Search Engine

As I alluded in a post a couple of weeks ago, I have been a bad blogger. And I have neglected my community of readers. However I would like to tell you what I have been doing in the last couple of months while I have been neglecting my blog. I recently got involved in creating a startup as the lead developer for an online classifieds site called Anything For Sale By Owner. From the ground up this was conceived as a middle-ground between craigslist and ebay where every listing would be charged at a static rate of $1.00/month. The $1.00 is a way to week out the crap from craigslist and the death-by-fees from ebay. ...

Google has extended its support for Google Bot restriction by giving us web developers a new tool to stick in our belt. It was announced today on the Google Blog that you can now control access to your non-HTML files on your website with a simple header. The header X-Robots-Tag will allow you to do everything the normal Robots Meta tag will, but now you can do it for the PDF, Word, Image, and any other document you can think of that is served via HTTP. They also announced on the same post a new type of exclusion cause that lets you set when the document will be unavailable, see below for more information on this new feature as well as currently supported ones for use with X-Robots-Tag: ...

A major update has been pushed out for Google Analytics, as described in a post on Google Webmaster: Webmaster tools from Google are indispensable for people who optimize their site for indexing in Google. Eighteen months ago, Google launched another free tool for webmasters - Google Analytics - which tells you about your visitors and the traffic patterns to your site using a JavaScript code snippet to execute tracking and reporting. This past Tuesday, Google Analytics launched a new version, with an easier-to-use interface that has more intuitive navigation and greater visibility for important metrics. We also introduced some collaboration and customization features such as email reports and custom dashboards. ...

Only a geek would find this funny. And if you really don’t understand it then you may want to brush up on your HTTP Status Codes.

In a follow up to my previous post on Proper URL Construction, I am going to dive more deeply in to the Status Codes that control the redirects that were talked about in my previous article. Most developers are familiar with the HTTP 1.0 Status Codes, that have been recently popularized by the SEO guys. We have all heard that you should use 301 Moved Permanently instead of 302 Temporary Redirect. What many of the SEO guys won’t tell you, because they don’t know any better, is that they are using the RFC 1945 HTTP/1.0 Standard that was released in May 1996, that is right it is about 12 years old. The newest HTTP/1.1 Standard, RFC 2616, was released in June 1999, and made some pretty drastic changes the the 3xx Redirect Status Codes. The goal of this post is to inform and familiarize developers with the HTTP/1.1 Standard, specifically the 3xx Redirect Status Code changes. This can have drastic effect on how you handle requests on your website and optimize your site for search engines. ...

Last week all the major search engine providers, announced that they were going to support a new specification at sitemap.org that allows them to auto discover your sitemap without you having to submit it: Ask Google Yahoo Live Yahoo did a good job at summing up the advantages to putting your sitemap location in the robots.txt file. All search crawlers recognize robots.txt, so it seemed like a good idea to use that mechanism to allow webmasters to share their Sitemaps. You agreed and encouraged us to allow robots.txt discovery of Sitemaps on our suggestion board. We took the idea to Google and Microsoft and are happy to announce today that you can now find your sitemaps in a uniform way across all participating engines. ...

For many developers the URL Address is just a means to an end, so very little time is actually spent on creating and planning a URL that is both functional and user friendly. We have all seen the URLs that seem to go on forever, I am not going to dwell on those URLs because you can find them anywhere. I am going to go over what a good URL consists of, and some easy ways to increase your search engine ranking with your already developed application. ...

Do you hate having to go to umpteen sites just to download your essential software to get your computer running? Do you hate then having to again go to umpteen sites again to check for software updates, and then downloading and installing them? Well I have the answer for you, it is call the Google Pack. Not only does the Google Pack include a wealth of Google software it also includes many non-Google software titles such as, Skype, RealPlayer, Adobe Reader, Norton AntiVirus 2005 SE, Ad-Aware SE Personal, Mozilla Firefox, and all the software is downloaded and installed according to your preferences. And as an added bonus there is a service that runs in the background called Google Updater and it will keep all of the supported installed programs updated to their latest and greatest version. See image to the right for a screen shot of Google Updater. ...

Many of the modern and sophisticated traffic monitoring software can track everything from number of visits, where a visitor came from, what search terms were used to find your site, where the visitor came from geographically, to what type of browser they are using on what platform. Many of the JavaScript based solutions such as Google Analytics offer much more information about the browser than ones that sit between the web and the web server such as AWStats. This is because there is much more information provided via JavaScript about the screen resolution and color depth, however the down side is that if JavaScript is disabled you don’t get any information. So it is usually a wise idea to use a combination of both Client and Server based traffic monitoring. ...

Google Maps Germany has a new feature: if you have a BMW car that includes a navigation system and you happen to live in Germany, it’s easy to send the address of a local business to your car’s navigation system. The “send” link from every Google Maps page will open a dialog that lets you fill your BMW account name and send an address plus some notes to your car. This service is free and it works only for businesses in Germany. Source