As the Google Blog says, it was seven years ago that Google began operating out of Susan Wojcicki’s spare room.

One of the many benefits of object-oriented programming is that it allows for reuse of logic. For example, classes can be created that contain a base level of functionality.

Back in 1997 I did some research in an attempt to reverse-engineer algorithms used by search engines. In that year, the big ones included AltaVista, Webcralwer, Lycos, Infoseek, and a few others.

It is no secret that Google and Yahoo are on a continuous battle to win our hearts and get everyone to convert, but is converting someone really a matter of the quantity or the quality? Let’s take a look at some top key searches and compare them with some search engines online.

Reader Question: Our Web developer uses page templates for our Web site. I am worried that “code bloat” and other template issues might interfere with our search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Are Web page templates good or bad for search engine optimization?

Are Meta Tags Really Dead?

It’s a fact, Page Not Found, known as a 404 error, can harm your website Ranking with Search Engines as well as being a Turn-Off for Visitors.

The Google Sandbox Effect has been discussed at length in our case study of a new website first crawled in May by Googlebot.

Mike McDonald of WebProNews is at SES 2005 in San Jose, and took in an afternoon session on landing pages.

Google Sitemaps enables Webmasters to Directly Alert Google to Changes and Additions on a Website and that’s just one of 7 Benefits.

Now that Ask Jeeves has acknowledged they are going ahead with their own search advertising service, in order to celebrate the switch, apparently Ask is going to revamp the appearance of their search engine result pages in order to reflect these changes.

Seventy-two days ago Googlebot first showed up and crawled over 250 pages of a brand new domain in an experiment that has had an odd cartoonish character to it, where unexplained things happen with sometimes dark foreboding, a kind of Fantasia online.

The web pages actually at the top of Google have only one thing clearly in common: good writing. Don’t let the usual SEO sacred cows and bugbears, such as PageRank, frames, and JavaScript, distract you from the importance of good content.

In Part One I discussed the Benefits of HTML Validation.

Listing delays that have come to be called the Google Sandbox effect are actually true in practice at each of four top tier search engines in one form or another.

There has been endless webmaster speculation and worry about the so-called “Google Sandbox” – the indexing time delay for new domain names – rumored to last for at least 45 days from the date of first “discovery” by Googlebot. This recognized listing delay came to be called the “Google Sandbox effect.”

Another AJAX site has popped up: Ajaxmatters.com. I know it’s not AJAX per se, but the A9 search site has a feature that’s really killer …

Many people know the importance of creating indexes on SQL Server database tables. Indexes greatly improve the performance of a database.

Apparently, the varying methods in which people use search engines are going to continue its evolution until the Sun collapses. Since inception into the mainstream, the way people use search engines has grown from a mere information and fact-finding tool to something many couldn’t imagine being without.

Many people are afraid to write the meta tags for their websites, thinking that they would have to be search engine optimization specialists in order to do it properly.

One of the easiest things you can do to optimize a web page is to write a better title for it. Aside from writing great content, learning how to write better titles is the best thing you can do for your web page. I’ll start with the basics of a page title and then move into more advanced discussion.