Rankspike

Here is a quick information I found for Google CSE for business for only $100.00/Year;

Platforms: all Internet-accessible web servers indexed by the Googlebot

Price: free versions
with advertising and limited customization. Note that non-profits, government sites and universities can use this version without advertising on request.
Paid versions:
many more options, no advertising, $100 per year for up to 5,000 pages, $500 per year for up to 50,000 pages (limited to 250,000 queries per year) and $15,000 per year for up to one million pages. Other configurations available from Google Sales cse-sales@google.com

Features

* Finding Content
o Can include multiple sites (unlimited pages in the non-business version)
o Only those pages within the Google search index are available, no promises about additional indexing.
o No access to pages secured by passwords or other access control.
o Updates to new versions of pages when the Google search index updates (no daily or weekly updating).
o Powerful robot crawler can handle most kinds of links

* Indexing
o Handles file formats: HTML, XML, text, PostScript, RTF, PDF, Lotus, MacWrite, MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
o Excellent character set and language recognition for best tokenization
o Does not store the contents of meta tags or page properties.

* Querying
o Defaults matching all words in the query, case-insensitively
o Uses the Google query language, including Internet Query Operators – (minus) and “” (quotes) , along with OR and various field names and other parameters.
o Optional Safe Search for eight languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish, Traditional Chinese)
o Light pluralization using an internal wordlist rather than stemming

* Retrieval
o Retrieves all matching pages (though the CSE doesn’t say how many that is)
o Shows spellchecker “did you mean?” for misspelled and mistyped words, but they may not have any match on a particular site or set of sites, so it can be a dead end.
o Search results can have “Refinements”, zones based on URLs which appear as links along the top of the results
o Search Suggestions appear using the “subscriptions” mechanism, which is quite poorly documented

* Relevance
o Relevance ranking uses all the Google algorithms, including PageRank
o Adjusting relevance weight can only be done via an XML “background label” and “boost” process

* Results UI
o Default looks like the Google web search results.
o Can display interface in English, French, Spanish, German, Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Swedish.
o Hides duplicate pages based on snippet similarity
o Page size and cache link seem to appear or not appear randomly
o Basic results page customization: logo, text and link colors
o Option to use JavaScript and show results in an iframe (not well documented)
o Option to request XML results and use a scripting language or presentation program to show them.

* Search Analytics and reports
o Shows traffic by hour, day, week, month or “overall” (since installing the search service)
o Shows most popular queries in the same time periods, with links to the queries and flags on no match (zero results) with details.
o Note: report periods for low-traffic search installations may end the previous Saturday, even for daily and weekly reports.

* Administration
o All admin done via web
o Option to allow “contributors” who can edit the URLs to be included or excluded, and annotate them with any refinement labels that you have created, but not otherwise change the search engine.

Information courtesy of http://www.searchtools.com/tools/google-service.html.

Have you heard about Google CSE or the Custom Search Engine? Well, it’s like having your
own google search engine inside your site. I recently installed one for our company to see if it fits
right on our websites,and I must say this is a great tool for number of reasons:

1. Well for starters, it’s like running a search engine just for your site that’s provided by the number one
search engine in the planet. Meaning, you get the right indexing and see the results that you would normally see when you go to google.com.
2. The odds are pretty good that when you don’t show up on your own custom search engine you are not going to show up in Google’s global search either.
3. It also helps you figure out how well google cse trust different pages on a site or a subset of sites, as it likely factors in link popularity and other off site relevancy measurements (not like most site search services that you pay).
4. And best of all, you can have one installed for FREE!. Just sign up for google account and you
will be given a code to paste on your pages.
5. And finally, using search results with the same format the way google has it, shows you how compelling your documents look to someone who searches your product or services from google.com.

If you wanted to know how to customized google cse based on your website look and feel there are couple ways to do it. Google provides a set of pre-defined CSS look that will fit the colors and background styles on your website.

In this next Article I will show you how easy it is to setup and customize your own google cse.

Moving your website can be really challenging especially when you’re dealing with SEO, if you’re not careful you’ll end up losing your position on Google’s Page Ranking. Surely you don’t want to start again from square one, and waste the months and years you have already invested to get to where you are right now.

Search Engines indexed your entire site and if you move or rename it without considering the right options you’ll run the risk of losing a lot of traffic and getting the infamous “Error 404 – file not found” link.

The best way to go about this is the 301 redirect.

What about other ways you say? Well let’s take a look at some other ways and why we don’t consider it to be a best option in this article.

Creating a Custom Error Page

But here is the catch;

1. Since Search engine spiders index your site all the time and if it doesn’t see your old content you lose all the keywords tied up to that page. It will take some time before search engine get to crawl deeper in to the pages.

b) This is going to suck for the visitors that they have to click links after links to get to the right content.

Creating Meta Refresh

A meta refresh can be implemented by having an empty page and putting the following code between your <head> elements.

<HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”refresh” content=”0;URL=http://www.new.com/new.htm”>
<META CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>
<TITLE>Page has moved</TITLE>
</HEAD>

What’s the catch?

Be very careful when using this since it’s a technique often used by spammers to trick search engines and what they do is create a page that is optimized for certain keywords and phrases -but usually the page has no real content. The page is then picked up by some search engines, but when a visitor clicks on the search engine entry, they are redirected to another site, often unrelated. You then run the risk of being banned or blocked by major search engines.

You can provide “ROBOTS” statement in the code example above which tells search engines to ignore this page, a safeguard against copping a slap from the engine.

htaccess 301 Redirect

A 301 redirect is the most efficient and spider/visitor friendly strategy around for web sites that are hosted on servers running Apache (check with your hosting service if you have any issues implementing this).  Creating a “301″ means that your site has “moved permanently”.

It’s not that hard to do and best of all, it preserves your search engine rankings. And if you have to change file names or move pages around, it’s your safest option.

A 301 redirect is implemented in your .htaccess file (only on linux box)

301 redirect for Static pages how-to

Download the .htaccess from your root directory, in case your isp don’t have one you can always create one on the fly. Using your notepad create a file called .htaccess (save it as .htaccess without any extensions)

If you have existing one, download it and scroll down past all the existing code, leave a line space, then create a new line that follows this example:

redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm

That’s it. Save your file, and upload it (back) into your web root and test it out by typing in the old address on your url bar.  You should be instantly and seamlessly transported to the new location.

301 redirect for dynamic pages how-to

A dynamic page are pages that are generated by a data driven application, such as cms, blog systems etc.

http://www.yoursite.com/page.php?id=13

Where a query string is used, the 301 redirect solution for static pages above will not work; you’ll need to use a rewrite solution. Using the page.php?id=13 example, here’s what you’ll need to use in your htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=13$
RewriteRule ^/page.php$ http://www.example.com/newname.htm? [L,R=301]

In our example above the should be replaced with the query string of the page you wish to redirect and the page.php with the name of your file prior to the query string.

So there it is, the next time you think about moving your site or file consider implementing the 301 redirect and for more powerful use of redirects check out mod_rewrite.

SEO effort can be challenging and a lot of trial and errors but you know the right tool and techniques you maximize your time well and get more positive results.

Here is a little video tutorial on 301 Redirect: