Search Engine Optimisation

Cuil is the latest search engine to take on Google (launched 28 July 08). It’s a start-up with some ex-Google engineers as its founders. The name Cuil is pronounced ‘cool’. But it’s not so cool for Web Matters as the site is not in Cuil’s big index – and to request your website to be crawled you have to email someone there (which I have just done).

I also checked my web stats to see if their spider Twiceler had paid webmatters.co.nz a visit, but sadly no, and it’s kind of a let down when you can’t find your own website in a new search engine. However my Christchurch Daily Photo site is in the index and comes up in the results. But as others have noticed the images shown with the search results don’t necessarily match the website contents. My CDP site is about Christchurch New Zealand, and rather oddly one of the results comes up with a picture of two men boxing (definitely not my picture). Kind of weird that such random images are being associated with people’s sites, clearly not their intention to do that!

As for the layout of the SERPs, it’s definitely very different from everyone else! And SEO’s will need to get their heads around sites ranking in columns rather than one long list. But that is only going to be an issue if Cuil takes off, I’m sure it will get quite a bit of attention on launch as its so different, but if people can’t find what they are looking for they won’t make the switch to it permanently (I know I won’t unless it comes up with the goods – and that includes referring visitors to my sites).

As for me, I’ll keep checking to see my sites are in it, and might just try it out for a few days – who knows, maybe it will be the next big thing in search. After all, I’m the person who said ‘what a funny logo’ about Google when it first launched – but I quickly ditched Alta Vista after Google proved itself to be just too darn good.

Yesterday I discovered the Website Grader site. It’s a free tool to judge how SEO friendly your site is and gives you a total score based on quite a few different criteria. As I’m usually working on other people’s websites (like the proverbial builder who never quite gets his own house in order), it was a timely reminder to work on a few other areas of the site.

But it doesn’t just cover the usual SEO stuff, the reports generated go into detail about social network, blogging stats, and so forth (with headers such as ‘Blogosphere and Social Mediasphere). Apparently my site has over 400 subscribers to my RSS feed. I really don’t know if this is entirely reliable as the report also states I’m in Zoominfo (I’m not – but a US and UK firm with the same name are listed). The report also states whether any of your blog posts have been dug – well none of mine have, but then I don’t have the digg function listed on my site (but I will soon).

So, maybe not entirely reliable, but worth a look anyway. View their sample report for more information.

This week many blog owners have discovered they’ve lost precious PageRank for their blogs. For years now some industry commentators have been suggesting that PageRank is ‘dead’. I don’t go along with that at all, but I suspect that PageRank has evolved and been tweaked beyond what we can measure.

However, I’m pretty happy that my photo blog has a PR of 4, and it’s only been live since September. That’s the power of linking within a network like the Daily Photo Blog, and of course, getting some good inbound links from other decent sites.

The WebMatters corporate site on the other hand, has lost PageRank, so now has less PageRank than my hobby site (the photo blog). I’ve not been actively building links to Web Matters, and because I don’t do much web design I don’t have other sites that I can automatically link to. Does it frustrate me? Yes it does, but I’m trying not to focus on it too much – after all PageRank is only updated every few months, so obsessing over it is pointless – better to get on with the job constant improvements to the site.