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one day percentages--
janeandrobot.com:
Firefox - 64%, IE - 24% Chrome - 4.5%, Safari - 4.5%, Opera - 3%
VFN:
Firefox - 43%, IE - 47%, Chrome - 2.6%, Safari - 5.5%, Opera - .5%
Another tech site I checked had 49% for Firefox, 35% for IE, and 5% for Chrome.
A consumer (retail) site I checked had 68% for IE and only .6% for Chrome. Another consumer site I checked had 63% for IE and .4% for Chrome.
All those extra parameters provide various types of info. You don't only see them from toolbar searches. They have data on where the search came from, the display language, etc.
For instance, I just did a search with the Firefox toolbar and got this URL:
http://www.google.com/search?q=jane+and+robot&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
If you want to link to this search result, you can delete everything after "robot". So this URL
http://www.google.com/search?q=jane+and+robot
Will display the same results. As you can see, since my search has multiple words, you need to lleave the "+" signs to indicate spaces between the words. The ? is before the first parameter (q). Subsequent parameters start with an &. The rls probably stands for something like "referral source.
John, I do think link building is important and in fact, have done a few posts on it. But as you might imagine, I approach link building a bit differently than some. I think of link building as part of marketing rather than strictly part of SEO (although I do, of course, recognize that quality links are an important part of ranking).
I recommend link building activities that raise awareness and attract customers (and put your great content out there in front of people who will want to spread the word and write about you). Hmm.. Perhaps I should write a post. ;)
DarkMatter, this is the trouble with the phrase "paid links" I think. Buying links for traffic purposes is advertising and you're right -- Google of course is fine with that. When people refer to "paid links" they generally mean buying links for PageRank, which is what I was referring to in my post. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/information-about-buying-and-selling.html
Automated rank checking tools have always been against Google's guidelines:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
"Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google."
I'm with Jill on this one. One of the questions people ask me most often is how they can check their rankings, but I generally try to discourage them. I think rankings data is particularly useful for diagnosing issues (does the site rank for branded queries? did the page that used to rank highest for a particular query drop like a stone?), but in general, it's a bad metric for performance. A much better indicator is search traffic over time.
Is your search traffic for a particular query trending up or down? Not only can all the factors mentioned earlier in his thread cause rankings to vary by searcher, but #1 ranking may not produce the most traffic for the SERP anyway. If the title and description are poor or if a universal (image, video...) result is lower on the page, then your #1 ranking may be attracting less traffic than other results on the page. You have to look at your results holistically to improve overall traffic. After all, high rankings that don't bring qualified traffic are pretty pointless.
Dan, I think your experience may be more due to a bug than lack of indexing. I found that for many searches, I got zero results the first time. But if I clicked the search button again on that "no results found" page, I got a full list of results for the query. I don't think they're lying; they just have a bit of work still to do in the execution.
Story: What's a 404 to Do?
Rae is absolutely right that you should reclaim all your broken links. If sites are linking to you, but they make a mistake and the link is broken, you want to be able to provide a great user experience for anyone clicking on that link and you want the SEO credit as well.
Of course, a great way to find broken links to your site is to check Google's webmaster tools. The 404 report lists all pages that Googlebot tried to crawl and received a 404 response. This situation generally happens when Googlebot follows a link (from your own site or another site) that is broken.
Your first response with that report should be to cross-reference it with the internal links report also provided by webmaster tools so you can fix any internal links that are broken. But for external links, while you can try to contact the owners of those links, you can't always get them fixed.
Personally, I recommend redirecting the broken links to the right page, but not to implement the catch-all non-404 redirect outlined in option 3.
One problem with redirecting all requests that would ordinarily return a 404 response with a 301 to a 200 is that search engine bots will think all non-existent pages are real pages and lots of badness can happen because of that. As Rae notes, your 404 pages will get indexed. Seach engine bots may end up spending lots of time crawling non-existent pages, which may mean they don't have time to crawl the pages you really care about being indexed. If you don't have a robots.txt file, a request for it will return a 200... Soft 404s just can cause trickiness that I wouldn't suggest setting up.
"Most of the time on a text-based document, meta-tag descriptions and keywords are not used to determine whether or not a page ranks."
While I have found this to be true of meta keywords, I haven't found this to be true of meta descriptions. the meta description can be very useful for determining relevancy.
Hi slingshotseo,
I actually don't work at Zillow anymore and don't do any work for them. I believe they have an in-house SEO. I haven't looked at their current site architecture so can't speak to their SEO implementation.
We should definitely do a Sphinn event. Should we try to all get together for lunch, maybe on Wednesday? (Like we did at SES San Jose?) Be sure to ad your name to the Sphinn calendar if you're planning to be there:
http://sphinn.com/calendar.php?cal_month=12&cal_day=04&cal_year=2007&section=single_event&event_id=15
That way, we can all look for you. :) Once we get there Tuesday, we can scout out the lunch area and see where a good place would be to meet up. We'll have lots of Sphinn stickers like last time, so we can decorate the general area to alert everyone.
Hi Denise,
Our guidelines ask that you don't submit more than two stories in a row to preserve variety:
http://sphinn.com/guidelines.php
I'm going to leave your two more recent stories and remove the rest for now. Thanks for understanding and for participating in Sphinn
Story: Listing in search
A few initial thoughts:
-change the title tag of the home page to something like "Art Classes in Cypress: Just Think Art "
-Add an H1 tag to the home page that says something similar - make sure it includes the "art in cycpress" phrase
-add an alt tag to your logo, perhaps, alt=art in cypress
-add location information to the home page. It's impossible to tell right now where the classes are located.
Are you sure "art in cypress" is what people are seaching for who would want to take classes? You might do a little keyword research and see if they are instead looking for things like "art classes in cypress" or "art training cypress" or something like that.
For keyword research tools, see:
http://searchengineland.com/070709-082957.php
If you find people are searching for different things, then change the description on your home page to include those words.
See "sites in general" about halfway into this post:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/guest-post-vanessa-fox-on-organic-site-review-session/
Make sure you add your business to Google's Local Business Center so it comes up for local searches.
http://www.google.com/local/add
Just published a big write up on how Feedburner gets its numbers. It's not Feedburner who's to blame here -- it's Google Reader.
http://searchengineland.com/071109-090259.php
Story: Ok Who Broke Feedburner?!
Yeah, this isn't Feedburner's bug. It's Reader's..
http://www.vanessafoxnude.com/2007/11/04/dont-panic-no-everyone-didnt-just-unsubscribe-from-the-internet/
Just posted more details on SEL as well: http://searchengineland.com/071031-200015.php
My comment about it being the most awesomest ever was both because as Burgo mentioned above, so many people have asked for it for so long and because it was Buffy night so I hypothetically may have had a bit of vodka. Heh.
In any case, DrPete, 'course I still have a good relationship with my former team and they definitely are still plowing full steam ahead.
Psst - women work at Google too (some of them even on Google Analytics). Crazy I know!
Similar story submitted here:
http://sphinn.com/story/10341
It comes up at 995 for me, which is the early bird price. What price are you seeing?
My guess is that it was either accidentally deleted or is being moved as part of a restructure. There's no chance that AdWords/AdSense is going to start influencing organic listings.
Indeed, Google says it should be back shortly:
http://searchengineland.com/071011-174513.php
Story: Big Changes Afoot at SEOmoz
Hey g1smd, my post absolutely was from an impartial non-related outsider and there was no coordination in any way on that post. And I don't think Rand was necessarily too pleased about it. I have been up front about the fact that Rand and I are friends. In fact, here are some posts that mention his fiance:
http://www.vanessafoxnude.com/category/friends/
http://www.vanessafoxnude.com/2007/06/19/making-the-right-choice/
And as you mention, I said right up front on the quiz post that he was my friend.
But my post about the quiz had nothing to do with whether I knew him or not. That's not how I write on my blog. What I write is not influenced in any way by whether I happen to know someone. I write my honest opinion.
If I were to become a board member I wouldn't become part of the SEOmoz staff; I would have an advisory role in which I would be free to continue to post about my opinions just as I do now. But the fact is that while they have asked me, I haven't accepted. I would need to learn a lot more about what it would involve before I commit one way or the other. I've been asked to be on several boards and so far I haven't accepted any of them.
So in no way was my post someone writing a review of their company's own quiz. Hope this clears things up.
Story: Share Your Chrome Usage With Us