Smalltalk with James Robertson

I don't much care for SEO tactics, but hey - it's a matter of finding holes in an algorithm. Which is why I find smackdowns of this sort even worse:

Google hit back hard today after it learned lyrics site Rap Genius had been using dubious SEO tricks to attain top spots in search results. Now RapGenius.com doesn’t appear on the first page of results for a search of “Rap Genius,” and popular queries like “Jay-Z Holy Grail Lyrics” don’t bring up the startup like they used to.

Gosh forbid they figure out how to plug the hole; better to just pull out the howitzer and let fly....

Auto-Correct is a great feature in a word processor - but in search, it can sometimes be frustrating. Take Locai's problem in the Android market:

Locai launched their Android app… but even days later, it was no where to be found in the Android Market. After some investigation, Locai found the issue: somewhere on the backend, Google’s Android Market is autocorrecting all searches for “Locai” to “Local” without alerting the user. As a result, would-be Android users just can’t seem to find the app.

That's a facinating problem, and one I certainly don't envy them for. Sure, Google should probably show exact matches in addition to "corrected" ones, but at the same time - maybe the guys at Locai sould have done a bit of research before committing to a name....

I wonder whether Google has any edge cases like this one John Forsyth found in Bing?

At first I thought it was a problem with the URL I was searching for, but it turns out any search containing the words "view topic" will crash Bing.

See for yourself, with one of the examples he posted (Follow the link above for more):

"what topics do they discuss on The View?"

It turns out that Bing is filtering out searches for phpBB that involve viewtopic.php (a huge security problem, seemingly) - and a bunch of other searches are merely collateral damage. Go read the whole story - it's fascinating stuff.

The war between Google and various SEO outfits continues:

Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

I predict another post very much like this one a few months or so from now, after the vast army of SEO zombies has taken another bite at the apple, and tweaked their gaming of the ranking system. The real problem isn't the SEO outfits; it's the places that hire them and use their strategies. At some point, they'll have to sit down and actually do the hard work of creating organic content that brings in links.

I know, crazy talk...

Technorati Tags: marketing, web

I've give Microsoft a lot of crap for what I see as a lack of focus, so it's only fair that I point out an area where their tenacity seems to be working for them: search. According to eweek:

Microsoft’s Bing continued its pattern of incremental gains, according to research firm Experian Hitwise, which reported the search engine grew to occupy 9.85 percent of the U.S. search engine market in June.

Anecdotally, I have friends who tell me that they've switched to Bing due to better results. INertia has kept me on Google, but I may have to take another look.

Technorati Tags: bing, google, microsoft