The Cardinal » Search Notes

Arlington Heights Restaurant Around Town Page Booted Off Google #1

admin — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:57:00 +0000

Arlingtoncards.com popular web page Arlington Heights Restaurants Arlington Heights Food was booted off page one search results for Arlington Heights Restaurants last week. The web page occasionally surfaced, but has now disappeared.

The web page has placed on the first page of search results for the last four years and is now gone from Google search results with no reasonable explanation. Web users are encouraged to e-mail the link to Arlington Heights Restaurants Arlington Heights Food to friends and bookmark Arlington Heights Restaurants Arlington Heights Food for quick access to information on Arlington Heights Restaurants and other popular restaurant directory sites.

The last time Arlington Heights Restaurants Arlington Heights Food disappeared from Google search results was March and April 2006.

This Googlewhack Is A ‘Yahoowhack’

admin — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 20:38:35 +0000

Not real sure there is a widespread acceptable Yahoo! version of a Googlewhack, but we have found a Yahoowhack that comes courtesy of Arlingtoncards.com

The two search terms, not enclosed in quotes are dangdy diggy with the single result being an article about the lyrics of a song called Cobrastyle by the Teddy Bears.

Single search result on Yahoo! for the lyrical words dangdy diggy.

More info …
googlewhack.com

HELP! I Didn’t Find What I Am Trying to Find!

admin — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 05:22:57 +0000

IMPORTANT: MANY PEOPLE ARE MISSING ARTICLES WHEN THEY ARE VERY CLOSE TO A SUCCESSFUL SEARCH RESULT. Google is a great search engine, but it’s not perfect. A lot of times people will do a Google search and find an older article with information from an older sports score, incident or report of the incident that they are trying to find. For example, let’s say they saw an accident at Higgins and Arlington Heights Road ‘today’ and they wanted to know what happened. There’s a chance that Google will not have indexed today’s story yet … and your search results will show an OLDER incident at the same intersection. Google is very inconsistent about showing The Cardinal articles in Google search results. Sometimes articles show in as little as five minutes and some days articles don’t show at all. Most articles show up within 24 hours. Therefore, you can check ‘Recent Articles’ in the left column of most pages of The Cardinal. The story might be covered there and you will see the latest Cardinal report. It will probably show up in Google in the near future, but meanwhile, you can find it in the ‘Recent Articles’ section as soon as it is published.

IMPORTANT: You should also try the SEARCH BOX in the TOP RIGHT COLUMN of most pages. That is a local search just for this website. If you type in ‘Higgins,’ it would find all the articles that contain the word ‘Higgins’ … no delay … no waiting for indexing. If you type in Hersey High School Football Schedule, you will get all the articles with information about the high school’s football schedule — for example 2007 and 2008, etc. will show up in the results. We have found that often Google does not show a newer article in the search results. It might skip it altogether or place it on a page further back. Use the top Cardinal search box in the upper right column to see only articles on The Cardinal.

The Cardinal website is focused on Arlington Heights, Illinois. Incidents in adjacent or nearby suburbs are reported if they involve Arlington Heights emergency services departments in mutual aid or if they are major events that are in the Chicago area that are possibly affecting people who live or work in Arlington Heights, Illinois or could be affecting people who live in Arlington Heights, because they are working or commuting in an affected area. Global events are also frequently published, but the global events are just a sampling of the complete news you may find on CNN, FOXNEWS or the traditional major news networks and newspapers.

A Sample of the Highest Ranking Websites

admin — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 22:28:00 +0000

Introduction

The following is a list of websites with a high PageRank as assigned by the Google search engine. PageRank (PR) is the number of points out of ten that signifies the importance of a site to Google. The PageRank number appears to be logarithmic, with a single point representing an order of magnitude difference of importance. See Wikipedia’s PageRank entry for more information.

This list is a portion of all PageRank 9 and 10 pages derived from the Google Toolbar, which displays the PageRank of a web page currently displayed by a browser. The exact PageRank may vary slightly, due to changes in ranking by Google, or by local differences through use of different Google servers or through DNS behavior (e.g., google.com may redirect to its regional sites, which may have lower PageRank). Redirects from a high PageRank page may reduce the redirected page’s PageRank.

The Google search engine can list pages with a high PageRank by searching common keywords such as http, www, the, a, etc.

PageRank 10

Adobe.com – Adobe Systems, software company
Apple.com – Apple Computer, also houses the iTunes Music Store
Blogger.com – Blogger, a weblog publishing tool
CSAIL – MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (*)
Energy.gov – United States Department of Energy
ERCIM.org – European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (*)
FirstGov.gov – U.S. government portal
Google.com – Google, search engine that assigns PageRank
Keio.ac.jp – Keio University, Tokyo, Japan (*)
Macromedia.com – Macromedia, software company
NASA.gov – NASA, U.S. government agency for the space program and aerospace research
NSF.gov – National Science Foundation, U.S. government agency for scientific research
NYTimes.com New York Times, news site
Real.com – RealPlayer, music, video, games
StatCounter.com – tracking service
W3.org – World Wide Web Consortium
- http://validator.w3.org/
- http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
WebStandards.org – Web Standards Project
Whitehouse.gov – The White House

(*): These websites are linked from W3.org, which automatically gave them a PageRank of 10, even if they do not have much traffic or incoming links.

PageRank 9

A9.com – A9.com, search engine
AAAS.org – American Association for the Advancement of Science
About.com – About.com, portal
ACM.org – Association for Computing Machinery
AlltheWeb.com – AlltheWeb, search engine
AltaVista.com – AltaVista, search engine
AMS.org – American Mathematical Society
Amazon.com (redirect) – Amazon.com, shopping site
AOL.com – America Online, portal
Apache.org – Apache Software Foundation, open-source software
APS.org – American Physical Society
Archive.org – Internet Archive
Arizona.edu – University of Arizona
ArXiv.org – ArXiv.org e-print archive
ASU.edu – Arizona State University
BarnesAndNoble.com – Barnes & Noble, bookseller
BBC.co.uk – British Broadcasting Corporation
Berkeley.edu – University of California, Berkeley
BlackwellPublishing.com - publisher
Bloglines.com – Bloglines, web-based news aggregator
Borders.com – Borders Group, bookseller
Boston.com – The Boston Globe, news site
Britannica.com – Encyclop

Welcome to Search Results Weblog Research Department

admin — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 22:28:00 +0000

You have reached the Research Department for Arlingtoncards.com, where we track and study search engine results and web referrals to Arlingtoncards.com and other websites. The Research Department works in conjunction with Successfulsearching.com.

You are likely to see incomplete comments and questions without answers in this section, since many suppositions will be posted as questions — in a sort of ‘question cue.’

The following weblog lists incidents and ideas for improving search result referrals to Arlingtoncards.com and other websites.

Yahoo! Site Explorer Stats Drop Again for Arlingtoncards.com

admin — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 04:58:00 +0000

Using Yahoo! Site Explorer, it was discovered that Yahoo! now only indexes about 30 pages for Arlingtoncards.com. It was once over 300, but started a downward spiral in October 2005.

Web Page Spam Alert

admin — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 20:44:00 +0000

Here is the SERP listing on Google for a page that mixes Arlington, Texas Area Code 847 with toys, jobs. It appears as though a computer generated the text or a human that has very strange writing skills. This

Toys 847 Area Code(Pop Up), 770 Arlingtoncards.com Area codes (Chicago Area) 224, 312, 630, 708, … families via the Toys For Arlington Facts Heights at a Glance Gap Kohls, …
www.chicagoillinoisnews.com/Toys-847-Area-Code.php – 17k – Supplemental Result – Cached – Similar pages

If you are looking for for Arlington Heights Pizza places, try Arlingtoncards.com/pizza
The following text is an excerpt from page that came up sixth on the SERP for Google for the keywords arlington heights pizza arlingtoncards (The pizza reference was attached to Bell, California):

847 Area Code Toys
Thursday, April 13, 2006

“Gigantic, willful, young, Chicago sitteth at the northwest gates. – William Vaughn Moody “An Ode in Time of Hesitation,” 1901″

Should be taught that candles, matches, and lighters running tools and not toys. (TracFone) V60iC Prepaid Phone Motorola Software, Toys & Games, Tools & Hardware, Video, Computer & Video Games and called Tracfone 847 try to get an to number, which is my home area code. QuintCareers.com Jobs in Texas Area Search 847 Code Jobs in QuintCareers.com Find Jobs in Texas Area USA 847. Car Toys Jobs (7) Show Matching Jobs. Carat Code Jobs (1) Show Matching Jobs Telephone Prefix Location List prefix a in location specific area code, click on the area code to go to the If you insist on using IE here is a workaround on the area code links.

To put it another way, QuintCareers.com in Jobs Texas Area Code 847 Search Jobs in Fort Find Jobs in Texas Area Code 847. Car Toys QuintCareers.com Worth, TX US Information Technology 20000 50000 Argonne Week 05/22 between the new 847 area code and all other at codes will require 11digits. Questions on the new area codes can be directed to Vander Heide area ext. GunsAmerica For Sale Guns Gun Classifieds Guns Browser Dealer Dealer No Area Code 847. (Pop Up), H&K USC/UMP CARBINE II (NEW) Seller GREGG’S TOYS FFL FFL Yes Area Code 907.

If you are looking for for Arlington Heights Pizza places, try Arlingtoncards.com/pizza

Google Search Result for “Arlington Heights Police Department” Produce Poor Results

admin — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 11:00:00 +0000

Google search for ‘Arlington Heights Police Department” (including the quotes) does NOT find the Arlingtoncards.com Police/Fire page covering Arlington Heights Police and Arlington Heights Fire Department information, but it does find the following Limousine page that doesn’t even have the word ‘police’ on the page:

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS LIMO DIRECTORYarlington heights limo directory.
www.rentlimosonline.com/limo-directory-city-arlington_heights-state-illinois/ – 32k – Supplemental Result – Cached – Similar pages

Notes:
An official page from the Village of Arlington Heights came up first on the search results.

Reference:
Google Search Result Link: “Arlington Heights Police Department”

Beware: Your Future Employer Could Google You

admin — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 13:50:00 +0000

The information you publish on blogs, forums, personals and dating services could end up in a Google search result that your job interviewer might find on his or her Google search results someday.

Some people have some pretty embarrassing stuff on places like MySpace.com. Compromising pictures, references to drug use or excessive drinking are commonplace. When it comes time to get a job, a Google search that finds these facts could come to haunt you.

Website Seeks Class Action Against Google for Blacklisting

admin — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 01:32:00 +0000

Google Inc. and Yahoo! maintain a lot of secrecy about how websites and web pages are ranked to produce search results. Google was named in a lawsuit accusing the online search engine leader of ruining scores of Internet businesses that have been wrongfully banished from its index.

The civil complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose by KinderStart.com, seeks to be certified as a class action representing the owners of all Web sites blacklisted by Google’s Internet-leading search engine since January 2001.

KinderStart, a Norwalk-based Web site devoted to information about children, says it was dropped from Google’s index a year ago without warning. Large changes in search results for many websites were seen from Yahoo and Google results last fall.

KinderStart claims that Google has engaged in anti-competitive behavior and misled the public by positioning its search engine as an objective source for finding Internet content. The suit seeks unspecified financial damages and a court order that would require Google to change its ways.

Google claims its system attempts to elevate the Web sites with content most relevant to a request. Since PageRank, Google’s ranking system can make or break websites, adminsitrators are upset over Google and Yahoo business practices. To make matters worse, some sites resort to dirty tricks (‘black hat techniques’) to try to fool Google into elevating their web links on search results. This makes it harder for search engine companies to manage legitimate website and web page results, and it sometime hurts the website with legitimate content.

Yahoo! and Google are known to eliminate websites or web pages from their indices, a process which is known as being sent to “the sandbox.”

KinderStart’s lawsuit alleges Google’s policing efforts have penalized Web sites that have done nothing wrong. It is even possible that some website owners use ‘Black Hat’ techniques to sabotage competitor websites – again a situation where innocent websites are penalized by search engines. The lawsuit also alleges that the administrators of banished sites can’t determine how they can restore their standings because Google doesn’t explain its actions.

Google has previously defended its business practices. In 2003, Google persuaded a federal judge to dismiss a case filed by Oklahoma City-based Search King Inc. after its search ranking abruptly fell. Google argued its search ranking formula represented an opinion protected by the First Amendment, which U.S. District Judge Vicki Miles- LaGrange agreed.

KinderStart said its traffic plunged by 70 percent after Google dropped it. At its peak, KinderStart’s visitors viewed more than 10 million Web pages per month, according to the suit.

Kinderstart will argue that Google has become an “essential facility” that should be required to warn Web sites before dropping them from the index. Imagine that your electric company cut your power because you didn’t use electricity properly and then the power company refused to explain how to prevent the cutoff in the future.

Google maintains its secrecy is essential to its success.

Submitted Suspected Spam Report for Google

admin — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 17:12:00 +0000

Searched keywords in Google Search Box
‘arlington heights illinois travel team baseball cardinals’ (without quotes)

Actual Search Result from Google

Exact same search results on two different web sites — one for Orlando and one for Chicago.

NO TEXT FOR ‘Cardinals Arlington Heights Community Directory’ was found on either one of these sites.

Here is the text that was shown on the Google search results:

No sub category
Arlington Heights Home of the Cardinals Arlington Heights Community Directory and
… Baseball Tickets: MLB All Star Tickets Buy MLB Tickets for all teams …
www.goorlandocard.com//resources/ general-no-sub-category.html – 72k – Cached – Similar pages

No sub category
Arlington Heights Home of the Cardinals Arlington Heights Community … Travel to
Chicago Illinois – Traveler Directory, Convention Guide to Hotels, …
www.gochicagocard.com/resources/ General-No-sub-category.html – 97k – Cached – Similar pages

Suspected Search Engine Spam Page

admin — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 02:48:00 +0000

Here is a page discovered on 1/16/2006 (2200 CST) during status check for some of our web properties, namely Aprioriathletics.com, Arlingtonathletics.com, Exercise-Reports.com

Google Search Keywords: arlington heights personal trainer

Link to Google search results

Link to Possible Offending Page

How listing Appeared on Google Search Results:

Arlington Heights Personal Trainer Certification – $49.99 – IllinoisExpertRating offers an online Personal Trainer Certification for people in Arlington Heights, Illinois who would like to become certified fitness trainers.
www.expertrating.com/Fitness/Illinois/Arlington-Heights-Personal-Trainer-Certification.asp – 21k – Cached – Similar pages

CONCLUSION:
Text from web page showing multiple unnecessary use of Arliington Heighs, IL. Web page at time of viewing had very little specific value to validate a relationship of Arlington Heights, Illinois and personal training.

Here’s An Odd Report from Google Local

admin — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 07:42:00 +0000

After checking Google Local for its search result handling of some restaurants and bars on Google Maps, we found a Google reference that information was obtained from:

www.comevisitarlingtonheights.com

We checked out a direct link from the Google Map bubble for the Boiler Room, a downtown Arlington Heights bar. The link was:

http://www.comevisitarlingtonheights.com/nightlife/nightlife.htm

There was a list for nine bars and there was a list of eight Google Ads (four real estate ad, one florist, and only three nightlife type ads).

This page seemed to violate one Google’s Webmaster Guidelines:
Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

FULL WEBMASTER GUIDELINES TEXT:

Webmaster Guidelines

Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the “Quality Guidelines,” which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index. Once a site has been removed, it will no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google’s partner sites.

Design and Content Guidelines:

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.
Check for broken links and correct HTML.
If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Technical Guidelines:

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, 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.
Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it’s current for your site so that you don’t accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site.
If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site.
Don’t use “&id=” as a parameter in your URLs, as we don’t include these pages in our index.

When your site is ready:

Have other relevant sites link to yours.
Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
Submit a sitemap as part of our Google Sitemaps (Beta) project. Google Sitemaps uses your sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Quality Guidelines – Basic principles:

Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”
Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Quality Guidelines – Specific recommendations:

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
Don’t send automated queries to Google.
Don’t load pages with irrelevant words.
Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn’t included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles listed above will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

If you believe that another site is abusing Google’s quality guidelines, please report that site at http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to pr
oblems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.

Yahoo! and MSN Referral Drop

admin — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 11:00:00 +0000

Yahoo search engine results gradually reduced indexed paged of Arlingtoncards.com during 2005. Yahoo! at one time referred about 70 pages per day at the height of 2005, but by year’s end was only referring about 5-10 pages per day. While this dropoff occurred Google results increased steadily.

Many other search engines use Yahoo for their search results, so eventually a dropoff was observed in other search engines as well. A sudden dropoff was observed in MSN.com in December 2005.

One frustrated webdesigner wrote to the Yahoo! Search Blog staff on 12/15/05 about dropped results:

I thought that after I emailed you guys so many times I would be back up on this next update. My main page is still up, but my hunrdeds of pages are still not listed in the serps. I emailed over and over again. I had tons and tons of #1 listings and then, poof, I vanished. I have a good site with no spam, etc. I don’t rely on evil tactics either.

Many times the results bounce back, but Arlingtoncards.com is working to attain search engine optimization to recover from the cuurent Yahoo! failure.

Searching Tips for Arlington Heights Restaurants

admin — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 10:23:00 +0000

We’re testing how people search for Arlington Heights restaurants to monitor referrals to restaurant related pages on Arlingtoncards.com.

This is a marketing test with the practical goal of gaining referrals to one of the restaurant pages on Arlingtoncards.com:

http://www.arlingtoncards.com/aroundtown/foodrest3.htm

This page has been off and on the Yahoo! search index since early October 2005.

From the Yahoo! keyword selector tool here are the related searches done in October:

Searches done in October 2005
Count    Search Term
597   arlington heights restaurant
99    restaurant arlington heights illinois
92    arlington heights il restaurant
52    restaurant in arlington heights
28    restaurant in arlington heights il
26    arlington heights illinois in restaurant

See searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/
Look for Keyword Selector Tool
See also searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srch/index.php
How many searches can your business get
Keyword Selector Tool