With more than 80% share in the search market, you may be forgiven for thinking that Google would consider itself to be the best search engine, but strangly they don’t.

Ok so if they don’t think they should be number 1 for search engine it must be Bing, or even Yahoo surely?

Erm, no actually, according to Google, the best result for search engine is… Dogpile!, seriously Dogpile. Number 2 is Altavista, a name I haven’t even heard in years.

So according to Google, the best two search engines are Dogpile and Altavista!.  Google have explained that as the visitor is searching on Google at the time then they don’t actually need to see Google. But this doesn’t explain why Bing and Yahoo don’t appear number 1 and 2.

My guess is that whatever algorithm Google uses to stop Yahoo and Bing search results appearing in Google is at work hear, as Dogpile and Altavista don’t actually use their own search service but use Google’s, Bing’s and Yahoo’s then they are safe to appear in the result.

Redirecting a website or webpage can be important for a number of reasons, site redesign, change of domain name, business rebranding etc.

As far as the search engines are concerned there should only ever be one form of redirect, and that is via the “301″ method. Any other form of redirect is considered bad form and will most likely cause all sorts of issues in search results.

The way you actually carry out a 301 redirect depends on the server you have (either windows or Linux) and the type of redirect you need.

Read the rest of this entry »

It is very important from both a web design and an SEO point of view that any website you create should display as fast as possible, giving the user the best experience and catering for those with slower internet connections.

There are quite a number of changes you can make in order for a website to run at it’s fastest and I will try and cover the easiest and most effective here. Before we get started, the most effective tools I have found to measure and improve the performance of a website are 2 plugins for Firebug, which is itself a plugin for Firefox. The plugins are Page Speed, created by Google and YSlow, created by Yahoo. Both are open source and provide excellent information. Watch out for Firebug though as it can slow down Firefox, my advice is only run it when you actually need it and have it disabled the rest of the time.

Read the rest of this entry »

In an update to the previous post, Google’s Matt Cutts has finally answered commented on the question asked back in July:

“Why are the UK SERPS still really poor with irrelevant non UK sites (US/Aus/NZ) ranking very high Google.co.uk since early June?”

You can see his video over at the Google Webmaster central video channel, but it may be difficult to spot as it actually answers a completely different question:

“Why are .com sites ranking highly in UK SERPs?”

This has caused a backlash by many in the SEO industry, so much so that Matt Cutts actually posted an article on his blog “More about generic TLDs in (say) UK results” , unfortunately it still doesn’t answer the question, or explain why Google UK results are so poor. It’s not confined just to UK search either though, other countries are seeing this invasion of poor irrelevant results.

Read the rest of this entry »

Google UK has been showing a large amount of fluctuation in it’s natural search results since late May 09 and this is still going on. As a science fiction and fantasy fan I often check where my other site is for this term.

Up to May the results returned for this search term were around 14.2 million and then late may they shot up to around 28 million results, many of these on the first few pages of either very low quality, old or from a different country including the USA and India.

Read the rest of this entry »