February 11, 2005 Archives

There has been a recent sighting of the famed GoogleGuy on WMW forums. Normally I wouldn't post directly about such a post but this one seems to provide an outlet for those that would like to comment about the search results to engineers. You can comment directly to Google, without going through the extra step of user support. Is your site gone completely? Rankings disappear? Would like to see a good quality site in the serps? Find a spammy site in the results? Just maybe want to vent a little? Many people are very frustrated with the results of the last update, for some though - this is just another update. He does go on to make a very good point, that with every update some site move to the first page and some move out and that is the way it is. According to GoogleGuy they:

"Test everything in depth before [we] deploy it to ensure that the changes improve quality, but I always want to hear feedback on spammy or low-quality sites in our results (or high-quality sites that people feel aren't where they deserve to be). I created a Google Group that you can send feedback to.

He goes on to say:

If you're especially happy or unhappy with something in our search results right now, this is the best way to tell us.

To find the email you can use to email Google and Googleguy see this SEOchat thread.

However I would avoid responses like the following if you expect to get a response (I have elaborated for comic effect):

Dear Googleguy,
Why don't you ever let us know what's going on. Clearly there is a sandbox and clearly sites are getting duplicate penalties from 302 redirects caused by PHP tracking scripts. Clearly I have a PR2 site that ranked #1 for a 360,000,000 result keyword but it is blocked from the index because of the 302 redirect problem. Clearly someone besides my 4 year old is playing in the sandbox. Are Larry and Sergey reading this email? When are you going to push the magic red button and fix this. Froogle ain't paying the bills you know. If I don't get a response in 2 hrs I am going to call my lawyer.
Signed,
Frustrated Website Owner

Long, long ago, in an age where there was only the "big three", MSN was powered by Inktomi. If you want to step back in the past - it has been a month now? - and see the old MSN, visit http://sea.search.msn.com/. It is currently showing Inktomi (known as Yahoo! Search) results at that special URL. The new MSN is its own beast and has its own results.

Forum discussion at SEO Chat Forums.

Jason Dowdell gave me an exclusive on a new patent filed by Become.com named "AIR" - affinity index ranking. Jason tells me that its going to provide much better results because humans can identify certain sites / pages that are high in rich content and then the machine learning algorithm takes that feedback and scales. He goes on to explain that "they're able to add the human touch to their algo in a way that scales because they're in a specific vertical - none of the other engines can do that." I believe they actually call some of these online stores and then add them to a special "reservoir". Jason adds that "google / yahoo / msn use the random link method".

Earlier today, we discussed that Become.com went Beta. Well, again, Jason Dowdell, provides the inside scoop with an entry he named Become's Got Talent. In that entry he writes that John Glick from Yahoo! has left Yahoo! to join Become.com. This is a big wow factor!

Also he notes that "Chris Kermoian, formerly of Alta Vista is the Vice President of Product Management and has some great new features in the pipeline for Become."

This sounds very exciting. More to come shortly on some technology advancements made by become.com.

Yahoo! was unable to comment on this as of yet.

Google fanatics, jump over to SEO Chat Forums and vote on your default Google data center. Currently .104 is leading the way with 18 votes or 78% of the votes.

There is nothing like good old fashion content scrapping to generate high end, cheap, weird looking content. There are many people who do it. There are many ways to do it. I am calling out one content spammer, because he is messing with our forums. And you should know not to mess with our forums. :)

http://qaix.com/ - no link for you

They have reportedly ripped content from WebmasterWorld, SEO Chat and other forums on the Web. I spot people ripping my content off all the time, its a full time job to track these people down.

Remember the Nigritude Ultramarine Google SEO contest? Well, a reader emailed me that there is now an Israeli Google SEO Contest, for the term לתור מוטור also known as "Seraphim Proudleduck". I found it cute, he sent me the PRWeb release and Google Blogoscoped wrote about it. So lets give him a link, so he can win, לתור מוטור.

Here are the current standings. Good luck all.

Danny Sullivan has confirmed that "the big four" (Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, & MSN) will be at the Indexing Summit on Day 2 of the SES NYC conference. Although I only see three individuals on the panel, none from MSN. It happens to be the same day Yahoo!'s Yang will be giving the Keynote (big thing for SES).

Danny Sullivan has started a thread at the Search Engine Watch forums asking to "please share what you'd like considered" at the indexing summit. So far there has been great feedback. I'll bullet point some of the points shared in the thread, but if you have any ideas, join the ideas for the indexing summit thread.

• Future of search
• Temporal link analysis on its way?
• Responses to questions about organic search for specific sites
• 302 Issues
• Park Domain Indexing
• Including pages without content but with linkage data
• The new no follow attribute
• Discuss Referral String Issues
• Issues with linkage data and abuse.

And so on...

Become.com Beta launched recently. Jason Dowdell has some inside coverage over at his blog named Marketing Shift, worth a read. And we have some forum coverage at Search Engine Watch Forums.

I hear exciting things about this new specialty engine. But it looks awkwardly like Google, but just yellow. :)

I finally made the switch from My Yahoo to Bloglines as my primary RSS reader. I have always set my browser's homepage to My Yahoo, but when I switched to Firefox from Safari, by default, the homepage was the page that loaded. My Yahoo loaded slightly on the slow side and I wanted a page that loaded quickly. I tested Bloglines and it seemed to load fast, it also shows entries I did not read by session.

I find it very useful, just wish I can add a keyword search for news feeds like Yahoo! allows for Yahoo! News. Who knows, it might be part of bloglines.

And if your using bloglines, feel free to:

It is interesting how the major four tend to discuss similar topics at the same time. Yesterday, I wrote on the topic of Ask Jeeves's Crawl Delay, where the Ask Jeeves rep clarified some of the rumors out there on how Ask handles it. Late last night, Yahoo! posts an entry at the Yahoo! Blog named Yahoo! Search Tips for Webmasters: Saving Bandwidth. One of the tips provided included using Yahoo!'s Crawl-Delay. In fact, Yahoo! constantly reminds Webmasters to use this parameter as the conferences. I believe the only other engine that made a big point of this was MSN.

Other tips:
- Gzipped Files - did this, but the day after I had a major sever crash, probably unrelated but I am done with this method. I rather pay for more bandwidth then try it again.
- Smart Caching - we do this all the time, it works great for many reasons, not only for saving bandwidth.