has finally made it clear — you are allowed to show ads from more than one AdSense account on a single page.

For revenue-sharing sites, it makes configuration much easier.  Instead of having to make sure all of the ads on a page are from the same account, you can mix-and-match however you want.  This has been the case since the last TOS revision back in February, but there has been a lot of confusion.  Google simply wanted to make it clear.

Cuil (pronounced “cool”) has just launched today, and looks like it might be the first search engine in a while to give Google some competition.  The main thing Cuil promotes is the size of it’s index — 120 billion pages, compared to the estimated 40 billion pages in Google’s index.

However, we’re not sure what to make of the “larger” index.  For almost any search query, Google returns more results.  If Cuil had a bigger index, wouldn’t it have more results for common words?  For example, a search for “horse” on Cuil produces 128,400,000 results, while the same query on Google produces 322,000,000 results.

Cuil also seems to be having some issues with multi-word queries, but I’m sure those bugs will work themselves out.  As TechCrunch said, “Cuil is only an hour old at this point, Google has had a decade to perfect their search engine.”

TechCrunch has just hinted at a major search engine announcement next week.  In this post, we read the following:

Google also says “But we’re proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine.”

That may be true today, but it probably won’t be true next week (check back here then). Google knows that as well as we do, and that’s why they posted this today.

Big news from Microsoft?  Yahoo?  Someone else?  What do you think it might be?

Google has just announced that they are watching over a trillion (1,000,000,000,000) pages on the web now, which is more than double the number of stars in our galaxy!

The Official Google Blog has details and some history.  Any way you look at it, that’s quite an impressive number.  That leads to the next question — how many of those trillion pages are yours?  Based on a “site:” search on Google (like this one), I’d say I’ve got about 500,000 pages in their index.  I know I’ve got more pages out there, but that’s all that they’re showing.  I would assume that their index has far fewer than a trillion pages, but they’ve not released numbers for that in quite a while.  How many do you have in there?

As first revealed on Mobileography, the WordPress app for the iPhone is now available in iTunes!  This is a slick little (free) app that makes it easy to write/edit posts and your WordPress blog.  This works with WordPress.com blogs or any self-hosted blog that is version 2.5.1 or higher.

My only complaint so far is that there are no comment tools in there.  I’m often having to clean up comments on the road, and a better way to do that would be nice.  That being said, this is a superb little app and I’m sure it’ll only get better with time.  Go get it and you’ll see what I mean.

WordPress 2.6 has just been released, and comes with a handful of very nice features.  They include:

• Word count display below Save and Publish buttons
• Theme pagination and a hot live preview feature
• The number of plugin updates available is now shown in the Plugins tab
• Ability to change the location of the wp-config.php file
• Multiple plugin activate/deactivate; improved sorting
• Admin page caching for faster speeds
• Improved galleries
• “Press This” bookmarklet for quick posting from anywhere on the web via your toolbar
• Post revisioning
• Drag-and-drop gallery sorting
• Multiple checkbox selection (on Manage pages) using shift+click

I’m out of town right now, but I’ll update in a few days and let you know what I think.  If you load it on your blog, leave a comment and let us know what you think.

I always thought there were two options for adding an image to a WordPress post:

1. Upload it through the image manager.
2. Enter a URL and “hotlink” it from there.

It turns out there’s a third, as described by wp-fun — upload and crunch directly from the net.  When you click on “choose files to upload”, just paste a URL in that box.  WordPress will pull the image from that URL, crunch it, and upload it to your server!

As an example, take this image from the Digital Earth Blog.  Rather than save it to my hard drive and then upload it to my blog, I can do it in one step.  Voila!

Between that trick and the excellent Fancy Zoom plug-in, you can add a pretty nice image to your post in just a few seconds.

Please note that this trick apparently doesn’t work on Macs, because they don’t have a filepath box.  For the rest of you, enjoy it!

Mickey

As reported on the Official Google Blog, Google has just launched their “Flash indexing algorithm”, which means that data buried in Flash applications on your site can now be seen by Google!

In terms of SEO, you’ll still be far better off using normal, well-written HTML instead of Flash, but this will certainly help.  Google will at least know what’s in your Flash files and help to rank your page based somewhat on that.

If any of you have Flash-heavy sites, keep an eye on your traffic from Google and see what it does over the next few weeks.  Let us know in the comments if you notice a gain in traffic from them, or if things hold pretty steady.