Search Engine Tigers

Running some reports for various sites that I oversee I noticed a strange occurrence when using the site: command. Several of them that had previously had many thousands of pages indexed suddenly were only showing 260 pages indexed, the same number - 260 - was showing for all of them.

The first one showed me the following stats as the result of the query:-

So only 5 were showing, with the ‘click here to view omitted results’ text at the bottom. Clicking on the text didn’t show me the other 255, it instead showed me the following:-

Maybe it’s a supplemental index issue, I thought to myself. Flipping through the pages to test this theory I got deep into the 700’s, and I still hadn’t seen that piece of green text to inform me that I’d finally found the first supplemental result. Strange. Ok, on to the next one. The Site: command returned the following:-

Clicking on the ‘omitted results’ text gave me the following:-

Again, well into the 700’s and no sign of my first supplemental. So why is Google reporting 260? Why doesn’t it report either the total number of pages in the index (as it did for my other sites), or heck just even the number in the main index with an option to add in the supplemental?

Update: Google has admitted that this is a known bug, and will be fixing it over the next few weeks. There’s a write up on Marketing Pilgrim about it too.

Google announce this morning on the Webmaster Central blog that Google Webmaster Tools are now an officially released product and out of beta. This beta period has lasted since June of 2005 when it was known simply as Google Sitemaps. Since then they’ve added a lot of nice features from crawl analysis to the recently added link list. The big change with this announcement? You can now comment on their blog. If you’re not using Webmaster Tools for your website or blog you’re missing a great free resource.

So you want to know what your competition is up to? You want to know what people are saying about your company? Well, on the web that’s easy enough to take care of. Simply go to Google Alerts, and set up some alerts. You can enter any text to search for, and when Google encounters it, it’ll send you an email (you can set up the frequency of the emails to ‘as it happens’, daily, or ‘once a week’). How well does it work? Well, I have the name of my company in an alert, and last Tuesday afternoon I got an email informing me that someone had written a blog post about a presentation that my CEO had given that morning… There are no restrictions on the text that you can enter, so feel free to keep an eye on what your competitors are up to, but also be mindful that entering text that’s too broad can result in a large number of emails.

It’s well known that Google Maps gets data from InfoUSA and, more recently, from business owners going in and editing their information themselves, but are they also getting that data from crawling regular websites? The short answer is ‘yes’ and ‘maybe’.

The long answer is that I’ve seen listings for small businesses in Google Maps where the website displayed for the business is that of a ‘profile page’ on an IYP site. It’s highly unlikely that these small businesses that don’t have their own websites have located their profile pages on these IYP sites (in multiple states), and submitted them as their primary websites. I also know that the IYP site didn’t go in and change the data for these advertisers to point at the IYP pages as these are sites that I have primary SEM responsibility for, and I don’t have the resources to go and add the listing for each advertiser in each phone book to Google Maps. Now as to whether it grabs other data from the website, such as address and phone number, that’s more difficult to detect, as there has to be a known difference before-hand that you can observe for a change. The advertisers that are out there now with these IYP profile pages as the primary website have the same info as in the IYP, which may mean that they always did have, or that they did change unobserved. I don’t have data on this yet, but given that I do have sites out there with metered numbers I may one day be able to say that they do (of course, I would never be able to definitively say that they don’t).

For the majority of sites with the metered numbers I am using this tip from SearchEngineGuide, and having the name, address and phone number of the business listed on one line on the bottom of the pages. It’ll be interesting to follow those that have that, and those that don’t to see if it makes a difference in getting picked up in the local search results.