Google knows the web is big – a informative post in Google blog,

Google is one of the biggest website. We’ve known it for a long time that the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, they’ve seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even their search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days when their systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone1 trillion-unique URLs on the web at once! So how many unique pages does the web really contain?? No one knows how many it contains but the number of pages out there is infinite! We don’t index every one of those trillion pages, many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content. But Google is proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine, and there goal is always been to index the entire world’s data. To keep up with this volume of information, their systems have come a long way since the first set of web data Google processed to answer queries. Then they did everything in batches- one workstation could compute the Pagerank graph on 26 million pages in a couple of hours, and that set of pages would be used as Google’s index for a fixed period of time. Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day. This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, they do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Google’s distributed infrastructure allows applications to efficiently traverse a link graph with many trillions of connections, or quickly sort petabytes of data, just to prepare to answer the most important question- your next Google search.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-web-was-big.html

Yahoo and Microsoft gain more market share but still Google leads way ahead

Some of the popular websites are Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, & Ask. Among these search engines Yahoo & Microsoft showed increment where as Google declined to great extent compared to previous years. The percentage of searches handled in US by five search engines are 61.5%, 20.9%, 9.2%, 4.1%, & 4.3%. Finally, a change – Google slips while Yahoo and Microsoft gain. Now there comes a question whether Google is in trouble?? The answer will obviously be no because of raw number of searches, June 2008 was another record breaker for Google. But Google dropped from 61.8% in May 2008 to 61.5% in June 2008, the first time a share drop has been shown over the past year since December 2007 (when it went from 58.6% to 58.4%).On other hand Microsoft showed its first gain in the past year. After many months of incremental decline, Microsoft rose from an 8.5% share in May 2008 to 9.2% in June 2008. This is likely a factor in Microsoft’s rise. By this it has achieved great success but at the same time Microsoft is hoping that program will generate more than a 0.7% rise in its share, and that’s all it has gotten so far. Clearly the program isn’t a massive initial game changer that some thought it to be. Instead, if Cash back is going to be a success, clearly now it will be something that happens over time. Let’s see if that indeed happens in the coming months. The other hand even yahoo too is showing a rise. After months of drops with the occasional rise, Yahoo posts two straight months of gains, i.e. 20.4% in April 2008 to 20.6% in May, then 20.9 percent in June 2008. I think there’s great rise in Yahoo & Microsoft. Lets see the actual number of searches each handled versus market share:
Google: 7.1 billion
Yahoo: 2.4 billion
Microsoft: 1.1 billion
Ask: 501 million
AOL: 471 million
By this we can tell that Google still shows a gain. Google went over the 7 billion searches served mark. Whereas Yahoo, at 2.4 billion searches, & Microsoft, at just over 1 billion searches, which didn’t break any past records but at least got closer to territory it held a year ago. On the whole there is a great increment in yahoo & Microsoft compared to previous years & Google declined a bit but then too created a record!

How to submit a re-inclusion request Google’s official video – transcripted by SRequesting reconsideration in Google how to remove banned site – Video

Requesting reconsideration in Google how to remove banned site – Video transcript

Posted by Mariya Moeva, Search Quality Team

Hai I am Mariya Moeva from the Google Search Quality Team and I like to talk to you about reconsideration requests. In this video we will go over one how to submit a reconsideration request for your site. Lets take a webmaster lady here as an example. Ricky a hard working webmaster who works on his ancient politics blog everyday lets call it example.com one day he checks and sees that his site no longer appears in Google search results. Lets see some things to know whether he needs to submit reconsideration requests. First he needs to check whether his sites disappearance from the index may be caused by access issues. You can do that too by logging into your webmaster tools account on the overview page you will be able to see when was the last time Google-bot successfully accessed your webpage. Here you can also check whether there are any crawling errors for example if your server was busy or unavailable when we try to access your site you would get an URL unreachable message alternatively there will be URLs on your site blocked by your robots.txt file you can see this by URLs restricted by robots.txt.

If these URLs are not what you expected you can go to tools and select analyze robots.txt here you can see whether you robots.txt file is properly formatted and only blocking parts of your site that you don’t want Google to crawl. If google has no problems accessing your site check to see if there is a message waiting for you in the message center of your webmaster tools account. This is the place where Google uses to communicate with you an put information to you on webmaster tools account in the sites that you manage. If we see that there is something wrong with your site we may send you a message there detailing things you need to fix to get back your site in compliance with Google webmaster guidelines. Ricky logs into his webmaster tools account and checked that there are no new messages. He doesn’t find any messages if you don’t find any message in the message center check to see if your site has been on is in violation on Google’s webmaster guidelines you can find that in the help center under the topic creating a Google friendly site how to make my site perform best in Google. If you are not sure why Google is not including your site a great place to look for help is our Google webmaster help group there you will find many friendly and knowledgeable webmasters and Googler’s who will be happy to look at your site and give suggestions on what you might need to fix,

You can find links to both the help center and the Google help group at Google.com/webmasters to get to the bottom of why his site has disappeared from the index Ricky opens the webmaster guidelines and starts reading. In quality guidelines we specifically mention completing avoiding hidden text or hidden links on the page. He remember that at one point he hired a friend named Liz who claimed to say he knows something about web design and that he can make the site rank better in Google. Then he scans his site completely and finds blocks of hidden text on footer of all his pages. IF your site is in violation of Google webmaster guidelines and if you think this might have affected the way your site is ranked in Google now will be a good time to submit a reconsideration request. But before you do that make changes to your site so that it falls between the Google

S webmaster guidelines. Ricky removed all the hidden text from his pages now he can go ahead and submit a request for reconsideration. Login to your webmaster tools account under tools click on request reconsideration and follow the steps make sure you explain what you did wrong with your site and what steps you have taken to fix it.

Once you have submitted a request you will receive a message from us in the message center confirming that we have received it. We will then review for compliance with the Google webmaster guidelines. So that’s an overview of how to submit a reinclusion and reconsideration request. Thanks for watching and Good luck with web mastering and ranking.

Adwords keyword suggestion tool now shows real numbers

Before it was not the case. We just see a bar estimating the competition and search volume for a particular phrase now we see real numbers. We can estimate traffic for a particular phrase for past month as well as average all time.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

I am sure all paid keyword tools will disappear now since google gives their own authoritative data and all other data are just a waste of time now.

Interesting post in webmasterworld on how punctuation in keywords affect results.

Andy of webmasterworld made an interesting post on how punctuation in keywords affects search results and search engine rankings

Read the post

“Various punctuation characters have a noticeable impact on search results – mostly from a searcher perspective. As a webmaster, you may find that your users include punctuation in some keywords, and so it can be of use to know what the effect on the results they see is. And besides, knowing how to search Google is one step towards understanding how Google works. This is a spot check of the current handling of punctuation by Google.
Indexed punctuation
Key_word
Underscores are treated as a letter of the alphabet, which is why you can search for an underscore directly. Use underscores in content if your visitors include an underscore when searching (e.g. if you had a programming site).
Key&word
Ampersands or ‘and symbols’ have fairly unique handling. They’re both indexed and also treated as the equivalent of word “and”. If there are no spaces separating the symbol and the adjacent letters, the search results are an approximate equivalent of combining results for [“key and word”] and [“key & word”] (note the phrase matching). Use ampersands in copy as is natural for your target audience.
Explicit search operators
Many punctuation characters are explicit search operators, with a documented effect on results. Search operators are not indexed (or at least, they can’t be searched for) and so are usually treated as word separators when found within website copy:
Key¦word
An (unbroken) pipe character is the equivalent of boolean OR: a search for [key OR word]. It can be a handy shortcut when conducting complex queries.
Key”word
A double quote triggers an exact or phrase search for the proceeding words (whether you include a closing double quote or not). So in this instance, it’s the equivalent of a search for [key word] since a single word can’t be a phrase. [“key word] is the same as searching for [“key word”].
Key*word
An asterisk is a wildcard search for zero or more words: [key … word]. Putting numbers on both sides will trigger the calculator. Occasionally, Google delivers (strange!) results if you search for an asterisk directly.
Key~word
A tilde triggers Google’s related word operator – in this instance, a search for both ‘key’ and ‘word’, as well as other words related to ‘word’ – like ‘Microsoft’, ‘dictionary’ and others.
Search operator oddities
Key-word
A hyphen (as is probably consistent with language use) returns a mix of results for the words both used separately, and joined together – somewhere between [key word] and [keyword]. It’s the preferred word separator within website URLs, since other punctuation characters that are treated as a word-separator have specific functions within a URL.
Others
A few punctuation characters have a strange impact on results – returning far fewer results than for either separated or concatenated words. They are neither known search operators, or indexed characters. These are . / \ @ = :
As far as I’m, aware, all other punctuation characters are treated as simply a space or word separator.
So, do I have too much time on my hands? Probably. But why not confuse whoever looks at Google’s search logs by trying a few punctuation searches yourself? 😉
Do you know any punctuation with an effect on results not discussed here, or more about the effect on results of the punctuation above? “

Google guide on reclusion request after penalty

Google Webmaster Central Team comes up with an other useful posting on how to submit your site for reinclusion in care you fear your site banned or penalized by Google. Google has recently been imposing lots of penalties to a site though they are not totally visible to users. If you suspect your site is in someway penalized read this post on how to remove the penalty.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/07/requesting-reconsideration-using-google.html

Google comes closer to ethical SEOs and SEO companies

Google recently rewrote their SEO page in Google Webmaster help. Before it used to focus on unethical SEOs now they have a more standard document where they give credit to companies who help Search engines deliver better results and webmasters / site owners develop better websites . According to Google good seos

• Reviewing and providing recommendations on your site content or structure
• Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
• Content development
• Managing online business development campaigns
• Keyword research
• SEO training

Well those are good points are most of them are basic stuff handled by any SEO company or SEO consultant. Apart from this good SEOs provide ethical ways to build quality back links. As we know Back links plays a very important factor when it comes to Search Engine Rankings especially in Google. Getting natural links through traditional ways are an important way for top rankings in Google.

1. Write articles which are useful and unique for users. This will help relevancy of the website as well as attract visitors which will result in back links.

2. Provide widgets that are useful and for free which will pay by itself through quality back links.

3. Impress the big authority and GOV sites by providing what they want they will link to your site if you can provide things they want to see and use often.

4. Make your site link worthy by making it as a useful hub for targeted users / customers. Good contents, attractive graphics, tools, forum, blog will all help If you have regular repeated visitors then you have achieved something. Repeated visitors are important since word of mouth referral is important for spreading the word which will result in quality back links.

According to Google some useful questions you can ask a SEO company:

• Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
• Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
• Do you offer any online marketing services to complement your organic search business?
• What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what time frame?
• What’s your experience in my industry?
• How long have you been in business?

I agree with all those questions they are pretty straight forward and covers a lot of things. If a good SEO gives a clear answer for these questions i am sure he can relied upon. I respect Google and will live by their stance on SEO even before this updation i never had anything against their rules. Its their search engine and they set the rules for it. We need to live by it. If we can’t and if something wrong happens we need to face consequences. This is how it is and this is how it should be.

Vijay

Google uses Search Logs effectively to combar Webspam

Fighting web spam using effective tracking of logs and click through data.

Matt Cutts Senior Software Engineer and Lead of Web Spam Team in Google recently made an interesting post on how Google effectively fights spam using Data collection.

Web Spam is the most annoying part of Internet today. Especially more than 85% people uses search engines to land on any site for the first time Search Engine Spam should be totally avoided when it comes to user search experience. Search engines have always had the taunting task of fighting web spam from the day they came into existence. Google is one of the search engines which used effective anti-web spam methods to combat search engine spam. This is one reason they are keeping their position on top of all search engines.

First time i have seen Google really acknowledge that they are using log data in their algorithm to combat spam. According to Official Google blog

“Data from search logs is one tool we use to fight web spam and return cleaner and more relevant results. Logs data such as IP address and cookie information make it possible to create and use metrics that measure the different aspects of our search quality (such as index size and coverage, results “freshness,” and spam). Whenever we create a new metric, it’s essential to be able to go over our logs data and compute new spam metrics using previous queries or results. We use our search logs to go “back in time” and see how well Google did on queries from months before. When we create a metric that measures a new type of spam more accurately, we not only start tracking our spam success going forward, but we also use logs data to see how we were doing on that type of spam in previous months and years.

The IP and cookie information is important for helping us apply this method only to searches that are from legitimate users as opposed to those that were generated by bots and other false searches. For example, if a bot sends the same queries to Google over and over again, those queries should really be discarded before we measure how much spam our users see. All of this–log data, IP addresses, and cookie information–makes your search results cleaner and more relevant.”

As per Matt cutts IP address and search logs do play a role in judging the quality of results delivered to users. I personally feel this is a good option i know there are some IPs that spam the search engines more than the regular IPs if Google is able to monitor the IPs pretty well they can effectively block automated queries and this can be used in search algorithm. Some keywords will always be spammed more than others, Google as they say can use these type of tracking to impose more filters to those kind of phrases. As a person with more than 5 years of experience with search engines i can see Google imposes stronger filters for certain phrases than others. For keywords like Cancer, mesothelioma more gov, org authority sites rank which for keywords like auto transport, real estate commercial sites do a better job. Really enjoy the way the results are displayed since i don’t like to see a commercial site when i search for medicine related information. Most of the time commercial sites provide much lesser value to users than non-commercial sites. There are areas where we need to see more commercial sites and there are areas that needs more information sites to be dominant. Only way to get this right is to check through the hysterical data and search logs and see what keywords are searched more from where, what the user did after clicking the data etc. User tracking can be done effectively using strong filters and effective methods.

Search Engines are facing problems every day. Apart from Web spam and search engine spam they see DDOS attacks, excessive bot activity, scrappers etc. To stand on top they need to keep working on stronger methods to combat spam.

Official Google Blog post here

Use Custom Search And Adsense For Search Live better – Google Says

Here in Google we are passionate about Search we are passionate about users and passionate about what they are looking for. obviously Google.com. As a search user you love the Google’s powerful search platform but what about putting a custom Google search engine on your site and now our custom search offers more custom options than never before not only have you control over the look and feel of your search result you now have full control of what’s being searched. Also with relevant search results Google will deliver relevant search results on what you are looking for where you can earn revenue as well as have a positive search experience on your own site. To tell you about some of our new features, i would like you to introduce to matt one of our search engineers who has been actively working on Adsense for Search.

Matt: With the new custom search engine you can customize Adsense for Search used just for your site. A collection of sites you specify say all travel blogs or the entire web we are also working on improving the color of site search so that you can
display a better format which will be good looking for your site.

That’s great matt tell us about getting relevant Ads and results on your site. Ofcourse with the new keyword feature you can continue search engine to your sites topic you have an other website say that is looking for Yoga class. So when you search matt in search box instead of getting results for Yoga maps you will also get results for commercial Mats and forum mats. I am not sure you have the yellow color for the floor mat.

So you define your search engine for keyword such as Yoga, Exercise and Meditation. So next time when you search for results for mat you will get results related to Yoga. That’s perfect

Ofcourse users will get quality and relevancy of Google search results. More customization means more control to you and better experience for your users. And its quick and easy to setup just click on the setup tab and under adsense account click Adsense for Search and if you don’t have an account today sign-up under www.google.com/adsense or www.Google.com/afs

Vijay

Google Leads the table in helping out webmasters

Google has picked up its efforts to help out webmasters for their website related problems. They now guide webmasters to effectively maintain a website so that it gets its deserved rankings. Google gives support in Google groups and other various forums, by employee blogs ( Matt cutt’s blog ) , Official Google blogs ( especially webmaster central blog ) , Google live webmaster chat ( 2 already over ) and now we have Google Trifecta: Webmaster Tools, Analytics, Website Optimizer coming up in July. We are very excited about this and thought we can create some cartoons representing Google’s good work.

1. Matt Cutts , Adam Lasnik and other Googlers are Desperate in impressing webmasters with their active participation in various forums and Blogs.

2. Matt Cutts Speaks in various conferences to make webmaster understand the way Google works.

3. Google is becoming increasingly popular among webmasters and site owners for their effort to become closer to them. Two successful Google Webmaster Live chat is a proven strategy.

4. Matt Cutts Answering Q and A in Webmaster Conference

5. Google has been actively promoting Google Webmaster Central BLog them want webmasters and site owners to read it. Also their Webmaster Tools are becoming increasingly popular.

6. Calling all webmasters to participate and visit Google Webmaster help Groups.

Vijay
Search Engine Genie.