Paid per search? Doesn’t sound quite right

Posted by multippt

My Search Funds is offering to pay you just for web searches. That’s probably one of the easiest ways to earn money, since after all, you do use Google or Yahoo right? Results are obtained from Yahoo, Ask, and Windows Live. Google is not supported since Google doesn’t permit third parties to modify searches. In order words, MySearchFunds would be Dogpile, except that it pays.

The new Dogpile?

Dogpile is already popular enough just for implementing the idea of combining all your favorite (and not-so-favorite) search engines in one. My Search Funds is very similar, except that you need to install a plugin in order to use their service. This plugin appears to record your searches, naturally since it has to know how and what you are searching for. The programme may discredit related searches so as to prevent “repeated searches”.

It’s pretty unusual that someone would offer paid to search services, especially since they may make a huge loss out of it. I’m sure that My Search Funds would be using the information collected in order to perfect their search results, or something else. Nonetheless, for those of you who are not too concerned with privacy issues, go ahead and use My Search Funds.

Nonetheless, the information collected by My Search Funds would be incredibly useful to companies like Alexa, since it records search traffic.

Privacy issue?

My Search Funds states in its privacy policy and Terms of services that it would collect information and retain it. Fortunately, it’s not much of a problem, since Google does almost the same. However, the fact that they are willing to divulge your personal information to the authorities meant that they will keep your personal information forever. Most search companies do not do that, so you may want to be wary of that.

Not much information was given on how the information might be used for future purposes.

To trust or not to?

There are no costs involved in participating in the programme, but you may want to note that My Search Funds is recording whatever you are searching. While you may not mind that, some do especially if they are searching for you-know-what. The pay rate sounds cheesy - but it’s possible that they may have gotten that from just ad revenue.

Check for 404s and 500s, before they ruin your SEO

Posted by multippt

Most new browsers have a habit - they will not announce error pages. That’s all as a side-effect of people wanting to have a custom “file not found” error message. While this is not a big problem, it’s always a good idea to check for such “page” errors that may affect your search engine optimization.

How search engines treat 404s

Search engines like Google have to deal with missing pages, and they identify such pages via that famous 404 error code (i.e. file not found). So, how does Google treat missing pages? It will remove missing pages from its index. Not a good thing if your “error page” turns out to be a working page that was wrongly producing the error.

This usually affects PHP scripts, and poorly made .htaccess files. So, if you are a person who uses plain HTML and don’t use anything server-related (which almost 80% of everyone is using), then you need not ever worry about this problem. Though, I’m not implying that everyone should downgrade from PHP to HTML, it’s just that PHP has that lovely ability to spoof error codes, hence the error messages.

Similarly, web-pages may spurt out a similar error - 403. This error means that the page is forbidden from being viewed, pretty common for files given the wrong permissions. Like 404, Google will not index such pages. Of course, think using error codes for stopping search engines (you got the robots.txt file for that) - they are meant to be used for… errors.

How search engines treat 50xs

Google is pretty lenient when it comes to error 50x. Error 50x messages indicate that there is something wrong with your hosting. If something goes wrong on the server-side, you get 50x. Google will still check on your site, but it will slow down on indexing your site (after all, a site with a malfunctioning server ain’t going to update much right?).

Why aren’t browsers showing the errors?

It’s a sad thing, but yes, web browsers will not indicate error codes to you (they are not meant to be “seen” anyway). So, if you have a main page that gives error 501, you will not know that it got that problem. In a bid to satisfy everyone’s desire for a customized error page, all browsers will display the page as “normal” regardless of the error given out (except for 30x errors which means redirection).

Detecting errors

Google webmaster has a nice way of telling you it can’t crawl/index something. Though, it has a crude way of telling you that. Fortunately, it’s just sufficient enough if you want to do a little check up on the page if it is really a missing page. Unfortunately, if it is a genuine missing page, you’ll have to go link-hunting for that broken link (not the scope of this article, but you can always use a sitemap generator to do that).

Why do errors ruin SEO

Errors are errors. People shouldn’t be seeing them at all. Similarly, you will not want search engines to face errors like that as well. An error is treated differently by all search engines, but the ultimate result is that the page producing an error will be given a “penalty”, well sort of. Most problematic pages are rarely indexed, let alone appearing in search results. Remember that nice Google bomb that featured a “page not found” page appearing for “Weapons of mass destruction”? Google has fixed that problem by simply removing error pages from the index.

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Ideally, your site should not have a single error response (unless the visitor deliberately stumbles into the unknown). If it does, fix it, otherwise you may have a few missing pages that will not appear in search engines.

Windows Live search: No longer indexing Google ads

Posted by multippt

Whew, sounds like Microsoft didn’t anticipate that it’s own crawler will be indexing Google AdWords ads. And no, don’t get the idea that it will help just because your ad link “gets more exposure” (oh wait, it does help). It’s pretty interesting to note that even those ads can rank up fairly well for certain terms.

The problem is this: In an attempt to increase the relevancy of the search results, Live search now includes links pointing towards pages blocked by even robot.txt files (well, it only told it to not crawl the page, but didn’t tell it to not count the stuff inside the links pointing to the page). Again, it shows that Microsoft ain’t following the robot rules completely, because those ads are only present in Google search results, which are disallowed to be indexed by the robot.txt file. Let’s hope other ads won’t pop up as well. Though, this wasn’t the first time it has happened before… :)

Well, at least those ads stopped appearing in the results for now.

Google, Yahoo,… what about Windows Live?

Posted by multippt

Google and Yahoo has always remained in the big picture. However, there is one big giant standing in the shadows. Windows Live is probably much better compared to its older precursor, MSN search, and is possibly comparable to the 2 top giants.

Though, Windows Live was not as well-known compared to Google and Yahoo. Rather than word-of-mouth, Microsoft decided to incorporate it into Internet Explorer 7 as the default search engine, which probably did not work as well as compared to Internet Explorer dominance in 2002.

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