facesærch blog

WTF? While messing around with URLs for the Google Profile Search Start page i came across http://www.google.com/s2/status and well

what strikes is of course the logo and the small changes

1. finally the “i’m feeling lucky” button is put to good use (did somebody use it, anyway)

2. Google Profiles got pushed into the main Nav.

Well, trying it out it lead to

well, it lead to a standard 404! now all is back to 404 as it never existed. so well, either it was a trick or else or is this another journey of Google into the social - asynchronous communication - twitter space? Update: Is it real? No, not really - but not so far of.

Google Profile - Googles effort to become not only part but center of the whole social profile frenzy out there - are now searchable, all that is missing is a suitable start page. A fact that i changes, facesaerch is proud to present the

unofficial Google Profile Search beta.

have fun.

ok, currently lot of my time is invested to search engine optimize a social travel guide. basically imagine a few hundred thousand pages of unique travel content by professionals with lots’n'lots incoming content of community members on a complete new -fresh & not used before- domain.

the first challenge is indexing, which means

• sitemap.xml (does not perform)
• human readable sitemap (performs much better form my experience),
• navigation optimization (URLs and unique linktext) and
• page weight reduction (less KB, gzip, …).

but also for indexing

• linkbuilding

Google just stops after a while if it has enough pages but can’t estimate how important the site is and if it is worth indexing. Basically after getting a few (50+) links out there in the blogosphere the indexing kick starts again.

checking my xing contact, realizing that i don’t have a premium account anymore. but i liked the search feature, everything else is crap anyway. so here it is, the absolute free xing search, inoffical edition. trashy, but it works. hope you like it / find it useful.

i just love sunday morning coding

interesting. when you try to verify a site via the great google webmaster tools you get three requests.

1. GET /noexist_aa78573zbb9821c2f.html
2. GET /
3. GET /aa78573zbb9821c2f.html

if the first one returns an HTTP 200 you can’t verify. it must be an HTTP 404.
think the second one must not be an HTTP 4xx. (it can be an HTTP 3xx)
the third one must be an HTTP 200.

so basically you can work around the “you can’t verify your site because you do not return any 404 statuses” if you just roll out a “/noexist_yourwebmastertoolskey.html” file, too. but nonetheless HTTPs 404 are a great tool. better fix your server first.

as i’m now working together with the tripwolf travel guide i learned a few things about the travel space:

1. damn it’s competitive
2. people use london if they want information about london, without any prefixes or additional words.
3. unique content is a must, there is so much replicated content around in the travel space, it looks a little bit like amazon.
4. think big wins, forget the niche (and then: make a collection of niches)
5. get your call to actions right

the last update was 11th of Aug 2008. no news since? the deep fall into the blogging canyon (the moment when companies realize that keeping a blog is actual work)? the stock exchange crisis? even though that i think that they are grossly overfinanced with the $43.6M they should not stop now. did i miss something?

an outside view of the stack widget adoption rate: still very slow - google only shows about 135 stacks in the index.

well, because success is so simple. simple changes, a twist here, a twist there, a few thousand visits per day. but i also know the downside: from 20.000 visits per day to 10. so, i don’t care pretty much about the big peaks and spikes any more (i have seen them to often) . i just care about sustainable traffic. why? you can’t sell peaks as well as sustainable growth.

on the other hand: hey, yeah, currently face search is quite popular!

call to action - essentials

1. a CTA is never pointless
2. a CTA must always be worth reading
3. a CTA must always include an action for the user to take (that’s why it is called “call to action”)