Source: seoresearcher.com

This group includes a large number of parameters, which determine how the page is presented to search engine spiders. Since webmasters have more control over these features than over any other ranking parameter, page-related factors are often used for SEO abuse. This is why search engine algorithms now assign a relatively low weight to them while concentrating more on off-page ranking factors. Nevertheless having a properly optimized page can still provide considerable benefits. The page-related factors are:

Validity of HTML mark-up

A valid page mark-up ensures that search engine indexer will parse the page content without errors and correctly classify specific areas, such as page title, meta-description, headings, etc., assigning keyword weights correspondingly.

TITLE tag

This tag is the most important one in a page. In eyes of search engine indexers the content of the TITLE tag is essentially a short description of a page. TITLE tag is also displayed in SERPs and is the first thing a user sees before following the link to your page.

Page URL

Having keywords in the filename of a page is also considered important since page URL is shown in SERPs. If your URL contains the search query keywords, they will be put in bold or highlighted in the search results page thus increasing chances of catching the attraction of a user. There is also strong evidence that ranking algorithms put considerable weight to keywords in page URL.

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Source: home.businesswire.com

ChaCha, which describes itself as "the world’s largest live search engine," is now available in beta form. The interesting feature is the defining one - ChaCha can supply "a human guide who assists you in real-time via an instant-message chat."

"Even expert searchers don’t always have the answers," reasoned CEO Scott A. Jones. "ChaCha’s search-with-a-guide process connects you to a live person who has knowledge about your particular topic and who knows the best resources on the web for that topic."

When "human-powered" search engine ChaCha launched in September it was a great idea with very flawed execution. The site offers algorithmic search, but also IM-chat based search with actual people in real time.  Today, the site has gone from "alpha" to "beta" based on lessons learned during the alpha period. And it appears from casual searching there have been some significant improvements.

According to the press release issued today, "Since launching the experimental Alpha version in September 2006, more than 14,000 people have entered the system to serve as ChaCha guides with as many as 1,500 guides being added on any given day. The fast-growing guide community has been instrumental in ChaCha’s accelerated Beta development, as they have been working around the clock to help end users find information online."

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Source: ysearchblog.com

I was going through my notes from Danny Sullivan’s Open Feedback sessions that occur during the ‘Meet the Crawlers’ panel at  Search Engine Strategies. One of the items on my list was a request for enhanced syntax in robots.txt to make it easier for webmasters to manage how search crawlers, including Slurp, access your content.

For those who may not be as familiar with search index terminology, webmasters use the robots.txt file to direct robots that visit their site, including search engine crawlers, which files should be crawled and which shouldn’t be. You can read about our support for robots directives in the help forYahoo! Slurp.

Well, we can scratch that one off the list, since we have just updated Yahoo! Slurp to recognize two additional symbols in the robots.txt directives – ‘*’ and ‘$’. The semantics of these is what is as widely understood for robots.txt files.

‘*’ - matches a sequence of characters

You can now use ‘*’ in robots directives for Yahoo! Slurp to wildcard match a sequence of characters in your URL. You can use this symbol in any part of the URL string you provide in the robots directive. For example,

User-Agent: Yahoo! Slurp
Allow: /public*/
Disallow: /*_print*.html
Disallow: /*?sessionid

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