Google Dramatically Increases Word Limit.
Given the study about surfers that I’m about to post, this may not seem like much news at all… but there IS a practical use for it.
If you publish to your blog, or have a lot of articles published, you can use this as a quick check to see who is linked to you. Create a folder to bookmark the article titles in so that you can go back and check them periodially.
To see how it works, go to Google and do this search in quotes: “Can A Ping Really Help Your Blog Get Top Search Engine Rankings”, or click the link, as I’ve done the search already.
This article was first published on January 18th. I’m having you do the search in quotes so you can get an Exact match. I had to rub my eyes to make sure I was seeing the total correctly myself. Last week there were just under 1500 references to this article, exactly a week ago. And that’s pretty good for an article that was up for only four days at the time.
Now, there are over 14,000 references to this article. I’m sure this will go down to a more reasonable number in about a week as the article becomes archived, because then it won’t appear on all the new article lists, or the links that appear at the bottom of each page of some directories.
I still expect the number of links to peak in the thousands and settle down to around a thousand after archiving.
If you publish articles, this may have happened to you and you never noticed. You might have seen an inexplicable peak in the number of people at your site, and not realized they were coming from having read your article.
There are other uses for the word limit increase – you can use it to research the title of a book when you can only remember a sentence, to find songs when you don’t know all the lyrics, to type in a quote in order to find out who said it. Endless possibilities for your Google power tool…
