In the early days of Google, when you performed a search, the results you received were just links to pages found on the Web, showing page titles, snippets, and URLs. Google started adding other types of searches to its Web search, such as:

A few days ago, I asked the question, Is Google Aiming at Building Faster Networks and Data Transmissions? Google had acquired some interesting patent applications that have the potential to increase the speed and quality of data transmissions. An even more recent intellectual property acquisition by Google points to a growing interest in [...]

How much might one page on a website influence the rankings of other pages? When I joined an agency in 2005, our focus was on rankings for individual pages – optimizing their content for specific terms and phrases, and making sure that they had links from other pages, both onsite and off. I found [...]

Last July, a Google Blog post titled More Wood Behind Fewer Arrows announced the closing of Google Labs, where a number of experimental projects taking place at Google were available for the public to explore and try out. Many of those projects sprouted out of Google’s 20 percent time approach, where engineers are encourage [...]

Has an improvement in how Google understands the layout of pages, and understands and classifies different elements found on page had an impact on the titles and snippets that we see in search results? Google may classify queries to decide what to show for those page titles and snippets in search results, but it’s [...]

Somewhere in an alternative universe, it’s possible that one of the most feared hitters in baseball might have instead been known as one of its greatest pitchers. Babe Ruth started out as a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox in 1914, and when approached about getting his bat into the lineup on a daily [...]

A patent application was published today which describes the kind of intelligent automated assistant that we see in use on Apple’s iPhone 4S, known as Siri. But the patent isn’t necessarily limited to the iPhone application itself, and the describes how such a system could be used in a number of ways, including with [...]

Yesterday, I wrote about how Google may be looking at the semantics associated with HTML heading elements, and the content that they head, and how the search engine might be looking at such content with similar headings across the Web to determine how much weight to give words and phrases within those headings.

That [...]

How important are heading elements to the rankings of webpages by search engines?

I’ve seen arguments by people who write about and study search engines and SEO very closely, which often appear written up in “SEO Expert Ranking Lists,” that HTML heading elements (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) are very important, arguments that heading elements [...]

In the last installment of this series, we looked at how Google may be using phrase based indexing to use the fact that many phrases often tend to co-occur with other phrases within the content of web pages, to re-rank those pages. When we look at phrases, we also need to drill down to [...]