August 12, 2004 Archives

I am all for this - if you promise top rankings then you must deliver. A promise is a promise, so make sure to be upfront with your clients and promise only what you can deliver.

Chris Sherman posted a thread at SEW forums named SEO Firm Ordered to Refund Fees, Pay Fine, that quotes the article at the Seattle Times.

"The [Washington] state attorney general said yesterday Redmond-based Internet Advancement must pay penalties for failing to get its customers top placement on major search engines. Internet Advancement, which also goes by 4GreatBuys.com, must refund customers, pay $24,432 to the state for costs incurred and a civil penalty of $25,000.

"The company had promised to get its customers ranked in the top 10 to 20 results on the search engines for $980 to $1,500 in set-up fees and monthly fees of $79.80 to $89.95."

I find this funny, Gary Price points out that A9 is ranked the number one search engine "...if you list them alphabetically".

I find it funny that a search engine guy, Udi Manber, throws out the directory ranking default (not Google directory but alphabetical ranking) as a joke to show how they would be ranked the number one engine.

Just funny.

Oh, I hope to post a couple more times tonight, tomorrow will be a crazy day for me - a little like today was. :)

Its finally available at http://www.google.com/googledance2004/!!! Lots of pictures out there, but this is the official place.

An interesting detail was presented to me by way of a thread at DigitalPoint Forums named Bolding doesn't work in the search results. The distinction here is that when Google finds a match between a keyword and the text in the URL, it will bold the URL in the SERPs. But when the URL is capitalized, the keyword will not match and will not be bolded in the SERPs.

As mentioned in the thread a search on allinurl:Test at Google will bring back results, some with bolded keywords in the URL. A picture will help. Does this have anything to do with rankings? I doubt it.

A thread at WebmasterWorld named Psychic Google? discusses Google's physic ability to locate newly registered domain names soon after they are registered. For example, if you buy a new domain name today, you might find the "coming soon" page in the index without you linking to it. I am of the belief that Google is finding it via a link from some page.

People are speculating that if you have the toolbar installed, Google can find new pages. I doubt they do that. And an other theory is the the domain name registrars are selling these names to Google. Come on!

There has been discussion at SEO Chat forums in a thread named Algo Merry Go Round??, where members discuss the large deviations between rankings for the same keywords among different keyword sets. For example, a standard keyword checked at Google's various data centers (using Datacenter Quick Check tool) can rank between position 57 and 132. In the past, this was not really normal. There was flux between the datacenters, but there seems to be a much greater flux these days, on a more frequent basis then before.

So the theories are:
(A) AdWare is causing the problems
(B) Google is testing different algorithms at different datacenters
(C) There is nothing wrong at all.

My question to you, which one you think is right? A, B, C or None of the Above?