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My 2 featured articles for the week ending Aug. 17, 2007:

Archived blogs for the week of August 13, 2007

1362 - Aug. 17, 2007 - 8.21 AM EST

Is Google's FreshBot a thing of the past?

Forum member Claire_V started an interesting thread late yesterday. Claire has been increasingly noticing that Google's FreshBot isn't coming much anymore to her site. Then she also noticed that FreshBot isn't coming to bigger news sites such as CNN.

I think she might be on to someting there... I must agree that I didn't see it myself since about 10 days ago. You can read Claire's Forum Thread Here.

Posted on Businessblog™

1361 - Aug. 16, 2007 - 4.23 PM EST

Google updates Meta Tags features

Today, Google has unexpectedly improved its Robots.txt analysis tool to better recognize sitemap declarations and relative URLs.

Google's earlier versions weren't aware of sitemaps at all, and understood only absolute URLs. Anything else was reported as 'Syntax not Understood'.

Google's new and improved version of the robots.txt file now tells a site owner or webmaster whether the sitemap's URL and scope are valid.

According to Google, overall testing can also be done against relative URLs with a lot less typing. Line reporting is also better too. Webmasters now will be told of multiple problems per line if they exist, unlike Google's earlier versions which only reported the first problem encountered.

Google has also made other general improvements to the robots.txt analysis tool and its overall validation.

For instance, a webmaster or developer managing the domain www.site.com wishes search engines to index everything on the site, except for the /images folder. The webmaster wants to make sure his or her sitemap gets noticed, so he or she saves the following code as the new robots.txt file:

disalow images

user-agent: *
Disallow:

sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Webmasters can visit Google's Webmaster Central to test their site against the robots.txt analysis tool, using these two test URLs:

http://www.site.com
/archives

Read more here...

Posted on Businessblog™

1360 - Aug. 14, 2007 - 2.06 PM EST

Yahoo beats Google in user satisfaction

Yahoo has now surpassed Google in overall customer satisfaction for the first time, according to the University of Michigan, which did some research on the major search engines in use today, as well as Internet news portals as part of its ACSI (American Customer Satisfaction Index).

On average, Google had topped the University of Michigan’s search ranking since it was first included in the survey more than five years ago.

For most industry observers, Yahoo’s rise to the top spot was unexpected, since it comes at a time when many on Wall Street wonder what’s next for the company's future.

Yahoo's new CEO and original co-founder Jerry Yang has said he’s looking to unveil a new strategy for the company in the coming months, and investors have avoided the stock after Yahoo’s latest disappointing earnings results.

On average, Yahoo’s overall customer satisfaction score rose almost 4 percent from 2006, while Google’s rating fell close to 4 percent.

Looking at the other top search engines, Microsoft’s MSN got a slight increase in its user satisfaction score, while IAC-owned Ask.com saw its user satisfaction score increase by an unexpected 5.9 percent.

AOL, the search engine and portal owned by Time Warner, saw its user satisfaction drop over 9.44 percent from 2006. Read more...

Posted on Businessblog™

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