Google’s site search feature is quite useful to query results within a particular domain. Generally the site search feature is available by a little text link below the organic search results. This used to be called ”More results from Example.com”. Now Google has included a baby search box to replace the text link. The secondary search button does not have Google’s logo – instead it reads Search Example.com The new search enhancement had been spotted in the wild before the announcement from Official Google Blog. A snippet from Google’s blog announcement is reproduced below.
”we’re pleased that we have been able to minimize the need to remember an alphabet soup of .coms, .nets, and .orgs out of everyone’s lives. However, one of the trends we noticed while studying teleporting was that there were lots of searchers who would type the name of a specific website as if they wanted to teleport, but would then immediately issue another more a refined search within this site.”
Google Christmas logo is not the only thing new today. For the first time in years Google changes the default homepage of Google.com and introduces various search options. This is only available for users logged in using a Google account.
As the above screenshot shows Google introduced the following options directly on the homepage.
- – (default)
- Categories
- Description
- Email
- Firstname
- Keywords
- Keywords””
- Language
- Lastname
- Linkspage
- Login
- Password
- Rss
- Title
- url
At the end of the day Google is an artificial engine based on a search algorithm. This algorithm gets tweaked and perfected by Google engineers every so often. But that can never eliminate the human element. Several SEO’s, both blackhat and whitehat have techniques which give you better search results for specific terms. Google takes various measures to counter these nefarious methods to return genuine results that the user is most likely interested in. You can use this fact to your advantage and in fact this is how I managed to outrank Google for the search terms “google toolbar beta version 5″.
Search Results Proof
Don’t believe me? I got proof. If you don’t believe the picture then try out the search for yourself – search google.
Method To Outrank Google
The ranking was not received by any single method. It is a combination of various things. The page title is search optimized with the Title of the post taking the first few positions with the blog name following it. This gives the search engines exactly what they are looking for right there in the title. If you look closely the all the search terms are present directly in the page title. This gives a huge boost in the search engine rankings. Secondly, the terms “google toolbar” have been used several times in the body of the post. So that the reader is not turned off various combination of the terms were used. Even though the terms were not formatted bold it received the mythical Google juice and ranked above Google itself. These may seem like the same old advice you get from any SEO. But as this example shows you use the “same old” proven techniques to rank well in Google.
How About Yahoo Search
For the same search terms I am ranking number 3 on Yahoo search. This goes to show you do not have to tweak your site for the various search engines – rank well in one and you will automatically rank well in others. Check out the screenshot and see that my post about Google toolbar is only preceded by the Google toolbar site.
How Can You Repeat This Feat?
If you use the right combination of keywords with the appropriate keyword density then you can have such results for your posts. Over the next few weeks I will show you step-by-step how to increase ranking, viewers and comments on your blog. Subscribe to my RSS feed today so that you don’t miss out. One thing to note is that you should always write for your readers and not for search engines.
