Search Engines

Has the background on why Google and Facebook don’t have a deal (competing social services – one might guess). But nevermind that. The point is – the search paradigm of the last several years has been broken in the drive to personalization.

Says Battelle – “I have a theory as to why all this is happening, and I don’t entirely blame Google. Back when search wasn’t personalized, Google could defensibly say that one service was better than another because it got more traffic, was linked to more (better PageRank), and so on. Back when everyone got the same results and the web was one homogenous glob of HTML, well, you could claim “this is the best result for the general population.” But personalized search has broken that framework … “

Internet Archive is getting easier to search. Keyword and site combinations have worked in Google (eg site:archive.org  your terms ), but now the Archive offers faceted filtering according to media type and topic, and full text – but in beta, and we all know the problems with converting with optical character recognition – tread carefully.

Searching Through Everything, Internet Archive Blog, Oct 26

Every day, we see an average of 50,000 hits on our search pages, as you, our users, search for a title, creator, and various other metadata about the items we’ve archived. But you have long asked when you would be able to search not only for all items but within them as well. For years you’ve been able to search within the text of a single book using our BookReader, but never before have you been able to search across and within all 9 million available text items at the Internet Archive in a single shot. Until now.

Internet Archive – A Pure Treasure

Internet Archive has been preserving the Web past for 20 years.  Defining Web pages, Web sites and Web captures, Internet Archive Blog (Oct 23)

As of today, the Internet Archive officially holds 273 billion webpages from over 361 million websites, taking up 15 petabytes of storage.

 

What is the Wayback Machine?

The internet wayback machine is a digital archive of the world wide web (www) and other information like books, music, and movies. The tool allows seeing archive version of web pages since the year 1996. Depending on when a website was created, the tool will display what the website looked since it’s creation.

Wayback machine SEO

At our Ottawa SEO company, we use the wayback machine in almost every campaign. The tool allows us to

How to use the wayback machine?

Wayback Machine Google

You can have a little fun by checking google history on the wayback machine

http://web.archive.org/web/*/google.com

Wayback machine alternative

State of the Wayback Machine

The Internet Archive has received funding to improve and expand the Wayback Machine for digital preservation of Web content. Thank the Laura and John Arnold Foundation for their foresight and concern.  Preservation is vital –  and everyone – governments, companies, and people should be contributing to the Internet Archive for the common good.

Grant to Develop the Next Generation Wayback Machine, Wendy Hanamura, Internet Archive Blogs (Oct 21)

The Wayback Machine, a service used by millions to access 19 years of the Web’s history, is about get an update. When completed in 2017, the next generation Wayback Machine will have more and better webpages that are easier to find. The Internet Archive, with generous support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF), is re-building the Wayback Machine which currently offers access to 439+ billion Web captures including Web pages, video and images.

As a qualified Ottawa SEO company we conduct a thorough analysis of your website to find all links that are broken and fix them in various ways here is why.

Have you ever been on let’s say a social media platform and while going through your feed, you notice an article about something you are interested in: You click the link to the full article only to find out that the link you clicked on leads to a page that no longer exists. I dunno about you but it kinda rubs me the wrong way, in our industry we have a term for that link it’s called a link rot.

Why Should you care about broken links?

When visitors follow from or to your website they are expecting the content to be available to them once they get to that page. Usually, visitors will just leave your site since broken links are not only bad for UX but can also be harmful to your site’s loving relationship with Google, i.e. your SEO. The less time a visitor stays on your site, the less likely the search engines will assume your website is not providing what the user is looking for thus giving you a lower ranking.

Google and other search engines regularly send bots to crawl your website, they travel link to link and collects data about each page on your site. If you have a lot of link rot the bots will have a hard time following the content of your page thus giving them a lesser score.

What types of links can be found on your site?

There are two types of broken links on your website and they can be divided into two categories: internal links and external links

Internal Links:

This type refers to a link that goes from one page of your site to another page of the same site. These are the links you have the most control on since you can decide exactly where to send them and what anchor text (the text that represents the link) to use.

External Links:

This type refers to a link on your site that points to an outside source that is used as a reference. Those links are harder to control since the linking source is not your website. Regular checks on your site are necessary to make sure that the places your website are linking to still exist.

How do we find and fix broken links?

At Web Search Guide we run your website through a broken link checker tool that will analyze both types of link.

Internal links are easier to fix if we find some we will work with you to determine if:

1-The page in question really needs that link

2-If the referred page that the link is going to can be re-created or if the URL has changed at some point

3-If we can’t find the content that was on the page we will consult archive.org which pretty much is the internet archive database in some sort and most likely had a version of that page archived.

If the broken links are external, we either replace them with a new destination source or contact the page owner and let them that their link is broken and need to fix it.

At the end of the day this can become a long process and has to be done on a few times a year just to make sure your website is running smooth and the search engine bots can navigate through your website smoothly.

 

 

 

 

Internet Archive Opens TV News Section, Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Oct 1)

The SEO company Ottawa Websearchguide bringing you the latest news.
Internet Archive now carries US television news broadcasts since 2009.
“The new collection began with about 356,000 news programs from all the national U.S. networks and local stations in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. It updates with a 24-hour delay. Searching the service uses the closed-captioning mandated by law for such programs. ”
Barbara Quint advises searchers on ways to make good use of this.
Also, see the Internet Archive announcement

In our broken link building article, we explain the benefits of fixing links that are no longer valid on your site. One of the methods we use is to consult the internet archive to find old content to help in our Ottawa SEO campaigns.

The Internet Archive hopes to create another copy of the archive to be stored in Canada – because redundancy will protect against loss. Good idea. They need money to do this. Donations are tax deductible but I presume that is for residents of the United States – not Canada. Certainly, it’s in our interest since there is plenty of Canadian materials from websites and digitization projects stored in the archive. For example, view this page listing Canadian Libraries and the number of items digitized.

 

All in all the Internet Archive is an extremely valuable resource to Canadians especially for historical research – we do need to help keep it safe from whatever disaster could befall it. It’s just good disaster planning.

The Internet Archive of Canada is a non-profit corporation located at the University of Toronto where you can read more about the Internet Archive