Author Archives: Nadir Garouche

Thank you Search Engine Roundtable

I’m finally back in France, the flight was a bit long from San Diego to Paris and I was surprised to see snow here. Anyway, I’m glad to be back and be able to see my family and friends again. I will stay a few weeks in France and then I will start a new career in the UK with whichever SEM company that would best suit my needs.

Because I wasn’t able to go to the SES in New York, I was following the news at SERoundtable everyday, as they decided to cover the events as much as they could.

I think this is the first time that we are able to get as much information from a SES conference without being there. I’d like to thank everyone over at SEroundtable for their efforts, especially Barry Schwartz (Rusybrick).

To illustrate how precious the information they provided were, you can read their last entry called Meet the Crawlers, where the audience was able to ask various questions regarding indexing and crawling to “Matt Cutts from Google, Kashual Kurapati from Ask Jeeves, a representative from Yahoo! (Tim Mayer was not present) and Ramez Naam from MSN Search.”

A good “new” blogs list

Todd, over at Stuntdubl has published a good list of his favorite “newer” blogs. I recognized a lot of sites on his list but he also included sites that I’ve never heard about before but that seem very interesting. A good example is Fiftyfoureleven, a beautiful web dev resources site and blog. The author seems very knowledgeable and his posts are quite unique. Another good blog is Rogerd’s notebook, who is one of WebMasterWorld’s administrators, his last post about copywriting and marketing is very interesting.

Thanks Todd for sharing this personal list with us!

Week end in San Francisco

I am in San Francisco this week end, so I apologize for not being able to post. You have to understand, San Francisco is such a beautiful town that you don’t wanna miss it for anything.

Yesterday, I have been visiting the bay and today I’m going up to Sonoma Valley.  I just love it here, I’ve visited so many towns and places in this world, but I think this one will rank number 1 in my visit list.

Alibaba: the perfect SEO’d ecommerce site, to speak at SES Nanjing, China

According to this article from AuctionBytes, Alibaba, the famous chinese trading site, will be present at the next SES event in Nanjing, China. Jack Ma, who is CEO of Alibaba but also Yahoo! China, is known for being one of the most revered entrepreneurs in China, and certainly seen as one of the best Internet marketers in this country.

I’m sure Jack Ma is going to give great advice and share his experience with the SEO that has been applied for alibaba.com.

If you ever looked to buy products online or just to find information, you probably happened to find a page from alibaba.com in the SERPS of Google, Yahoo, or MSN. I personally did.

The reason behind that is that their site is just well optimized, and their thousands of pages are all search engine friendly. I’ve noticed the SEO efforts implemented into this site the first time I saw it.

For example, if you look at the homepage, you’ll first notice how usable and clean the site is. The main products categories links are displayed on the main section of the page. The featured products section is also a nice way to link to inner pages: they use relevant anchor texts and optimized title tags (short and focused on their keywords only).

The Resources box on the right is also a great way to add “fresh content” to the home page and also link to relevant information for their visitors.
If you navigate through their product pages, you can aslo notice the use of header tags (check out the source code, they use H2 tags) for products names (for example for the product “Sell Blood Easy Pass”), but also title attributes for people who use screen readers (something that their main competitor Ebay doesn’t do yet).

If you click on a product, it will open a new window, with again, a very nice title tag, short and keyword targeted.

You can also note the use of clean urls, without any dynamic variables.

I hope Jack Ma is going to give people more information about their own experience with Search Engine Optimization over at SES Nanjing. If you have the chance to hear him, please try to share your experience with with me.

How Google recruits Stanford Students

According to an article from ZDnet, Google is using its homepage to hunt Computer Science Students from Standford. When going to Google.com, CS Students apparently can see a text link on the middle of the page that says “Graduating? Come work with us.”

It’s a remarkable way to recruit, and also inexpensive.

Yahoo! Mindset could make life harder for SEO

The guys at Yahoo! Research have been working really hard. Yahoo! Mindset is a great example of their efforts. This search engine, currently still in Demo version, is able to determine if a page has for primary goal to sell something (commercial) or if the goal is to present information only (informational).

They’re using machine learning technology to score web results, from -2: for a page that is most commercial, to +2: for a page that is most informational.

For example, if you do a search for “dell laptop”, by default, you will see dell.com as number 1 result. However, if you scroll the slider to the very right that is “researching”, you’ll get a page about Linux on Dell, a page that’s indeed 100% informational.

If you set the slider to the very left: “shopping” , the first page is commercial only…but it’s not about “dell laptop”, it’s a page about “dell laptop memory cards”.

Well, it’s still in beta version, so we cannot blame them for now. But the technology is actually very interesting.

For SEOs, if search engines are going to use that kind of technique – at least Yahoo! – that would mean that if we want to attract all kind of people to a site, we have to build pages that are informational only, in addition of commercial pages. Plus, if the user can change how the results should appear, that would mean that we won’t be able to tell for sure what our rankings are.
I’m looking forward to seeing how this project goes.

Wifi everywhere and free with Fon

Fon is a very innovative Spanish Startup. They set out to create a community of people who will share their Internet connection with strangers. Basically, to be part of the community and share your Wifi connection with others, you need to go to Fon‘s website and download a program onto your WiFi router that will allow Fon members to get access to WiFi anywhere in the world.

For example, let’s say you live on 51 West 21st Street, in New York, and you decided to share your connection with Fon members, if a member happens to be in the neighborhood, he will be able to access to the Internet, from his hotel, his car, or even down the street.

To know where you can find a Fon “access point”, you can use their maps and locate one near you. It’s still a new project (3 months old), so you have only a few access points available yet.

Google and Skype were very interested in that project that they decided to invest in Fon.

Please, use our search engine!

You don’t like my search engine? I’ll pay you to use it! That’s what Yahoo! is willing to do. They will give different kind of rewards to their users if they use mainly Yahoo! Search Engine. They are currently polling their users about what kind of rewards they would like to get in exchange for using Google’s first competitor as their primary search engine.

In order to get these rewards, users will have to use a specific search box:

Users would have to log in or use a search box specifically designed for the program, like “a Yahoo rewards toolbar

An article in Cnet gives more information about it.

The rewards offered would be stuff such as unlimited mail storage, free Yahoo! Messenger Voice credit, or even flyer miles.

Personally, I think that’s one of the poorest decision they could come up with. I have to admit that their search results are far from being the most relevant. By forcing people to use their search engine more often, in a certain way, they force people to find irrelevant results, while they could get better information somewhere else.