Menlo Park based Cuil (pronounced ‘cool’), has launched a massive search engine today, with an index of 120 billion web pages. This is arguably the most comprehensive search engine on the web. Patterson believes that’s at least three times the size of Google’s index, although there is no way to know for certain as Google doesn’t disclose the size of their index.

This massive search engine project was founded by highly respected search experts, husband-and-wife team of Stanford professor Tom Costello and former Google search architect Anna Patterson, joined by Russell Power who also is an ex-Google empoyee.

Anna Patterson’s last Internet search engine was so impressive that search engine leader Google Inc. bought the technology in 2004 to upgrade its own search engine. She believes her latest invention is even more valuable, however, this time it won’t be for sale.

The most striking difference between Cuil and Google is in its ranking system. Rather than assigning authority and higher rankings to pages based on inbound links as Google does (”Pagerank”), Cuil analyzes the content of Web pages to decide their relevance to a search query.

Cuil claims its search is contextual. What this means, in the real world, is that Cuil results are automatically categorized. So, if you search for ‘Japan’, Cuil will automatically bring up relevant categories such as ‘Prefectures of Japan’, ‘Port Cities in Japan’ etc.

Cuil’s results are presented in a more magazine-like format instead of just a vertical stack of Web links. Cuil’s results are displayed with more photos spread horizontally across the page and include sidebars for categories to the right of results, that can be clicked on to learn more about topics related to the original search request.

Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time starting from today. Cuil is just the latest in a long line of Google challengers. Compared with Google’s globe spanning data network of data centers, Cuil’s two modest data centers hosting less than 2,000 PCs total will have to run pretty fast to outpace Google’s crawlers. On the very first day of their launch, their servers seem to be out of power to handle the unexpected surge in traffic on their website. 

I was further disappointed with its search results when I tried to search for ‘indian curry’. I received the response - “We didn’t find any results for indian curry … please check your spelling …”. That’s a big flaw in Cuil’s algorithm. Cuil also failed to fetch any results for other long tail keywords I tried, like ‘tokyo based chinese restaurants’. And. when I tried searching for ’seo consultants in mumbai’, it fetched all the consultants in USA and Germany !! I feel there is long way to go for Cuil to take on Google.

Technorati Tags: Cuil, search engine, Pagerank, Google

• 4 Comments

You must have already heard of the product ‘Get Google Ads Free’. The man behind the product - Dr. Jon Cohen II - the world famous Internet Multimillionaire, has come up with a new complete Website that actually “forces” money into your pocket!

The breakthrough “Forced Money” system claims to be the best Internet Marketing Technology that forces the Web to pay you - unlike before when you had to rely mostly on chance, SEO or expensive targeted advertising! The software inside the website will do all the SEO work to get targetted traffic to your website and make money on autopilot.

Please check the Review of Forced Money if you would like to know more about the Forced Money System.

Technorati Tags: Get Google Ads Free, Jon Cohen, Internet Marketing, SEO, advertising, traffic, make money, autopilot, Forced Money

• 1 Comment

Google’s Spam fighting captain, Matt Cutts announced the launch of NoFollow Google Help Center in a video interview today with Mike McDonald of WebProWorld at the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, Washington, USA.

I wonder why Google has launched the help center for NoFollow. About 99% of the world does not even know what NoFollow links are, and the rest 1% are not going to deliberately ask Google about it. I hope this news will not send another PageRank hoarding panic among the SEOs.

Technorati Tags: Matt Cutts, NoFollow, Google, links, PageRank, SEO

• 3 Comments

If a site links to another site from every page, those links are called site-wide links. If you are buying links, it may look as a good option to receive hundreds of incoming backlinks for the price of one link, however, most search engines would count only the most powerful link which is relevant. Site-wide links also make your link profile to look artificial, as you’d have hundreds of incoming links with the sama anchor text. Many SEO forums have reported that side-wide links can actually hurt your ranking in search engines like Google, especially when site-wide links constitute a large percentage of the incoming links.

If most of your link popularity comes from purchased site-wide links, Google will eventually find and eliminate the value of these links. So it is advisable to buy few single links that would fly under the radar.

However, it makes me wonder how Google treats blogroll links. Most blogroll links, by default, are site-wide links - Going by the logic of anchor text, it would mean that it is better not to receive blogroll links from huge blogs having hundreds of pages.

Technorati Tags: site-wide links, backlinks, SEO, ranking, Google, link popularity, Google

• 12 Comments

Links with “nofollow” do not count as backlinks to search engines like Google, so you don’t get the PageRank juice or search engine ranking benefit for a link with “nofollow”. Commenting on DoFollow blogs is one way of getting some Pagerank or link juice. There is no specific penalty from Google (as of now) for having links from blog comments.

The D-List or Do Follow List is a list of over 200 blogs which have the ‘no follow’ link disabled from the comments, which means that if you comment on these sites, you will get an actual dofollow link back to your site.

The original D-list was compiled by Colleen and is currently maintained by Court at http://courtneytuttle.com/blogs-that-follow

If you would like to find blogs relevant to your keywords for commenting purpose, I recommend Fast Blog Finder software. It works like a charm and finds hundreds of relevant no-follow as well as do-follow blogs.

Dofollow blogs tend to get lots of comments, and hence the comment moderation is little strict on such blogs; so please use your judgement and leave meaningful comments.  This post on Net Etiquette for Commenting is very helpful if you want your comments to get approved.

Technorati Tags: PageRank, search engine, D-List, Do Follow

• 3 Comments

We often hear the SEO advice that ‘Content is the King’, and search engines like Google favor good quality content. Many people confuse it with creating more pages, and they often end up in buying software like spam site generators, automated content generators and scrapping tools. Many others buy cheap articles and stuff their websites with copies of the articles. However, search engines are not lookinig for such useless garbage which hardly offers any value to the site visitors.

Quality content in short is link-worthy content which is original, conceptually unique and serves as a useful resource for information. And, it refers to the text part of your website. Though keywords matter in your page copy, your page should not look like a keyword stuffed page for search engine robots; you should write for your site visitors focusing on readability and usefulness.

Good quality content has other rewards, too. If people find your content useful and spreading information, they will naturally want to link to your site, and give referrals. Thus, useful pages meant for people can attract links which are very valuable for your ranking in the search engines.

If your pages are copies of pages on other sites, search engines like Google will perceive your site to be of poor quality offering no value. You should therefore create content which people will find useful in your niche. It is better to have few pages with quality content than having thousands of pages filled with garbage. Good content will attract referrals and citations to your site and boost your ranking naturally.

Technorati Tags: SEO, content, search engine

• 4 Comments

Many webmasters give importance to inbound links, but are reluctant to link out to other sites - trying to hoard the pagerank. However, many search engines including Google grade your pages based on the sites you link to, apart from the content and inbound links.

Linking out if done properly can improve your ranking in many search engines. If you link out to other related sites, search engines may start perceiving your site as an authority site in your niche. When you link out to other sites - especially blogs, the other bloggers may reciprocate by linking back to content on your site. Also, if you provide good information to your site visitors through outbound links, it will enhance the usability and user experience; and you may end up in getting valuable referrals and citations to your site from these users. Thus, outbound links to other related sites can boost your search engine rankings.

You should, however, be careful of who you link to. Bad outbound links can drastically affect your website authority and rankings. The ideal rule to follow is - Do not link to any site which you would not like to associate with. If your site has many random links which are not related to your niche, search engines may start perceiving your site as a link farm or spam site. Some search engines may penalize your site by scoring it low on the perceived authority. Your outbound links may lose their value and may not be able to pass any pagerank juice to the linked sites.

Technorati Tags: pagerank, Google, Linking

• 2 Comments

A Common SEO mistake made by many webmasters is that they are not consistent when it comes to linking to their URLs across their site.

If some of your links go to the URL http://yoursite.com, and the rest go to http://www.yoursite.com/, your link popularity gets divided among these two URLs - thus affecting the pagerank as well as the ranking for that URL. So, it is better to pick the URL that you want and use it consistently across your entire website, as well as for your incoming links. One cannot, however, control how other sites would link to his website. So you have to inform Google which URL you prefer to be canonical. Google calls Canonicalization as the process for picking the best URL when there are many alternatives.

‘Google Sitemaps’ offers an option to select a canonical URL for your site. Another way to achieve canonicalization is by adding a 301 redirect (permanent redirect). So, if you want your default URL to be the www version, then you can 301 redirect your non-www version to the www version. Having a single, canonical version of every URL on your site will improve your site rankings as well as the pagerank.

Technorati Tags: SEO, link popularity, pagerank, ranking, Google, Canonicalization

• 0 Comments

Most of my clients in Japan have multi-lingual websites targeted at Japan as well as other foreign countries. So, I always keep looking for techniques which can help to rank well in different local search engines. Recently, I came across a software which claims to improve rankings in Google and other search engines in different languages. Essentially the software creates automatically translated pages of your website in 8 languages. I tested the software and found the automatic translation to be of horrible quality. By merely creating more pages, you can not create quality content. By using such software, you will not only lose your money, but you’ll also lose your prospective customers.

In my experience, it is very difficult to rank a multi-lingual website to rank high across different local search engines. If you really want to target different countries/languages, it is better to have a separate site for each language, and have its content translated by a native speaker of that language. Also, your site will rank better in local search engines if you have domain extension for that country (e.g. .jp for Japan) and you have your site hosted in that country. And, of course, you have to register your site in local search engines. It also makes sense to get links from sites from that country/language.

The additional cost in terms of time, effort and money will definitely bring tons of traffic that converts your prospects well.

Technorati Tags: Google, content, search engines

• 1 Comment

Google is harder to manipulate compared to other search engines because of various filters it incorporates in its algorithm to prevent spam. Minus 30 penalty is one such filter for handling spam in Google algorithm.

So, what is this minus 30 penalty? If your site was previously ranking high in Google search results, and suddenly its ranking drops by 30 positions, there is a chance that the minus 30 penalty is applied to your site. Normally, if you do a search on your domain name, you would expect to see your site at the first position; but if you see your site at 31st position, it is very likely that the minus 30 penalty is in force.

Most likely candidates to experience this penalty are affiliate sites which do not add much value for the site visitors. However, many non-affiliate sites also have reported this penalty. Though there is no proven theory which can identify sites which are likely to face this penalty, sites with excessive low quality inbound or outbound links and lots of non-unique content may have a minus 30 ranking penalty applied.

The only solution to avoid this penalty is to have unique content on your site, to get links from well trusted sites and to link to high quality sites. For detailed information, please refer to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Technorati Tags: Google, spam, ranking

• 3 Comments