Arachnophilia, the Joy of Playing with Spiders

Spiders make great geek pets, at least virtual ones do. Here at StepForth, we keep a couple spiders on our system to test sites, pages and documents in the hopes of learning more about the behaviours of common search engine spiders such as GoogleBot, Yahoo’s...

Optilink Update

A couple of weeks ago, Leslie Rohde from WindRose Software was minding his own business when a user of their signature tool, Optilink, emailed him to ask about the 404-page generated when querying Google. Optilink is used to trace incoming links to the myriad of sites...

The Web We Weave, Linking for Google: April 2005

Over the past week, SEOs and SEMs have noted some significant changes in the search engine results delivered by Google. Google appears to be actively cleaning its listings by targeting sites using suspicious link-building techniques. A couple of well-known search...

The Distribution of SERPs: Who’s Feeding Whom in 2005

The search engine marketplace underwent a number of changes in 2004 with the number of independent sources nearly tripling by year’s end. Twelve months ago, Google was the dominant search tool feeding information to almost every other popular search engine in...

Florida Update One Year Later – The Year Google Grew Up

It has been a full year since the infamous Florida Update rewrote Google’s rankings with a massive pre-Christmas purge of previously well placed sites. The update, which caught virtually everyone by surprise is assumed by most to be the introduction of semantic...