Google launches Page Creator

Want to create your own web page, but don't know where to start? Google makes it easy with Google Page Creator.

Google Page Creator allows you design your web page using a simple WYSIWYG interface.

See Matt Cutt's blog for a snapshot of the different web page designs you can choose from.

What's in it for Google? They host your site!

Your web page will have the name: http://yourgmailusername.googlepages.com

Natural Search Blog - Alt tags

If you have gifs or jpegs on your webpage, it's good practice to implement ALT tags to help crawlers know what your graphics are about. Generally speaking, the overall SEO impact of ALT tags is low, but offers another opportunity for boosting keyword frequency. Learn more:

http://www.allbusiness.com/articles/EBusiness/3296-2804-2809.html
http://www.perfect-optimization.com/image-alt-tags.htm
http://www.a1technology.com/blog/2004/10/using-alt-tags-is-very-important.htm

Natural Search Blog - Yahoo Tops Google

BIGresearch's latest Simultaneous Media Survey of 15,000 respondents found that Yahoo tops Google in overall purchase influence.

Natural Search Blog - To Buy OR Not to Buy

Trying to boost your PageRank? Buying text links is one way to achieve that end. But some specialists warn it may not help. To be clear, you likely won't be penalized for buying text links, but you won't benefit from it either. Learn more here.

Natural Search Blog - Four Scenarios of Google's Future

Business 2.0 features an interesting article on Google's future, dreamed up by scientists, consultants, former Google employees, and tech visionaries like Ray Kurzweil and Stephen Wolfram.

In general, the scenarios spell doom for everything under the sun, as Google starts to truly make use of its stored consumer data. No doubt, search is very much in its infancy and Google is positioning itself to take it into the future.

Natural Search Blog - Google's BigDaddy Update

Google's BigDaddy Update

For the past couple of months, Google has been conducting an algorithm test, dubbed "BigDaddy". This test is currently live in 3 datacenters (66.249.93.104, 64.233.179.104 and 216.239.51.104).

Google datacenters (DCs) house all the pages Google has crawled on the Internet. These pages become cached pages. For example, if you conduct a search for "ebay canada" right now, you'll see which DC crawled and cached ebay.ca: http://72.14.207.104

The cached content is what Google uses to judge whether a page is a relevant match for a query.

When rankings differ between DCs, it's an indicator of a potential algorithm update (The term Google Dance comes from the fact that rankings seem to "dance around" and differ between DCs).

What's the implication of BigDaddy? According to Matt Cutts, the algorithm test will be applied to all DCs, resulting in an algorithm update. Therefore, website rankings may experience fluctuations in the next month or so.

BigDaddy seeks to:

- Reduce canonicalisation (A Google term for instructing a search engine how to decide which of a series of related URLs is the proper one to insert into the Google index.)
- Eliminate 302 redirect issues.
- Reduce webspam.