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Posts Tagged ‘time search’

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about real-time search, but is it necessary? First, let’s look at the current state of search and crawl.*

Unless your site is decidedly authoritative, like CNN.com, you’re likely to get crawled as Google indexes more authoritative sites that are linking to your own. Your site will end up on a particular crawling schedule.

The lengthening or shortening of the crawl schedule, with blogs especially, is largely determined by the amount of new content found on the site each time it’s crawled. In the chart below, the diagonal lines represent getting crawled by the search engine and the ominous black spots represent posting new content.  In this case, if you haven’t posted in a while, you’ve probably worked up a fairly large interval between crawls. If you suddenly return to posting on a consistent schedule, over time the crawl interval will be narrowed until your content gets indexed soon after posting.

In essence, you can and should train Google to index your site more frequently by posting new content regularly or by getting new backlinks to your site.

Real-time indexation is just what it sounds like. Content is indexed and searchable immediately upon publication. None of the big three engines are there yet.

Is real-time indexing by search engines (and hence real-time search) inevitable? It’s starting to appear so.

Twitter is already considered to be real-time, though it’s far from a genuine search engine. Microsoft seems to have tweaked Bing to place higher value on more recent news. In tests, Google Caffeine, the new under-infrastructure version of the search giant, seems to be indexing a lot more pages and giving higher placement to the newest content than the current version. And Facebook’s FriendFeed acquisition suggests they’re definitely eyeing the real-time search space.

Real-time search helps anybody who reads or writes content with a short shelf-life. If you post about an in-progress disaster, a celebrity death, or a limited-time offer, your content is hot one minute, cold the next, so quick indexation by search engines means that your content will be found while it’s still relevant. You would probably gain a good amount of site traffic just by riding the wave and capitalizing on long-tail searches, regardless of how frequently you post.

The real-time search goal has plenty of obstacles. Real-time indexation takes a mountain of data computation power. Plus, algorithmically, how do you consistently showcase an on-scene Twitterer’s play-by-play updates over the Huffington Post side commentary during a crisis? Or do you? You can’t use backlinks as a determinant. Authority is negligible. One practical solution would be to house real-time search separate from regular search, just like Google News is separate from the primary index. Regardless, real-time search is only as valuable as the relevance of the top-ranking content and is likely to look different from today’s version.

Until we get there, the most important thing you can do now is get your site as close as possible to real-time indexation using the available SEO techniques.

• Create good content on a consistent schedule, applying other relevant SEO tactics to optimize your site, and building up your authority
• Create sitemaps for your site so search engines know which pages to crawl
• Use NoFollow tags on non-critical pages as a way of shining a light on the more important ones
• Submit your site and content to directories and social bookmarking sites
• Work on building links from more authoritative sites pointing to your own

*For clarification, crawling (or spidering) is the method search engines use to populate their data repositories so people can search using their websites. It involves running programs called bots (or spiders) that go from link to link scouring web pages and returning information to be indexed.

After a July update less than two weeks ago, Bing seems to be updating again. Many webmasters are noticing a search results update on Microsoft'search engine. Some webmasters are reporting their experiences in a WebmasterWorld thread as follows:

“Definitely seeing a shift across the board. Biggest change I can pinpoint is a continued decrease in relevancy of KIDs (keywords in domain). More than 80% of the top 500 KWs I track showed movement (mostly positive for me and mostly displacing a lot of KIDs results).”

“Yes, looks like an update – and Bing traffic converts well with certain demographics. Now I've gotta scramble to do some long over-due site updates because some pages popped up out of nowhere.”

Now, you know why it's happening if you are seeing an increase or decline in your referrers from Bing recently!

Forum discussion going on at WebmasterWorld.

Google’s VP of Search Products and User Experience, Marissa Mayer, announced yesterday the latest in Google’s Search Options. I’ve embedded the YouTube video below but am going to give you an outline of what you’ll see on the video. The new options allow you to:

• view results identified as videos, forums, and reviews;
• narrow down results depending on the recentness of the content (fresh results, past 24 hours, past week, past year);
• see the evolution of results over time via timeline; and
• view related search terms graphically via wonder wheel.

Options can be combined although just how exactly isn’t discussed in the video, which encourages us to simply go to Google to play around with the options.

The things that I found to be really interesting about the new options are the wonder wheel and the time-related search results. The wonder wheel doesn’t really really give something new when it comes to keyword research because there are more useful tools out there but personally I found it really fun to play around with. It would also be a really good tool to use when presenting and explain the process of choosing keywords to clients.

The time-related search results is of interest because just last Friday I posted about Twitter Search and how its power lies in real-time search results. I guess everyone’s interpreting this new Google search option as a response to that. Though it won’t give you tweet results at least results can be filtered to give you just the most recent stuff (24-hour window being the most narrow of results here). In my opinion it still won’t dampen people’s interest over Twitter Search though because the target audience there is pretty well defined – Twitter users. Furthermore, I don’t think that most of Google users will be really using this option but it is still a good thing that Google has the new options of course because what’s important is that when users have greater flexibility in filtering results when they want to do it.

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Filter Results Using Google Search Options

Heads up SEOs. If you haven’t been factoring in Twitter in your client’s SEO campaign now is the time to stop and seriously consider upping your social media efforts.

Twitter has announced that it will be expanding its Twitter Search to include not only the text found in tweets in its index, which is what it currently does, but to crawl the links found in tweets and index the crawled pages. We all know how big Twitter is and how fast it’s getting even bigger so this is not the time to ignore this opportunity. You want your sites to be indexed in Twitter Search just as much as it is in Google right now. Of course this doesn’t mean that Twitter will be replacing Google anytime soon but Twitter Search’s power lies in having a real-time search engine that people CONSTANTLY use.

The only negative aspect I can see here is that we can expect spam to start flooding Twitter pretty soon, but then again that is inevitable and it’s Twitter’s problem. They’ll just have to find a way to minimise the noise. As for those who want to make the most of Twitter Search but don’t have any plans of spamming what you can do will be to:

• Start building your rep on Twitter – This is also very important because Twitter is planning on having a ranking system based on reputation soon.
• Widening your network – Of course this goes with building your rep.
• Link dropping – The key here as usual is to do it appropriately. Don’t spam! So start tweeting people and somehow steering the topic so you or they can drop desired link.
• Be current – Have something new on your site more regularly that is tweet worthy. You can link drop all you want but people won’t pass it on if there’s nothing new and noteworthy to pass on. Remember Twitter is all about the now.

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SEO for Twitter Search