A little background: In November 2009, Google began testing a new look for the search engine results pages (serp). The largest change in this first test was adding the “Options” to the left side of the page from it’s relatively hidden location in a link at the top labeled “Show Options…”
Bing is the “rising star” in the US search engine market. Microsoft’s revamped search engine that launched in 2009 and replaced their existing Live search engine has been slowly adding market share, gaining on rival engines Google and Yahoo!. However, this will all change as Microsoft Bing continues to push forward to two key “Powered by Bing” partnerships.
The first of these, that is widely publicized, is their partnership with Yahoo!. This deal, which has recently been approved by the US government, has Yahoo! stepping out of the search engine business and relinquishing their search results pages to Bing. Even though searches will still be conducted on Yahoo! the results will be from Bing (both organic and paid). This Powered by Bing partnership is slated to take effect during 2010 before the holiday season at the end of the year (US only). This move will give Bing an immediate ~150% increase in search engine market share in the US.
When evaluating the ethics of search engine optimization techniques the most commonly known terminology to identify tactics is to see if they fall into one of three buckets: White, Gray or Black hat tactics (and in some cases a potential 4th comes into play asshat).
An emerging trend (backed by Rand Fishkin here and opposed by Jennifer Laycock here) is to direct consumers to the search engines to perform a search you rank highly for and to have then click it to enter your site.
The future of SEO (search engine optimization), I feel, may lie in the hands of the latest HTML coding standard – HTML5.
HTML5 as we know is just around the corner. Browser support for the latest version of HTML is already rolling out and can now be run on Chrome, Safari and IE (with Chrome frame installed). And, developers have already started jumping on board to begin playing around with some of the new functionality the largest push being the YouTube HTML5 beta test that is currently going on.
One of the benefits of working with a variety of clients who’s websites come through the door in a variety of states (of disarray) is that you get to see when the search engines do strange things. And by strange I mean really really obscure things that probably have a 1 in a trillion chance of happening while someone is actually monitor a website. Today is one of those days and it boils down to redirects.
The Google Caffeine Update was first introduced subtlely to us back in August 2009 via this post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog where testing of some new search infrastructure was underway and being code named Caffeine.
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