Google Image Swirl Offers Fun Ways to Explore Images
After graduating the feature “Find Similar Images” in Google Labs, here’s a new experiment on finding and exploring images being offered by Google – Image Swirls. The idea behind Google Swirl is similar to the “Wonder Wheel” options that was recently introduced in Google Search Panel.
Google Image Swirls builds on a new computer vision research which groups similar images together and present them in a fun way, which in this case is in “swirling” formation. Each images in the group or cluster are clickable links which will bring you to the webpage where that link is contained.
Google Image Swirl uses the same technology as Similar Images and Picasa Face Recognition to analyze images and group similar images together as well as in hierarchies. Each of these images were also analyzed as the best representative images in a particular group or cluster.
The feature is pretty cool, if I may say so. Although a bit “unconventional”, it is however very appropriate for Image Search since it gives a new way of looking at Image Search results.
This feature currently works for around 200,000 pre-determined queries. If you want to take it for a spin, just go to http://image-swirl.googlelabs.com and check out the search examples given.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Google Image Swirl Offers Fun Ways to Explore Images
Google Displays Site Hierarchies in Search Results
If you’re paying attention to the green URLs which Google appends at the bottom of each results, you may have noticed something different recently. Google is currently enhancing this URLs to give not just the plain generic URLs but replacing it with hierarchical links that show the precision location of the page on a particular website. This is an important enhancement since it can determine whether some users will actually click on the link to your site when Google gives it on search results.Basically, what Google will be doing is to analyze destination web pages and pay particular attention to the site’s navigational tools webmasters know as the “breadcrumbs.” Google then takes these site navigational tool when indexing the site and use it as the links provided on individual search result links.
It’s a good feature, particularly for quickly jumping into the appropriate web pages that contain the exact answer to your search results.
Here’s a good example of a search result displaying site hierarchies on the link provided.
From the link, you can immediately see which part of the site should you go to and whether the results will really give you the right information that you are looking for.
This new feature will be available to everyone in the next couple of days.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Google Displays Site Hierarchies in Search Results
A week worth of treats for SEO geeks
Filed under: SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engines
Welcome to another edition of ‘7 Days of Search and Social‘ – I hope you are well and getting well into another week in the trenches. As is the case with most conferences, things were a bit slow out there as the PubCon effect was in full swing. ut have no fear as they’re always good for an announcement or two (Matt had a few interesting ones). Over the last week he spoke about Cafeine going live, page load speed as a ranking factor and the web rchive block as a spam signal (kinda WTF on that one in this corner)
Anyway, let’s get on with it shall we?
Catching a buzz in the new year
This week it was a stand off between Matt Cutts…and well, Matt Cutts, for the story of the week (for me at least). While news of page load speed being a new ranking signal did pique my interest, methinks that news of Cafeine going live in the new year is more comment worthy for the moment.
Here’s the thing, people are always talking about this ranking change, that indexation level change…which has been more than a little irritating. For the more seasoned among us, there is a long list of major named changes that you’ve already been through; some more influential than others.
This is much more relative to the Big Daddy update which was more about infrastructure than search quality really. With this one, it is best to keep in mind that it is mostly about the processing power.
Think about the new signals such as social search, deeper personalization, crawling upgrades, greater spam detection and the like. Any changes we see that affect actual rankings/referrers is to be seen in the near future; ENALED by the upgrade. Don’t start looking for immediate affects…this one will be long term (Matt posted about it here – and for those that missed it, the original Matt interview on it)
| Quick Nav Links – Talk of the Town – Geek Central – Social Search – Local SEO – Videos – Tools – SOSG Alerts – Patents - |
Talk of the town
| SEO Dojo voted #1 Training Community – ok yea, I am gonna toot my own horn on this one, but hey it’s not everyday one gets to see such a passionate response from the gang. Not only did we actually get some free bootie from Lee… but the outpouring in the comments of the original poll were wonderous and humbling – my Dojo geeks rock! |
| Site speed may soon affect Google rankings – WTF? This is a VERY interesting development that we’ve been talking about over the weekend in the Dojo. Oh, and before peeps go crazy, this really can’t be a heavily weighted signal, so don’t get anal – m’kay? (also on SEL) |
| Calculating The True SEO Costs Of Major Site Changes – looks at the many problems that can arise from major site changes. While it seems second nature to most SEOs, I can tell you that MANY of the problems I inherit are from clients that lost rankings due to site changes… so it’s always worth highlighting once more. |
| Rich Snippets: A Golden but Missed Opportunity to Enhance Search Engine Listings – is a post from Paula Allen (via BC) which once more looks at the world of microformats. If you remember, that was our top story last week. Start learning this stuff my friends.. their value continues to grow for a balanced program. |
| The Disproportionate Value of Deep Links – was an interesting post from Eric Enge which puts forth a hypothesis on the value of deep links. It is an interesting idea that was worth thinking about. If I had to find any flaw, it would be the assertion of using the ‘original PageRank model’. One thing we DO KNOW… is that the current one is a far flung cousin of the original PageRank; much has changed in the last 10 years. |
| Top tips from PubCon 2009 – yes, it is true that we didn’t talk much about PC this week, but I generally don’t find much from conferences of real interest. That being said, this short round up has some goodies for those that missed it. |
| Why Some Sites MUST Block Archive.Org – is a post from Michael that is a must read as I was also kind of taken aback by Matt’s comments. In the end, while still kind of sketchy, they are now saying it is a secondary factor once a spam bot digs deeper. Still, kinda odd… |
| Using Noarchive to Remove Your Cache; What’s the Impact? – is from (one of my fav white coat SEOs) Richard Baxter who decided to muck about with the NOARCHIVE tag to see what effect it may have on site rankings… Want to know what he found? Then be sure to go read it… hehe… |
| The most sexy browsers screw your analytics – was from everyone’s favourite mystery man Sebastian X. It seems that both Chrome AND Safari aren’t passing along referrer stirngs… which as U might imagine, can be a nightmare for your analytics (especially as adoption of Chrome rises). Spread the word and help Seb fight the good fight wontcha? |
| Quick Nav Links – Talk of the Town – Geek Central – Social Search – Local SEO – Videos – Tools – SOSG Alerts – Patents - |
Search Geek Central
| Quick Nav Links – Talk of the Town – Geek Central – Social Search – Local SEO – Videos – Tools – SOSG Alerts – Patents - |
Search Patents
| Microsoft
Look ahead document ranking system Providing search results for mobile computing devices Document clustering based on entity association rules Query-based snippet clustering for search result grouping Method of speech recognition using hidden trajectory Hidden Markov Models |
| Yahoo |
/end SOSG session
| Quick Nav Links – Talk of the Town – Geek Central – Social Search – Local SEO – Videos – Tools – SOSG Alerts – Patents - |
‘7 Days of Search and Social’ is a joint effort from Search Engine Journal and the SEO Training Dojo to bring you the latest in SEO and Social Search news. Each week (on Tuesdays) we’ll be posting the highlights of the most recent (SEO Geeks) newsletter here on Search Engine Journal.
Be sure to grab the SEJ feed for the latest or sign up to the SEO Dojo newsletter to get it straight to your inbox.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
A week worth of treats for SEO geeks
Bing, Google Increase Market Share While Yahoo Declines
Latest search market data from comScore show that both Bing and Google have gained in October while Yahoo continues its slump. Google remained steady at the top with 65.4% market share from September’s 64.9%. Bing on the other hand managed to post a 9.9% marker share from 9.4% in September.
Meanwhile, Yahoo seems to be suffering, probably from Bing’s gain with 18% market share in October from September’s 18.8% data.
Another interesting point is the fact that Bing’s Y/Y growth is at a significant 30.8% from 2008. This maybe naturall, espcecially since prior to Bing, Microsoft search, was in a big slump for the past several years as well.
What really matters now is whether Bing and Yahoo’s combined search market share will have enough force to get some more search market juices from Google. Unfortunately, we won’t be seeing until probably after the first quarter of 2010.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Bing, Google Increase Market Share While Yahoo Declines
3 SEO Browsers to Evaluate on-Page SEO
SEO browsers are designed to highlight features of a web page pertinent to the work of SEO. This way, it helps you browse sites the way an SEO should or possibly the way that Google would.
We have picked 3 popular browsers to evaluate, each of them having similar features.
Domaintools SEO browser
It gives us information concerning:
- Whois record (also NS server and IP server history)
- Site profile (SEO score, meta tags, Alt tags, relevancy score for the meta tags, word count and number of linked words, number of images and number of links as well as related sites)
- Alexa and Compete scores
- Search engine preview
- Registration details
- Server stats
- Similar domains
- IP
This tool gives a fair bit of information off the back of the Whois record. It is probably the best tool to use if you want to focus on server and registrar information. It is quite thin on the ground as far as pure SEO information is concerned though, but it does give you links through to other tools if you want to see a spider view for example of use the W3C validator. It does give you basic information such as meta tag stats, number of images and some stats on the body of text. One interesting offering is the “SEO Score” that it assigns to a site. The SEO Score does not use PageRank or any Off-page factors, but it does use On-domain links, Off-domain links, and No-Follow links. There is no actual formula for this score but they say:
“Our goal is to allow everyone to accomplish a 100% score. If no obvious html optimization methods exist and everything looks good we will be giving it a 100%. We will be picky about the obvious things like completing Title tags and h1 tags, webmasters should be using these. We are very hard on frames and lag of alt tags.”
The idea is to help people understand where they can improve in their site. If you have a score of 20% for example, it’s pretty clear that you’ve missed out some obvious opportunities to optimise your site. With a high score in the 90’s you can safely say that you’ve pretty much covered everything. Beyond that it’s hard to make much use of it because it doesn’t actually tell you where the missed opportunities are. They do say that the scoring algorithm is in beta, but the info on this is from prior to 2007 if you read it. Their plans for the future include this “We will fetch all pages on your site and calculate PageRank according to the Standford Whitepaper. Then display the results in a bulk layout and allow for downloading of the results.” I’m not really sure what has and has not been implemented but it is going to be hard to calculate PageRank seeing that the value depends on a damping factor that only Google really knows and that the PageRank scoring method has changed since it’s implementation some 14 years ago. I don’t really know how useful it would be anyhow.
Spiderview
- Spider view
- Meta data report
- Robots.txt
- Lists all internal links
- Status code
- Lists all external links
- Number of words
This one doesn’t give an overwhelming amount of information but it does have the advantage of actually crawling and listing all of the links in and out of your site. This is a nice touch and really helps web professionals in figuring out what a site looks like structurally speaking. Out of the 3 tools on show here, it offers the least amount of information about the site for SEO purposes. It is more a crawler tool rather than a complete SEO tool really. It would be nice to not have a long list of links but rather a better display of this information. Humans aren’t good at detecting patterns in long lists of data.
SEO Browser
It has both a basic and advanced mode, so this review is for the advanced mode. It gives information covering:
- Meta data (meta tags, alt tags)
- Text to page weight ratio
- Load time, page size
- Number of words
- Number of images
- Robots.txt
- JavaScript elements
- Frames
- Cookies
- Number of links external and internal
- IP
- Google analytics presence or something else
- Response code
- Spider view
Extra tools include the:
- w3c validity checker
- DNS info via intodns
- HTTP viewer
- Link checker
- Duplicate content check
- Quantcast clickstream reporting
- Source code view
This tool is pretty cool because everything is made available on one big page, which means that if you;re looking over a handful of sites, you can do it quickly without having to skip to another page or another tab or something. It has a lot of useful information on display and will help anyone to identify problems and things they could improve on in their site. It also have links out to a number of other very useful tools as well. Out of the 3 tools, it’s the one that covers the most important SEO statistics for me.
Conclusion
All 3 tools have very different strengths. Using only one of them would be a shame, because the other 2 have lots of offer as well. DomainsTools is perfect if you want server and Registrar info for example rather than a code perspective. SpiderView is excellent to use for it’s crawler and allows you to take a look at the site structure (albeit not in a very user friendly way) and SEOBrowser is the bees knees you want to quickly give a site an SEO health check. All of them could be improved, but then all of them are free so as they say “There is no silver spoon”.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
3 SEO Browsers to Evaluate on-Page SEO