Welcome to SageRock.com Web Marketing Blog

Amazon gets into shopping search | CNET News.com: “Called A9.com, the independently run unit of Amazon is charged with building a shopping search tool for internal use and for other companies.”

Rocky just put out this week’s newsletter. You can read the article here:
Sales and Business Planning for Web Marketers

She has compiled some really interesting statistics of what is happening in online marketing. If you are in the process of creating a marketing plan or business plan for 2004 this information might come in very handy.

We hope you find it valuable.

CRN : Daily Archives : VeriSign Sticks To Its Guns On Site Finder Battle : 11:27 AM EST Thurs., Sept. 25, 2003
Have you ever typed a web address into your address bar and it turned out not to be an address that belonged to anyone? Well, when that happened before, your web browser usually handled what it would say. For example, Internet Explorer would show an MSN.com search bar.

Well, today, versign.com shows you their site. Many people are up in arms about this… that Verisign has hijacked unregistered domains. They are the people, however, that dole out domains to companies and people. It’s an interesting debate… where should you go if you are going nowhere?

Google hits advertiser milestone : “The Web search company amasses 150,000 advertisers worldwide, thanks to an aggressive international growth strategy that now includes Spain, the company says. “

Consider yourself extremely lucky if you don’t have this problem, but in Google’s updates some sites have lost their titles and descriptions in the listings. So all a person sees in Google is your web address. There’s no title, no description, no nothin’.

What does that mean to that poor person? Well, basically, while you are indexed in Google you are not going to appear for many, if any, key phrases.

Have you done something wrong? Probably not. Google writes:

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4. There’s no description of my site.

The Google index contains two types of pages–fully indexed and partially indexed pages. Your page is currently partially indexed, which means that although we know about your site, our robots have not read all the content on your page(s) in past crawls. This does not adversely affect your PageRank or your inclusion in our index. It does mean that we don’t ‘know’ what to call your page, so it gets listed with the URL as the title and no description.

We appreciate the frustration this causes webmasters who work hard to make their sites accessible to users. We are working to increase the number of fully indexed pages in our search results to alleviate this problem.

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That’s found on this page:
Google Information for Webmasters

They also comment about it here:
Google Information for Webmasters where they write:

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6. Where is my page’s title?

Unlike many search engines, Googlebot can return results for pages that are known but haven’t been crawled yet. Since we haven’t looked at those pages yet, their titles aren’t shown; the Google results page displays the URL instead.

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Here is a link to a discussion on WebMasterWorld where this happened to a poor chap:
No Title or Description for my Google page result..help

What do you do? A WMW member writes:
Welcome to the waiting game!

Don’t bite your nails

Don’t chain smoke

Don’t take it out on the kids

Don’t pop too many pills

Don’t wear the carpet out pacing in circles

E-Commerce News: Google and Overture Hunt for Local Results, Revenue: “Google, which began testing its local search service with users this week, said the experiment involves analysis of a Web page’s content to find hints or signals that indicate its geographic origin.”

301 Permanent Redirect

Have you ever had a search engine emergency? Well, I didn’t think it was possible, but I just had one.

I had a client call me bright and early today and inform me that all of his main positions had fallen out of Google. That’s not news you want to hear.

I checked and sure enough all the big phrases were gone. I had to run off to a meeting and told him it might be a problem at Google.

As I was driving to and back from the meeting I was thinking all this through. What could have possibly happened?

When I got back to the office, I ran a search on Google to see all of the pages they have indexed from the site.

Incidentally, I did this by doing this search:
site:www.company.com -lsosoos

This shows all of the pages on www.company.com that don’t have the phrase “lsosoos”. So, basically, it shows all of his pages that are registered in Google.

What to my wondering eyes did appear? His home page was not listed and an identical page was swapped out in its place.

The main home page is titled Default.asp and this new page was Default1.asp… and it had no title!

This looked to be a page that possibly his developer was using to test the layout of the home page. It, somehow, got indexed. And because it was indentical to the home page, Google chose to index that page instead of the home page. So there went all of his link popularity and his title.

Viola, no listings.

This is what I did to fix the problem. It’s real easy. This is on a Windows server. So all I did was replace the Default1.asp with a file that simply had this in it:

<% 

Response.Status = “301 Permanent Redirect” 

Call Response.AddHeader (”Location”,”http://www.company.com/Default.asp”) 

Response.End 

%>

Now, when Google comes to that page they will see that it is permanently redirected to the home page. This should do the trick.

The 301 is an important code for an engine. Doing a simple redirect might not have the same impact.

You can learn more about HTTP status codes and redirects here.

And you can check to make sure the statis code is correct here:
Server Header Checker

Hope this helps you if you ever have a search engine emergency.

Advertising: Search Needs Better Labeling:
“An in-depth study of people unaware how pay-for-placement search found that they are surprised, and often negative, when they find out how paid listings work.”

Ah, finally I don’t have to explain to clients when their Overture cost-per-click ad may or may not appear in MSN. They’re always appearing now, plus some:
MSN Expands
Overture Ads

“Search is interesting again”

An Open Source Search Engine
Why does open source make search more interesting, you ask? Well, for one thing, no one will be able to ultimately say what are the best results for you. Because ultimately, anyone will be able to put up an engine and tweak the results to their and their visitors liking. And 1000’s of open source developers updating and adding to code can often provide a much better platform than anything one company can do. Just look at Linux.