July 5, 2005 Archives

This tactic at best is questionable and for most purposes I would discredit any positive effect it would have on improving rankings. However there is an interesting thread at SEOchat discussing how bringing your site down for a short period of time might actually help increase your rankings slightly when it comes back. I have seen quite a few sites go down some because of server issues, others because they forgot to pay a hosting bill, others they accidentially disallow the entire site in robots.txt and I can't say most of these sites have risen above their previous positions. Some might have, but for the most part they just go back to their normal positions.

One of the members who started the thread indicates he has seen increases in both Google and MSN for his phrases after the site went back up. When the site goes down, it disappears from the search engines, once back up things slowly start to return to normal. The effect could be comparable to the effect some news sites get in a boost in ranking once they are first included and then slowly decline to obsurity over the course of time. In any case, interesting read, but I don't know if I would recommend anyone trying it. It doesn't make sense to loose all that traffic while the site is down to hopefully get more of it back later when the ranking come back. However a few are discussing letting visitors still get to the site, but not allow spider to get in as a way to test this.

Discussion at SEOchat - Bringing Down Site to Raise Rankings

An interesting thread at WebmasterWorld named Blocking Adsense Traffic to poor countries have skyrocketed reports just that. Member, asianguy, with 177 total posts at WebmasterWorld claims;

I just blocked all Asian countries and some countries in Europe, then I saw a spike after a couple of hours. Then it stayed there on top since then.

Of course this shocked many. Who cares if a click in Asia is worth 5 cents and a click in America is worth 25 cents? Why not take the 5 cents clicks as well as the 25 cents clicks? Why block the low income visitors? As jomaxx said, "Block all those countries and your bottom-line revenue will go down, not up. Your CPM may go up, but who cares?"

It is still hard to understand if AsianGuy is talking about the advertising campaigns (the actual ads) versus the people who click on the ads. He further tried to clarify, "I am talking about those pages with Google Ads." But I still do not clearly understand if its advertising campaigns or the readers he is blocking. It makes more sense that is it is the campaigns. Jenstar?

A WebmasterWorld thread shows the SEMs disappointment with Google specifically for now actively promoting the Live 8 campaign that took place over the past few days. With the exposure Google, Yahoo and MSN have - the SEMs were upset with the lack of involvement with this campaign.

A thread at WebmasterWorld named Five Year Anniversary of Google on Yahoo!, where Yahoo picked Google to provide its default search results. I did some clicking and found the press release on Google's site; Yahoo! Selects Google as its Default Search Engine Provider. The press release was dated on June 26, 2000. I assume that the results switched over on this date, July 4th, 2000.

I hope most of you remember five years ago today (July 4th) when Google replaced Inktomi to serve secondary search results at Yahoo!. How many of us predicted then that Google would be as huge today, and paving the landscape of search? It is incredible what can happen in just five years.

A thread at Search Engine Watch Forums asks AdWords: No Tobacco but Pornography OK... why? Some guess it has to do with tax reasons, some believe it has to do with the war against smoking, but the best answer in the thread is by Ian.

It's because tobacco gives you cancer and porn only gives you hairy palms.

Did you ever wonder what else is prohibited? In the thread is a link to the Google AdWords Content Policy. The list includes; Aids to Pass Drug Tests, Alcohol, Anti and Violence, Bulk Marketing, Cable Descramblers and Black Boxes, Counterfeit Designer Goods, Dialers, Drugs and Drug Paraphernalia, Fake Documents, Fireworks/Pyrotechnic Devices, Gambling, Hacking and Cracking Sites, Miracle Cures, Mod Chips, Prescription Drugs and Related Content, Prostitution, Sexual Content (Adult), Solicitation of Funds, Tobacco and Cigarettes, Traffic Devices, and Weapons. Note, the "Sexual Content (Adult)" is "not permitted for the promotion of child pornography or other non-consensual material."

Search Engine Watch Forums Moderator, DaveN, feels that Google is targeting directories, by that he means, devaluing the links from directories. He bases this statement on the large amount of recent data he collected. For those not familiar with DaveN, he is someone who might be referred to as an "algo chaser." In other words, he is one of the guys that make the search engines better by exposing loopholes within the algorithms.

Of course, most of us would just push off such a statement. Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN and all the search engines recommend getting quality inbound links. Some even say that you should get them from directories. Heck, Yahoo and MSN promote paid directories, Google uses the ODP.

But if one would think about it more. The way this industry has been going follows this sort of pattern. Search engines like variable X. Some SEOs look for ways to exploit the variable X. Search engines have to move away from liking X and then move on to Y. The process repeats, over and over again. So maybe DaveN is right.

The well respected Search Engine Journal blog has been "Defaced by Outlawsys." This is very sad to see, I hope we see SEJ back soon. Loren Baker, the owner of SEJ, is a very nice guy. I don't see why anyone would want to do this to his Internet property. If you want to see the screen image of what these "Outlawsys" did, click here.

Pandia has coverage on this as well.