July 11, 2005 Archives

Remember Darrin Ward, founder of SEO Chat Forums and then he followed that up with a new forum named SEO Town? Last Friday, he contacted me, asking me if I heard of the below URLs or Google Data Centers. I said I did not, so he decided to post a thread informing the SEO community about them.

Suggested New Google Data Centers:

* gfe.google.com
* gfe-va.google.com
* gfe-va2.google.com
* gfe-va3.google.com

More at the thread.

Steve Rubel's Micro Persuasion wrote Yahoo Testing Blogs and RSS Search. Basically, the test site was at http://test.rss.search.yahoo.com/ which now redirects you to the advanced search page. Two small screen shots were captured by Steve, one of the homepage and the other of a search results page. There is a really large image at Flickr.

For some reasons, I haven't found any threads at the major SEM forums. So I started a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google Site Search is a quick and easy way to provide a search feature for your Web visitors. I use it on this site but I tend to opt for the built in search feature.

Why? Well, the built in feature tends to look more part of the site. It is fully customizable, and much more professional then using Google's solution. Is it as good? I think sometimes its better, it depends on how I am searching.

A thread at WebmasterWorld discusses this topic. Clint offers some good advice. (1) "If you're in sales of a product, that putting a G search box (or any search box for that matter) that has a "search the web" feature, that this is going to potentially push your potential customers elsewhere." (2) "Atomz's paid version is great", if you can afford it.

Mikkel calls for the removal of the way Google currently handles the links to the author of the provided videos at Google Video. In a thread he named Google Video Doing 302 Redirects Mikkel describes how the link just below the "About this show" section is 302 redirect link, not 301 and not a direct link. What makes matters worse is that Chris_D points out, Google is not excluding that redirect within its robots.txt file.

Example of Mikkel's video.

We have all seen the results of 302 redirecting in the past year or two - and the problems dosen't seem to be over yet (especially not in Google). I am not sure I am so happy about this 302 from Google. With Googles high PR I am simply affraid that they will end up hijacking the sites I point to from the videos I upload and the question is, do I really want to add videos without any reference to my (or the artists) site?

Nacho started a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums asking Does Age in URL transfer with 301?

In that thread he asks, if one has a URL path domain.com/old-category1-name.html and wants to move that 301 style to domain.com/new-category1-name.html "will the age recorded in the search engine's records for "old-category1-name.html" follow down to the "new-category1-name.html"?"

I do not believe the "age recorded" for either of those file names will affect anything. I believe it is the age of the domain name, domain.com - that will play a roll in the whole site's success or failure. What do I base this on? Some personal experience.