• Register
• Log in

SEO Theory - SEO Theory and Analysis Blog

Algorithm analysis, Web community relationship analysis, SEO practices and techniques, industry news, etc.

• Home
• About SEO Theory
• SEO Glossary

Working the search engines into your content

Posted by admin on January 12, 2007 in SEO Theory

Google has posted a list of its most popular custom search engines. I don’t see Xenite.Org anywhere on the list but I suppose we’re just not as popular with the seaching public as, say, the New York State DMV (I can see how searching for driver license information in New York is a matter of international concern).

We offer three custom search engines on Xenite.Org right now. The one of most interest to SEOs is our SEO Discussion Custom Search interface. I personally selected the forums and blogs and sites that are included in this search engine. One of the most frustrating things for me in Google’s search experience is that they will often prominently link to content that you cannot get to.

Michael Wolf and I have both complained about this general disservice to Google’s users on Matt Cutts’ blog, but Google doesn’t seem to be inclined to do anything about the very serious problem. So it’s up to people like us to create custom search solutions that exclude the sites which require paid memberships or complex registrations or — worse — highly restricted access — from polluting Google’s search results.

But what’s the benefit to search engine optimization from creating or using a custom search tool, rather than that you may have a gizmo that provides some link bait? Well, for one thing, just doing the research gives you some insight into who you know about and who you don’t. When you’ve only got 50 sites in your list it looks kind of skimpy. If you can dig up 100 worthy-of-searching resources, you feel like you have accomplished something.

But more importantly you can learn something from setting up a custom search engine about determining quality. What is really most important to you with respect to quality of information, authority of voice, etc.?

Another custom search engine I set up for Xenite is our Entertainment News Search. This CSE model focuses on both general entertainment news sources and science fiction and fantasy-related news sources. If you cannot recall a specific article that you have read in the past, there is a good chance this CSE will find it. As long as the article is not in the Supplemental Results, that is.

As a CSE designer, I would like the options of both including and excluding Supplemental Results from my tools. I would like to include them because now in the wake of the Thanskgiving 2006 Google Update many very relevant good content pages have gone Supplemental for lack of trusted linkage from the Main Index. Those pages won’t appear in any CSE because the custom search service only works with Google’s main index.

On the other hand, it would be nice to be able to create a Supplemental Pages-only tool that helps people figure out where they need to point the deep links. And it would be nice to create a guaranteed non-Suppemental Pages tool just in case Google makes the CSE service comprehensive by default. If that means we have to set up Supplemental Custom Search Engines, I can live with that — especially if an SCSE service would let me import my destinations from the CSE service.

The only other request I would want to make at this time (in addition to suggestions I made in December) is that they give us some reporting. Which destinations are the most popular, and for which queries? I could tweak my CSE destinations database by changing my preferred lists or by adding more destinations similar to the most popular ones.

And, oh yeah. Can we move the ads out of the main search area? Sticking them in your face is so ugly and unhelpful.

I have not tried Yahoo!’s search tool. In an ideal environment, I would be able to put 2-3 tools on page and have them share results URLs. Give my visitors the best possible experience by allowing them some convenience.

And if you’re wondering why I link so much to Google’s blogs and not the other search engines’ blogs, it’s because Google has more blogs and collectively the Googlers are more productive in putting up posts. Rip van Winkle could take a second nap in-between posts from Yahoo!, Ask, and Windows Live Search. But here is a link to Ask’s Best of 2006 blog post which is a little different from the other search engines’ end-of-year recaps.

Actually, their first end of 2006 post differed too in that it included a lot of strange white space. What’s up with that, Ask?

But I was talking about using search engine tools. I tried including Picasa ads on some pages but as far as I can tell no one was clicking on them. And what can you do with Picasa that you cannot do with a million other tools? I couldn’t figure out a way to turn it into an advantage for Xenite.Org. Maybe my mind is just not graphical enough. I don’t know.

Through the years I have experimented with many ways to incorporate search data into Xenite’s content. It’s not easy. There was a time, for example, when someone was circulating a Perl script that allowed you to rebrand the Open Directory Project pages as your own directory. This was well before SpamAd sites became popular with spammers.

It was a great tool and quite popular on Xenite, but Inktomi’s spider (Slurp) was continually finding its way into that dynamic mass of URLs and it brought my server to a crawl (haha! a little SEO pun). I had to call them (and finding a technical contact number for Inktomi was not easy — the search engines weren’t very good at helping with that stuff) and get a quick tutorial in how to keep deep-crawling spiders from wrecking a server. Eventually, the script author stopped updating it and I had to take it down as DMOZ changed its interface.

Probably just as well, given the way DMOZ went.

I have no doubt I’ll continue to experiment with search engine tools, especially tools that report some data. It helps me to know what my audience is looking for, but it also helps me to learn what they think is quality content because they continually change their queries until they find what they want. And if I decide to create some content about a topic, knowing exactly what people are looking for will help me help them find it.