Archive for October, 2009
Google Webmaster Tools Displaying PDF & Word Document Links
Google Webmaster Tools has the ability to explore the internal links and external links or backlinks information for a given domain, instead of relying on the infrequently updated and wildly inaccurate link: operator within a Google search. Traditionally the link information within Google Webmaster Tools has displayed links, that were sourced or crawled from, what would otherwise be considered standard web formats such as HTML.
For a long time, Google has been indexing numerous non-web specific file formats such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Adobe PDF and Macromedia now Adobe Flash file formats. While they were indexing and ranking those documents to show up in search, I have never seen anything to suggest that Google was counting either links or plain text URLs within those documents as a ranking indicator specifically. However, while viewing backlink data for a domain recently I noticed that Google Webmaster Tools was reporting backlinks from Adobe PDF and Microsoft Word documents.
If you’re in the business of generating a lot of documents to provide to third parties, a certain number of your clients will put the document on their web site for their users. If that happens, you’ve just gained additional inbound links to your site using the link text of your choice. If it turns out that Google is counting PDF, Word and other file format links as a ranking indicator – a savvy marketer might even recommend to third parties that they upload the document to their site – for any number of reasons, least of which is search engine optimisation.
Google Local Business Centre Receives Upgrade With Humorous Outage Message
The Google Local Business Centre is currently undergoing maintenance for approximately 60 minutes and instead of a standard maintenance notice, Google engineers have gone for something a little more light hearted:
The Google Local Business Center is unavailable for the next hour
We appreciate your patience as we perform some routine system maintenance.
More specifically, we’re updating ‘the backend’ (to employ that catchy, catchall moniker coined and lent to us by engineering folks who work on all of the technical fiddly bits behind the scenes but know we communications folks can’t very well say ‘We’re updating all of the technical fiddly bits behind the scenes’ and expect you, an enlightened Google user, to take us seriously or at least not wonder aloud ‘ Wait, what sort of bits were those again?’).
So please check back in sixty minutes. Maybe less, considering the time you’ve invested in deciphering this message.
Google Search Options Enhanced
Google Search Options allows the user to refine their search to target a subset of the normal search results, such as only showing video, forum or news results in addition to date and time filtering.
Today the search options have been enhanced further to allow a user to remove shopping sites such as Amazon from the search results or to see more shopping sites in the search results. By choosing to add additional shopping sites, the layout of the search results changes slightly to be more price focused for comparison.
I came across new category filters that I haven’t previously seen, such as restaurants, retail, apartments, for sale, parking and so on. In this particular example, the additional category filters are contextually relevant to the search – in this case Circle on Cavill.
Circle on Cavill Gold Coast is a residential high rise located in the heart of Surfers Paradise and is of comprised of two towers and complemented by a retail precinct located at the base. As a by product of the type of facility, it offers restaurants, retail shopping, apartments for holiday letting, apartments to purchase to live in, secure under ground car parking and an enormous outdoor big screen hanging between the two towers which plays sport, movies, news and life style shows and much more.
The additional categorisation filters available within the search options are fantastic, allowing a user to see the different types of information that Google knows about a particular search term.