Telegraph web site

[RichardCranium]

I originally wrote a whole bunch of stuff relating to SEO, the history of Google's update speed, and how it's increased over the last few years; I went back to 2004 (although I could have gone further - anybody else remember the googledance?).

I was working for a business startup around then. I learned shed-loads about SEO work. The hardest part was keeping up with Google's changing practices.

But it was fun being part of the community of amateur analysts watching those search results and sharing our theories on what has changed in the GoodleDance algorithm this month.

[NickFitz]

Publish, sir!

OK, here's as far as I got before I decided to snip it; remember, this is just work-in-progress, and therefore ends abruptly; it also doesn't include some stuff I had the links for but hadn't filled in yet:

The days of drawn out experiments related to terms like "nigritude ultramarine" are behind us.

I remember reading Anil's post at the time (2004) and reckoning that he was spot on with his assessment of the so-called "SEO experts" - many of them are just filthy spammers.

Interestingly, though, companies such as Yahoo! employ their own teams of SEO experts - people working on non-search-related projects (e.g. Answers, flickr, Upcoming) have no access to Y!'s in-house search mavens for legal reasons, so they are just as concerned with SEO as everybody else.

At the end of the day, it always comes down to the same thing: provide useful and relevant content, and publish new (useful and relevant) content reasonably frequently (regularly isn't actually necessary, but leaving things to rot for a couple of years won't help).

Oh, and make sure your <title> tags contain meaningful descriptions of the content, although the algorithms are smart enough to route around fripperies such as the site's main title being included (and that can actually help).

After that, meaningful URLS are always better than the kind of stuff Microsoft products like ASP.NET come up with by default - remember that although Amazon has dreadful URLs yet still ranks high, that's because it's Amazon and gets linked to by everybody, not because its URLs help it.

Same with the MSDN library - seriously, are Microsoft's technologies so crap that the best name their own people can come up with for a page entitled (to pick one example at random) "max Method (Windows Scripting - JScript)" is dxcwky7y(VS.85).aspx?

[Menelaus]

I originally wrote a whole bunch of stuff relating to SEO, the history of Google's update speed, and how it's increased over the last few years; I went back to 2004 (although I could have gone further - anybody else remember the googledance?).

Then I realised that what I'd written was a) off-topic, and b) too good to waste on a post in General

Publish, sir!

[NickFitz]

All hail the famous-web-search-engine.

I originally wrote a whole bunch of stuff relating to SEO, the history of Google's update speed, and how it's increased over the last few years; I went back to 2004 (although I could have gone further - anybody else remember the googledance?).

Then I realised that what I'd written was a) off-topic, and b) too good to waste on a post in General

[Menelaus]

Yep - they take less than ten minutes sometimes

The whole "chutney spoon" explosion was a good opportunity to see just how rapidly Google can index CUK and ramp it to the top of the results for suitable searches

All hail the famous-web-search-engine.

[NickFitz]

Crikey, that second link shows that Google has already found the first post in this thread!

Yep - they take less than ten minutes sometimes

The whole "chutney spoon" explosion was a good opportunity to see just how rapidly Google can index CUK and ramp it to the top of the results for suitable searches

[OwlHoot]

Here mainly, although I've mentioned it in a couple of other places too

Crikey, that second link shows that Google has already found the first post in this thread!

[NickFitz]

Where was Nick slagging it off?

Here mainly, although I've mentioned it in a couple of other places too

[OwlHoot]

Where was Nick slagging it off?

A while ago. (They may have fixed the problems since then, but I doubt it.)

I know I'm getting chucked off with the reporting there.

Me too. An example from last week (quoted from memory) ".. given the tens of thousands of years between the evolution of multicelled life and the emergence of humans ..". I suppose technically that is right, because it is 70,000 lots of "ten thousand years", but it's misleading.

[Sysman]

Where was Nick slagging it off?

I know I'm getting chucked off with the reporting there.

[OwlHoot]

Recalling NickFitz's low opinion of the Telegraph web site, I notice it has taken to automatically refreshing its pages every 5 minutes (which I'm sure it never used to). Sounds like a stunt to artificially boost the page view count.