A great little summary of top search terms in 2005 over at Search Engine Watch. Most of the results are what you’d expect, but the one from dogpile.com is hilarious. Apparently, dogpile is a search engine that searches all the major search engines at once and returns results. And what were their savvy users searching for?
3. Google
4. eBay
5. Yahoo
6. Mapquest
Other search services, LOL!
dc
Earlier I wrote about how my site was missing from Google due to the freshbot effect. Banned no longer, the site is being listed again where it belongs 🙂
I’m trying to talk myself into a full remodel of the site over the break, I wonder how badly that will hurt search performance LOL!
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Many, many thanks to Eric Stoller for his hard work on getting this blog setup and integrated with our current Admission’s template. N1!
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Nah, not really. Well I don’t think so anyway.
A week ago, I was in the top ten results for ‘Dan Crouch’, ‘Daniel Crouch’, and those terms plus ‘blog’. All of the sudden, my site is completely missing from Google! What could have caused it?
A little research reveals that it’s probably called the Freshbot Effect. Apparently it’s very common for a new site to get listed very high artificially and then disappear while the ‘true’ value is determined by algorithm. Doing a search on my URL returns absolutely nothing, which means the site is currently not even indexed on their servers — a sure sign of Freshbot apparently.
To get it back, I’ll need more traffic and more inbound links. In addition, keeping fresh content should also be of benefit. I just wonder how long it will take.
Additional Google Search Result tips.
dc
DevgroupNW hosted David McFarland to demonstrate the new noteworthy features of Dreamweaver 8. David is the author of many Dreamweaver books titled ‘The missing manual’. I can see why, he knows the in’s and out’s better than anyone I’ve seen.
Dreamweaver 8 highlights:
– In the code view window, you can collapse code segments. Especially useful with complicated template headers that won’t get modified, leaving just the relevant section to edit.
– Guides in design view. Similar in functionality to those found in Photoshop and Illustrator, these will prove very handy in lining up div segments. And yes, there is a snap to features as well.
– Dreamweaver can now link to external stylesheets. This allows the user to code a page for an existing site’s stylesheet during construction. I’ll bet it’d be especially handy for those Zen Garden authors/adopters.
– .css support is better, but not great. At least all the .css specific functions are located in their own pane now.
– David demonstrated the advanced search and replace features that Dreamweaver supports. Although not necessarily a new feature, I hadn’t seen the tool used with such prowess before. The example he used was for stripping font tags from a 10,000 page website and referencing the .css sheet instead. The conditional search and replace with 3 levels of conditional logic was impressive!
– Dreamweaver 8 supports PHP 5, which OSU will be getting in the spring.
– XSLT support for XML documents/feeds. This was very cool and he demonstrated just how easy it is in design view by adding feeds to his demonstration website in about 5 minutes. I’ll be trying this functionality out soon on my index page.
– fyi to me, David mentioned that Flash installations are much higher Windows Media Player or Apple QuickTime. Makes sense after I thought about it.
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