Is this a manual review – webmasterworld member points Google employee visit

A webmasterworld member sees a visit from Mountain view Google’s IP checking site: search for his sub domain. If you don’t know what a site: search is its used to check the pages indexed by Google for that particular domain.

For example site:www.searchenginegenie.com will reveal all pages indexed for searchenginegenie.com , this is the regular method used in Google.

Kidder says : “I just noticed a Mountain View IP running a fairly specific site: query on one of our subdomains. I checked the IP and it came up as Google. Does this sound like a manual review? “

Tedster Google forum Administrator replies a Yes. Since he is a veteran in this industry we can believe his words. I feel manual visits from Google is just normal especially for a webmaster site like ours since we do write articles on Google and use tools that are using Google to deliver results.

Yahoo’s Petabyte index – Bigger is not always better

Yahoo breaches the petabyte mark. Yahoo’s VP for data Mr.Wagan announced that yahoo has crossed the petabyte mark of the Search Index. Google in 2005 announced their data is 3 times more than Yahoo’s but after that they went into silence and started discussing on search quality.

Now Yahoo has bragged again that they now have the capacity to store 10s of petabytes of data and is ready for the coming future.

For anyone who don’t know what a Petabyte is it 1024 Terabytes and 1 terabyte is equal to 1024 gigabytes.

To tell in simple terms imagine you have an image on your website that is 50 KB then yahoo has data equivalent of 20,000,000,000 images that you have on your site. Or the current data cluster of Yahoo data equivalent of 20 billion 50 KB images.

To read more on Yahoo’s Bragging go here . Though yahoo claim to have a huge index i am sure Google will have much bigger index than Yahoo. I feel due to the competition between these two rivals soon we might expect an announcement from Google about their index capabilities.

Google opens up more with their secrets

Google’s Vice president in Engineering for Search Quality Mr .Udi Manber opens up more with the inner working on Search Quality with Google. He vaguely explains the inner working on Google and the various methods they use to rank a website in Google. Some of the highlighted points of his posts are the way he describes about factors that are used to return a document relevant to the query.

1. Pagerank: PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).
Pagerank as per Udi Manber is still in use though not the way it used to be primary factor but now just part of a bigger algorithm.

2. Ability to Handle phrases: As per Mr.Manber Google’s ability to handle phrases play an important role when it comes to ranking a webpage. The better the algorithm understands the phrase better the results will be.

3. synonyms, diacritics, spelling mistakes – Google sees synonyms spelling errors and other factors to return relevant results. ( Diacritics – A mark, such as the cedilla of façade or the acute accent of resumé, added to a letter to indicate a special phonetic value or distinguish words that are otherwise graphically identical. )

4. query models (it’s not just the language, it’s how people use it today)

5. time models (some queries are best answered with a 30-minutes old page, and some are better answered with a page that stood the test of time) – I have seen this more and more with Google in recent days for some keywords Google wants to rank new documents immediately and over few days the document drops out of Google’s index only to return later in a position Google decides best for its users.

6. personalized models (not all people want the same thing).

“we made significant changes to the PageRank algorithm in January”
I feel this is where the testing is not done throughly because for lot of high quality sites inner pages are showing grey bar in Google toolbar pagerank display. Its very ambiguous what Google thinks about these pages are they not worth for Google anymore? Are they penalized in any way? Do they needs to be fixed in some way?

Google has left us guessing with this particular change IMHO.

Thanks anyway for Mr.Udi to give an excellent writeup we are very happy to see this,
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/introduction-to-google-search-quality.html

May 2008 Google update and SERP changes

Google has been into ever flux for a long time. Some webmaster world members are discussing a possible update in Google in May. I have seen some changes happen to our sites and client sites so definitely something is cooking up with Google results.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3639486.htm go to webmaster world for discussion more on Google may 2008 update

Google images are a great source of traffic

We get ton of traffic from Google images. Optimizing for Google images should be part of a good SEO strategy since Google images has good potential to send quality targeted traffic. People who search for particular product / image will like to see the image of the product to judge their ideas. A good product with good images will result in Good conversion.

There are some sites that feature their image in first page of Google regular results. If those images are featuring for some important terms like Mouse . I am sure sites that sells mouse will get the maximum benefit.

You can read more about optimizing for Google Images right from the mouth of a Google image search quality engineer here

Google now offers Hindi translations in their Translator

Google had been providing a translation platform for various languages for a long period of time. Now they offer Hindi to English and English to Hindi translation. Its an amazing improvement hope Google moves into other leading indian languages too

English to Hindi http://www.google.com/translate_t?langpair=enhiHindi to English http://www.google.com/translate_t?langpair=hien

subdomain or own domain blogs which one is better?

Many have questions whether sub domain blogs on blog service providers or blogs hosted on www yourdomain com is better.

As an expert in this first for more than 5 years ill tell you both don’t have any difference. whether its *.blogspot.com , *.blogsome.com or *.wordpress.com there are no visible differences. As long as your blog has good back links and the feed URLs are facilitated to ping regularly your blog will be indexed regularly. Use some blog software like feedburner which helps in automated pinging from Google blog search and other blog searches. If you are into Google blog search you can be sure of that you will be included into Google search results too. Search Engines love fresh contents make sure you provide the crawlers as much fresh contents as possible.

I recommend you submit your feed URL to Google Blog ping service http://blogsearch.google.com/ping I am sure it will help,

Matt cutts on web spam in recent web 2.0 Conference Oreilly

Here you can find some tips about combating spam from Google’s Matt Cutts head of Google’s Webspam team and an engineer who’s been working on the problem for eight years. During a speech at the Web 2.0 Expo Matt Cutts explained about countering Web spam as-

“Spammers are human,” Cutts said. “You have the power to raise their blood
pressure. Make them spend more time and effort…If spammer gets frustrated,
he’s more likely to look for someone easier.” How? Forthwith, some tips for
those who manage their own or others’ Web sites. • Use captcha systems to make
sure real people, not bots, are commenting on your site. He uses a simple math
puzzle–what’s 2 + 2?–but he also likes KittenAuth, which makes people identify
kitten photos. One blogger merely requires people to type the word “orange” into
a field. “The vast majority of bots will never do that,” Cutts said. •
Reconfigure software settings after you’ve installed it. A little modification
of various settings will throw bots off the scent. “If you can off the beaten
path, away from default software installations, you’ll save yourself a ton of
grief,” he said. • Employ systems that rank people by trust and reputation. For
example, eBay shows how long a person has been a member and how satisfied others
are with transactions with that person. • Don’t be afraid of legitimate
purveyors of search-engine optimization services. “SEO is not spam. Google does
not hate SEO,” Cutts said. “There are plenty of white-hat SEO (companies) who
can help you out.” Registering your Web site at Google’s Webmaster Central site
can help find bogus search-engine optimization tricks others may use on your
site, such as keywords written in white text on white backgrounds, he added.

Speech by Matt Cutts was very information he did say white hat SEO companies are definitely recommended and its not difficult to find a good SEO company. He recommends comment authentication since there are a lot of blog spam lurking out there. Mattcutts has been a major link between webmasters and Google.

Slow Crawling experienced by few webmasterworld members

Some webmasterworld members have reported slow crawling from Googlebot on their sites. When you check this thread you can see that many have posted data showing slow browsing from Googlebot. From the sites we monitor we don’t see much changes to Googlebot crawling some of the sites which are actively updated Googlebot is regular in gobbling up pages. Some sites which are not updated often see a bit lesser browsing other than that things look very normal to me.
I probably feel this could be caused by drop in backlinks to sites or Google devaluing some links. Google is very active in devaluing links recently. I recommend webmasters to keep a check on their backlinks and see if they are devalued.

Google Update reverts back – Dewey update no more visible

Google recently made an update to their index and matt cutts commented on that here http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3615693-3-30.htm . From checking different datacenters I dont see much changes now and the small changes that was visible in the datacenters mentioned in that webmaster world thread is not visible any more.

Most of the changes have reverted back and there are no visible signs of changes that happened on those datacenters propagating to other DCs.

Other cool thing is updates are not the hot topic anymore. People used to discuss 100s of pages for any major updates. When I see this dewey update thread i hardly see it go beyond 30 pages which is a good sign. People are becoming more and more aware of the changes and the communication between search engines and users have improved which has resulted in lesser worries for people.
While Google update mania is no more Pagerank Mania still continues.

False Pagerank update alarm has triggered 10 pages of posting in digital point forums

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=808970&page=2