The cache is your friend...

Google's cache is the most helpful, from both an end user's and an SEO's point of view. Why? It highlights the search words that you are looking for, and also shows the date that the page was added to the cache, so you know when the page was last updated.

The highlighting of words is extremely helpful to an end user because you can quickly find what you are looking for, while the date is typically more useful to an SEO who wants to see when the page was last updated. However, the date sometimes explains why the page appears in the SERP long after the actual item has disappeared from the page.

As an end user who is looking for something, I frequently look at only the cache links in the SERP because I know that is where I can see the actual information I am seeking. And, if a site does not allow a cache, I don't trust it and skip down to the next link in the SERP.

Yahoo highlights the words, but does not display a date anywhere so you have no way to know when the page was last updated. MSN displays a date, but does not highlight the words.

So, can you guess which search engine I rely upon when looking for something?

The absurdity of Sitelinks...

Sitelinks would be much nicer if a webmaster could update the URLs with the most appropriate links to what is important to the owner of a site. This plan to automate the entire process is marginal at best, as can be seen by the amazing number of sites that have less than 8 sitelinks under their site in Google, which means that an observant webmaster has blocked an absurd sitelink via Webmaster Tools.

It is very nice that webmasters can now block absurd links, but trying to get a proper link is impossible. Each time I check the sitelinks under one of my sites they have changed to something even less appropriate and more absurd. So, I continue to block useless links, and even provide the appropriate links in the message box that Google provides.

MSN is copying Google sitelinks, but I dread having to fix those when they go out of control as well. I can understand that the search engines do not want to give any SEO preference to sitelinks, so they are ignored. And, if the search engines are ignoring them, then why can't webmasters include the correct URLs in a robots.txt file?

Putting sitelinks into this file would be infinitely easier for a webmaster than to go into all of the various webmaster interfaces and fix the absurd URLs. I thought that the purpose of sitelinks was to make it easier to find relevant links in a site, which would improve the end user's search experience.

But to have links that go to the wrong URL, or say, "No Cookies Allowed" is pretty useless to anybody trying to find anything...