Google and SEO: Some interesting facts

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Google now "sees" underscores in URLS as word-separators(delimiters). Previously, in a URL like http://www.mysite.com/iphone_review.html Googlebot couldn't "see" the words iphone or review. Instead it read iphone_review as one word. Now, it will see iphone and review.

Google treats URLs with a query string the same as static URLs. Caveat: as long as there are no more than two or three parameters in the URL, that is! To explain in another way, you won't take a hit in your Google rankings if you have a question mark in your URL; just don't have more than two or three equals signs in the URL. So, if you've been tormented about whether you should implement URLrewriting in your site or blog, don't fret.

The number of slashes in your URL (i.e. the number of directories deep your page is) isn't a factor in your Google rankings. Although it doesn't matter for Google, it is rumored to matter for Yahoo and MSN (Live Search).

The file extension in your URL won't affect your rankings. It doesn't matter whether you use .php, .html, .htm, .asp, .aspx, .jsp etc.

Contrary to rumors, Google does not use its status as a domain registrar to access domain registration data to use it as a ranking signal. However some self-proclaimed experts believe Google is using WHOIS data as a signal.

if you want to get your blog into Google News, one of Google's requirements for inclusion is that the blog must have multiple authors. So if you want your blog to show up in Google News results, it needs to be a group blog.

Why don't all my pages get indexed by Google?

One of the classic crawling strategies that Google uses is the amount of PageRank on your pages.
So just because your site has been around for a couple years (or that you submitted a sitemap) doesn’t mean that google will automatically crawl every page on your site. In general, getting good quality links to pages in your site would probably help the googlebot know to crawl your site more deeply.

You might also want to look at your remaining unindexed urls; do they have a lot of parameters (the google crawler typically prefers urls with 1-2 parameters)? Is there a robots.txt? Is it possible to reach the unindexed urls easily by following static text links (no Flash, JavaScript, AJAX, cookies, frames, etc. in the way)?

Feed Reader Stats

It appears to me that Google Reader is cornering the feed reader market pretty well. Google Reader provides 37% of the readers of this UnBlog, with Bloglines providing another 16 percent. Newsgator comes in third with 11 percent.

I use Google Reader myself, I have it on my customized home page as a Web Part (or whatever, widget, thingy, you know what I mean). I also use the IE7 built-in feed reader.
Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

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