The Axandra newsletter archive

1 April 2003

This week we're telling you how Starbucks.com inadvertently prevents Google from indexing their site and what you can learn from it.

Cookies are short pieces of text that your Web browser can remember for the Web site you're visiting. The Web site canalso tell your browser application to save the cookie to your hard disk for future reference.

Web sites use cookies to personalize information (e.g. "Hello Your Name" on Amazon.com), to help remember login information or simply to collect demographic information.

For this reason, cookies have always been a source of controversy related to online privacy. Nevertheless, most online store pages require cookies to work.

Can your visitors view your Web site only if they accept cookies? If so, you should know that cookies can stop search engines to index your Web site. People can fill out forms and accept cookies but search engines can't.

If search engine software programs hit a Web page that insists on cookies before displaying the page, they could index the wrong text and abandon further indexing.

Just look at this search result and you'll see that cookies even prevent popular Web sites from getting indexed by search engines.

No, it's not an April fool's joke, the #1 result is indeed Starbucks.com.

Another example from AllTheWeb

On its webmaster pages, Google gives the following advice:

"If fancy features such as Javascript, cookies, session ID's, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site."

Other such barriers to search engine indexing can be broken links and password-protected Web pages.

Google's webmaster guidelines that include the advice above:
http://www.Google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

More information about cookies in general:
http://www.CookieCentral.com/faq/

* Eniro Group switches to Google

Eniro is one of the leading online media companies in Northern Europe, providing search sites in 12 European countries. It's going to switch the search results of its search engines from FAST Search (recently bought by Overture) to Google.

Eniro's more popular search engines include Evreka (Sweden), Kvasir (Norway), Suomi24 (Finland) and Wer liefert was (Germany).

* Espotting to double minimum bid price / Overture news

Starting April, 15th, the European pay per click search engine Espotting will double its minimum bid price to 10p. All lower bids will be automatically moved to 10p.

In related news, Overture has finally grandfathered all US$0.01 bids to US$0.05. In addition, it has published a "Frequently Asked Questions" page about the AltaVista and FAST acquisitions.

* Google Compute

Google has introduced Google Compute, a new feature of its toolbar that lets Windows users donate their otherwise unused processing power to help solve scientific problems.

If you want, you can turn this feature on at http://labs.google.com/

* Google: No plans for IPO at this time

Google co-founder Sergey Brin said that Google had no plans to sell its shares to the public any time soon.

"Brin explained that competitors would gain insight on Google's finances. He added that going public could cause the company to focus too closely on short-term financial concerns and distract employees who watch the day-to-day movements of the stock."

* News from the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org)

The popular directory dmoz.org has often been down in the last weeks so there's now a mirror site available at http://ch.dmoz.org

There's also a new Weblog written by some ODP editors where you can read the latest news about the Open Directory Project.

* Google's expert search tips

On its homepage, Google now links to expert search tips: http://www.google.com/tour/services/query.html

* Interview with Google's co-founder Sergey Brin

Sergey Brin has been asked whether Google planned "to leverage user identity (e.g. search history) to do more personalized search results."

"He points out that philosophically it cuts against the grain of Google -- a search on a given string should always return the same results for any user. He gives the example of performing a search and sending the search URL via email. If it was profile/history driven, this would break."

* Are you disappointed by the low number of Web site visitors you receive and the low online revenue you make?

More people than ever before are using the Internet - more than 665 million. Unfortunately, many Web designers build Web pages in a way that prevents people from finding the site. Many sites are virtually invisible to the search engines.

If your Web designer is not a search engine optimization expert trained in using the right keywords, HTML tags and many other things that are necessary to get high search engine rankings, then you're losing a lot of revenue.

Your Web site must be properly prepared for the search engines, otherwise you're missing the free traffic from high search engine rankings.

Fortunately, you don't have to be an Internet expert anymore to get high search engine rankings. Our award- winning Web site promotion tool Internet Business Promoter (IBP) can automatically find the weak points in your Web page design.

In three easy steps, it will tell you in plain English what must be changed and how. Finally, getting more customers and more sales through high search engine rankings is not only for the Pros anymore.

Just download the freeware edition and start optimizing your Web site for high search engine rankings.

• How to optimize for Google's image search
  
  
• Google's everflux and fresh crawl
  
  
• How to optatin a top 10 ranking for your web site
  
  
• How to make your Web site more effective
  
  
• Frames and the NoFrames tag

The Search Engine Facts newsletter is free. Please recommend it to someone you know.

You may publish one of the articles above on your Web site. However, you must not change the contents in any way. Also, you must keep all links and you must add the following two lines with a link to www.Axandra.com: "Copyright by Axandra.com. Internet marketing and search engine ranking software ."

All product names, copyrights and trademarks mentioned in this newsletter are owned by their respective trademark and copyright holders.

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