Tim Yang’s Blog

Hot news this week: Google has launched a blog search tool. I think we were always expecting a blog: operator for the regular Google search site, which I think I would have liked better. But Google decided to come up with a separate engine. If they had decided on a new operator, then (given Google.com’s ubiquity) Technorati.com would have had something to worry about. So far all the other contenders like IceRocket.com and Blogpulse.com have nothing on Technorati because of either a lack of results, lateness or too many duplicates. For Google, it appears that their problem is too much spam and not quite as many results as Technorati. And one strange thing I noted was that Google blog search is getting a lot of results from RSS feeds. This means that if you are publishing only a partial content feed instead of a full content feed, you won’t be getting as many references as you should.

Google Blog search looks like a decent companion (I’m subscribing to both Technorati and Google RSS feeds of myself), but I wouldn’t be declaring the death of Technorati yet. What we need right now is a Google and Technorati side-by-side blog search comparison tool ala Yagoohoogle.

Yahoo Sitemaps is out. You can point Yahoo to a text file (no XML support yet) containing a list of your site’s urls. You can’t upload the file to them. Yahoo was playing around with this a few months ago, but now it’s public. [via SeoWeblog]

Nothing else to say about GooRSS. It does the job it advertises. And it will probably take over from Ben Hammersley’s Google to RSS script because it has an input interface instead of making you construct the link.

Coming right on the back of Mary Hodder’s blog search comparison table is Talkdigger.com which is easier way for you to make comparisons between the results of nine search engines (both conventional and blog search engines are included). But you have to type very specific urls. The results from your url with “www.� and without “www.� will be very different.

Talk Digger: Check who is linking to you

UPDATE: There is now also Uptimebot.com which does the same thing. But they have a better explanation of the results and they include Alexa.com in the search too.

Mary Hodder of Napsterization.org has produced an analysis of five popular blog content search services (Bloglines, Feedster, Technorati, Blogpulse, Pubsub). She examines what each of them searches, how they search, what sort of links they count and how long they keep those links counted. It gives us some idea of why the results from each of the search engines differs so greatly from the others. For example, Bloglines keeps all data on inbound links from Day One whereas Technorati keeps link data as long as it is on the front page of a blog, so their link count is much lower but much fresher.

Hodder has put her research into a table on a PDF file for easy reference. I’m sure many people will be using her table to produce more insights into the way each of these search engines work. I hope she’ll include Icerocket.com in that table when it becomes more popular.

SEO Black Hat has an interesting article on
how to give any website an outward appearance of PR 10. It does work (SEO Black Hat points out a PR10 demo site), but it’s a superficial PR10 that only website visitors are able to see.

1. Add a permanent (301) redirect with htaccess or some other means on your website to a PR10 site (eg Google.com).
2. Wait for a Google update to happen. After that, when your website visitors check the PR of your URL, they will see your website now “has” PR 10.
3. When you have your “new PR”, add a condition to your permanent redirect that says only Googlebots get redirected while allowing your website visitors into your site. Voila! People can now visit your new PR10 website while Googlebots are still sent away.

As the author of SEO Black Hat also says, Google will not index your site while you are permanently redirecting. So as far as Google is concerned, your PR is the same as before the redirect (and it will probably be lower after the update because it can’t index any of the content on your site). You cannot pass on your “new PR” with outbound links. But your site visitors will get fooled and they won’t know any better (unless they try to Google your site).

Note: This works for Google. But it might also work for Yahoo search and other search engines like AskJeeves too. I’m just not sure if it does, but theoretically it ought to.