Occasionally, there are times when you learn a thing or two regarding SEO. This post here: http://tinyurl.com/5rb58g reveals some top tips to help keyword analysis for those times you get those pesky KW mental blocks!
If there wasn’t any further proof that domain names have a major impact on rankings, check this out:
Look! No optimised title or relevant description tag.
Everyone with some reasonable computer knowledge has downloaded torrent files before. Rocket science it ain’t! One thing that was noticed when trying to download films was that when a user activated the .avi file a message came up saying that this movie clip had to be viewed by a certain program. “Download program here” the page announced! Now the lure of seeing the latest movie isn’t that strong with me and it certainly isn’t strong enough for me to trust some weird HTML page telling me to download a dodgy viewer program I have never heard of. But unfortunately it is for some, in fact, 530,000 computers according McAfee, the security company which says that the number of computers infected with Trojan viruses. These viruses are not malicious as in stealing data. They simply serve advertising. Could there be more than meets the eye here?
According to the Guardian, last year Media Defender was exposed as deliberately placing thousands of dummy media files into the path unsuspecting downloaders. They did this on the instruction of the big media corporations. This of course, simply changed the way Torrent sites operated with many now putting a ratings system on files so users can give the thumbs up or down (also can be manipulated though it’s something of a fight back). Hmm, dummy files and now possibly virus hit files?
Big Companies can take even more drastic measures. The MPAA(Motion Picture Association of America) recently successfully sued TorrentSpy for $110m on grounds of Copyright infringement. They are now actively targeting Pirate Bay now for $15m of lost revenue. The Torrent Spy case has effectively opened the door for companies to go after Torrent portals. I predict that a few of these sites will eventually disappear but the internet is a big place and there’s always somewhere to hide in most cases.
Now, lets look at this in a different way. Despite, companies crying foul of Peer-to-Peer torrent wares destroying their businesses, we still have of plenty of success stories. The latest Grand Theft Auto game generated a staggering £255 million sales worldwide and the latest Iron man movie took $98m worth of ticket sales over three days. This isn’t pocket money for the big companies. At the end of the day, if the product is good, we’ll want to see it, play it, listen to it. However, the torrent sites are only the tip of a big iceberg. The big corporates will always have tricks up their sleeves but Torrents are here to stay.
Semantic search has been the focal point of some intense blogging and opinion of late. What is semantic search? Essentially, it disseminates meaning of words and their context within the text to determine whether it is relevant to the search query or not. This is different from the approach given by Google which uses link authority to determine higher ranks.
As widely reported in the tech media in March, Yahoo has begun adopting some of the key aspects of semantic search into their engine: . Amit Kumar explained the shift in the Yahoo! Blog: http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000527.html. Through supporting microformats and a variety of web standard friendly practices, Yahoo! Search intends to to use this to increase the quality of information given to the user. An interesting note which I noticed was that fact that Yahoo! will embrace the Dublin Core initiative which has been discounted by myself as just code padding and superfluous to the crawl process given that the HTML meta tagging are already well established. I could be wrong there but now that Yahoo! Search has been opened for third party development anything is possible to improve its search services. Before we know it, the ability to tag and label content on a page will be widespread and will have to factored in on any optimisation process.
Google has recently been noted to have improved their own semantic search routines with stemming (e.g. run vs runners vs running) becoming more sophisticated. Also, recently Google group members noticed that synonyms (e.g sprinter) are now capable of ranking for sites. These observations bode well for the future of semantic search but will Google ever dump its PageRank formula? Unlikely given that PR has been a lynchpin of Google since day 1. Certainly we’ll expect the handling of semantic search to get much better over time
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