Google Artificially Promotes Recent Web Pages

Google paid a big price when it started to index pages faster and show them in the search results minutes after they're published. The problem is that you can't rank a page that has just been created because it has no backlinks so Google artificially inflates the rankings of the recently-created pages based on historical data and the few backlinks that are detected.In some cases, if Google sees a lot of searches for a query that wasn't popular before, it assumes something has happened recently and shows more recent results.These two changes are extremely visible today. If you go to Google's homepage and click on the special logo that celebrates 25 years of TCP/IP and the New Year, you'll be sent to the search results for [January 1 TCP/IP] and you should normally see a Wikipedia page as the top result. But the first page of Google's results has changed dramatically in the past hours and all the results are new: most of them are from spam sites, pages that discuss Google's logo and quote from Wikipedia. Most notably, the top result is a Digg page that links to a newly-created blog with a meaningful address: january-1-tcp-ip.blogspot.com and a highly-optimized title: "January 1 tcp/ip". Obviously, that blog hoped to take advantage of Google's new logo and succeeded: the two top results are Digg pages that link to that site and they're followed by that blog's homepage and a post from the same blog.

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Online Videos – How Old Media, New Technology Is Driving Search!

Video search is growing rapidly. It is considered third most effective online advertising media today to reach your target audience. More and more newspapers and conference sites are adapting to the multimedia challenge by adding video to their web sites. Video search results are blending in to the main universal search. Currently there is no cost per view for online video. It is time for businesses to get a head started and use it effectively. It is one of the most effective media today to reach your target audience. Interested to see an example?

Here are a few tips and best practices for video production and submission:

• Make sure each video has good call to action in the end such as URL address of the website or phone number to call.
• Use professional talent to do voice over.
• Create a compelling story highlighting all the reasons to use your product or service
• Make sure to use right web friendly format. You do not want to have large file which no one can download or view.
• Make sure to encode your video with Meta data and create RSS so your video can be found on search engines.
• Make sure you have video site map and separate page allocated for each video. The page where you are posting your video should have search engine optimized content, meta data, RSS etc for engines to crawl your page easily.
• Submit your video on top ten video sites and track video viewer ship.

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Nielsen Online: Nov. 2007 Search Stats See Google On Top

According to Nielsen Online, formerly Nielsen NetRatings in November 2007, Google is leading the pack, (no surprise there) followed by Yahoo and Microsoft. You'll find the press release here (PDF format), showing the top ten most popular services. Here are the top five:

• Google: 57.7%
• Yahoo: 17.9%
• Microsoft: 12.0%
• AOL: 4.5%
• Ask: 2.7%
  

The figures above are the percentage of all US searches handled by the leading search engines.