It’s a well known fact that Earth is the center of the universe, and by natural extension of this quixotic reasoning, the United States is the center of the Earth (to be perfectly exact, the center of the universe is Tulsa Oklahoma. Duh).
As a Canadian, I’m okay with this – it’s very hard to upset me. As an SEO, I’ve always been a little perturbed to know that the American oriented Google index has, as its home, the aggrandized Google.com domain.
Yes, yes I know Al Gore’s dog Tipper invented the Internet, and that it’s as all American as apple pie (which was in fact originally imported by the Spaniards in the late 19th century - source), in fact, I probably still have an ARCnet network running somewhere in my basement, I know this stuff cold – but really, can’t Gooooooogle give America its own index? Actually, at the start of 2008, they did – they just didn’t bother to tell anyone.
Round aboot January ‘08 Google effectively changed their domestic Google.com search results (those produced when searching Google.com from inside the USA), filtering out, or down, sites they had deemed non-US centric. Simultaneously they started pushing out geo-targeted results to people who searched Google.com from other countries, like CanadEH. Almost a year later, it doesn’t look like it was a mistake (much to the chagrin of many a webmaster who lost rankings in the US), and the trend isn’t going anywhere. Google is proudly cloaking its index internationally. (more…)
I decided to use a Sunday morning of new sinus congestion and early autumn chill to curl up and read some news. My formula’s always the same; start with a heathy dose of Reddit, where the worst of the world’s day gets sugared by wit, wisdom, and a sense of shared response. After reading a sweet story about a unique cab ride, more Tina Fey inflicted Sarah Palin Mockery, and a Business Week piece on Saudi oil perspectives, I followed a link to NewsWeek, for a story on how to keep men from cheating: “Google the words “marriage and affair” and you get more than 17 million variations on how to heal. That’s because “fidelity in marriage”—which only gets about 3½ million hits—is a hard thing to come by these days.” Reading those opening lines, I cringed, took a sip of sweet, creamy chai, and fired up Wordpress. (more…)
What domainers may want to learn before purchasing a domain + ranking package
Have you ever been approached by someone trying to sell you a domain with a ranking attached? This counter-intuitive conundrum comes up consistently among my colleagues. If the domain is already ranking, why is the current owner not simply trying to monetize the traffic instead of the domain? I’m an advocate of buying sites with solid link profiles, as I’m sure every SEO is, but I’m not a fan of buying sites based on a current ranking without some investigation into the nature of where that ranking came from. Sometimes you buy a horse, and come home with a donkey.
In this article I would like to go over the methodology I employ in these situations – a good old fashioned backlink profile examination for domain and ranking value. I’m actually going to use a real-world example simply because the concepts will come across with greater ease, and because I know that in SEO, a little solidity goes a long way. I’m not trying to out anyone for anything – as you’ll see my conclusion isn’t completely conclusive anyway – if you happen to own the site I’m talking about, good for you, you’ll likely end up selling it for profit. (more…)
I’m dropping in on the universal and blended search panel today – Google calls it universal, Yahoo calls it blended, apparently nobody likes informative generic labels like multi-media with pictures and video and stuff SERPS. Screw-em, this is the multi-media with pictures and video and stuff SERPS panel.
Mitch Joel (just thought you needed that wiki entry Mitch) from TwistImage is up first.
Mitch hails from Montreal and is a bit of a mythic figure in the marketing world, in no small part because of his story – he comes from music, he interviewed all your favorite punk rockers, and crafted a bit of a punk journalist image for himself. Now he runs a company called TwistImage – a full service-ish kind of thing on St-Laurent, a couple of blocks from the residence of yours truly. He was employee number 4 at momma.com – remember those girls? (more…)
Quite unambiguously, I rate the Google Adwords Search Query report a number out of 10. That’s right, a stunning #/10.
The Google Adwords search query report is designed to help you see the entire phrase your visitors searched for, when that search matches a ‘broad match’ or ‘phrase match’ - in other words, when what the user searched is not exactly what you were bidding on.
Awesome I exclaim with as much glee as PPC can make me muster - which is exactly not much… but really, this should be the talk of the town - this is the first made-for-the-public way to view all of these long-tail keywords. This represents the first simple end-user glimpse at the real truth of how people are reaching your site via those mystery-meat Broad and Phrase match terms.
I don’t fear telling you, I’m in love with the long-tail. It’s a torrid affair that dates back years, to the halcyon days of my youth when search engines were mere tools, not omnipresent overseers of the Internet. And in my heart of hearts, I truly believe that this romance would become infectious to the general web-site-running populace at large, if made just a little easier to understand, just a little easier to see. (more…)
Let me tell you a little story.I was going to pick up a friend at the Airport in Montreal and he called me to say his flight was going to be delayed. “No problem I said, I’ll check your updated arrival in real time and come and get you when you land!”
So off I went to Google, to look for the official Montreal airport website which has real-time updates on flight departures and arrivals. I tried 10-15 different searches, here are some examples:
Montreal Airport
Pierre Elliot Trudeau Airport Montreal
Montreal Airport Flight Arrivals
Etc. (more…)
Since it’s my first post on this blog (and the first post on this blog at all), let me introduce myself and this blog before going into the meat of the article. My name is Francis Vallieres and I work for NVI Solutions, a Montreal SEO company, since May 2007. I have a long-time background in SEO, working the search engines on my own for more than 5 years. I’m not an active publisher of content in the SEO community, but I’ve been reading a lot of blogs, forums and websites since I began. So, if you have any questions, ideas, or comments about my writing, just send me a mail at fvallieres@nvisolutions.com and I will try to reply to you as soon as possible. Now let’s get started with some real content. (more…)
