Keywords and Search Results & Upcoming Updates August 30, 2011

The Big Three

Search Engines  Google, Bing and Yahoo!  Algorithmic crawling  Not every page is looked at  Distance from root may determine whether or not a page is crawled

MSN - Bing  Fairly new  Bad at differentiating between natural/artificial links  Analysis sucks, so place too much weight on page content  Likes recent links

Yahoo!  Better than MSN but not as good as Google at determining if a link is natural/artificial  Ton of internal and paid content biased toward commercial results

Google  Better than the other engines at determining if a link trueness  Biased towards information resources  Old sites trusted too much  Aggressive filters for duplicate/similar content  Pages with heavy keyword focus, e.g. keyword spamming, cause page to rank lower than pages with single or few references.

Search Results  ‘michigan driver license’  Each of the three had Ad as first result Michigan Drivers License Get the Test Questions & Answers All 50 States. See what others say!  Google and Yahoo! had correct link listed second  Bing had news articles second and correct link third  MSFT, GOOG, YHOO are for-profit

Keywords and SEO  Search Engine Optimization  ‘michigan food stamps’ example

Black vs White  Spamdexing  Hidden text/keywords  Cloaking  BMW and Ricoh (2006)  Conform to SE guidelines  Create content for users not search engines  Make content easily accessible crawlers

Google Search Appliances Google Search Tool can Provide Reports on Top Search Terms How to Make Search Better:  Tagging Content using Keywords and Descriptions  Add Metadata to Documents

Content Keywords

Category Keywords

Documents  Add Metadata to Documents  2004 presentation  ‘Documents and Settings’ – a user feature  Public – spell-check goes a long way, but …

Michigan.Gov GSAs  Implement XML feed imports in the GSA to add more information to documents (PDF, DOC, XLS etc) returned in the results.  Setting up the Duplicate Hosts configuration to recognize crawled servers.  Use the correct Meta tags for Document Dates.  Using an intelligent switch so that it will automatically switch to the other GSA if the Primary fails.

On the Feature Horizon What is coming? (Q4 2011)  New version of the mobile site  New video player  Forgot Your Password for CMA  Content versioning  Extended user management for Site Admins

Questions? Rick Peterson