June 23, 2008

Matt Cutts Shares 5 SEO Tips with USA Today

USA Today recently asked Google's Matt Cutts for tips to help sites rank in their search engine. Cutts offered up 5 tips plus a word of advice in implementing the tips. Here they are:

  1. Spotlight your search term on the page. If you want to be found for your keyword, make sure that term is on the page you want to rank. The term should be at the top as well as peppered throughout your copy.
  2. Fill in your "tags." The two most important tags are Title and Description b/c that's what is displayed on the search results.
  3. Get other sites to "link" back to you. This is one of the most important of the 100 factors Google considers when ranking sites
  4. Create a blog and post often. This can help you get links.
  5. Register for free tools. Cutts recommends using the tools at google.com/webmaster, as well as creating a text-based sitemap www.xml-sitemaps.com, and adding your business to Google's Local Business center (google.com/local/add)

And that word of advice? Don't overdo it. In other words, don't stuff your pages full of keywords.

What do you think of Cutts' advice? Leave a comment!

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (28)

January 14, 2008

Search Engine Optimization 2008: Silence of the Lambs?

Search engine optimizers, or SEOs: experts in the art and science of SEO or search engine optimization.

So are we hearing the Silence of the Lambs in response to SES London chair Mike Grehan's ClickZ Experts column "The Diminishing Value of the SEO Shop ." Claims SEO is stuck in a time warp and not keeping up with the search engines themselves. Does that make Mike the Hannibal Lecter of Search?

Whether universal search is a rocky horror picture show for SEOs remains to be seen. Do you think Mike means simply "Meta Tag" SEO?

My take: SEO isn't dead. It's growing faster than any analyst firm is reporting. I'll tell you why soon.

But is SEO as a service really losing value?

If so, what does that mean for in-house SEOs?

How does that jibe with the SEMPO salary survey results?

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 3:35 PM | Permalink

November 20, 2007

SEW Experts: On Page vs. Off Page SEO

Off-page SEO factors are getting all the attention these days. But good, old-fashioned, on-page factors are also vital for every SEO project. In today's au Natural column, "On Page vs. Off Page SEO," Mark Jackson discusses a few cases where on-page SEO is most appropriate, and others where off-page SEO tactics will get the most bang for your buck.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:00 AM | Permalink

October 26, 2006

Yahoo To Add No Yahoo Directory Tag

Rejoice! I reported at the Search Engine Roundtable that Yahoo! is to add no yahoo directory tag support soon. Yesterday Yahoo added support for the NOODP tag, and based on a WebmasterWorld thread, requesting Yahoo to also support a tag to prevent the Yahoo Directory title and description from showing, Tim Mayer of Yahoo said, they are working on it. He also asked for our input on if they should make "a different tag or should the NOODP tag apply to both YDIR and ODP?"

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:22 AM | Permalink

October 25, 2006

Yahoo Adds NOODP Support & Weather Report Update

The Yahoo Search Blog announced that Yahoo has finally added support for the NOODP META tag. You can deploy this two ways;

META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP" (stops MSN, Google and Yahoo from using ODP directory) or META NAME="Slurp" CONTENT="NOODP (stops just Yahoo from using ODP directory)

I reported back on October 11th that this was coming and Danny explains why NOODP tag support is not enough, we need it to support a method to tell Yahoo not to use the Yahoo Directory title and description as well.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:37 AM | Permalink

October 11, 2006

Yahoo To Support The NOODP Tag; Won't Prevent Display Of Yahoo Directory Title

Last night, I spoke with Tim Mayer of Yahoo about supporting the NOODP tag at Yahoo. In short, the NOODP tag allows webmasters to tell the search engine not to use the ODP's title in the web search results. MSN was the first to implement the standard, and then Google followed. Tim Mayer said that Yahoo will be supporting the NOODP tag starting next week or the week after. But the tag will not prevent the Yahoo Directory title from displaying in the Yahoo search results.

Tim Mayer explained that Yahoo uses an algorithm to figure out when to use the title provided by (a) the webmaster, (b) the ODP directory or (c) Yahoo Directory. He said that since the NOODP is a standard already, they will add support for it. But they did not want to create a new meta tag to exclude the Yahoo Directory, because they use algorithms to best determine when to use which title. He said it doesn't mean they will not create a new tag in the future, but the NOODP tag that will be released next week will only prevent the ODP title/description from displaying.

Danny and I feel that the NOODP tag should not just tell Yahoo to not display the ODP title but also be used to tell Yahoo to not use the Yahoo Directory title. Danny clearly showed me how Yahoo's algorithms to determine when to use what title is not working a 100%.

A search on tony knowles shows the same thing it did back when he wrote; "you'll see that tonyknowles.com is given a description by Yahoo about his senate attempt. That was correct at the time, but since then, Knowles has changed the web site over for his gubernatorial attempt."

So something needs to be done here as well.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:28 AM | Permalink

July 19, 2006

Google: Semantic Web Faces Webmaster Challenges

For years, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has posed the idea of a semantic web that will be smarter through tagging. I've always said the flaw with this idea is that people make mistakes with tagging. Google's also said this type of thing before, as well -- but Google's director of search Peter Norvig gave fresh pushback yesterday when on a panel with Lee. Google exec challenges Berners-Lee from News.com has the details, with Norvig explaining that site owners often don't tag information correctly, along with some simply being misleading. True enough.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:04 AM | Permalink

January 29, 2006

Work To Begin Next Month on Developing a Standard For Shopping and Comparison Search Product Descriptions

A DMNews.com article: Retailers, Engines Want Standard for Product Description, discusses a session at Shop.org's FirstLook 2006 event where representatives from Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Become, and Shop.com, along with several retailers and trade groups, about the need to develop, "a common standard for describing products for online SKU-based advertising and comparison shopping."

Retailers and engines shared their frustration at the lack of a common platform to describe products and receive advertising reports, [Alan] Rimm-Kaufman said. He noted that "organizations with widely different interests all agreed that the current situation was far from good and that an industry standard would help greatly." Participants agreed to work on an industry standard for describing products online using the expertise and process of the Association for Retail Technology Standards, he said. The group plans to meet Feb. 27 in Menlo Park, CA, to begin work on a spec.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:19 PM | Permalink

June 30, 2005

Yahoo My Web Tagging & Why (So Far) It Sucks In my Yahoo My Web: An eBay For Knowledge article out today, I cover the promise that Yahoo My Web has for potentially improving search results through trust networks. As for the promise of tagging to improve results, I find myself just as dubious as I've been about tagging.

Where to begin? I could let Gary run lose with a litany of complaints. In fact, he probably will share his own perspectives in the near future. But I'll dive in on the problems as I see them.

Double Duty

Most important, the tags are in the impossible position -- one that even Yahoo admits when I talked with them about this -- of trying to do two things at once that aren't compatible. They are:

  • Trying to show the freshest content on a topic
  • Trying to show the best content on a topic

At the moment, neither situation is happening. Freshness is determined by when a document was saved. So if I save the iPod home page under the tag of ipod (link viewable only to My Web 2.0 users), there's nothing "fresh" about it except that I've just added it. The page has been around for ages. The mere act of saving it didn't make it fresh.

In contrast, the new iTunes 4.9 software with support for podcasting is new. If someone adds that, it's a nice way to alert others monitoring this topic to the latest about iPods.

Fresh Versus Best

Tagging at a specialized search engine like Technorati doesn't face the double-duty challenge. Technorati is dealing primarily with feed and blog content. That content by its very nature is fresh in some way. In other words, no one is blogging, "Hey, here's the iPod web site" and feeding it as fresh news via the Technorati ipod tag. People are for the most part -- aside from spammers -- saying something new or offering a fresh opinion about iPods and things related to iPods.

As a result, if you want to tune into the latest stuff about iPods, the relatively specialized and fresh content that Technorati gathers can be found via tags. The new Live 8 area is a good example of this.

In contrast, if you want to find a general good resource about a subject, the tags at Technorati suck. Where's the official Live 8 web site? It's not at the top of the recent blog posts for the Live 8 page. The only reason it's on that tag page at all is because Technorati made a customized, special page for the event. For a regular page, go back to the ipod tag page and try to find the official iPod home page. You won't.

Directories Were For Categorized Best Stuff

Showing a list of the best content on a categorized topic -- as opposed to the freshest content -- is the role traditionally filled by directories such as Yahoo's own Yahoo Directory. Look at the Live 8 category there. It's sparse, surprisingly so (or perhaps not given Yahoo's general abandonment of its directory, but at least it has something at all, unlike the Open Directory). But nonetheless, you have no problem finding the official site and top resources about the event, including Technorati's page!

iPod? When I looked at the Technorati tag page for this, one of the top things listed was someone spamming to sell me sunglasses using a gibberish page which was tagged as being about iPods. Meanwhile, Yahoo's iPod category shows the official site first along with a bunch of resources that look good and are focused broadly about iPods.

Well what about del.icio.us? People are bookmarking general information over there, right, not just fresh stuff! Are they? Whenever I look, it seems like people are busy bookmarking a lot of new stuff.

Looking at the google tag today, I saw bookmarks about the new Google Earth service or the new Google Maps API. How about ipod? Some new stuff, some old stuff -- and the same result you get with Yahoo. Stuff that's "fresh" isn't necessarily so, while the popular view shows me only "recently" popular stuff rather than what I'd call "always popular" such as the iPod home page.

Tagging In The Verticals

How about Yahoo-owned Flickr? Yahoo talked to me this week about how 70 percent of all items on Flickr are tagged, but then it immediately qualified without prompting that because Flickr is a photo service, tagging is much more essential.

Indeed -- if you don't tag a picture, you pretty much have no good way of finding it. Tagging makes much, much sense in a photo space. And I love photo tagging. Check out my Photo Search: Google Picasa 2 Vs. Adobe Photoshop Album 2 article from earlier this year. I tag like a madman with Photoshop Album. I live to tag!

You know what? I'm weird. And people tagging on Flickr? They're weird as well. Weird in a good, organized way. Go talk to people you know who have digital cameras -- not your net happy friends but relatively ordinary people or don't work in some net-related industry. They aren't tagging, not on their computers and not with Flickr. Maybe they will eventually, but it's far more likely it will only happen among the masses in areas where tagging is really useful and essential. For general web search, it's not.

Tagging -- like spontaneity -- has time and a place. For some verticals, as I've written, it may make more sense. That's especially so for relatively little services that aren't going to be spam targets. But tagging web listings in general so far makes me think Yahoo's not going to please anyone.

Stepping Backwards

It gets worse, by the way. Tagging will help you keep all your My Web content you're saving organized, right? But what happens when you've created hundreds of tags for thousands of pages? Are you going to browse pages? Everyone largely abandoned browsing directory categories ages ago because keyword search was like a warp drive to zip you to what you wanted, as I've explained.

If you really do save thousands of pages over time, you're not going to want to rely on tagging to locate things. You'll probably just keyword search. Even more so, that will be essential, as the tags you initially created probably won't hold up as things change over time. Do you retag everything? Chances are, you won't.

Another backwards step example? We've had automated clustering technology for ages that will put content into categories, or tag them, if you prefer that term. Check out Clusty, an example using Vivisimo's long-developed tech.

Yahoo bought two different search engines -- AltaVista and AllTheWeb -- that also had clustering that no longer gets offered. Yahoo's own current technology is even used to create the Yahoo News Tag Soup "tag cloud" that I wrote about last month, tech you can now apply to any site or collection of sites you'd like.

Why not use this tech to organized My Web automatically into tags? At the very lest, it would avoid problems like the "important bookmarks" tag being so large in My Web's current tag cloud, something that annoys Gary to no end.

It might also help with the short term tag cloud bombing problem I'm sure that's going to emerge. Look at this:

That's from the A Search Marketer's Look At Yahoo My Web 2.0 article I just posted. In about 15 minutes of work, I popped up "rio karma" and "mp3 player" into the cloud. They won't last, but neither was I working particularly hard to make it happen. Tag cloud spamming at the moment seems incredibly easy.

Yahoo says it has defenses in place that will stop this, stuff that will ramp up as needed. We'll see. But just having just having to have those defenses at all reeks of another step backwards. Rather than tags solving the search spam problem, an entire new way to eliminate tag spam is going to be developed -- just as search spam has had to endure an arms race of defensive measures.

One more step backwards example. As mentioned, some people are looking to tags to keep up with what's new. There's another way to do this. You create keyword-based news alerts to monitor new stuff.

The problem with the major search engines is that keyword-driven news alerts they offer aren't tapping into blog and feed content. That could be fixed over night. And news alerts help ensure that if you're looking for information on podcasts, you might get it even if someone "tagged" what you wanted in the completely different "podcasting" category.

I still miss Excite's awesome NewsTracker service that we had way back in 1997. But there are plenty of good replacements that will automatically scan for stuff on the news sites, and I covered a few here recently. Hopefully we'll see the majors come up with ways for you to flag keywords you wish to monitor in blog and news content, in the way Technorati's Watchlists work or as PubSub allows, to name only two such services.

Nice To Have, Just Don't Expect Much

It's important to note that the long term plan for Yahoo ISN'T to use tags to refine web results. As my other article out today discusses, Yahoo is depending on trust data to improve results. That will be applied to the keyword data primarily inherent in the pages themselves, as well as link data. Tagging will have a role, but not the dominant one. It certainly won't take over for organizing.

That's one reason my long term view isn't to worry about it. Tags are there for those who want them, which is good -- very good. They will be useful to some people, especially so when limited to particular communities. When Yahoo introduces popularity sorting, general tags viewed by everyone might even get better. But as long as they have to do double-duty, I suspect they still won't fulfill either role particularly well.

In contrast, an alternative would be for Yahoo to experiment with some type of social compilation of its actual directory, similar to what I suggested about an Open Directory alternative last month. Let me tag the "best" stuff on a particular topic separately from something that's just fresh, new, cool but not the best in the long term. It would be interesting to see how those two different lists developed.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:17 AM | Permalink

June 7, 2005

Make Your Own Tag Clouds With TagCloud.com

I wrote earlier of Yahoo News Tag Soup, which automatically groups Yahoo News stories into tag categories in a "cloud" format. Want to do the same to your own feed or a collection of feeds? Yahoo News Tag Soup creator John Herren sends news of his new TagCloud service. Sign-up for free, enter your feed, and you'll have your own tag cloud. Or give it a list of feeds, and you can make a cloud in particular subject areas.

I made two clouds to see how it works. The first below shows stories just from the Search Engine Watch Blog. The second collects stories from a range of search blogs I read. Not all of them are listed, as I didn't have the time to get everything in there (the ability to take a standard OPML export of feeds would be cool) and some feeds glitched (sorry, Threadwatch, your feed didn't validate for TagCloud). No doubt others will in short order setup a comprehensive search cloud including every blog under the sun (need a list? see this past post). I'll link across, when they do.

SEWBlogCloud SearchCloud

Yeah, I know, the borders spill across our margins. And technically, I've done wrong by putting the link data that should go in the page's header into the body. But it seems to work, and trying to put something into one particular post's header isn't easy. But you get the idea!

From what I gather, the clouds are based on what's in a current feed. So I was disappointed in our SEW Blog cloud. We cover a lot of different subjects, and the cloud doesn't take that history into account. It would be cool to see what would happen if it analyzed the full-text of all of our posts.

In addition, it remains more fun than useful if you really wanted to drill-down to find stories on a particular topic. We actually categorize all our stories at Search Engine Watch for members. You can find a list of categories shown on this page (I'll be putting a page on the blog listing all of these directly in the future, though drill-down access will remain a members-only feature).

It would be cool to see that list turned into a cloud based on number of posts. But the underlying data would remain based on us putting things into a set categorization scheme we have here. That works for us -- mileage may vary elsewhere :)

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 6:53 AM | Permalink

May 17, 2005

Yahoo News Turned Into Tag Cloud

Yahoo News Tag Soup takes Yahoo News stories, extracts key concepts from article headlines and summaries, then automatically tags them into different categories. The results is a list of tags shown in "tag cloud" style, where the most popular topics show up bigger. Click on a category of interest, and you'll see all the related stories for that topic.

Pretty cool -- but why does the default have to always be alphabetical with these things? Why not show clouds ordered with the most popular categories coming first?

The creator of Yahoo News Tag Soup explains how it is done here. The Yahoo Search Blog today writes of loving it and also adds more details here.

By the way, technically this isn't tagging in the popular sense, where various members of a community label objects according to whatever syntax they want. This is clustering, where a group of documents is automatically organized into categories. But it looks and feels like tagging, so those who like to explore tag categories will feel right at home.

FYI, Yahoo News has for years had similar functionality in the apparently non-cool Full Coverage category system. Check out Yahoo Full Coverage, and you'll see stories topics placed into categories (ie, tags).

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:12 AM | Permalink

May 16, 2005

Music Search: A New Search Battleground

Internet search firms target music business from News.com looks at how search engines are eyeing music as a new search battleground. Interesting is the issue that more meta data -- and more consistency in meta data -- is being called for.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:37 AM | Permalink

April 15, 2005

A Review of Social Bookmarking Services

Those of you who are into the social bookmarking and tagging "thing", might want to take a look at two articles in the new issue of Digital Libraries.

The April issue features two articles about social bookmarking services. The first article provides a review of many services and offers comments about tagging. The second article is an overview/case study about Connotea, a social bookmarking service for scientists.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:58 PM | Permalink | TrackBack

April 14, 2005

Another Poke At Tags As Search Savior

I've been dubious before about tagging in relation to search, but Steve Rubel's Targeting Through Tagvertising article makes me want to poke at them a few more times for a reality check. He writes:

Type the word "blogs" into Google and it can't tell if you are searching for information about how to launch a blog, how to read blogs, et cetera.

Sure -- and that's true of every major search engine, an age old problem. They generally solve it by offering query refinement tools, such as the related searches links that Yahoo offers. Google's problem is that it among the majors has never offered query refinement and is long overdue to do so. Google Suggest, if ever rolled out to the main site, will help.

As for query refinement in general, see my Google Ranking Itself Tops For Britney Spears & The Need For Better Categorization post for even more background on how this potentially can route searchers in the correct direction.

Steve suggests tagging as a solution to the query refinement problem:

Using del.icio.us you can bookmark this page or subscribe to its RSS feed. Then, everyday you will find the latest interesting links consumers are finding and sharing about blog marketing.

The page he bookmarked is for blog entries tagged as "blogs marketing." OK, the tagging didn't help on the query refinement challenge at all here. Go to the del.icio.us home page. Now try to imagine you are someone searching for information on blogs and marketing -- an ordinary person, not someone hip to the mojo of tagging.

Good luck. Unlike a directory such as the ODP, there's no list of categories to begin with and help you drill down into an interest area. Blogs is a popular tag, so it does at least show up in the "Most Active" list of the page. Click on that, and you can see all the "blogs" stories out there.

But I wanted blog marketing stories, right? How do I get those? Better understand that you need to join the terms that you are looking for together in the address bar of your browser with a plus sign, like this:

http://del.icio.us/tag/blogs+marketing

Yep, that's intuitive. If you -- ordinary person -- are savvy enough to do all this, suffice to say you were probably smart enough over on Google to have just typed in blogs marketing into the search box -- and doing so gets you answers on that topic, no tagging required.

What that doesn't do is help you keep up with the latest posts on that topic. But again, I can do that with no tags required. Head over to Google Alerts, and then you can have any changed information for whatever terms you want to monitor across the web or in news content sent to you via email.

No, Google lamely doesn't offer this via RSS. But Yahoo does, if you want to do a news search. MSN does for any type of search it offers. And various blog search services allow this -- in all cases, without tags being required.

So let's not hand over wonder powers to tagging yet. In fact, how about a closer look at some tag kryptonite? Looking back at the del.icio.us tag/category for blogs today, I got treated to these fine, relevant entries:

  • A site about restaurants because it's a "restaurant blog." It has nothing to do with blogging other than being a blog, so the relevancy is pretty pitiful.  
  • A site called "extended cake mix," which aside from being a blog, seems to have nothing to do with blogs whatsoever.  
  • An entry called New Satellite Image of Space Shuttle "Stack", from some odd web site called ResourceShelf. Yep, that's Gary's research blog. Like me, he's dubious about tagging for lacking a controlled vocabulary (and also see his further comments about tagging here). And here we see it in action, as his entry about the space shuttle falls into the blog category simply because it was seen on a blog.  
  • An entry called "Now you can blog about your sex life! Bet my blog is bigger than yours!," which I visited for research purposes. If you were looking for an adult friend, then that's the site for you. If you were looking for information about blogs -- as this tagged page ought to provide -- sorry, dear reader, you look to have been spammed.

By the way -- did you want information on blogs, blog or blogging? Those three are independent tags that will produce different information, since there's no coordination going on.

I think tagging can be cool in the right areas. Del.icio.us is cool to be because it's serendipitous. I can see a post on the home page of interest, then click on one of the tag links to explore new areas that probably will have a lot of relevant stuff on a particular topics. And because a post can have multiple tags, I get a lot more variety than the somewhat similar category links that a search on Yahoo provides (and that Google used to).

But mark me dubious that tagging will be the great savior for search, which attracts many more people and provides a great incentive for spam. Controlled tagging -- in the form of directory categorization -- has already been prone to spamming at places like the Open Directory. Wide-open tagging, where anyone can get their pages to the top of a list just by labeling it so, is going to be a giant spam magnet.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:25 AM | Permalink | TrackBack

April 11, 2005

Newsweek Talks Tagging

In the article: In the New Game of Tag, All of Us Are It, Newsweek's Steven Levy talks about the rise of interest in tagging.

If you need an overview as to what some of the issues about tagging, take a look at this post from Danny. I also posted a few thoughts on John's blog in February.

This following is not a rehash of those issues or another post arguing the pros and cons of tagging. We can save that for later. It's just a few facts about cataloging information.

Levy writes:

Whereas the old, Dewey-style taxonomies involved graybeards figuring out in advance how things should be categorized, tagging is done on the fly, adapting to the content itself. What's more, because all this is digital, there's no limit to the number of tags people can slap on an item. In a library you can put "Frederick the Great" in the history or the biography section, but you'd need a second copy to put it in both. With digital tags you could use both, and more: military,Prussia, really great reads.

First, I think it's time to end comparing everything to the Dewey Decimal System. Many libraries (school and public) use Dewey but many others don't. Another classification scheme called Library of Congress Classification (LCC) is used in many large libraries around the world. Also, many of the people who do this type of work are not graybeards. (-: Hey, this week is National Library Week. (-:

Second, Dewey and LCC are used to determine where a book goes in the stacks. These numbers do reflect what the book is about and yes, most books have just one classification number assigned to them. However, the same book might have several subject headings assigned to it (more on that below). Btw, many people don't realize that online library catalogs (aka OPACS) allow you to browse by classification number just like you would browse the stacks looking for items.

What Levy gets wrong is that books and other objects are also assigned what Library of Congress Subject Headings. A book can have many subject headings assigned to it just like a bookmark in de.lico.us can have many tags. When you do a subject search in a library catalog you're most likely searching on these headings. Of course, cross references are also a part of these headings. For example, the book I co-authored with Chris titled, The Invisible Web is assigned the following headings from one library: + Online databases--Directories. + Database searching + Internet searching

Here's one more example: Title: Eisenhower and Churchill : the partnership that saved the world This book is assigned five subject headings: + Eisenhower, Dwight D. (Dwight David), 1890-1969 + Churchill, Winston, 1871-1947 + World War, 1939-1945--Biography + Prime ministers Great Britain Biography + Generals United States Biography

Local libraries can create their own subject headings or modify what the Library of Congress provides. You can learn more about Library of Congress Subject Headings here. If you scroll down to "The Weekly Lists" you can see lists of headings as they join the vocabulary or are removed from it.

You can see and use subject headings and other parts of a catalog entry to refine your search when you use RedLightGreen, a database of over 120 million books. You can even use RLG to find items in thousands of public and academic libraries. An overview here.

Finally, many large database providers have their own vocabularies that indexers choose subjects (often referred to as descriptors) from when indexing articles. Often, articles are assigned many descriptors. ere's a link to the vocabulary that ProQuest uses. More about "authority control" (another issue) and a vocabulary for images here and here.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:18 AM | Permalink | TrackBack

April 6, 2005

Google Using ODP Titles In Addition To Descriptions

Google has long used Open Directory descriptions in some cases for the web pages it lists. While that usage seems to have ramped up, it's doing something else I've never seen or heard of before -- using ODP titles for some of the pages in its listings.

Until now, no major search engine has presumed that it should replace a page's HTML title tag as the source of the titles in its listings, that I can recall. And, I'm not sure I like the change. Yes, it will help searchers get a better experience for some searches. However, the idea that the title of my page may come from something completely outside of my control also makes me wary.

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable has a good illustration here of what's going on here: Google Showing Dynamic Title. More examples and discussion of this is in forum thread, Google shows different titles depending on search term used. Join that, if you'd like to chime in.

Also see the Meta descriptions displayed in Google results? thread for talk of how the ODP seems to be used more in some cases by Google, and the Does Yahoo Directory use DMOZ listings as the supplementary listings? for a recap of how the ODP even can factor into Yahoo descriptions, plus how other things may influence what Yahoo uses as a description.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:14 PM | Permalink | TrackBack

March 23, 2005

Writing Search Friendly Web Content

Last week I wrote about eye tracking studies that emphasized the importance of creating content that users respond to favorably after finding pages using search engines. One way to get people reading and interested is to write for your audience—your users— rather than simply trying to tweak your words to rank well. As obvious as this sounds, effective copywriting gets surprisingly little attention in the search optimization community, despite being one of the key elements of overall web site success.

Today's SearchDay article, Writing for Search Engines, reviews a comprehensive eBook that's focused solely on the art and craft of creating copy that's both search friendly and grabs attention, compelling web users to action. It's an excellent book, and deserves a place on every serious search pratitioner's bookshelf.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 9:14 AM | Permalink | TrackBack

March 22, 2005

Tagging Not Likely The Killer Solution For Search

In case you've missed it, there's been an explosion of interest in "tagging," the idea that if everyone labels photos, blogs and so on, we'll more easily be able to find what we're looking for. But all the interest (dare I say hype) is largely ignoring the fact that we've had tagging on the web for going on 10 years, and the experience on the search side is that it can't be trusted.

The meta keywords tag has been around for nearly a decade. The idea behind it in part was that people could use the tag to classify what their pages are about, as well as provide copy that search engines could index if the relevant text for some reason couldn't fit on the page itself.

Last I surveyed, Google still didn't support it. Yahoo did; Ask Jeeves said they did so "unofficially," meaning they might not tomorrow. MSN doesn't, to my current knowledge.

In addition, none -- NONE! -- of these search engines now or ever has made use of the tag in a way to let you perhaps see all the pages "tagged" to be on a particular subject. Why not? The data is largely useless.

Thinking that tagging would lead to top rankings, some people misused the tag. Other people didn't misuse the tag intentionally, but they might poorly describe their pages. In addition, especially as Gary likes to talk about, no one uses the same controlled vocabulary.

Now Yahoo's bought Flickr, which makes use of tagging has part of its photo organizing. Yahoo's game of photo tag from News.com is a nice look at whether a community of taggers will help make Yahoo somehow more competitive against Google, which steadfastly hasn't seen value in tags:

Yahoo itself said that digital photography was secondary to its decision to buy Flickr. More important is Flickr's technology and founding team who "get it," said Yahoo spokeswoman Joanna Stevens. "Flickr's strength are complimentary to Yahoo's goals for creating next-generation services," Stevens said.

If that's the plan -- if tagging is seen as some type of secret weapon -- good luck Yahoo. I'm in the Google camp on this, and you ought to know better yourselves. Anyone on the Yahoo crawling team knows how tags have been misused in web pages. Want to talk about leveraging tags? C'mon, there are literally billions of web pages out there with tags on them already.

OK, but those are self-provided tags! What if we let a community do tagging. Hey, the community already does that through links. Links are a form of tagging pages. And what have we found? Links will get misused, if there's a possible financial gain involved.

Mark me extremely dubious that tagging will make major inroads in improving search. And if I'm wrong, I'll happily mea cupla. But after 10 years of tagging, the experience so far gives me good reason to be dubious.

I'll come back to this issue with a proper rundown on what's been happening with tagging at some other places across the web, which I've been collecting information on. But until then, I'll leave you with some other reading:

Want to comment or discuss? Please join our forum thread, Can Tagging Help Search?

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 4:37 PM | Permalink | TrackBack

January 18, 2005

A Controlled Vocabulary to Assist in Describing Images

Tagging photos for your own personal use is both a great idea and a must do. Danny shares plenty of examples why in his SearchDay article: Photo Search: Google Picasa 2 Vs. Adobe Photoshop Album 2.

It's one thing to create a set of terms for your own personal use. However, when creating and using tags to build a shared database of images or text, problems can quickly come into view. Synonyms are a problem (ie. pop vs. soda, torch vs. flashlight, bag vs. sack) Another example, if I tag an item "Treo" does it mean images taken by a Treo camera? Images of Treos? What do the tags "From" or year mean? As categories grow larger, can they be subdivided? What are the subdivisions? What about pluralization? Vocabularies should quickly bring like things together, help the user conduct a thorough search, and hopefully help save the searcher time.

I believe controlled vocabularies still have plenty of value especially when trying to add verbal subject access to materials (both image, video, print).

Are controlled vocabularies the perfect solution? No. First, they can be expensive to build and maintain. Second, they take time and effort to update (add new terms, remove old terms, map old to new, etc.) Second, localization can still be an issue. Third, scalability can pose problems. Finally, it's one thing to build a vocabulary, but it's another thing to apply the terms it contains properly. Deciding the "aboutness" of an item in just a few words can be a real challenge.

Ask working librarians and library school students what they found the most challengeing part of their MLIS education, and you'll likely here that cataloging (aka adding metadata) was it.

With that out of the way, I thought some of you might be interested in learning about a few of the many controlled vocabularies out there.

Let's begin with a look at the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials II: Genre and Physical Characteristic Terms (TGM II) from the Library of Congress. This searchable thesaurus contains more than 600 agreed upon terms to describe graphic materials.

The terms in the TGM II provide the cataloger (who chooses to uses this thesaurus) with agreed upon terms to describe both the genre and physical characteristics of an image or other type of graphic material (posters, line art, etc.) For example: + What does a "birds eye view" mean?

+ Is the image a portrait? Is it a cityscape? + Who created the image? You can read more about how terms were selected here and review changes/additions made to the thesaurus here.

Spend some time browsing and searching TGM II and you'll see how terms relate to one another plus find "scope notes" to explain what certain terms mean.

Finally, if you want to see the TGM II in action, check out the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog. All of the records contain subject access and more than 65% of the holdings in this database have been digitized.

Much more on controlled vocabularies (both pluses and minuses) and many more examples of tools to visit, coming soon. Again, my reason for sharing is not to say that one specific tool or method (controlled vocabulary vs. folksonomy) are better than the other but rather to introduce resources you might not know about and perhaps promote some thought and discussion.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBack