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Well it is it is Christmas Day again and while for most of us, it is predominantly a time of excess and gluttony, we must remember that it is also a religious time of year. That made me think. What SEO  problems would Jesus’ website face?

• Keywords: Jesus, Religion, Christianity, Crucifixion, Carpentry, Fish.
• Set all pages to robots, follow.
• Change the parables because of hidden content.
• 301 redirect the Jesus-is-dead-page to the he-has-risen.htm
• Duplicate content: Father the Son and the Holly Ghost (only on the Catholic website.)
• Create a  blog on a sub-domain called, “Loaves and Fishes” and direct it to the main site.
• Each page would be a PR-10 because it had a link from God.

Merry Christmas and best wishes for the New-Year.

One of the cool things that has been added to Google Webmaster Tools is the feature which allow you to see the website as Googlebot sees it. There are plugins which also you to do this in Firefox, namely, user agent switcher. This alters the user agent string when making a request to a website so that it will return the page as though it were being spidered by Googlebot.
The addition tof this Google Webmastertools adds this functionality. It is located in  the labs section. Simply type a URL and press fetch. You can only fetch pages on sites which you have added to your webmaster tools account however.

When the request is processed, it will show the page code as Google sees it allowing you to identify if there are any problems. It is particularly good for identifying spam links that have been injected into your site which may only be visible to Googlebot.

You may have noticed that Google is added more features to keep it ahead in market share of search. To use the new search feature, select latest from the search menu options and results will appear as they occur. The results are taken from a variety of sources including Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca, but you find mostly they tend to come from Twitter. For example to find out the latest news on the snow in the UK search, snow UK for this and news will be relayed as it happens. It could be useful in certain situations but I think that it will be used for spam when it is realised that it will display in realtime for certain events.

I was looking on Google trends and I was thinking I wonder how Bing is doing? Would Google show me the information for its largest competitor? As it turns out it did and the results are much as you would expect. Almost nothing before the launch of the search engine then a large spike, settling down somewhat and now starting to increase slowly. (I would post a picture but the image upload facility is not working.)

http://www.google.com/trends?q=bing

On the image you can also see there also a small blip at the end of the year before Bing was even conceived. Thinking what could that be. The Christmasy answer was revealed when I thought of a White Christmas. It was Bing Crosby.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=bing+crosby&ctab=-1&geo=all&date=all

A partnership between the BBC, ITV, BT, Five, Channel 4 and TalkTalk has been given a provisional thumbs up by the BBC Trust to develop an internet television standard. The project known as Canvas, would develop set-top boxes to access services such as BBC iPlayer and ITV player.
The boxes could be available by the end of next year and will sell for around £200. In addition to these services, users will be able to access internet services such as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. The news of this free service has not pleased everyone however. Pay TV providers such as Virgin and BSkyB are critical of the scheme.

Microsoft’s search engine Bing! may find itself in court over the name it chose for the search engine. Apparently, there is another company called Bing! (with the exclamation mark). It is an internet design company based in Missouri and according their lawyers, they have been using the name for more nearly ten years.
They also allege that Microsoft’s use of the name will create confusion in the marketplace.
In my opinion, I cannot see how any confusion can arise.
Microsoft are not averse to stomping over people that use even variations of their name in websites (Especially if they are critical of their products.) However this case is slightly different. Microsoft is a global company that everyone has heard of and a large proportion even have the misfortune to use their products every day.
I would not find myself typing a query into the search engine when I meant to order a website or conversely, ask for a website to be built in a search engine only to have a list of search results returned. In any event, the difficulty can be resolved by being more precise with the language.
If the Bing! in question is ambiguous then clarify it by saying Bing! the search engine or Bing! the web design company. The default position will be Bing! the search engine since most people did not know there was a web design company called Bing! until now. If there is still any doubt, then say Google.

One of the predictions from SEO consultants, SEOMoz is that SEO will become harder as search engines try to keep you on their site by answering your queries before you even click on a search result. This can be seen in automatic answers that appear for you search. The most rudimentary of which would be a query like, how many meters in a mile. Just type meters in a mile and you will be returned the result.

1 mile = 1 609.344 metres

If you need to know the weather it will show the answer as you type in the suggestion box. At least it will in the US Google, it does not do this in the UK yet.
It is not just Google that is doing this, Bing is also in on the act. If you type a flight number into Bing, it will give you results of its current status, where it started from and its destination.
All these feature are seen as ways of answering the query without having to go to a website. The search engines are becoming information engines. What effect will this have on driving traffic to a site?

Speculation  today that Google will develop its own phone. This is not news I hear your say and you would be partly correct. The operating system developed for telephones and mobile devices has been around for some time. However, this has been made to run on telephones that have been produced and sold under the manufacturer HTC.

Now the Google telephone is going to be made for Google, with Google branding. The research phones have been issued to some employees at Google to test the facilities.  Unfortunately, that is where the story ends as further news is not forthcoming.  I would expect that it will probably have something to do with augmented reality as applications for this seem to fit well with Google’s information retrieval model.  Don’t you get the feeling they are trying to market this for all it is worth?

To keep pace with Bing, Google have announced they are rolling out personal search in their results. What does this mean for the average user?

Personal search has been around for more than a year. The idea is that the search engine will learn about your likes and dislikes through your search history and return results that it believes you are more likely to interest you. This skews yours results according to your previous searches.

The more searches that you perform the more data there is to work from and so in theory the results should become more tailored to your needs. However, does that mean that they will be better?

Although there is no way to switch personal search off, it can be disabled by adding the parameter &pws=0 to the end of the search query URL.

Bing is making great efforts to differentiate itself from its arch nemesis, Google. One of the ways it is doing this is with a new visual search. ( This creates sets of data and allows the images to organised in ways that show relationships between them. One example is the Priministers of the UK, and the images can be sorted and arranged in many ways.
As well as the usual alphabetical order, the prime ministers can be ordered in terms of their age, how long they spent in office, which political party they belonged. Hovering over an image produces lots more information.

Other data sets include the periodic table, oscar winners. At the moment this is in beta and there are limited data sets.
However, an interesting dataset is the shopping dataset which allows products to be arrange in terms of price, brand, number of reviews and who they are suitable for. This can be ordered and arranged to suit your particular queries. People find it easier to look at images than read text and the way in which queries can be answered by sliders is an interesting and tactile way of interacting with the information.
If it can be adapted to larger dataset from search queries it could prove to be a winning search tool that bests Google.