hi ho
awesome, google released a top 1000 list for all websites (well, all not google-websites, they “forgot’ those) for april 2010.
cool list, nice graphs.
sadly google released the list as an ugly multi page ajax thingie i compiled them in one single shareable spreadsheet (and different formats). have fun.
hi, the facesaerchteam is currently on a sabbatical.
Q: häh? what? how can a company go on a sabbatical?
thats the thing, facesaerch is a cool website that takes google images and displays them in a cool and usefull (some argue that usefull stuff) cover flow like design for faster scanning. its not really a company, its a hobby side project thingie. see more about what facesaerch is and what it isnt in the about section http://www.facesaerch.com/about.php.
and facesaerch is a hobby project were from time to time less then <2 people are working on it. and they are going on a sabbatical in a country where they are not so sure about the internet connection. so if you comment, mail or conntact facesaerch one way or the other there could be the possiblity that we can not respons in real time but with quite a few days in between. so please be patient. please see our aout section for any questions. thx a lot.
see you late
yours sincerly facesaerchteam (hobby side project thingie team)
www.facesaerch.com reaches 900.000 visits / 30 days - still hosted on a 1EUR webspace - still a hobby project - still for sale!
more infos about facesaerch.com - what facesaerch.com is, what is isn’t (i.e. we don’t host any pictures, they are all managed via the google API, see more about it in the about section) and it’s still for sale.
On Feb. 12 2009 Google announced the support of the new Canonical-Tag. Basically you can now specify the preferred URL you want Google to associate with a specific webpage.
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/url/here” />
So cool.
After implementing it on various properties and checking the use of it on other websites there are a few findings:
After implementation you see first effects about 10 to 14 days later, depending on your indexing speed. If you have a grown, messy site it will give you a big plus SEO wise.
Now the downside:
powerful + easy + lack of feedback = source of possible devastating errors
The minor errors i have seen:
Wrong markup
As SEOs are used to deal with meta tags, we write a lot of stuff in meta-tags (robots, description, …). The canonical element is not an meta-tag, it’s a link-tag (like external CSS or RSS referrers).
The consequence is quite harmless: you implemented something without effect. It only becomes an issue if your implement logic on top of it, or look for a reaction and see none. A popular wordpress theme made this mistake, and i got caught up in a serious twitterfigth by pointing it - impolite (sorry) - out.
Typo that leads to an HTTP 404
The typo (/urlh/ere instead of /url/here) leads to an error (most common HTTP 404 file not found) page.
Google follows this lead, sees that something is wrong, keeps on continuing his work without any consequences. Again not a biggy until you implement something on top of it or wait for a reaction.
Major errors
Typo that leads to an HTTP 200 or HTTP 301 / HTTP 302
If /url/hier exists (HTTP 200) or instead of an HTTP 404 triggers a redirect to somewhere else (i.e. the startpage) you communicated to Google that the page the canonical tag is on placed on is not valid, and another page is the right one. Google does not hesitate to kick the original URL out of the index, and goes to the ‘canonical’ one instead.
If the error is systematically (on a lot of pages) you will butcher your search engine traffic in no time (10 days). The shit thing is: mistakes happen, and especially if you don’t see any real time feedback.
Also if you update your URL structure or your redirect logic, but forget to update your canonical you will run into major issues.
Conclusion: The canonical tag is a present from god Google. Due to the lack of direct feedback also a source of possible devasting errors.
Help: A simple JS Greasemonkey script which shows the canonical tag in the upper right corner (if it is sepcified).
everybody knows HTML, the stuff websites are made of. HTML - as intended by sir tim berners lee - was a simple construction to makes text a little bit more useful (he called it “hypertext”). It was simple, cool and a disruptive innovation. And for a time, it was good.
Then came the modern - graphical user interface - browsers. And suddenly simple was not good enough and design as added. And simple HTML was misused to create something like tagsoup. An ugly mishmash of tags that fought a never ending war against each other. It was ugly and a crime against technology.
The thing with “never ending war” is, that the war is still ongoing. Startups with HTML sites as ugly as if your grandfather would suddenly have a second puberty. Sites that have HTML so misused that tim berners lee rotates in his grave (actually, he is still alive and i hope he stays so for a long long time, but he would rotate anyway). Believe me, it’s an ugly HTML world out there.
But - where there is darkness there must be light - there is a small PSD2HTML company called psdslicing.com which produces the most beautiful HTML i have ever seen in my whole career. Pure semantic XHTML, CSS, WAI conform code that just makes me (and probably tim) more than happy.
They cost 159$ per PSD (PSD = photoshop image you want to get sliced into beautiful HTML), you get 5 revisions free, and they usually deliver in just 2 working days.
I have worked with webdesign companies which charged for a similar work 1000% more, and delivered a much, much, much, much lower quality work after 20 times the time. (I’m in the business for more than 10 years, i have seen everything….).
So if you need you PSD sliced, just send them your design - pay - and make me, the internet and your users happy.
Their HTML is a thing of beauty!
First of all:i coded this for me, not for you! Because i deem it useful. Basically i came to realize that in my job of checking and optimizing websites and their brand visibility i came to use twitter search more and more often. So saving a few seconds per search i integrated Twitter in Google.
This script was recommended by Matt Cutts! Cool!
So now after you install
you get
yeah, look, there is a new unobtrusive twitter link in the blue bar (next to Groups in this case). Click it and …ta da…
the last ten tweets about the topic (via twitter search)
Oh yeah, of course the twitter link only shows up if there was something found via twitter.
Why is it important: After thinking about Twitter and using it for a while i realize it will become an underlying communication layer of coming real time web (and the mobile web). Google hasn’t realized it yet to it’s full extend. Information in twitter is faster available because it does not need to be indexed by Google to get found, it has it’s own search - It’s Google independent and has a speed advantage. On the other side Google is my One-Stop-Shop for information. So either i would have to leave my beloved one-stop-shop to get this valueable information or i fix it. Thx to Greasmonkey it’s only about an hour worth of work to fix a website. Have fun.
Oh yeah, the script is in an CC do whatever you want LGPL license.
can you spot the little difference on this Google search result page?
yeah, there is a little, nice “Twitter” link in the blue bar, next to the fat “Web“, a click on it jumps the search result page down to:
yeah, the top 10 tweets (via the twitter search).
basically i have been using twitter a lot in the last time - both active as a tweet-tweeter and passive for research. Googles coverage of twitter can be seen as quite pore (seems instead of organizing the worlds information they seem to be more busy to force half baked wiki functions down our throat) so this
firefox greasemonkey script “google twitter”
fixes this.
hope you like it, oh and if you don’t have greasemonkey installed, you can get it here. if you want to follow me on twitter just check out my feed.
It took me about 4 month (it was a side project, so i was in no hurry), about 5 well placed inlinks and a landing page on an authoritative domain. So now i’m finally proud to present me, myself and i as nr.1 on the german google for SEO Manager - http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&q=SEO+Manager
Franz Enzenhofer - SEO Manager - XING
Franz Enzenhofer bietet Beratung, Gespräche, Konzepte, Wissen, Effizienz.
https://www.xing.com/profile/Franz_Enzenhofer
SEO is great!
Last Thursday Google launched a new feature called SearchWiki and well, it sucked. in my opinion. They turned a perfect clear-purpose product into a noisy icon-dessert which you can’t easily opt out .
I look at Google like 10.000 times a day, i don’t have time for noise, on the other hand, as an SEO manager I’m part of the GoogleEconomy, so i can’t just logout of the Google products or disable this feature completely.
So basically i coded a tiny
firefox greasemonkey enhancement called
“searchwiki on/off“
which lets you turn Google SearchWiki on if you need it (with this enhancement searchwiki is opt-in, means searchwiki is disabled by default.)
If you ever need the Google SearchWiki feature, i can just turn searchwiki on.
But if you have enough, the just turn SearchWiki off again.
And yes, the on/off status is remembered. So basically now you have a choice. This is how a user centric product is supposed to be from the beginning.
Installation SearchWiki on/off:
1. First you need the great Greasemonkey Firefox add-on.
2. Then just install the Search Wiki On/Off User Script with one-click.
3. Test it
Note: Googles SearchWiki behaviour is currently …. strange, al least here in austria it shows up on .com for some queries sometimes, then it is gone again. The “Wiki” on/off link that comes with this extension shows up all the time at google.com and google.co.uk.
