May 25, 2005
In
This Issue:
1. More Design Inspiration
2. In the News - Google's Factory Tour, AdWords
blog
3. More News Headlines
4. This Week's Q&A - Where'd my Title go?
5. Wrapping It Up
_________________
More Design Inspiration
This harks back to September, 2004 -- the days
when this was called the "OWT Newsletter"
-- when the subject of our 29th newsletter was
"Design Inspiration." The idea then,
as now, was that sometimes a web designer just
needs to step back and see what everyone else
is doing to get some new ideas and thoughts on
the design process. Do people like architects
do that? I don't know. But I do know it works
for me.
I still do keep an eye on the sites I listed back
in September, but I was pleased this week to come
across a new design repository called CSS Drive.
It's a site where users submit web sites they
like as examples of good CSS-based design. Other
users can then offer comments on the sites, too.
The gallery is neatly divided into two-column,
three-column, and "mixed" sites, or
you can browse by theme -- Business sites, Entertainment
sites, etc. -- so you're pretty well covered no
matter what type of inspiration you're looking
for.
Beyond the web site gallery, there's also a collection
of CSS and javascript examples for your web development
needs. Good stuff all around!
CSS Drive
_________________
In The News
Google Opens the Factory
Google opened its doors last Thursday and invited
journalists in for an event they called the "Google
Factory Tour." It was part news conference,
part sneak peek at future plans and products.
And for a company that's usually very tight-lipped,
there was a surprising amount of meat to chew
on.
The biggest announcement, or the one that got
the most press, was the debut of the Google Personalized
Homepage -- a place where you can access several
of the Google services, such as Gmail, Google
News, etc., from one page. They don't like the
term, but Google is officially a portal like Yahoo,
MSN, and many others. Google's personalized home
page is in its earliest testing stages now, and
offers only about 5% (or less) of what you can
personalize on "My Yahoo," for example.
But it's worth watching to see how it develops
over time. The other new product which caught
my eye was "Google Earth", which appears
to be something akin to Google Maps on steroids.
It's a downloadable software tool that integrates
Google Maps satellite imagery with Google search
and more, and it's not available yet for purchase.
The full webcast from the Factory Tour is online
(link below). You'll want to go forward about
4-5 hours into it to get to the preview of future
products/services. And the very end is an interesting
Q&A session with co-founder Sergey Brin and
CEO Eric Schmidt.
Google Personalized
Home Page (see Google Labs to get started)
Google
Factory Tour
Google Adwords Starts Blogging
If you use Google AdWords, you may want to keep
an eye on the new, official AdWords Blog. They
writers promise system updates, Q&A with advertisers,
tips on getting the most out of Adwords, etc.
Inside
AdWords
_________________
More News Headlines
Here are a few news headlines worth your time to read.
These are just some of the headlines we've posted
to OWTweb.com in recent
days.
TrustRank
and the company you keep
May 24, 2005 - Search-Marketing.info
If a large percentage of your links come from
sites which are not well trusted search engines
could either discount those links, or produce
a negative weight against your site.
Google
launches personalized home page
May 20, 2005 - Search Engine Watch
Google has unveiled a new service that allows
people to consolidate various Google features
they use, ranging from web search to email, into
a personalized home page.
Pursuing
copyright infringers
May 18, 2005 - Search Engine Guide
There was a time when I thought imitation was
the sincerest form of flattery. But when it comes
to copyright violations, it's not flattering at
all.
More headlines: http://www.owtweb.com/news/
_________________
This Week's Q&A
Hi Matt,
We've spent a good amount of time working on our
page titles, the meta "description tag",
and other things that are supposed to make our
site more visible to search engines. But we recently
noticed that when you do a search for web site
on Google, we're there, but it just has our company
name. It doesn't show the page title with our
keywords that describe what we sell. Is this a
bug in Google's system? Can we do something to
get it changed back?
Scott
Hi Scott --
It's not a bug. It's a new way of listing some
pages in Google's index. This was first noticed
about a month or two ago. What's happening is
that, for some web sites, Google is dynamically
changing the name of your web page in its SERPs
under certain conditions. The conditions appear
to be pretty simple, actually: if the web page
is listed in the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org),
and if the search term exactly matches the Open
Directory listing, Google will use the title and
description from there rather than what's actually
on your web page.
So in your case, you probably did a search on
your company name. That search query exactly matches
the title of your listing in the Open Directory,
so Google used that title and description in its
SERPs.
And no, there's really nothing you can do about
it. There's some debate and discussion about this
new practice happening now in webmaster and SEO
circles, and if space allows we'll address it
in some more detail in a future Net Gains.
(Have a question? Email questions@owtweb.com)
_________________
Wrapping it Up
Back to work for me. Hope business online is treating
you well. Keep sending in those questions to help
restock for the newsletter....
Thanks for reading,
Matt McGee
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