Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

After weeks and weeks of use, and a reboot this morning even, I finally did it. Yay Me! Do I get a prize?

Trying to load the dashboard for Google Analytics today, I first came up to "An error has been detected". I thought that was nice, but when I hit refresh and the dashboard did come up, it was even better. Thanks for the data, Google. It's appreciated. If your Urchin purchase keeps doing this well, I'll be forced to give more money to Yahoo for their IndexTools purchase.

Apparently, ToolBarn.com is 1 page out of 1 Billion plus on the internet discussing tools. I'm sure there are lots of types of tools (web tools, power tools , photo tools, hand tools, blogging tools, David , etc.), but today Google says we're the best when it comes to tools. Thanks, Google. I appreciate the compliment. Now, if I could just get those people to buy something. Yeah, head term conversion rates stink, but they're sure nice for branding. It's also causing yet more server load issues, so it's really good we went memcached heavy over the past few weeks so we can handle it without a terrible load on the database server. That leads to the question... now that I've hit the biggest target in our industry, where do I go from here? The joys of doing SEO well on a big site. :)

Checking to see if some new products we added to the site were indexed yet, I came across another "oversight" on Google. A while back, it was reported that Google hadn't excluded www.google.com/products after the switch from froogle to Google Product Search, but today I found results which have been updated and are excluded by robots.txt but still in their index. As you can see in the image below, print.google.com/products, which mirrors the GPS results, still shows in the SERPs, meaning those of us listed in Google Product Search are getting credit for some links from Google.com, but also that they have Search Results showing in Search Results again, which is something they told us they don't want anyone else to do. Not only are there a few URL's listed, there are 219,000 URL's listed. Also, it appears to be updated recently since new products we've added in the past several days are showing up. Yet, when I check the robots.txt file, /products? is disall...

Now that we're going to put our current back-end into a new site, it turned out to be the perfect time to buy another mini. We'll have two v2 minis running for ToolBarn and a v1 mini on the new site. That'll make load balancing much less of a headache. Also interesting is that they no longer include the print books with the machine, instead giving a CD with the instructions. Seems much smarter to me. Oh, and they now have a 30 day trial. Excellent. I look forward to experimenting with the price range search on the v2, so overall this should be a great upgrade. I'm pretty happy with the $2k we spent this week.

Ok, so I don't usually pay that much attention to the look of the SERPs on Google. I've noticed the yellow, noticed the 50 results earlier today, but I got a funky new look tonight. Blue lines and no background color for the ads. I wish they'd pick a look already and get on with it. Oh, and clicking on the image will give a clearer view. This one just seemed creepy to me. I didn't like it at all, mostly because it's so chopped up. Oh, well... it's their site to mess up I guess. One other change that was noticed on this version: No links for the other Google services above the search box, and it doesn't show me as logged in (or able to log in). Final thing I just noticed... on the "Standard" results, I show 294M results for the two word phrase power tools. With this new look, I only get 20M results. What happened to the other 274M?

Google started showing 50 results today on search result pages for me. I've never changed it from default, as I want to see what a "typical" searcher sees, so when it kept scrolling and scrolling I was confused. Is this another UI test? If so, I give it a thumbs down. I know how to change it to show 50 or 100, but I choose 10. Showing me 50 with the yellow ads is too many changes for me. Baaahh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Have you ever wondered what a search engine bot looks like? Well, I've met them first hand at Search Engine Strategies , and they're a scary beast. Yahoo's Slurp, Google's Googlebot and others are strong bots, running around and grabbing pages from all over the web. Once trapped, you'll have a hard time getting them to let it go. They'll hold on to it for a very long time, until at some point it either gets banned or it vanishes into the supplemental index. They're truly mean bots. On the other hand, MSNbot (some may say it's a-LiveBot) has the same core concept, but it seems to have missed one important piece. While it still runs around and finds pages, it's got a much tougher time holding on to them. This has led to numerous indexing problems. Hopefully they can get their bot's issues repaired soon, but I'm not holding my breath on that one. They're just too corporate for pincers ( defined as "Noun : roach clip, roach holder - met...

I seem to stumble on Google jobs ads quite regularly. This time, it was for Google Analytics. The ad simply read " Join our sales team! Openings for experienced analytics professionals. " Ok... Google is having a sales team for analytics? They're going to sell something that's free... how clever. I guess they really do want to index the world's information... one site's stats at a time. Positions are available in Mountain View, CA and New York, NY for the following: • Account Manager • Account Executive

Many times, niche sites hide in the SERPs. I know that for ToolPartsDirect.com, there are some competing sites that we've never heard of when searching. But I know about quite a few of them. How did I find them? I did a niche keyword search in Google Image search. Even some of the more general searches, like makita parts, show some competitors that don't normally hit the SERPs. While I was doing some research in this manner recently, I saw some familiar names on the tool side that seem to be trying to take our idea and slowly work it into their site. But I know they're there, so I can monitor what's going on.

I recently spotted an ad saying that Google is looking for a few good people for their AdSense team. It looks like Mountain View and New York at this time. http://www.google.com/jobs/aspireadsense/ If you get the job, make sure to write us little people. :)

I was doing some searching to see how a blog we set up was doing. When you use the "And" operator in a Google search, it says that it isn't necessary because Google looks for all the words in the query string for each search every time, or something to that effect. So, the natural meaning to that is the longer the query, the fewer the results. Google search for tool repair = 1.7M results. Google search for tool repair success = 8.7M results. What's wrong with this picture? Making the query more specific by adding another word shouldn't more than quadruple the number of results. That's just plain crazy. So much for the "More accurate counts" I have been hearing about.

For the past several months now, we've been using Kemp LM-1500 load balancers to split the load among multiple web servers. These are pretty simple Linux based load balancers which don't have hard drives - everything is on CF cards. Well, to make our servers even more balanced, we're going to move to load balancing our database servers and our Mini(s). Yes... load balancing replicated database servers isn't unusual. That's actually a lot of the reason that the load balancers have a second network interface. But mini-balancing? Since Google has been generous enough to offer us some cash off of a second mini, we're going to go ahead and look at buying a second one to put behind the load balancers as well. Load balancing a couple of minis will do several nice things for us. 1) If a mini fails or needs rebooted, we will still have a functional site search. 2) We can use one primarily for searching ToolBarn and one primarily for searching ToolPartsDirect, making fo...

It comes up from time to time at the forums I hang around at that many sites use frames, but not too many people know if they can be crawled or not. Taking a look around our Google Mini this morning shed a little light on that topic. Appendix F: Crawling Framesets and Frames To crawl framesets and their nested frames, the framesets must be well-formed with the tags occurring within the tag. Anchors (links) must also occur within the frameset. Depending on the particular structure of your site, the search results may point to the frameset page itself or to the individual frame pages. There is currently no way to specify which behavior you prefer. Sort of says it all... don't rely on the engines to handle frames correctly. Frames = poor SEO due to the unpredictability involved and lack of content on the actual page - the content is in each frame, which makes each one of those more valuable than the overall page but also much less useful to someone landing the...

Last week, I was at SES in San Jose. Each year, Google hosts a little event that they call the Google Dance at their Mountain View headquarters. While I was waiting to get on the bus, I was given a white hat with the letters SEO on the front. It was a nifty gift from some friends at appliedseo.com , so I donned it. Later in the evening, I saw Matt Cutts getting ready to grab some grub in the cafeteria. He walked over to talk to us, and it didn't take him long to notice the hat, and even less time to realize it was hidden text (white on white). He posed for a picture in the hat, but now I'm left wondering. Since I've been caught with my SPAM (hidden text) at the GooglePlex, do I need to file a reinclusion request so I can return next year? If so, should I do it in video format like Matt's latest blog entries? Someone please give me some advice here. :-D

Today I received a voicemail from a gentleman asking about customizing the Google mini search appliance's results. He explained that he had asked about adding product images and an "Add to cart" button to the results that the mini kicks out and he was told to check out ToolBarn.com . Well, thanks for the compliment, Google. I'll take that as an indirect Kudos, and you can deposit +3 to our green Kudo meter in your toolbar whenever you'd like. I'll be expecting it by the end of the month, but really... no hurry. ;-)

Ok, so not really. But, they have an easter egg in their search appliances that is sort of funny. If you click on the "About" link at the bottom of the main page, then click on the snowy or sandy looking image along the left side on that page, you end up with the image shown below. I believe they're celebrating it's completion and they're sending it off into the world, but who is this mystery googler in the picture?

I've been following the v7ndotcom stupidity - I mean SEO contest - just a bit. Every now and then I see a link to the search results . I just came across one of the best ads yet based upon those keywords. Sergey Says Eat my V7ndotcom Elursrebmem ! www.isthisyourcat.com Obviously poking fun with the name of one of Google's founders, but it sure made me laugh. Very simple and to the point, which took someone with a warped sense of humor to start in the first place. Kudos.

So I've taken part in a debate over if CSS navigation systems cause an SEO penalty and all the internal pages to fall out of grace with Google. I personally don't think this is the case, so I've started working on one for ToolBarn.com. I can see how the usability for some will be great, for others it'll be used the same as always, and some people will keep on using search. However, it's neat looking and our competitors don't currently use it, so it'll differentiate us from them. So what's the reason people are saying it's a penalty? Simple. There are div's that are hidden. Well, the version I'm building doesn't use many divs. Most of it is just unordered lists with different classes applied depending on the depth. I'm interested to see how it ends up looking and working. My biggest obstacle right now is our webstats and our live help buttons. They both run JavaScripts that have to complete before the JavaScript for the nav system will...

I'm taking my time in sharing mini revelations (insights gleamed from reverse engineering our google mini's algorithm.) I've got so many tests planned and want to make sure that the data I'm extracting is accurate. Anyone with an interesting test, let me know. I've been playing around with link order. If I link to a series of pages as linkto1 linkto2 linkto3, does it change anything to reverse that like linkto3 linkto2 linkto1? I've tried playing with that a big, but it's tough to conclusively decide without making 100's of pages exactly the same and reversing the links. Then, I'm having to go back and forth to make sure the results are consistent. I'll be ready to share my observations on this one shortly. I'm all ears for new tests. Brian.