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For years now photographer Katherine Newbegin has travelled the world and photographing inside empty buildings. Newbegin lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, but in 2008 she received a DAAD fellowship to live in Berlin, where she had been visiting and working over the years.

PHOTOGRILL: Please tell us about your photography in general.

PHOTOGRAPHER: My work is combination of the experience of wandering, of allowing myself to be carried to the locations, and being open to that moment of recognising what is home. For me, breaking into spaces and exploring the traces of what has been left behind feeds my insatiable curiosity about these places and the people who occupied them. My hope is that the photographs create a stage for a story to be told, for the viewer to examine the remainders and piece together something that echoes within their own history. The work is deeply informed by the human relationships that took place in these spaces, but now only remain in the evidence left behind. The lingering floor patterns, ancient mattresses, and bedside tables act as a conduit into a displaced time. Initially, the interest in these spaces is of a visual nature and not a political one, or one related to changes taking place in that society – then as I learn more about these countries, it takes on a bit of a societal interest, but primarily it is visual.

PHOTOGRILL: What was it about Cambodia that attracted you?

PHOTOGRAPHER: Cambodia and Vietnam held a real fascination for me – the architecture is influenced by a 1970?s soviet feel. I had always wanted to travel to Vietnam because of the history of the Vietnam War, and the Khmer Rouge, which I had researched some during college. At the time, I was living in Berlin and preparing for a show there in the Spring. I was thinking a great deal about the context of where and how the work was shown. On top of that, the Berlin winter was dark and brutal. I had never been to South East Asia before, so I did not really know what to expect. I thought it might be a little like Mexico, but I was surprised by how completely different it felt. One of the things I loved in Cambodia was visiting Sihanoukville – I went there to find an abandon train station. While I was photographing, this cow kept entering the shot. People actually lived in the train station, and finally a little boy helped keep the cow out of the shot.

PHOTOGRILL: What was it like working in Cambodia?

PHOTOGRAPHER: My process is very much about wandering and discovering and allowing the photographs to shape themselves. There is a book by Rebecca Solnitt, called A Field Guide to Getting Lost. In it she talks about the colour spectrum and the blues we cannot see, almost like the residue of a hidden world. Cambodia felt like it held secrets, long passageways that led only to emptiness.

I did not have a specific agenda in mind when I started shooting in Cambodia. I found a local hotel magazine guide and I took a taxi from one hotel to the next. The most daunting obstacle was receiving the permission of the hotel manager to photograph, but usually I paid to rent the room and then it was no problem, since I was a customer. Cambodia was relatively easy to work in, since they are very accustom to tourism, incredibly kind, and most people spoke English.

PHOTOGRILL: I?d like to get a sense of what you look for in a building?

PHOTOGRAPHER: This is a great question, most of the time I travel alone and my process occasionally involves illicit activities like breaking into places, throwing rocks threw windows, or giving people a bribe for letting me into spaces while their manager is away. Once I do find the actual space I want to capture, then I think it is an indescribable feeling of being pulled towards something.

With Phnom Penh Discotheque, the building was near a hotel that I was looking at photographing. The truth is my boyfriend saw the building first, I was making a phone call in the lot right in front of the building. While I was doing this, he walked in and looked at the first floor, then he came back to get me knowing that I would love it. The building itself, was not that interesting from the outside, but once I entered, it had this feeling of history, and traces of people having passed through it, which is crucial to my work.

I am not sure how to describe when I?m certain I need to photograph a space, other than that there is something I recognise in it, something that feels like home. I also completely fell in love with the patterned floors. The light was this perfect afternoon light and it seemed to completely set some of the rooms aglow. The space was both abandoned upstairs and in use downstairs as a discotheque, a dichotomy which I found engaging – this very old royal house was being taken over by kids and used as a party scene at night.

PHOTOGRILL: How did you work once you were inside the building?

PHOTOGRAPHER: When I am shooting I don?t feel that I engage my analytical mind at all, it just becomes a pure experience of seeing. I remember feeling safe since I was not alone, and this gave me the freedom to relax and take my time, which is why I think these images turned out so well. I think I only made slight variations on a specific idea, well two ideas – one is to capture the space as a whole and the second is to then to move closer in and reveal the traces.

I always use the same equipment, which is a Pentax 6 x 7 and my tripod. I use the Pentax because it is small enough for me to carry in a backpack and large enough for me to print 30 x 40 inches or larger. It is a great camera when I am in rushed circumstances because it is roll film and it goes quickly. I do remember several times in this building, packing all my gear up and then realizing I had found another shot and unpacking everything again. The architecture here seemed to engage me for a disproportionate amount of time, I recall being surprised by how long I stayed there shooting. I shot this on film, in natural daylight, and the only real technical aspect were the long exposures, two minutes or more for most of the shots.

This was a very prolific day for me, I just loved this building. The shoot took almost five hours, and I think it was at least 150 images, but all from this same building. In the entire trip, I took around 1000 shots, and in total I probably photographed twenty buildings.

PHOTOGRILL: What do the Cambodian people think of you photographing their old buildings?

PHOTOGRAPHER: Most of the time, people are usually a bit uninterested about the work I do in their buildings. In this particular situation with the discotheque, the guard did not seem to care. I later found out, from someone who came to see the exhibition in Berlin and recognized the space, that this particular building had also been used to exhibit contemporary art for a celebration. In Cambodia, the children were very fascinated by my camera equipment.

Most recently, in India it was very difficult to get the permission to photograph the cinemas, because people were suspicious of me. The people of India were very curious about what I was doing, where I was from, and what my work was like. Usually, I had anywhere from ten to thirty people watching me work while I shot the cinemas. There was a real indescribable warmth in India.

PHOTOGRILL: Is post processing important to your work?

PHOTOGRAPHER: Yes, the post process is very important to my work, but I am a traditional darkroom printer, so it is different. I have to strike a delicate balance of not being too close to the work by allowing myself distance after I make the photographs. But also I must not lose interest in the work by doing too much darkroom time and getting burned out. With this particular project, I printed my own contact sheets in New York and then I flew straight back to Berlin where I was suppose to be living full time for my DAAD fellowship. I had broken the rules a bit by sneaking off to Cambodia to make the new work, but at that point, Berlin was so dark and depressing I was ready to jump off a bridge.

Then once I was back in Berlin I sorted through all of these images on the computer (because there was no money to print them) and repeatedly narrowed it down. Finally, I had about 30 images printed into tests in order to edit for the exhibition and I chose which ones would become the final 30 x 40 inch prints. For me, this in depth editing of the work was brutal and just as important as the shooting of the work. This is the part of how I essentially decide what the story is I want to tell.

PHOTOGRILL: How has your photography career progressed?

PHOTOGRAPHER: I received an MFA in Photography from Hunter College in 2005 and BA in 1999 from Yale University where I studied English and Photography. During my studies I worked with Reiner Leist, Lois Conner, and Todd Papageorge. In the Spring of 2001, I moved to New York City, where I have been living and working ever since. In 2008 I received a DAAD fellowship to live in Berlin, where I had been photographing in Eastern Europe, off and on, for years.

While living in Berlin, Revolver published a two-person catalogue of my work. I have been showing my work at various galleries and institutions in both Europe and the US, including: Dina4Projekte, Haas & Fischer Gallery, Galerie Open, Pinakothek der Moderne, Kunstverein Munich, and the Loeb Art Center at Vassar College.

For the past five years, I have worked on a project photographing old Soviet hotel rooms, in countries such as Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania, Cuba, Moldova, and Eastern Germany. In December 2009, I received a fellowship from the Tiffany Foundation, which allowed me to travel to India where I photographed old Cinemas.

This past spring, I had my first museum show at the Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, where I was invited, along with Tina Barney and Tim Davis, to photograph the campus over the course of one year.

PHOTOGRILL: Is there anything I should’ve asked?

PHOTOGRAPHER: For some reason this question made me think of my first photograph from when I was thirteen. I remember constructing a scene with no people in it. I photographed an old chair in my house with the back door open and the reflection of the daylight on the intricate wood of the chair. It is an image that still resonates with me and seems to hold everything I look for now a sense of isolation and emptiness, the lack of people but in a way it is a stage waiting for people, the traces of history, the architecture and the domestic background.

The other thing I should also mention is a recent collobaration with ArtStar.com, where I have a couple of images from my work photographing cinemas in India. What I love about ArtStar is that they are making my work available to everyone, because it is very affordable. I like to think of having these images from India in house in Portland, Oregon or an apartment in New York City. I have also been really amazed with how much support and exposure they have provided for me as an emerging artist. They are working with some fantastic artists in both their main site and with littlecollector.com – eventually the website will be launched in 5 languages. And not to leave out the fact that they are just really fantastic people.

a a This entry was posted on Thursday, July 21st, 2011 at 8:10 am. It is filed under The Grill and tagged with Creative Photography, Photographic Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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Search engine reputation management (SERM) is reaching the next level. PR firms across the globe are starting to offer elaborate services in corporation with SEO firms. A professional approach doesn't just consist of cleansing the search results once a reputation is already in trouble. Companies need to become aware that all their activities can result in well-ranked online messages that can have a huge effect on the perception of their brand.

This article explains just a selection of SEO PR services that I've seen offered so far. New ones are sure to come and hopefully Search Engine Watch readers can share some of their discoveries.

SERP Cleansing

Already quite well known is the service of pushing undesired search results for your name out of the prominent first search engine result page (SERP). This can be done by textually optimizing pages on different domains for your brand name and by directing various links to those pages. Only once 10 results are better optimized than the negative result, will the negative result be removed from the first top-10 page. It will, however, still be visible on the next page, and in cases where the negative message is situated on a domain like CNN.com, it's very hard to beat it (10 times).

If you can find a less negative page on the same domain as the result you want to lose, you might be able to switch the page shown in the search results for your name. This way you don't need multiple results to outrank the negative one, but only one. That one result doesn't have to compete against a domain like CNN.com because it is on that same domain. The page that you choose needs some keyword relevance for your brand name. Enter a query like "site:cnn.com apple" to find possible contenders. If possible, try to add your company name in the comments of a desired page, but it is likely most of the work should be done by links. Intensely linking to the desired page from multiple domains allows it to outrank the undesired one. Because Google likes to show just a few pages for each domain in the top-10 it is likely to take its place. Only in rare cases do you need to push two or more pages from the same domain to have a clean top-10.

If the negative result is clear slander, search engines are known to remove certain results for you. Sites like chillingeffects.org can often help you to take the right legal steps to get this done. You can also try to arrange a settlement with the complainer or the website the message is on. This is often cheaper than SERM, but the negative result needs to be removed for this to be effective. Rectifications or positive remarks on how things ended well at the bottom of the negative page are seldom read.

Reputation Monitoring

It is always smart to set alerts for your brand names, product names, and key employees. Google Alerts can signal you when your name is mentioned on regular web pages. Social media is often much quicker to indicate problems and Google doesn't offer a service for that yet. Free services like Social Mention can be used to monitor various social media channels so you can resolve a problem before it ends up on regular web pages that could rank in your branded SERPs.

Professional reputation monitoring needs to be done across many channels and many keywords. Big brands have thousands of keywords that are mentioned thousands of times each day. It requires careful keyword selection and expensive professional tools to detect the negative remarks that need attention in time. A contingency plan and quick reaction force are also needed to quickly dismantle potential negative outbreaks.

SERP Claiming

Even if your reputation is still clean within search results, it might be a smart thing to make it harder for that one dissatisfied customer to get a lot of attention. If the top results for your name would all be well optimized, it's harder for newcomers to enter the top-10.

There's several steps you can take to create a strong result page for your name.

Create business profiles on various strong domains.Create social media profiles.Contribute to sites and events to get an "about the author" page.Get others to write about you.Have multiple websites yourself.Also optimize for Google results like AdWords, images, video, and local search so you control a larger portion of the SERP.

If these pages are well optimized for your name, if they are on authority domains, and if they are well linked from other sites, it is harder to beat them. Hypes have a chance of temporarily outranking your controlled search results, but they will drop within a short timeframe.

Branding

The main difference between marketing and PR is that PR doesn't seem to include a big commercial aspect. Where SEO has been mainly focused on marketing in the past, it is also very effective for PR purposes. SEO for marketing mainly focuses on ranking your own website; SEO for PR should also be focused on boosting messages on other sites.

Ranking for technical terminology that your customers will never use won't bring a lot of sales. If you do, however, rank with insightful information on new developments, people in your industry will notice. This attracts job applicants, business partners, and media coverage that confirms your authority to potential customers.

Positive attention for your brand should rank - for whatever keyword they're relevant for. If you win awards, speak at conferences, sponsor a charity, or when business is kind to you, it should rank and get additional attention from Google visitors.

Image search also doesn't bring a lot of direct sales, but it is very effective for branding purposes.

If you use certain claims in your sales pitches, make sure the sources that confirm your claim rank well. You can also make sure contradictory sources don't rank well.

As you can see, SEO has become more than a traffic source. SEO PR might even be more important to large corporations than SEO marketing.

Various activities require you to have a lot of control over media coverage. The media also intensely uses search engines to find background information, sources, and experts. Stock quotes and IPOs are great examples of how media coverage and Google results have a great impact on your financial situation. If you're able to make the right information rank better across a broad spectrum of keywords, you can influence how positive or negative certain events are seen.

Lobbying

Marketing an idea is even more powerful than marketing a product. Public opinion can be heavily influenced through SEO activities. People still don't realize that Google results are based on simple calculations and that they don't represent an unbiased version of the truth.

Working for various lobby groups during the last U.S. presidential elections has really opened my eyes. On multiple occasions we got to determine which experts were interviewed and which sources were cited by prominent media. Not that these sources weren't reputable, but we chose which reputable source got most of the attention. Statements by our lobby group needed to be confirmed by multiple experts and opposite statements needed to be surrounded by doubt and contradiction.

We even discovered that a couple of senators had been misguided by a message we planted only through Google. No other source could explain the exact numbers they cited. Everybody seems to use Google.

Negative PR

Hopefully this last option doesn't get to be used often in the future. Besides making sure negative messages don't hurt your brand for times to come, you can also make sure negative messages for your competitor keep ranking well. You're not creating the messages, you just make a selected few of them rank better for your competitor's brand name.

While working on an SEO PR case, I came across old negative messages that were manipulated in this way. I was, however, able to reconstruct which competitor was behind this unethical practice, and after some apologies they removed the links they had bought.

We should probably agree to keep SEO PR ethical. You don't want to be hit by something like this either, so don't practice it yourself.

SEO = PR

Search engine reputation management isn't the only form of PR work you're able to do with SEO. All PR activities have an SEO ingredient in them. It's about time all PR firms start to notice this.

2012 was a key year in Digital Marketing. How will 2013 compare? Find out in London.

Feb 18-21, 2013: The brightest and most insightful marketing minds in the industry will be gathering at SES London. Register today.

Improve your Online Marketing Skills at SES New York!

March 25-28, 2013: Save up to $600 with the Early Bird Rate. Receive an unparalleled education, network with your peers, and achieve results! Register today.

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Over the last few weeks, the one thing I'm hearing a lot more people starting to talk about is the need to be agile in marketing campaigns.

At BlueGlassX, Greg Boser went as far to predict that agile marketing is going to be the new buzzword of 2013:

As I said in my last post, it doesn't matter what you call your online strategy - and buzzword or not, that's not what's important - but there's a lot about agile marketing as a concept that makes perfect sense.

2012 Is the Year That Search Grew up!

Looking back over 2012, we've seen a huge volume of changes.

The problem we've had with SEO in the past is that there was a huge gap between what Google said the algorithm did and what it actually did. Everyone knew all along we should be creating great content to build a brand online. But this year, more than any other, we've seen that gap close to the point that the only way to achieve sustainable results is to finally do what Google has been telling us all along!

This means we have to be nimble and able to think on our feet a lot more to naturally acquire relevant links as a by-product of high-quality content generation, not by traditional link building.

Andy Betts has written some excellent posts on the shifts we're seeing recently, and I spoke at SES London back in February about the measurement of ROI in search. During this time I definitely feel that we've seen a significant shift toward the industry evolving in this way, with not just search marketers realizing the value, but also social, PR, content, and branding teams being integrated into the bigger digital picture, too.

Having a Great Strategy Doesn't Mean You Forget About the Tactics

2012 has been a crazy year for seeing SEO evolve - how many years is an Internet year now? In 2012 I think we're looking at closer to seven years for every month!

And 12 months on, we now seem to be in a world where we realize having a solid, long-term strategy is a far more effective and sustainable way to get results.

But that doesn't mean we should completely forget about tactic-driven strategies. Tactics are still a key part of your strategy that gets you to the top - so as long as you apply tactics that complement your long-term strategy, as opposed to quick wins, you should still be trying out new tactics all of the time.

Everyone knows that the only constant in this game is change - even if you're staying on top of what's working now, you're still likely to be behind the curve.

To quote Greg Boser again, "Chaos is good, complacency is the kiss of death" - and there's no way you can stand still in this game; everything changes so quickly. You need to be looking ahead to where things are going; read the patents (for example, this one on Agent Rank gives some very clear signs) and make sure you're testing all of the time. That way when your competitors are chasing you, they're always one step behind.

Learn From Agile Project Management

There's a huge amount you can learn about marketing by reading about agile project management techniques and processes.

Image source: Tutorials Point

This might be a very new way of thinking for search marketers, but it's not a new concept or model. In fact, it follows a very simple process:

BuildMeasureLearn

Image source: HubSpot

If you're trying to prove a point to your boss or client, this is clearly the easiest route to getting that message across. This is exactly the same way you would create a prototype for showcasing a new product, or a pilot episode for a TV series.

For anyone who is experienced in SEO, I would suggest that rather than trying to develop new skills in search, perhaps you should buy a book on agile project management instead.

But with agile marketing there's no need to change your whole strategy, just make sure you're adaptable enough to learn what does and doesn't work - and be well prepared to take advantage of any opportunities that may come along.

I think the one thing I've learned, especially this year, is that it's not always a case of right or wrong. There's a good chance you're doing something that's working, but it doesn't mean it's your best option.

The great thing about this industry is that we're constantly surrounded by great opportunities - so the first step is often figuring out what you shouldn't be doing or how you can free up some time.

For example, where are you wasting your time? What don't you enjoy doing? What aren't you good at? Once you figure this out, everything else is much easier to fall into place. Whether it's reviewing a client fit, your career, or your online marketing strategy, it's exactly the same.

Agile Isn't Flexible, It's Intuitive

In order to make your marketing campaigns agile, you need to fully understand what this means - and just as importantly, what it doesn't.

While it may seem like a campaign that's flexible, that's not what it's about. Yes, it's sensible that rather than having a rigid 12-month editorial calendar, you add flexibility in order to adapt and change. For example, perhaps you'll set 25 percent of your plan aside for topical issues, which may come up and allow time to be adaptable (depending on your industry, it may be much higher).

But flexibility suggests making a compromise, which isn't the most effective way of getting results. An agile marketing campaign needs to be able to adapt and intuitively grow based on your key findings and strategy.

Run Controlled Experiments and Prove a Point

As Greg says, it shouldn't be a "throw stuff against the wall and hope that something sticks" model. Instead, you should be testing out new ideas and concepts by creating controlled experiments.

If you can closely measure the impact of a tactic on a small scale, and prove a point that if you do X, this Y happens, then you can make data-driven, strategic decisions on whether you'd like to roll this out more heavily across your campaign.

This makes you more agile in being able to move quickly . Plus, it means that by running small experiments in this way, you'll be able to prioritize decisions based on their likely success. And that's what it's all about - the building and prioritization of a clear marketing plan.

Marketers Need to Lose the Fear of Failure

By being agile, you also lose that fear of failure. It's not about making every single thing you do a success - that leads to taking safe bets and consistently getting average to good results.

You might be happy with that, but if instead you accept that you're going to make mistakes along the way, you're incrementally improving your processes and likely to achieve much better results in the long term. Matt Roberts from Linkdex made an excellent analogy recently, which was a comparison with the VC funding model.

"VC's will often back 10 companies, accepting that some will be complete failures, others will do ok - but if one is a big success that outweighs everything else they've backed. And this applies to search and content - it's much better to have one outstanding piece of content which outperforms everything else you've done, than it is to have 10 pieces [of] content which have had good results."

SocialTriggers.com by Derek Halpern is another good example of this. Derek would much rather have one great piece of content and then focus the rest of his time on promoting that content. His theory being "why create new content when there are still people who haven't seen your last post yet?"

It's a different way of looking at things, but again it makes a lot of sense - he's learned what resonates with his audience, to the point that every post he writes has over 100 comments. So now he gives his audience what they want to see - and follows up by promoting it as much as possible.

Your Team Must Be Integrated, Not Siloed

If you're going to have an agile strategy, the first thing you need to do is ditch the silos.

In order to get the best results, you need to make sure that everyone is on the same page. The days of doing SEO, social media, PR/branding, and even content marketing effectively in silos have gone - each of these benefit and help each other in different ways, so to get the best value you have to look at the bigger picture.

By using an integrated model, you can figure out your internal restraints and challenges - and then fix them. It's not always easy when everyone is fighting against each other for their own individual goals and budgets.

When's the Best Time to Publish a Story? When It's Most Relevant!

I was asked this question after my BlueGlassX presentation. My answer was to find out more about your audience and to learn what works best with them, in a similar way to how you would test an email marketing campaign.

However, for topical stories, timing is everything. If there's big news that's happening within your industry, you need to be prepared to drop everything and adapt, so that you can instantly switch your focus to what's most relevant.

For example, following Michael Jackson's death in the early hours of the morning, Amazon very quickly updated its Amazon Store to make a tribute to him and cater toward the huge demand of people looking to purchase his music. You don't wait for the optimal sharing time for topical stories like this.

Summary

For agile campaigns, you need to be on top of your game, and know what's going on around you. If you're prepared to adapt quickly when that topical story comes along, you're much more likely to reap the rewards.

Likewise, if you can ensure your campaigns are ready to adapt and you learn from both your successes and failures, then that makes you more likely to achieve that steady progress month-on-month, which is far more sustainable to long-term growth.

What do you think? Are your campaigns agile enough? And how important do you think this is going to be toward marketing success in 2013?

2012 was a key year in Digital Marketing. How will 2013 compare? Find out in London.

Feb 18-21, 2013: The brightest and most insightful marketing minds in the industry will be gathering at SES London. Register today.

Improve your Online Marketing Skills at SES New York!

March 25-28, 2013: Save up to $600 with the Early Bird Rate. Receive an unparalleled education, network with your peers, and achieve results! Register today.

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Advanced search commands are the cornerstone of “good, old-fashioned SEO.” By that, I mean the art of doing SEO stripped down, without tons of tools.

In a world that is saturated with SEO software solutions, advanced search commands are the man vs. wild of the search world. If you gain a better understanding of advanced search commands, you will definitely become a lot more resourceful when doing down-and-dirty site auditing, link prospecting, and competitor analysis.

Before we get into it, a short disclaimer: there are so many ways to use these advanced search commands that one could easily write a whole book on it – or at least a novella.

Also, if you're using these search commands in another awesome way that I fail to mention, please do leave a comment. I love discovering new ways to use advanced search commands, as do SEW's readers!

With all that said, let's explore the most awesome advanced search operators for Google and Bing and how to use them.

Where Else You Can Use It: Google, Bing, Blekko [/site], Yandex, Baidu
*note:site:may behave slightly differently in those engines

Definition: Adding site: to your query will restrict the search results to the domain you've specified. [site:example.com]

How to Be Awesome With It: You can scan indexed URLs to get an idea of information architecture, potential duplicate content issues, and get an idea of overall number of pages indexed.

Pro Tip: Combine Site: with inurl: or allinurl: [may not work in all search engines] to analyze specific sections of a site. How big is the blog of a competitor site relative to the approximate total pages indexed? How many of those sort pages without are indexed? How many paginated pages are indexed? How many session ID pages are getting indexed? [site:example.com inurl:sort=price]. Are those pesky non-www. versions of pages getting indexed. Any time you want to analyze content within a site, the site: command is a very robust tool to have in your toolkit.

Where Else You Can Use It: Blekko [/similar]

Definition: When you use the related command, Google will return webpages that are similar to the webpage you've specified. [related:example.com]

How to Be Awesome With It: The related command has been used to find out the "neighborhood" of backlinks. However, keep in mind that there has been debate over the years on how accurate this command is for Google specifically.

Where Else You Can Use Them: Bing, Yandex, Baidu, DuckDuckGo

Definition intitle: When you use the query in title:, Google restricts the documents it returns to those containing the term you included in the title. [intitle:keyword]

allintitle: When you use allintitle:, Google restricts results to those that contain the keyword that you specified in the title. So if you search [internet marketing] google will only fetch documents that contain the keywords ”internet” and “marketing” in the title. Notice the addition of the conjunction. [allintitle:keyword phrase]

How to Be Awesome With It: This command can be combined with a site: command to help identify templated, thin or duplicate pages by just identifying a part of the title that appears across the thin pages and searching for it. You will see about how many of those types of pages Google has indexed.

Definition: wildcard(*) to search for terms separated by 1-5 words
[internet * marketing] or [“internet * marketing”]

How to Be Awesome With It: The commands mentioned above are a great way to find articles about specific topics to build a potential list of prospects to market to. Keep in mind, though, that although these are powerful commands, they're only as good as the searcher who is performing them is clever.

Google Reverse Image Search

While this isn't an advanced search command, it is so cool! Just click the little camera in the Google image search bar and you can query an image link or a local file and it tells you all the places where your image has been found. If you're an image heavy site, you can easily reach out to websites that have snagged your images and ask them for a citation back to your site. It's also fun to see just how image content travels.

Google Verbatim

Again, this isn't a search command, but Google Verbatim allows you to search using the exact keyword you typed, so no spelling corrections, no replacing words with synonyms, and no words with the same stem, or personalization. Verbatim gives you search rankings without the preservatives. To get to verbatim from a Google SERP, click on Search tools, then you'll find it in the All Results sub-menu.

Definition: Returns the pages that are linked-to from a domain.

How To Be Awesome With It: This command can be used to explore check the link neighborhood for a site or for finding prospective sites to connect to for promotional purposes.

Definition: This command returns originating results from websites or subdomains for the provided IP address. Another thing to note about this command is that prefix-matching is also possible with it, so ip:89 returns the site IP:89.356.567.76 if it's in Bing's index.

How To Be Awesome With It: This command can be used when you’re trying to map out a possible link network that may live on the same IP for competitor research or backlink removal projects.

Definition: url: command tells you if a given URL is in Bing's index.

How To Be Awesome with It: This command is similar to the Google cache: command. The url: command is a useful one to run to identify if a particular page is indexed in bing or not. This is helpful for diagnosing if you’re having a crawling issue in Bing beyond just using Bing Webmaster Tools.

Definition: The Domain: command limits results to the domain that is specified. This command also returns any suffix matches. The big difference between the domain command and the site: command is that site: searches up to two levels only. Also, keep in mind that IP cannot be used with this command.

Definition: A meta operator is an operator that is used with other operators. Takes a simple list as a parameter and returns results based on that. One example of this in Bing is keyword:(intitle inbody)software. The output of this command would translate roughly as intitle:software or inbody:software.

How To Be Awesome With It: When you’re trying to find a type of content with great precision, this is very helpful.

Subtle Differences contains: and filetype: in Bing

The contains: operator returns pages that link to other documents and multimedia like music, video, PDF, and so on. Conversely, “filetype:” returns pages that created in the format that is specified, returning .pdf documents, if you specific filetype:pdf.

Understanding words surrounding a given keyword using near:

The near: operator searches for a specific keyword that is within range of another word. Bing documentation gives the example of foo near:10 bar explaining it as, “Ordering is considered in ranking. Thus, in this example, pages that contain bar ten words or less after foo would receive a greater boost in rank than pages in which foo appears ten words or less after bar. However, depending on the rest of the query, this does not necessarily mean that the former would be ranked higher than the latter.”

Although Blekko SEO data is no longer free to the masses, here are a couple cool slashtags that I have had fun playing with.

Definition: Lets you see the links to a site.

Definition: Lets you check the popularity of internal pages of a site.

Definitions: These commands displays URLs that have content that is the same as that of the website you are looking at. This lets you quickly check for content theft.

Offical Documentation

Image Credit: 123RF Stock Photos

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Tim Berners-Lee first spoke of a Semantic Web at his address at the first World Wide Web Conference in 1994. Given the technical level of the audience, his presentation was, for the most part, met with excited nods.

The Web Berners-Lee described was a far cry from the library-style repository of the Web at that time, but the concept wasn't so far-fetched, at least to the listeners with a more visionary nature.

"Semantic", however, is a qualifier that means a great deal in this context. It demands that a machine, or more accurately, the software that drives that machine, must understand the information in the way it was intended. Let's face it: most of us know a handful of human beings that are challenged in that regard.

Indeed, for a machine to comprehend the meaning behind what a human has put to text, requires a certain amount of artificial intelligence. Humor, irony, and emotion certainly seemed to be beyond the conceivable limits of a computer program in 1994. Even in 2012, there are still some that doubt that such comprehension will be possible in the near future.

Looking at the issue strictly from the standpoint of achieving a semantic search capability, it seemed that rather than trying to teach a computer how to think like a human, it would probably be much easier to teach humans how to present data in a format that a machine could understand. Take Muhammad to the mountain...

Enter: semantic mark-up, such as RDFa, microformats, microdata, schema.org... structured data.

Many might be surprised to know how far some search engine algorithms have progressed in being able to parse text and discern what a document deals with, or even a specific sentence within that document. Certainly, there is still a ways to go, but more progress has been made than is obvious to the casual observer.

Would you be surprised to realize that your elementary school teacher was introducing you to syntactic graphs when she had you do sentence diagrams? You remember these, right?

For the simple sentence, "The two of them were lost in the cave", you would diagram it as:

Rudimentary, perhaps, but still pertinent. You were actually learning to parse the words in a sentence, determine their relationship to each other and then graph those relationships. (If you had been learning English as a second language, this would have been a very helpful exercise in helping you understand what the sentence was trying to say.)

At the point that you grasp the meaning of the sentence, you have left the purely syntactic mode and entered the realm of semantic relationships. In the context of search, the meaning of that sentence can then be aggregated with the meaning of other surrounding sentences in the document, to give a deeper understanding of the meaning of the document as a whole.

In your school classroom, you had a dictionary and lists of common verbs, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, etc. These tools could be loosely compared to the entity classes of semantic mark-up. And interestingly, RDFa triples can be compared to the subject, verb and object of a simple sentence.

Just as your elementary English teacher taught you, there are rules that need to be applied to semantic parsers, as well. For instance, using an example that Tim Berners-Lee presented in 2001 in The Semantic Web, for a genealogy system, a rule such as "a wife of an uncle is an aunt" would be a rule that applied to that knowledge-representation system. A rule would often only apply in that system, even if the database could be utilized in a number of other systems.

Similarly, many rules (a great many!) must be included, behind the scenes, in semantic search algorithms. These help the algorithm recognize Uncle Bob's wife as your aunt, even though she's not specifically identified as such.

What does this mean for search in the future? As the knowledge-representation graph continues to grow, linking more and more entities and establishing their relationships to each other, more connections will be available. And since the algorithms can learn, those connections will be more easily mapped.

Search engines will be able to dig deeper and deeper into the graph to find information about an entity. For instance, today, if you search on Google for "what does Bill Slawski say about patents?" (without the quotes), you'll predictably get thousands of results. But those results will simply be documents that contain terms such as "Bill Slawski", "patents" and "say".

Eventually, a semantic search engine will be able to get past that limitation, understand the meaning of your question, understand the meaning of those thousands of documents, and then return results that only contain statements that Bill has made about patents.

Ask a question like "Does Bill Cosby come from a large family?" and the search engine of 2025 should be able to analyze all the portions of the graph that contain connections that pertain to Bill Cosby, and quantify the number of people that qualify as members of his family.

Can they do this now? To an extent, yes. Certainly, I believe, to a greater extent than most people realize. But since the vast majority of the data on the web is unstructured, they're somewhat limited. As structured data becomes more prevalent, and as the algorithms learn more, it will become more obvious to what extent they can make those connections.

Imagine that you want to be able to ask how Bill Cosby's wife's next door neighbor voted in the 1948 presidential election. Today, no search engine is likely to be able to help you much.

But in 2025? Let's examine that possibility.

If enough structured data has been made available, the engine could detect the fact that Bill Cosby's wife is Camille (Hanks), who was 3 years old in 1948. And that her parents, Guy and Catherine Hanks, lived at 317 C St. in Anytown, Mass., a house which, at the time, had a hardware store on one side and a private residence on the other.

It could determine who the resident of that house was in 1948, and see that he worked from 1943 to 1950 as a volunteer for the Democratic party. It could then return a result with that information, perhaps even extrapolating a 98.5 percent probability that the man had voted for Harry Truman.

Do you really think that current technology isn't capable of such a thing? Of course it's capable! Do you think the data doesn't exist? Sorry – it exists – and what's more, much of it has already been uploaded.

The problem is, so much data is still unstructured, that the instances in which such a query could be accurately answered are too few and far between to make it viable. So where does that leave us?

It leaves us holding the bag. We need to provide more structured data, not just going forward but retroactively, as well. Fortunately, the search algorithms can fill in a lot of blanks, so uploaded data in an accessible digital format will take care of the majority of that gap. The question, of course, is how long will that take?

For my part, I'm betting that semantic search will be substantially enabled by 2025. Sooner would be better.

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Continuing their aggressive positioning to get people to try Bing, Microsoft and Amazon have partnered up to make Bing the default search engine on the Kindle Fire.

Bing will be the default engine for the Silk Web browser on the new Kindle line. However, users will be able to change the default to a different search engine.

Positioning Bing as the default search engine on a high-profile product like the new, highly-anticipated Kindle Fire HD devices, Microsoft as found another way to bring their search experience to a potentially new group of mainstream users.

Last week, Microsoft launched the Bing It On campaign to bring brand awareness to the masses, encouraging people to try Bing side-by-side against Google. Citing a survery where people chose blindly Bing search results nearly 2-to-1 over Google's, Microsoft's hope is that by gaining more exposure to people, Google will become less of a habit and Bing will become more of a choice. While the decision to garner the default search engine position on Amazon's new product line is not directly tied to the new Bing campaign, it certainly augments Bing's desire to get in front of more users.

Bing has also been making many inroads recently to improve the user experience across all platforms. Most notably, Bing added a suite of Bing for Windows 8 apps to provide a unique search experience on Windows 8 devices. Delivering the Bing experience on Kindle Fire adds to the experience.

"Bing is committed to delivering a multi-platform strategy to better meet the needs of our customers, including the new Kindle Fire devices," said Stefan Weitz, Director of Bing. "The mobile and tablet space is increasingly important, and Bing’s mobile search strategy remains focused on enabling customers to easily discover, access, and use the information, answers and local content they need and want – anytime and anywhere with the convenience of their mobile device."

Neither Amazon nor Microsoft would comment on the terms of the agreement. Though many are speculating Microsoft paid a premium price to be front-and-center on the Kindle Web browser. Amazon's terms and conditions state that Amazon Silk initially select's the default search engine but Amazon "may change the default search engine in the future without notice" to the user.

Amazon is no stranger to reaching into people's Kindles. In 2009, they removed copies of George Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm" from Kindle owner's devices.

Are you a Kindle Fire owner or do you plan on buying one of the new Kindle Fire devices? How long do you anticipate keeping Bing as your default search engine?

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Google has extended its Gmail search trial to include results from its calendar and online documents applications, as well as adding the features to its email application and its core search tool.

Gmail users will now be offered a mix of search results from their Google Calendar, Google Drive and email messages when they start typing into the Gmail search box.

The first version of the expanded search results offering, which launched in August, was restricted to Gmail messages appearing in Google search results.

As well as adding the new search feature to the Gmail application, Google has also updated its core search functionality. When searching Google for a particular term or name, users will be now be offered a mix of results from their Gmail messages and Google Drive files on the right-hand side of the page, as well as the core search results in the middle.

According to Google, it has received positive feedback on the initial trial, which has led the firm to expand it to Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive.

We signed up and were accepted for the original trial back in August, but have seen very little evidence of it in practice. Although we run Google searches on a daily basis, we've seen our Gmail messages returned only once, even though we've run tests searching for specific terms included in our email.

We've signed up for the extended field trial and will report back on the results once we hear we've been accepted.

For those of you keen to try this out for yourselves, the trial is available only in English and for those with @gmail.com addresses.

This article was originally published on the Inquirer.

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Google will no longer suggest that visitors head to The Pirate Bay. The search giant has removed the website's name from its autocomplete suggestions.

The removal from Google's search suggestions of the full range of Pirate Bay addresses was first noticed by TorrentFreak.

According to The Pirate Bay this sort of thing doesn't have much of an impact on its traffic though, and this seems fairly common for the website. When it was banned by UK ISPs its traffic increased and this new notoriety could have the same impact.

This is part of a pattern of events for Google and this year it has made some strong moves against websites that might be offering someone else's content.

In August Google began deranking websites that offer "pirated" material, saying that it was basing its reordering on the number of valid Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests a website had received. Google also reported receiving nearly 6 million requests to remove search results last month.

This post originally appeared on The Inquirer.

This article was originally published on the Inquirer.

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