Some amazing information about the Google algorithm can be found here: http://www.seomoz.org/article/google-historical-data-patent

All the information is from these sources:

1. The patent from US Patent and Trademark Office - US Patent #20050071741 – Information retrieval based on historical data
2. From SEOChat Forums - Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data – Sandbox Explanation, Aging Delay?
3. From Threadwatch - Google’s War on SEO – Documented
4. From SearchEngineWatch Forums - Does New Google Patent Validate Sandbox Theory?
5. From HighRankings Forum - New Google Patent, Must Read
6. From SERoundtable - Sandbox Explained by Google? “Information retrieval based on historical data”
7. From Search Science (Xan Porter) - New Google patent proves “sandbox” exists

This is just a little demonstration of embedding Google maps into a website or blog. I just created a website for an upcoming event and wanted to give visitors directions from a local hotel to the event. To make it easier for everyone, I just embedded a Google map with directions on the “Directions” page.

More information from Google here

As a demonstration, if the event was at the University of Dayton, and my guests were staying at the Dayton Marriott…

Print this map

View Larger Map

However, so much more is possible with the Google Maps API. Matt Cutt’s (a favorite blogger of mine) made a great post about things you can do: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/fun-with-zip-codes/

I just came across why Google built a browser.

Google Chrome is by far my favorite browser of the moment. I lost interest in Firefox as it became slower and slower with each update (it takes nearly 10 seconds to load from when I click the icon to launch it!). Additionally, Firefox had tons of memory leaks, and leaving the browser up all night would have my computer at a crawl by the morning.

Chrome loads immediately and my favorite feature is the one-box-for-everything (URL and search in one box).

I recommend you try Google Chrome out if you are looking for an alternate browser.

Sorry, there are no polls available at the moment.

According to research by Hitwise, as of December 2008, the top four search engines are (in order) Google (72.07%), Yahoo (17.79%), MSN (4.10%) and then Ask (3.15%). Each of these search engines provides a method for you to track how your site is doing in their results.

1. The first step is to make sure you have a robots.txt file and that it allows search engines to index your site.
2. The next step is to setup a sitemap, based on the sitemap protocol. This gives the major search engines a list of what pages you would like indexed and how you would like them to be indexed.

With those two steps complete the major search engines will be able to better find and index your content. To track how your site’s indexing is going for each engine, the steps are pretty much the same. Create a login, verify you own the site through either creating a file on your site or updating a meta tag, submitting a sitemap, and then tracking results:

• Google: Google.com by far the most popular search engine, provides Google Webmaster Tools. I like Google’s tools the best, as it not only provides statistics, but lets you view how individual pages, if there are any indexing errors, and allows you to diagnose your site. I think it provides the most information and I use it in combination with Google Analytics to track my traffic results.
• Yahoo: Yahoo.com provides Yahoo Site Explorer for its users to track their sites indexing. This tool provides a method to submit a sitemap and see your site indexing statistics but not much else. I still have an account registered to track how I am doing statistically.
• MSN: MSN.com provides Webmaster Tools to access indexing information. They provide a cross between Google and Yahoo tools as far as depth of information goes. While they have more information than just the statistics offered by Yahoo, it is not to par with Google’s offering.
• Ask: Ask.com does not provide a webmaster login but states that simply creating the appropriate robots.txt and sitemap files are all you need to do to help your listings. More information about Ask.com sitemap submission here.

Using these tools, why it will not increase your search ranking, will help you see how you are doing and diagnose areas of improvement. They are great tools to see how different SEO techniques are improving how your site is indexed.

The method I was using is no longer working. Google returns a “Forbidden” message now.

It was previously using the return from this link: http://www.google.com/search?client=navclient-auto&ch=6488814576&features=Rank&q=info:www.matthewstevenkelly.com

What is your websites Google Page Rank? A sites page rank shows how important Google says it is for search results. The higher the page rank, the higher and more likely the page will display in a search. Additionally, every page has its own individual page rank. With a good internal site linking structure when one page obtains a higher page rank it will pass it on to all other pages in your site. You should check your home page as well as many different pages throughout your site to see what your overall page ranking is.

Wikipedia actually has a great overly technical description of the page rank algorithm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

At this moment in life I am using Google Chrome as my browser of choice.

It is fast, efficient, and has some interesting features and functionality that makes it easy for me to use (I am a big fan of the startup page, as well as how it organizes bookmarks, etc). However, I just noticed that it does seem to use my hosts file. For those of you who don’t know, a hosts file is a file that allows you to configure certain websites to redirect to certain other sites. For a home user, a big use is to block certain websites from displaying or accessing your computer…. Such as Google Analytics.

Let’s say I wanted to keep google analytics from tracking when I go to my own website. This is a very useful feature when you do not want the pages you view on your own site to show up on your google analytics page. This skews the ratings, generally towards direct referral traffic.

The way it works in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc is… in Windows XP simply open: C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

In notepad and add:

# [Google Inc]
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com

to the file.

Is this a feature intentionally left out of Google Chrome to prevent users from blocking Google advertising like Google Adwords, etc? You can do it like this:

I just updated my web site pages with the new Google Analytics tracking code snippet. It fixes a rare javascript pop-up error message by using a try-catch snippet. If you are familiar with object oriented programming languages, try-catch statements are nothing new. If you aren’t familiar… well the Google article gives you everything you need to know.

For more on javascript try catch statements:
http://www.w3schools.com/jS/js_try_catch.asp

Have you updated your snippets?

• 30 day challenge update: meditation!
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• Climbing Kilimanjaro
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• Climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro
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• [POLL] Help me pick my next 30-day challenge!
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• Give Buzz another look
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