The authority on search engines!

In order to provide more relevant results, Google uses a database of commonly used words that it ignores when found in web site copy. It ignores these words because they are too common to add meaning or value to the actual content, and thus can make it easier to analyze web site content to understand what exactly the page relates to or is themed about.

The downside on this is that if you’re optimizing for one of these words, your efforts are likely hitting a brick wall. Try to avoid using these words within your main targeted keywords

Deep Linking is the practice of building links and authority to the sub-pages of a website. In many cases, this is to help the site rank for various competitive terms rather then trying to get just one single page to rank for numerous terms which can be complicated and tricky to manage.

Fig 1: Dangerous Searches

Mcafee, creators of arguably the most bloated antivirus and spyware software suite, has recently unveiled a list of the most dangerous keywords to look up in search engines.  The list (fig 1) fills out various niches from the obvious downloadables like screensavers, free games, to celebrities, movies and prescription medication.

Wolfram Alpha Logo

Wolfram Alpha, for those who have managed to avoid the hype, is a new search engine built on the Mathematica platform, which uses complex algorithms to determine relationships and patterns between pieces of data and content. The idea is to index content, much like Google does, but with the intention of applying various complex algorithms to each piece of data found in order to create a complex tapestry of relationships between various data sets. By organizing the data according to relationships, the data then becomes identifiable and classifiable according to relevance to one another. That is to say that it becomes easier for the search engine platform to truly understand the content and be able to pull up similar or corresponding content or data sets. This ideally means that the system not only understands a user query, but can also pull up information that it has identified as being linked to the query.

I was checking up on a blog I help run this weekend, and noticed something particularly awkward about the size and modification date of the page.  For starters the last modified date revealed it had been updated quite recently (2 days prior in fact).  Looking at the source, I quickly realized that someone had managed to gain access to a theme file and had edited it to add in a whole bunch of links.