August 17,
2005
In This Issue:
1. Dogpile gets it wrong
2. In the News - Ask PPC, Yahoo's size, GoogleGuy
blogs
3. More News Headlines
4. This Week's Q&A - 404 pages
5. Wrapping It Up
_________________
Dogpile gets it wrong
Dogpile made a big announcement a couple weeks
ago: They had added search results from MSN Search,
to go along with the results they already show
from Google, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves. If you're
a meta-search engine like Dogpile, that's the
right combination of SERPs to show. It would be
hard to screw things up when you're showing the
four main search engines, right?
Well, Dogpile got it wrong. Because when you run
a search, like "digital camera" for
example, what you actually get a mishmash of SERPs
and paid ads that look like SERPs. In fact, as
I look at that search query right now, seven of
the top ten listings are "sponsored by",
which means they're paid advertisements.
Would you use Google if 70% of the sites showing
up in the SERPs were actually ads? I doubt it.
Google figured out long ago that advertisements
should be separated from search results. Shame
Dogpile hasn't caught on. I'm not much of a meta-search
engine fan, but when they announced the inclusion
of the four big SEs I thought it might be worth
a try. It's not.
_________________
In The News
Ask launches PPC program
We said a couple weeks ago it was coming and now
it's here. Ask Jeeves has launched its PPC advertising
program -- their equivalent of Google's AdWords.
It lets you advertise on search terms of your
choosing.
Ask
Jeeves Sponsored Listings
Yahoo gets bigger; industry reacts
Yahoo recently announced that its index of web
pages and documents had grown to more than 20
billion items. Google, meanwhile, advertises on
its home page that it has 8.1 billion web pages
indexed. These "size wars" have been
going on for years, and Danny Sullivan of Search
Engine Watch has had enough. "Screw size!,"
he says. "I Dare Google & Yahoo to report
on relevancy." John Battelle says not so
fast -- size is important.
Sullivan: Screw
size!
Battelle: Size
matters
GoogleGuy blogs
Matt Cutts, a Google employee most known for being
"Google Guy" on various forums and search
sites, has launched his own blog. It's not strictly
search-related, but he keeps dropping hints that
search will be one of the topics he covers. And
there's a post from August 1st titled "Step
into my shoes" which details in a funny way
how he handled a recent complaint from a webmaster
wondering why his site wasn't in Google's index.
Matt
Cutts' blog
_________________
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.
Yahoo
gains on Google in customer satisfaction
August 16, 2005 - Forbes
The two-point gap, the closest Yahoo! has come
to Google in customer satisfaction, underscores
how the lines have blurred between the two Internet
companies.
Switching
to a new domain without losing your Google rankings
August 16, 2005 - Search Engine Guide
Google doesn't seem to recognize that you've simply
changed the URL of an existing site, and ends
up subjecting the new domain to the aging delay
as if it were a brand new out-of-the-box site.
Search-stravaganza
August 12, 2005 - ClickZ.com
Another August, another break-all-the-records,
mother of all Search Engine Strategies conferences.
More headlines: http://www.owtweb.com/news/
_________________
This Week's Q&A
Matt,
This may seem like a stupid question, but I have
to ask anyway. How do you make one of those error
pages that come up when someone tries to go to
a page that doesn't exist anymore on my site?
All that happens now is people see a blank page
that says "Document Not Found" or something
like that. But I've seen other sites that have
a nice page with helpful information for visitors.
Thanks,
Chris
Hi Chris -- those are called "404" pages
in web server terminology, and they're a good
idea to include on your own site. It's not too
difficult to do. You need to be able to edit or
create what's called a .htaccess file in your
site's root directory. Your web host may need
to help with this.
Once you have access to edit or create the .htaccess
file, you just put a line of code in it like this:
ErrorDocument 404 /404.html
That tells the server to show the page called
404.html whenever someone tries to visit a page
that doesn't exist. And then you just create a
page named 404.html and put some kind of message
that you want your lost visitors to see. And you're
done. (You can name that page whatever you want;
it doesn't have to be 404.html. Just make the
.htaccess file lists the correct name of the page,
whatever you choose.)
(Have a question? Email questions@owtweb.com)
_________________
Wrapping it Up
Hope your summer is going well and that business
is good.
Thanks for reading,
Matt McGee
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