May 2006 Newsletter

News

Getting back to Google - Part 4

Last month, Google threw us a fish in the form of PageRank for many of our pages. This month, it dealt us a cruel blow by removing most of our pages from its index! To be honest, we're not really sure why this has happened: we're fairly sure that we haven't done anything that search engines would consider questionable - especially as MSN is indexing the entire website regularly.

Our focus over the last couple of weeks has been improving the "external profile" of the BRAINBOX website. (As you may know, the search engines look at the quantity and quality of links leading to a website to assess the importance of that website.) The BRAINBOX website now features on a number of directory websites.

With a bit of luck, Google will be impressed and start indexing us again!

New Client Website

We're very excited about our latest web development project:

• At 120 pages, it's not quite our largest website ( - the Records Management Society website weighs in at 170 pages).
• And it's not quite our most sophisticated website ( - the Administration system for The Fine Line website takes that prize).
• But it is by far the most beautiful website we've been involved with to date.

It should go live around mid June, so we'll bring you full details next time.

Website Ideas

Choosing (Multiple) Domain Names

[Extract from an article on the BRAINBOX website]

The rules around choosing a domain name have changed over the last few years. It's now much more difficult to get the "perfect" domain name... but it's also much less important to get the "perfect" domain name.

It used to be about .com and typos

When we were looking for our first company name, it was very important to us to be able to secure the corresponding ".com" address. Because ".com" was cool.

Even back then (2003) it seemed that "all the good names were gone." We had no choice (given our perceived need for an address of the form [company name].com) to go for a rather contrived company name.

Read the rest of this article on the BRAINBOX website...

Tricks of the Trade

Google Index

Here's how to find out how many of your pages Google hold in its index: it's simply a matter of searching for:

site:www.yourdomainname.co.uk

Here is Google's result page for "site:www.rms-gb.org.uk" which shows that approximately 284 pages from the Records Management Society's website have been indexed. Put another way: 284 pages from the website have the potential to appear in search results.

A couple of things to note:

• Notice that the headline for each result (above) is specific to the page. The searcher can use this to decide whether the page is of interest. Many websites, however, present the same title for every page on the website - usually the company name. Here's an example.
• The number of pages reported by Google is often greater than the number of HTML pages on the website. That's because Google is also able to index files - Word files, PoweerPoint files, .pdfs, etc. - each of which adds to the page count.
• The site:www.yourdomainname.co.uk trick also works on MSN.