10 SEO issues

I included 10 questions involving SEO and search engines which might be issues that search engine optimizers might come across, that I wouldn’t expect most developers to have spent much time thinking about. I’ve written about most of these here, and I thought it might be fun to share them.

1. What impacts might Microsoft’s VIPS, Yahoo’s Template Extraction, and Google’s Segmentation of Visual Gaps have upon a search engine’s weighing of links, document representation, shingles based duplicate content detection, and categorization of topics on a page, and how might a search engine determine which segment is the most important?

2. What steps should one take to try to get a site to rank well for a query in Google Maps, and how might something like location prominence and location sensitivity of that query term impact the range and rankings of sites that appear in a Google Maps listing?

3. What are some of the potential flaws that a search engineer might make when using a discounted cumulative gain approach to evaluating the relevancy of search results at different positions?

4. How might image size, image resolution, image contrast, inclusion of a face in an image, use of images across multiple pages of a site, internal links on a site to images, and external links on a site to images impact the possible rankings of images in search results?

5. What should be contained in a video XML sitemap to make it more likely that the videos included are crawled and indexed by Google?

6. How might Google customize search results for a searcher based upon language and country preferences and past browsing history, even when a searcher isn’t even logged into their Google account and seeing personalized results?

7. What types of user behavior data might the search engines be using to reorder search results besides simple clickthrough rates, and how might those kinds of signals be used in determining sitelinks or quicklinks that Google, Yahoo, and Bing may show in search results?

8. How might a search engine determine which kinds of results besides web pages to blend into search results, and how might that approach change when named entities are involved?

9. What kinds of ranking signals might make it more likely that a news source ranks well in Google’s news search, and why might the search engine choose one article over others when the stories are substantially similar?

10. How are search suggestions (query refinements) chosen by a search engine to include in search results, and why might a search engine show one type of search suggestion at the top of search results, and another type at the bottom of the results.