SEO Info

Using Google engineers’ terminology will help you look like a search industry insider. For example, talk about “signals” rather than SEO “factors”. Describe weak, undifferentiated content as “thin” (as in a “thin affiliate”). Work “canonicalization” into a sentence at least once every 5 minutes. Share your enthusiasm for “shingles” (yeah, NOT the disease). And so on.

At Google’s Searchology conference this month, some new buzzwords were bandied about. Here are a few pulled from this post and this post by Matt Cutts:

• Chameleon = internal Google codename for the algo that does mid-page suggestions (like search for “labor” and get in the middle of the SERPs “See results for labor and delivery“)
• Spellmeleon = internal Google codename for the algo that preempts the first natural result with 2 results from what Google believes is the correct spelling of your query (like search for “ipodd” and get “Did you mean: ipod Top 2 results shown”
• Google Squared = a not yet launched Google Labs project that returns search results in a structured format (i.e. as a spreadsheet). Search for “small dogs” and get a matrix with breeds, descriptions, sizes, weights, origins, etc.
• Rich snippets = search listings with addition info in the snippet, such as star rating and number of reviews. Google gets this extra data hReview and hCard microformats - simply put, it’s semantic, agreed-upon markup in your HTML pages. Kinda reminiscent of Yahoo’s SearchMonkey. More about it here. (Incidentally, Dries - of Drupal fame - has an interesting take on what this could mean for SEO.)