I only post this information every few months or so but it is insightful.
334.3 million searches per day was the average for Nov 2007.
According to research firm comScore Inc.:
* Google: 58.6 vs 49.7% in April
* Yahoo: 22.4 vs 26.8%
* MSN/Live: 9.8 vs 10.3%
* Ask: 4.6 vs 5.1%
* AOL: 4.5 vs 5.0%
* Other: 0.1 vs 3.1%
Doug
I’m not sure if this is the latest scam or not but it points out the value of a good return policy.
Your online store ships an item to a buyer using a credit card. A little while later, a lady calls up -your store-, hysterical, that someone stole her credit card and recently made a purchase. She asks if you could resolve it by refunding her money. Hopefully you do not.
First of all, if a credit card is stolen or misused, the correct place to call is the credit card company, not a store. Besides, how did the person know so quickly that a purchase was made? If you are like most people, you do not check your credit card purchases online every day. With the credit card company the buyer can dispute the purchase in which case the credit card company gets in touch with the vendor (your store).
One wise person has a return policy that no money is refunded unless they are contacted by the credit card company or the merchandise is returned. Crooks will back off contacting the credit card company. Of course, the credit card company may trump you and decide to issue a refund.
Regarding the original story, in case the item was shipped, you can try to stop the shipment or redirect it back to you if there is enough time. Contacting the police may help but I doubt they will break down the door and recover your merchandise.
This site has been upgraded to WordPress v2.3. Please let me know if there are any problems.
Webmaster Doug
Once again Google leads the search engine providers with the largest number of search queries.
Percentage of US Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers
| Domain | Aug 07 | Jul 07 | Aug 06 |
| www.google.com | 63.98% | 64.35% | 59.99% |
| search.yahoo.com | 22.87% | 22.13% | 22.73% |
| search.msn.com | 7.98% | 8.79% | 11.86% |
| www.ask.com | 3.49% | 3.21% | 3.37% |
Data from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US Internet users.
Note that msn search results also includes live search.
Google supplemental index (SI), a la secondary search index, are not something you want to be in. About the only time you will see them is if the query is so esoteric that supplemental pages are needed to fill out the search results. Note that a page is not moved to supplemental index because of a violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines. There are several reasons why a page ends up in SI and there are several ways to get out of SI - it is not a roach motel.
To view your Google supplemental pages
1. Go to google.com
2. In the search bar enter
site:mysite.com ***-view
will show only the supplemental pages.
If you just enter site:mysite.com then all indexed pages are shown, including supplemental ones. The words Supplemental Result will appear near the bottom of each supplemental search result.
There are two indexes at Google: main and supplemental. Supplemental is for obscure results when no regular pages exist. Remember, search engines want to deliver the most relevant web pages as the result of a search query - generally the ones with the best content that fit the query. Of course there are several factors (over 100 in Google’s case) in determining SERP ranking.
A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that it’s pulled from our supplemental index. We’re able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.
If you’re a webmaster, please note that the index in which a site is included is completely automated; there’s no way to select or change the index in which a site appears. Please also be assured that the index in which a site is included doesn’t affect its PageRank.
A web page classified as supplemental will -not- show up in normal search engine queries unless the query is so obscure that normal pages do not exist.
There are many ways to get out of the supplemental index but they are not guaranteed because many times you do not know how you got -into- it! A little research may be necessary.
* The page may be too similar to other pages on your site. Remember to look at all the text on the page and see how similar it is to other pages on your site. Don’t forget navigation counts.
* The page may be too similar to other pages on the Internet. Most of the time this is the result of copying someone else’s work.
* The page may be nested too deep in your website. This signifies unimportance as the pages near the top are deemed more relevant.
* A dynamic web page URL may have too many parameters. See how many parameters are after the question mark in the URL.
* A dynamic web page URL may vary the parameter order. This usually occurs in eCommerce stores you build yourself.
* There are not enough good external links to your site (does not include reciprocal links). Many of these links should point to pages other than your home page.
* Similarities like the same title tag for many web pages. Sometimes this cannot be avoided (well, it can by not using them) due to using third party packages such as some build it yourself eCommerce sites.
* You must decide on whether to use www or non-www in your domain name and stick with it. One must be redirected to the other. Type in yourdomain.com and see if it redirects itself to www.yourdomain.com. Here is how to redirect non-www to www on an Apache server.
* Lame META description tags. For each web page create a 2 or 3 sentence description using your best keyphrase that sound natural. The description should be relevant to the web page.
* Low PageRank. Generally if a page has low or no page rank it is for a reason which probably includes one or more listed. Remember -each- web page has its own PageRank.
Face it. Quality content is the best thing one can do to alleviate the supplemental index problem. Not a sentence or two but a few relevant paragraphs of something to interest the reader. The meta description should be relevant, too, and not contain repetitive keywords. The text needs to be unique and not copied from another site.
In order to reduce confusion I think it is best to put web page in all lower-case letters. Some pages I’ve seen use the capitalize every word scheme such as mydomain.com/ThisIsMyPage.htm. This is a different URL than mydomain.com/thisismypage.htm.
Note that it takes longer for Google to revisit crawling supplemental pages than regular pages.
Do not get too hung up on why your pages are in supplemental. Of course follow the tips as best you can but I would spend my time creating good content and marketing my web site rather than worrying about how to get every page out of the supplemental clutch.
Doug
According to research firm comScore Inc. Google has increased its market share of search queries 1.7% in the month of April. Here are the stats:
U.S. users did 7.3 billion searches in April. Outside the U.S. it is estimated Google has over 60% of the market.
Doug
Millions of people search for images every day. And if yours is near the top that is a marketing opportunity. Some people report they get nearly as many visits through image searching as regular searching.
Google uses a different bot to crawl for images. Its sole purpose in life is to index images. One key thing to realize is the bot visits are much less frequent that the Google indexing bot. It may be up to 6 months between visits.
To see what images have been found so far:
The images specific to your website will show up along with an image description. It is important to get a good, pertinent description for each image. According to Google they use the alt tag, surrounding text, overall web page theme, and filename to aid in determining on how to label the image.
Go to images.google.com and type in the description that is under one of the images. It will probably show up on the first result page. As you can see, the URL of your website is below it albeit unclickable…but the image is clickable and will take you to where the image exists - your website.
Here are some tips on improving your image search positioning:
A little bit of focused work on images can pay off with big dividends. Your work on images will carry over to other image search engines such as Yahoo and MSN.
Doug
Google’s market share of queries has increased to 64.1 percent of all queries of U.S. searches in March 2007 according to a survey by Hitwise. This compares to 58.3 percent a year ago.
Another, more conservative survey by comScore Networks places Google at 65.7 percent on a global basis.
The biggest gains occurred in health-related and travel searches.
Doug
I have been hesitant about getting onto myspace to do promotion. And even more hesitant about creating an account. From what I have read is that visitors from social networks do not stay long on websites - look and run. Myspace’s population is large, though, and perhaps there is relevancy in some visitors. I plan to join some target groups, make contributions, and see if traffic (and sales) increases.
Doug
One feature that is valuable in getting the word out is making it easy for people to subscribe to RSS feeds. When I speak of RSS I mean RSS or Atom feeds. Read about RSS - probably more than you want to know.
Blogs and many web sites use RSS feeds to communicate new information, such as press releases, new software, and upgrades available. It should be as easy as clicking on your favorite RSS reader logo (or if it is not listed click on the universal RSS icon and paste it into your reader) and go. I try and list the most common readers without getting out of hand.
A help page on feeds is a necessity since many people still do not know what feeds are or know enough about feeds to feel comfortable subscribing to them.
If you are a user of WordPress for your blogging, one of our favorite syndication plug-ins is subscribe me. Once activated there are many choices of syndication buttons to choose. They show up on the sidebar under a ‘Syndication’ heading.
For particular sites containing RSS readers such as Bloglines, Google Reader or Newsgator have buttons that can be added to your blog or website so users can subscribe to your feed. Note that most personalized home pages such as MSN, Google, or Yahoo have ways of adding RSS feeds to them.
Here are some examples of how an RSS feed button can be added to your blog/website. Click on ‘Add’ and it will take you to the appropriate site so you can create your own syndication code then cut-and-paste into your blog or website area.
Services such as FeedBurner, Squeet, or FeedBlitz can handle syndication for you. Some blog software, such as WordPress, have plug-ins to reroute your feed to FeedBurner where the subscriber then chooses which reader to use. A nice side effect is you can monitor your subscriber base.
If you choose to add feed subscription yourself you can add the universal RSS feed button 
or a text-only link which is directed to FeedBurner. When a subscriber clicks on it, FeedBurner takes over and offers various subscription buttons.
Doug
