Submerged Mexican

Death of the Long-Tail?

bryan — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 18:23:33 +0000

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…

Good Winter Beers - Tis the Season!

bryan — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 01:25:35 +0000

The winter beer season is upon us! Those strong, hearty, sometimes insanely hoppy, darker ales that will keep you warm during the frozen months. Seasonal beers are as old as brewing itself and legend has it that those crazy monks brewed special holiday beers to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Well, the tradition continues and there are a bunch of excellent examples out there for you to try. Here are some of my favorites…

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Looking for that 3rd Political Party?

bryan — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 17:19:26 +0000

For years, long before the days of hanging chads and Diebold, citizens have been restricted by the political party system. For the most part, it has always come down to Republican vs. Democrat and if a person’s views didnt align with theirs (or if it was ”schmuck” vs “worse schmuck”), the only options were to abandon the vote or pick the lesser of two evils.

Well, someone in Australia has found a truly democratic way to bring the vote to the people.

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Free Mouse Click Sound - Royalty Free!

bryan — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 01:05:05 +0000

Have you noticed the mouse click sound of every single advertisement since 1992 is the same?

Every dot-com commercial or website promotion on television uses the exact same mouse click audio track. It’s as if we were all still using Apple IIes with mice the size of our feet that weigh 14lbs a piece! Here’s a recent Ask.com TV ad as an example. You’ll hear what I mean at 0:12…

There’s only one click in there but you know the sound I’m talking about. Apparently, no matter how many millions of dollars you throw into an advertising campaign, you can’t buy a decent sound engineer these days…

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Robots.txt disallow

bryan — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 01:40:23 +0000

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…)

A Martini is Made with GIN!

bryan — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 00:38:35 +0000

Ladies and gentlemen, a martini’s primary ingredient is gin. If this is a revelation for you, please start taking notes. It is not a Russian concoction or some sort of frou-frou cocktail served in a weird-looking glass. A martini is comprised of 3 parts gin, 2 parts sex appeal, 1/2 part decades of tradition and maybe a bit of vermouth depending on your taste. Throw in an olive or 3 for color. There is no vodka in a “martini”… (more…)

R.I.P. Michael Jackson

bryan — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 03:01:58 +0000

I’m almost a month late on this but the Beer Hunter, Michael Jackson passed away in his home on Aug 30th.

In the world of beer, Michael Jackson was a legend. He was one of the first people to bring the word beer into the same discourse of wine and single-malt scotch.
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SEO for large, dynamic web sites

bryan — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 03:15:38 +0000

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:

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M3 Headgasket Project

bryan — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 03:21:06 +0000

When I purchased the car, I had noticed (and was subsequently told by my mechanic) that there was a small, external headgasket leak in the engine. It was not a big deal because it simply meant a little oil was seeping out of the crankcase and there wasnt any risk of catastrophic engine failure. I simply added it to a running list of projects that I needed to tackle.

Well, in April of ‘04, I decided to do some tackling… (more…)

Convincing the Dinosaurs about the Value of SEO

bryan — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 16:42:11 +0000

“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…)