Motoko’s weblog

Yahoo Japan has been testing the search results display by mixing some of the Google’s search results for some time. Now, Yahoo Japan’s search results is identical to Google’s search results in many cases if you use Chrome browser. In other words, depending on which browser you use, you get different search results in Yahoo Japan right now. (See Yahoo JP results in Chrome vs. FireFox and Google JP results for the same keyword.)

Since Yahoo Japan and Google Japan announced its plan for search service tie-up (both organic search and PPC services) in July, the search business partnership has been getting much of the attention and some Continue Reading »

The use of XML sitemap seems to come up at the search conferences all the time, and SES London was not an exception. During the “Pushing Content Via XML, RSS & Site Maps” session, one of the panelists advised not to use XML file to get pages indexed. He said that it wouldn’t get them indexed any quicker, and a link from big, popular and authoritative site would work much better. I completely agree with him in the way that XML site map won’t help getting page indexed quicker, or ranking page higher in the search results.

The best way to let the engines crawl your site/pages is to; 1) get good links from other websites, and 2) have good linking structure within your site. The link is the way to tell engines that there are pages on the other side of the links.
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I had a short interview yesterday, and the question was “What do you want Google to bring for Christmas?” My answer was “easier algorithms”. OK, maybe “easy” wasn’t the right word, I should’ve said something like “standardized” or even “fare” and this is my thought behind this answer.

We have a pretty good understandings of the algorithm. We know about the keyword, the links, the TLD’s, the hosting, etc., but we also know that even though you are dealing with the same Google, what seems to be the good practice isn’t always so in other market. For example, the link strategies that works in US market may not be the best approach in other markets even though Google tells you it works the same.

No matter how easy or complex the algorithm is, as long as many sites compete to be on the 1st page where only 10 links are available, SEO will play an important part of your search strategy. Social media is great, but what we found from the surveys is that people don’t always click a link in Continue Reading »

Back in May, Google launched “Rich Snippets” in Google.com search results. This review and price range information appear in the search results. It requires you to add the markup formats to your website.

Rich Snippets was just rolled-out in Japan, which is the second market to use this feature. August and December are 2 of the biggest gift giving months in Japan, and this new feature came out just in time to help those holiday shoppers.

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