Recently I’ve been playing with linking to specific parts of a video and incorporating YouTube subtitles. Then I realized that you could do a neat trick. YouTube allows you to create closed captioning with a simple text file that looks like this: 00:00:07.000 Hi everybody. Welcome back to anot...

If you’ve been watching your Google rankings any at all lately, you may have noticed your website going up and down in the SERPS like a Yo-Yo. Don’t be alarmed. Most everyone’s sites were affected by the latest SERPS earthqake. No one is real sure what the deal was/is with Google....

It’s hard to believe that the spring gift-giving season is already upon us. With Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and Graduation season quickly approaching, it’s time to plan ahead and adapt your business strategy for upcoming opportunities and challenges. Read the rest here: Spri...

There’s been a lot of hype lately about “realtime search” using Twitter being a Google Killer. John Battelle talked about it in searchblog. Mike Arrington talked about it in TechCrunch. There are two scenarios that have been talked about with Twitter and search: using Twitter to as...

Does Google care for SEO? Yes, it does: from Google’s SEO Starter Guide (pdf) to help provided in the Google Webmaster Help Forum, the search engine is pretty transparent when it comes to how it prefers you to optimize your site for inclusion. We’ll be discussing URL structure, TrustRank and...

Google’s seemingly automatic trust of popular social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Wikipedia make all of them—and by default, you, the end game—a target of spammers, scammers, and hackers. Combine that trust with Twittter’s foray into realtime search, and you’...

Once upon a time Google bitchslapped me for selling direct text link advertising— ads which were clearly ads from a human standpoint, but the advertisers were hoping Google would thinking of them as editorial endorsements. But here's the thing: in Japan Google is not the dominant search engine...

Last week Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced support for a new link element to clean up duplicate urls on sites. The syntax is pretty simple: An ugly url such as http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265 can specify in the HEAD part of the document the following: <link rel=”can...

Ian had a great question in a comment on my previous post. He asked: How do you judge the balance between lots of people will be looking for that [popular keyword] against there are lots of results for that [popular keyword]? Using your example, for “nba all star game 2009″ you’d be one of 500...

Go ahead and laugh, because it is funny. Google Japan’s probably too embarrassed too laugh, though, and someone somewhere is likely to resemble the spittle-drenched apologist from the movie Gung Ho. Google Japan, according to its apology, was apparently unaware of the company’s own terms...