Has Google just undermined long-tail search term SEO?

They have just released the Search-within-a Site feature. For certain search results, Google displays a searchbox within the listing for that site. Their example is a search for “NASA”: The SERP displays the nasa.gov site with an additional searchbox underneath the result to let the user further refine their search within the nasa.gov site.

This may be beneficial for the user because it will allow them to specifically search the NASA site without having to leave Google, but how does this new feature scale? If these mini-searchboxes become a common sight on Google SERPs, what kind of effect will this have on user search behavior? Will users start abandoning the long-tail keywords that more localized, targeted and relevant sites need to “compete”?

I am curious as to how broadly Google’s algorithm will implement this feature. Once per search? (Top result only). Single keyword terms only? Restricted by TLD? (edu/gov/org/etc). I will do some research and see what I can come up with.

Obviously, this isn’t the end of long-tail searches, but these minor “enhancements” may balloon to have huge impact on SEO. Stay tuned…

Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting recently interviewed Matt Cutts of Google. In this interview, Matt discussed how Google handles disallows in a robots.txt file. The most interesting comment I thought was this:

“…robots.txt says you are not allowed to crawl a page, and Google therefore does not crawl pages that are forbidden in robots.txt. However, they can accrue PageRank, and they can be returned in our search results.”

Maybe this is common knowledge among the SEO old-guard, but I found it quite insightful. (more…)

One of the websites I have done SEO work for is rather large. We’re talking 300,000+ pages on average. Obviously, it is a highly dynamic website and people have asked me how to manage optimization for these types of sites so here are some key strategies to consider when developing SEO for the larger scale compared to smaller sites:

(more…)

“Internet Marketing is a fad.”

Believe it or not, there are still people that think this. Worst of all, many of these people are managers and decision-makers in positions that can make or break a marketing campaign. If you’re in an organization or consulting for a company that has a few dinosaurs, how do you convince them of the value of SEO and SEM? (more…)