Cre8tive Flow

One of the most talked about and disputed topics in search engine optimization is how search engines handle duplicate content. It’s exciting when we find new research from a Google or Yahoo that discusses the topic.

If you have a Web page, and someone scrapes your site, and copies your page, but with ads upon it, how does a search engine find out? Does the search engine even care? If you write an article, and syndicate it, with links back to your web page, will there be problems?

A discussion on localized search that began at Cre8asiteforums in September was recharged this week.

The thread, called Localized Search Strategies contains links to resources as well as discussion and education on how to optimize pages and websites for local searches.

Concern for local search results is growing as more individuals rely on the advantages of going local. Furthermore, with IP-based influence behind the scenes, the result is that search results pages are no longer the same for everybody.

Writes one member:

Google Labs Accessible Search is open to the public. A few days ago T.V. Raman, research scientist in charge, announced the beta debut with a post in Google’s official blog. Have you taken a peek yet?

In its current version, Google Accessible Search looks at a number of signals by examining the HTML markup found on a web page. It tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully–that is, pages with few visual distractions, and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off. Google Accessible Search is built on Google Co-op’s technology, which improves search results based on specialized interests.

Cre8asiteforums member Bob Mutch first shared his Rating System for Inbound Link Quality with our community when it was hot off the presses of ABAKUS SEO Blog in late March. Now he’s released “ILQ” to the world through PRWeb:

This new rating system, called ILQ (Inbound Link Quality), is not easily manipulated or artificially inflated through purchased links…

Because of the huge increase in the buying and selling of text link ads, search engines are giving more ranking weight to trusted sites. This is why it is important for Websites to gain links from high ILQ-rated sites and makes the ILQ rating system an important gauge when considering link placements.

An excellent recap of the thoughts that went into the redesign of funny site The Onion from Khoi Vinh, called Making Fake News.

The Letter from Publisher J. Phineas Zweible is worth a look, too.

If you missed it earlier this week, The Onion posted an exclusive titled Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can’t Index. Insightful read.

If you haven’t been to a Blogger web site on Blogspot lately, you may not have noticed a new button on the Blogger NavBar.

It’s been out for at least a couple of weeks, a way of indicating to Google that there is something offensive on a blog hosted on Blogspot. Blogger has a page with more details: What is the “Flag” button?.

There have been a few people who have started to go through Blogspot, and click on the button for blogs that are filled with spam. I’ve even seen a suggestion making a cooperative effort to join together in an international flag day.

Imagine the following.

You have a web site for your retail store, which sells bowling balls, and shoes, and shirts in Central New Jersey.

The site doesn’t sell any of your products online, yet. In the future it might, but right now, it acts to let people know what you offer, and how they can get to your store.

You include your address on a contact page and a directions page, which are linked to by all of the other pages, but your address is only on those two pages. It should be on all of them, but your designer wanted to fill the pages of the site with multi-colored balls, and shoes and shirts.

I missed this when it blogged at the Google Blog a few days ago.

In case you don’t know, Googlebot is the name of the computer program that visits people’s web sites, and indexes the content of those pages. Even though it’s a computer program, it’s easy to think about it as a living organism, and you’ll sometimes see Googlebot referred to on the web as if it were a sentient being.

Seems like the dull environs of Google’s data centers are a good place for some moral building - like a mural of the Googlebot connecting the world together. See I, Googlebot.