Monthly Archives: December 2006

No Title Tag On Your Page? Don’t Worry, Google Will Use Your Headers Instead

One of my colleagues today noticed something weird with a client’s website. Basically, because of a problem with their CMS, some of this french site’s pages do not have title tags. While my colleague was working on the website, she realized that in its index, Google displayed some text in the SERPS for what’s usually the title tag..

Let’s take this page as an example. As you can see, there’s no title tag. Now let’s look at the cached version of this page in Google :

The text displayed instead of the title tag is actually a header. Google is showing the first header that it found on the page. In our example, the first header in the source code is a h2 (note: there’s no h1 tag on the page) :

<div id=“lang”>
div>

<div id=“last_news”>

<h2>Dernière minute

I’ve checked other titleless pages from this site, and in the SERPS, Google always shows this h2 tag instead of the missing title tag. The first header tag is always this h2 tag containing the text “Dernière Minute”, or “Fresh News” in english. Unfortunately, the site didn’t make a clever use of Hx tags to structure their document, if they did, Google would have showed something relevant to users, but that’s not the case…

This is yet another example that respecting basic accessibility principles will be appreciated by Google and improve both your rankings and the user experience.
I tried to see if someone else came across the same case, and found this guy.

Five Things You Didn’t Know About Me

Ok, Pierre and Joe both tagged me. Now I got to share 5 things about myself, please don’t laugh! 🙂

So, let’s see:

1. I got into SEO by chance. On the last year of my Bachelor degree in France (a year ago, in 2005), I had to do a final four-month internship. I always wanted to go to California, so I decided to try to do this internship over-there while my classmates would freeze their ass in France. So how did I manage to get my ass 6000 miles from my home? Well, I kinda spam over 1000 companies in California with emails that I’ve found on craiglist. I used an emailing software and within a few hours, I had sent 1000 emails to companies from San Diego, L.A. and San Francisco. The next day I had a few companies that were ok to hire me, I chose the one that was the closest to the beach. It was a SEO company located in Carlsbad, CA. So I basically learned SEO from scratch in Carlsbad, in the San Diego area, and from that day, I fell in love with both California and SEO 🙂

2. I love Rap. Mostly old school stuff such as Public Enemy, KRS One, A Tribe Called Quest, Slick Rick, Bone Thugs N Harmony or N.W.A (West Coast!)… My favorite rapper is 2pac, then comes Eazy-E.

3. I didn’t know how to swim until the age of 16, I’ve always been scared of the water, even if my sun sign is Pisces.

4. I was a born in France but my parents are Algerian (Kabyles) immigrants.

5. I’m a heavy weekend drinker, I really started to drink when I was in Dublin, and now even in Paris, I’m still drinking Guinness even if my friends keep making fun of me.

Ok, now I need to tag 5 people. So, let’s see. Wow!, everyone has already been tagged. Alright, so let’s pick 2 french guys: Arnaud, and Sébastien Billard. Let’s see what my friend Earl Grey has to say. I don’t know her personally, but let’s choose Natasha Robinson to add a girl to the list. And Mashhoor.

Take That Google! Yahoo and IBM to Offer Free Enterprise Search

How can you differentiate from a competitor in order to gain more market share? Sometimes, a company can take a pricing decision that can boost its sales but also generate a positive response amongst their customers.

A good example is Yahoo and IBM who just announced that they teamed up in order to provide a free enterprise search tool.  Their goal was to develop an enterprise search tool for companies that don’t have the budget to buy a solution such as Google’s Enterprise Solutions (with Mini for small businesses, and Google Search Appliance for medium and large ones), Fast, or any other paid search tool.

Besides being free, Yahoo and IBM solution, called IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition has got some excellent features:

• Indexes up to 500,000 documents and over 200 file types in 30 different languages.

• Customizable search results interface

• Add new synonyms.

• Create your own featured links.

You couldn’t even get those features for $1995 with Google Mini 🙂 More information about IMB Omnifind Yahoo! Edition (maybe they should get a shorter name…) can be found here.