I posted the following announcement on the SF Fandom Forums' General Discussion forum. I don't have the time and energy to rewrite it.
Yesterday, Friday, December 5, 2009 Google announced that all users of its service will now be automatically opted in to its Personalized Search feature.
Personalized Search, previously available only to people who were logged in, tracks your queries and clicks on search results. As you click on Web sites repeatedly over time they will move up toward the top of your queries. You will no longer see "natural" search results if you click on the same sites many times.
Although this is often a helpful feature, it does make it difficult for users to find new content they have not previously clicked on.
You can opt out of feature by clicking on "Web History" in the upper right-hand corner of your Google page. You must PAUSE Web History (in the lower left-hand margin) and CLEAR RESULTS to remove your Web history.
Google promises to remove your Web history after 180 days (but that means they will maintain a constantly scrolling 180-day window).
Google is using a "secret cookie" to maintain this functionality for people who are not logged in. It is not tied to the Google.com domain.
If you do not want Google to track your search history, you MUST opt out of the Web History/Personalized Search feature even though you are not logged in.
Search Engine Land has a lengthy article explaining what Google has done and showing you with screen captures how to disable your Web History.
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Showing posts with label google. Show all posts
Showing posts with label google. Show all posts
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Friday, October 9, 2009
Is Google Blogsearch dumping blogs from its index?
I noticed something curious this week which I suspect may afflict many low-frequency bloggers, especially people in the science fiction and fantasy community. Google Blogsearch seems to favor only frequently updated blogs.
At work I used to write 5 days a week for a blog called SEO Theory. I had to suspend daily updates to the blog several months ago because my work schedule was overwhelmed. I have occasionally posted new articles on SEO Theory but not with any consistency.
Time was, if you wrote a blog post -- especially on Blogger -- you could expect to see it show up in Google Blogsearch almost immediately and eventually it looked like it would move over to the Main Web Index in a matter of days (for popular blogs, at least).
In October 2008 Google redesigned its Blogsearch service and at the time they hailed it as a step forward. Unfortunately, from that time forward many blogs I had followed through Blogsearch (without bookmarking them because Blogsearch was so convenient in indexing their latest content) simply vanished from the search results.
Having discussed the changes in Blogsearch results online with a couple of Googlers (who asked for specific examples I was not able to provide because I had until then not needed to bookmark good blogs), I found little hope in seeing Google restore its once superior blog indexing service.
Still, I was working on some popular blogs that were being indexed quickly so there remained some value in Blogsearch for me. Until this week, when I noticed that a blog post on SEO Theory titled Brent Payne's PageRank Sculpting Report is Bogus had not appeared in the Blogsearch results.
You can find the article just fine in Main Web Search -- which is what most people use -- but the article simply doesn't appear in Google Blogsearch. Anything duplicating its content or linking to it shows up just fine, apparently.
So I checked another blog I had created for work which had received much less attention than SEO Theory. That blog had vanished completely from Google's Web indexes -- it's not even appearing the Main Web Search for its own name.
The only common factor between the two blogs (SEO Theory has far more links than the other one) is that the posting rates died down to almost nothing or nothing. So it seems like, in order to be included in Google Blogsearch your blog has to be updated with new content on a regular basis, probably once or twice a week.
Another blog I write for (yes, I keep up with a fair number of them), Best SEO Blog, appears in the Google Blogsearch index just fine, usually within seconds or minutes of publishing a post.
So if you're wondering why your science fiction blog is not receiving any traffic, it may be because you don't post much to it any more. I cannot guarantee that, but if you have stopped posting new articles, maybe you should try writing something twice a week for a month or two and see what happens.
SF-Fandom is a moderated, fan-run community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. SF-Fandom was founded in 2001 and is part of the Xenite.Org network. Free registration is required to post. Please be sure you read our Posting Guidelines.
At work I used to write 5 days a week for a blog called SEO Theory. I had to suspend daily updates to the blog several months ago because my work schedule was overwhelmed. I have occasionally posted new articles on SEO Theory but not with any consistency.
Time was, if you wrote a blog post -- especially on Blogger -- you could expect to see it show up in Google Blogsearch almost immediately and eventually it looked like it would move over to the Main Web Index in a matter of days (for popular blogs, at least).
In October 2008 Google redesigned its Blogsearch service and at the time they hailed it as a step forward. Unfortunately, from that time forward many blogs I had followed through Blogsearch (without bookmarking them because Blogsearch was so convenient in indexing their latest content) simply vanished from the search results.
Having discussed the changes in Blogsearch results online with a couple of Googlers (who asked for specific examples I was not able to provide because I had until then not needed to bookmark good blogs), I found little hope in seeing Google restore its once superior blog indexing service.
Still, I was working on some popular blogs that were being indexed quickly so there remained some value in Blogsearch for me. Until this week, when I noticed that a blog post on SEO Theory titled Brent Payne's PageRank Sculpting Report is Bogus had not appeared in the Blogsearch results.
You can find the article just fine in Main Web Search -- which is what most people use -- but the article simply doesn't appear in Google Blogsearch. Anything duplicating its content or linking to it shows up just fine, apparently.
So I checked another blog I had created for work which had received much less attention than SEO Theory. That blog had vanished completely from Google's Web indexes -- it's not even appearing the Main Web Search for its own name.
The only common factor between the two blogs (SEO Theory has far more links than the other one) is that the posting rates died down to almost nothing or nothing. So it seems like, in order to be included in Google Blogsearch your blog has to be updated with new content on a regular basis, probably once or twice a week.
Another blog I write for (yes, I keep up with a fair number of them), Best SEO Blog, appears in the Google Blogsearch index just fine, usually within seconds or minutes of publishing a post.
So if you're wondering why your science fiction blog is not receiving any traffic, it may be because you don't post much to it any more. I cannot guarantee that, but if you have stopped posting new articles, maybe you should try writing something twice a week for a month or two and see what happens.
SF-Fandom is a moderated, fan-run community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. SF-Fandom was founded in 2001 and is part of the Xenite.Org network. Free registration is required to post. Please be sure you read our Posting Guidelines.
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