I wanted to create and easy way to search for the things I sought within a targeted list of sites. This translates into a customized search engine. I know Google’s had an app like this for a while but I wanted to give Rollyo a shot. I was reminded of this service when reading SEOmoz’s Web 2.0 award winners. Rollyo allows you do create your own little search engines. I say “little” because unfortunately Rollyo only allows you to add 25 sites to your custom engine. I have 469 SEO and SEM blogs that I need to enter into a CSE and Rollyo couldn’t cut the cake. So I went over to Google’s CSE app and created my own. I’ve pasted the search box code below. Have fun!

Undoubtedly it’s a tight race so I wanted to see how Google (the largest gatekeeper of online information) was treating the Democratic front runners. Let’s take a look at Hillary’s rankings first. After all, she is the candidate who gets asked all the questions first

1. Some up-to-date news worthy information from mlive.com, Michigan Election News
   This ranking seems totally fine and makes sense
2. Hillary’s campaign website.
   Displaying a really nice array of site links. Very impressive.
3. Hillary’s splash page.
   Also being indexed. Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to be indexed twice AND have site links but hey, she’s taking up some nice real estate here.
4. Hillary’s Wikipedia entry under en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton
   Good, fine, makes sense.
5. Hillary’s second Wikipedia entry under en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_Clinton
   Ok guys is this really necessary? Don’t get me wrong it’s great for Hillary but rather redundant.

Now for Barack

1. Barack’s Books
   Of course. This is keeping in line with typical Google protocol. Nice.
2. Some up-to-date news worthy information from NPR
   Good, fine, makes sense
3. Barack’s Campaign website
   Good, fine, makes sense
4. Barack’s Wikipedia Entry
   Good, fine, makes sense
5. Barack’s Illinois Website
   Good, fine, makes sense

Barack’s rankings seem to be more appropriate and less redundant than Hillary’s however Hillary is taking a nice chunk of Google real estate with the site links and the dual Wikipedia entries. Why doesn’t Barack have site links? I mean BarackObama.com has 537,000 pages indexed in Google and Hillary has only 53,200! If anyone should have site links it should be Barack!

Let’s look at some stats yeah?

HillaryClinton.com
G: Indexation – 52,300 pages
G: Backlinks – 9,460
Domain Age: 2001
PR6
Alexa: 14,392
Compete: 1,746

BarackObama.com
G: Indexation – 537,000
G: Backlinks – 15,500
Domain Age: 2004
PR6
Alexa: 4,060
Compete: 877

Barack is definitely kicking Hillary to the curb with indexation, backlinks, Alexa, and Compete stats but Hillary has the 7 year old domain and the Google SERP real estate. With Candidates however, they are both authority names and so Google SERP real estate doesn’t really matter a whole lot since we’re searching for their names specifically and not something like, 2008 president of America…I wonder what those results are?

Submitting press releases is a small part of an overall SEO campaign. Usually beneficial, especially if you opt for some of the paid services from more popular sites like PRWeb.com or PR.com. If you’re generating new, unique, and original content, you’ll want credit for it in one of two ways. You can either post it to your blog or post it through the press release and article networks but not both. I used to think both was ok as long you posted the content to your site first and allowed it to be indexed and then syndicated it throughout the PR and article sites. I was wrong. Duplicate content and authority enter into this indexing equation. Even if you post the content to your site first and allow it to be indexed, not only will Google display and give credit to the site with the most authority but it will also deindex your site’s URL that the content is on.

Here is a timeline of content generation, publication, and syndication:

1. Generated press release
2. Posted to corporate blog
3. Release is now indexed in Google
4. Submitted press release to 4 free press release sites (Backlinks included)
5. Press release sites have been indexed for content
6. The Release’s original URL on the corporate blog has been deindexed
7. Overall site rankings dropped for two keyword phrases found in the title of the release

This obviously stinks but all may not be lost here. There are Backlinks that are contained within the content of the release on the PR sites. These have not been processed yet by Google so I’m not sure if the presence of these will hurt or help. So even though we’ve been hurt content-wise we may still gain rank from the anchor text in the links. I’ll have to return with an update on this.

To spread the word and get indexed for your content, post to your site or the press release sites but never both. Where and when you post first doesn’t seem to matter.

For some reason ‘Mongolian Invader’ is number four over at Google Trends. I say “for some reason” because the the news articles that accompany this search query (that being one single news reference since June 16th) is a spammy site. Could it be that someone is repetitively searching the keyword ‘Mongolian Invader’ to game Google Trends and gain traffic? Interesting bit of manipulation if this is the case.

I’m sure I’m stating the obvious a bit here but has anyone else noticed that Google’s backlink data within webmaster tools isn’t displaying any data? It lists how many links are pointing back to each page but when you click on the link list it doesn’t display anything. Additionally, whenever I attempt to do a site: or link: request within Yahoo, it churns forever and isn’t returning results. I’m not sure what’s going on in the world of backlink data but when a reporting mechanism works 99% percent of the time and then suddenly doesn’t, especially within the two major search engines, it’s a bit disconcerting.

Also worth noting is the weird Google results mentioned over at Search Engine Land and by Aaron Wall.