Is Yahoo! going for universal search?

It’s only a few months since Google decided to provide its search engine result pages with additional media. The so called “universal search” was born. The Google SERP’s no longer only offer webpages, but also news, images, videos, maps, stock information,… Sure it will make our SEO work more difficult, but also more challenging.

Yahoo! universal search: delicious integration

And now Yahoo! seems to be going the same way. Is Yahoo! gradually adding extra information to its result pages? Sure looks like it! Techcrunch noticed Yahoo! SERP’s today that mentioned the number of times a web page was added to del.icio.us.

Continue reading Is Yahoo! going for universal search?

How the big ones implement their 404 page not found error pages

Yesterday while browsing on YouTube I ran across a 500 Internal Server Error. Never happened to me before on YouTube, but I didn’t mind. The YouTube 500 Error page seems to contain a funny message, and if there is something I like it is funny errorhandling.

YouTube 500 Internal Server Error page

A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation. Please report this incident to customer service.

And that reminded me of something I learned when I started SEO : one of the first things you should implement when setting up a new website are user friendly AND search engine friendly errorpages. Especially the 404 Page Not Found error page is one that should be perfect. For the search engines it should return a 404 status code. For the users it must contain a clear message that says their browser asked for a non existing page and they should be able to click through to the home page or search for another page. You can find more on The Perfect 404.

So I decided to take a look at the 404 error pages from big guys like Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, Live Search, LinkedIn, … And what I found wasn’t always exactly perfect on the usability side …

Continue reading How the big ones implement their 404 page not found error pages

How to get your blog indexed by the Search Engines

So you managed to set up your new blog. You were much excited about it, told all your friends and some of them even took the effort of paying your new site a visit, but now the amount of daily visitors dropped to somewhere near freezing point.

Please, index my new website/blog

How do all those websites generate traffic ? Thanks to search engines like Google, Live and Yahoo!. Great ! But before search engines can send traffic to your site, it has to be indexed. In the post “How to SEO your WordPress blog and make Google like it” I promised to show you ways to get your new blog noticed and indexed by the search engines. So here we go : there are several ways to accomplish indexation and attract the search engine bots or crawlers to your new website, but there’s one road you don’t want to take…

Continue reading How to get your blog indexed by the Search Engines

True Knowledge, should Google be aware?

True Knowledge, Search Engines 2.0Also fascinated by Search Engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN / Live Search?

Also wondering what the future of search might bring? Some sort of Search Engines 2.0? Artificial intelligence? Or intelligence based on user generated knowledge?

Search no more! True Knowledge might have the answer…

Continue reading True Knowledge, should Google be aware?