Websites targets ignorant offering grants money:

Some scam websites that advertise with Google or rank in Google organic results are scamming people about Obama Stimulus package. According to those websites you can buy a home, a car, pay credit card bills, invest in Business, run a business or can do anything with that money. To find these scam sites just type “government grants” , “grants” , stimulus share , stimulus package , stimulus etc.

Con artists are creating and running scam websites like federalgovernmentgrantsolutions.com, OfficialStimulusPayments.com etc and lure ignorant people for spending to some crap services. Scammers create bogus blogs too and redirect traffic to sites that offer tips on bogus grant offers.

“A company in Las Vegas called The Grant Instructor has generated even more complaints – 450 so far. The BBB says the company, which also has an “F” grade, runs at least two dozen sites with names such as: American Grant Club, Get My Grant, Grant Dollars, Grants Are Easy, Grant Resource Center and Your American Grant.

Christopher Gaffer of Mankato, Minn. stumbled onto one of their sites called “The Grant Search.” Gaffer is on the board of a non-profit group in Mankato that helps provide affordable housing. Part of their funding comes from grants. Gaffer went online to look for new funding opportunities.

The initial cost was just $1.95 for seven days access to the Grant Search database. Gaffer paid but never got his access code. Seven days later, he found a charge for $49.50 on his credit card for “a recurring monthly membership.” Gaffer tried to contact the company but could not find a phone number or e-mail address. “It was a nightmare,” he says.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29643680/

Yahoo Makes money now from Yahoo search BOSS developer network:

BOSS is currently offered to developers free of charge. In the near future (likely late Q2 2009), we plan to implement a fee structure for API use above a set threshold.

BOSS will continue to offer free use of the API below a set daily threshold – up to 10,000 search queries per day depending on the type of API call. In addition, we plan to implement a service level agreement (SLA) in parallel with fees. We will announce firm timing and further details when we get closer to launch.

When we implement fees, we also plan to offer developers the ability to make non-time sensitive API requests at a significantly reduced price. This “off-peak” option can be used for research and analysis efforts to support building search experiences and would allow developers to request queries to be fulfilled by BOSS when capacity permits.

We currently plan to implement a fee system with the following structure:

· Fees will be determined based on the number and type of API requests made per day

· We are no longer restricting developers from monetizing their products using third-party platforms

· Fees will be determined using a unit system

· Units for Web, News, and Image BOSS API calls will be incurred based on the last result requested. For example, an API call requesting results 91-100 is the same cost as one requesting results 1-100

· Developers may request up to 1000 results in a single API call

· Units will cost $.10

· Developers will receive 30 units per day for free of charge

http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/fees.html

Webmaster help videos : a must watch:

http://www.youtube.com/GoogleWebmasterHelp

Does pagerank for a website affect crawling rate?

Pagerank is just a value assigned based on pagerank of other pages linking to it. Crawling rate for a site depends on various other factors and its definitely not pagerank alone. Martin Buster of webmasterworld gives a good explanation of the myths behind pagerank and crawling.

“I can’t be more emphatic about the falseness of this emphasis on PageRank 4. It has to die. If you are going to get ahead you must walk away from this myth. It’s a number that was arrived at in relation to backlink searches many years ago. The situation that gave rise to the myth went away, it ended, but the myth endured. I’ll explain.

History lesson
Many years ago Google used to show the backlinks of sites with a PR of 4 or more. This caused webmasters to make the erroneous assumption that PR 4 is the threshold between a good ranking and a bad ranking, that Google did not count links from -PR4 sites. Otherwise, why didn’t they show them in the backlink searches? It could be said to have been a reasonable assumption but at the time the Googlers were saying this wasn’t the case.

To the webmasters, because Google didn’t show links from sites with less than PR 4, they assumed that -PR4 meant you were crawled less, had less authority, etc. Over PR 4 meant your site had finally arrived.

Then during a London Pubcon DaveN suggested to Matt Cutts that this scheme was inaccurate and Matt Cutts agreed. Not long after he arrived back at the Googleplex their search engine began showing a sample of backlinks across a range of PR.

Stop and examine the facts

Anyone who has ever ranked a site with an under PR 4 site knows that the assumption that -PR 4 is less worthy is an assumption without foundation. Anyone who has watched their rankings jump with – PR4 backlinks understands that the PR 4 threshold is absolutely false.

The superstition continues

So even though Google began showing PR 4 backlinks, to this very day many webmasters still cling to the mistaken notion that PR 4 is a significant threshold. It is not. This belief in the superiority or meaningfulness of PageRank 4 meets the definition of superstition: “A belief in something not justified by reason or evidence.” It’s a myth. The healing powers of PR 4 is a superstition.

So what determines crawling?

What determines crawling is the amount of links you have. Each link is a new door, so to speak, for a bot to find you. One can have thousands and thousands of links and still rank under 4, yet be better and deeper crawled than a PR 4 with less inbound links.”

Age of domains – Importance in search engines:

I’d say the age of domain is one of the top factors in obtaining “authority” status. And then within the age factor are all the other things that determine its age. Change of owners. Change of IPs. Change of Servers. Change of just about everything that takes place within DNS.

I also feel that “stability” in the hosting network is another factor. I feel that anyone who has a serious Internet business is going to have their own IPs and possibly server(s) to do their thing. They won’t be relying on a cheap web host to compete in a market that is reserved for the BIG BOYs. That’s like showing up for a drag race in a Prius or something. 🙂

It is not the “only” factor though. Success takes time. There was a point in Internet history when it “could” happen overnight but that has slowly dwindled to lotto type statistics. You’ll have to invest the time and patience knowing that what you are building is a long term proposition.

Sure, you can open your doors and have success overnight and it still happens. If you have the right product and/or service along with a few strategically placed marketing efforts, you can start the ball rolling. Nature will take its course from there. Yes, things will “naturally” happen as it goes viral. Unfortunately many of us may not reach that level and we’ll continue to work in the trenches, feed our families, and make a decent living off the leftovers. 🙂

Yes, domain age is an important factor in “all” things Internet related. Each year that passes, the value of that domain increases. It’s like fine wine. Since 1995 has a bit of meaning when talking Internet these days. Companies who have been online for any period of time would be wise to start advertising their since dates.

Is excess links from social bookmarking sites harmful?

We get this question from our readers. I believe yes too much of anything is harmful right? If you are into building links from social media sites we need to make sure its done correctly. First of all we need to make sure social media links are not no-followed. No-follow links are not counted by Google. Even if the links are not no followed there are too many links submitted in sites like Digg.com so most of the time it’s not worth doing excess links in social bookmarking sites. Keep in mind, you are building a “link profile” right now. Do you want that profile focused in the Social Media space? If so, you’re on the right track but maybe going about it the wrong way. The way the question reads almost sounds as if you are abusing the Social Media outlets where this stuff was supposedly submitted.

Social bookmarking sites are meant for communities which want to share pages and sites they like on the web I am sure if you want to abuse it then you are in wrong track.

Unable to get rid of potential penalty?

You know your site is penalized. You cleaned up what you thought was the trigger. Filed re-inclusion request. After that you are in the dark. The chances are you never get reincluded-

– Your site might never have had a problem to begin with. It might have been one of those Google’s freak collateral damage issues that landed you in the soup.

– You correctly identified the issue, cleaned it up, filed a request, but you are in the mandatory penalty period, which you don’t know is how long and when will it end.

– You haven’t identified the problem or have partly addressed it and Google wants you to do more, a fact you are not aware of and are waiting endlessly for the penalty to end.

– It might never have been a penalty by Google’s definition, but an algorithmic tweak that has affected a select set of keywords. If the overall traffic hasn’t been affected drastically, perhaps a perceived penalty might belong to this category.

– Your site is affected (penalized or algorithmically tweaked), you undertake damage control efforts, file a request to Google citing what might have been the problem that you addressed, which might be a news to Google! So, they use the stick you gave to beat you.

It might just be best to clean up issues that you are aware of and leave the rest to destiny.
Google penalties are vague and sometimes affect high quality sites I feel best is to go for re-inclusion requests.

Is Google devaluing forums:

Several people have reported that Google is devaluing forums and not indexing them well these days. I did notice something similar in couple of forums we monitor. Google stopped indexing our PHPBB forums. Before it was indexing it every day, all new posts appeared in Google the same day, sometimes with an hour. Now it stopped. It doesn’t index topics at all, and last time it cached the main board page (index.php) was January 30.
My rankings of what is already indexed didn’t drop, the overall position of the site on the generic keywords even improved. And yes, we checked: our board was not hacked, there are no redirects, .htaccess or robots.txt hacks. Webmaster Tool doesn’t display any error messages, everything looks ok. But crawl graphs do show that Google crawls less in January-February than in November-December. It seems like Google just ignores the board now, like it has “better things to crawl”. Which is a pity, because there are tons of important info being posted daily.
We did some research on few of the other PHPBB sites we monitor, and even those boards faces the same situation. I suspect this could just be a temporary glitch with Google. Hope it gets fixed soon.

Yahoo search update February 2009:

Yahoo has done a update to their index and I can see a lot of changes and shuffling of results for my client sites. Most of our client site rankings got boosted this time. Yahoo loves most of our client sites they sometimes act very weird when it come to ranking sites. Their ranking algorithm is the most difficult to rank as well as the most easy at times. There are sites we had been trying for months to rank in yahoo but none of the keywords are in first page but there are few sites which we just do work for a week and from 2nd week it tends to dominate for major keywords.
According to official Yahoo search blog, Sharad Sharma reports that they have done a yahoo search index update and this will affect ranking and indexing of websites. Sharad also mentions they have updated their algorithm this time I am sure it’s a minor changes because way I am seeing across most of our sites and client sites is that there is little or no movement and the few movement we see are all positive and upwards.
http://ysearchblog.com/2009/02/27/weather-report-yahoo-search-index-update-19/
According to Ysearchblog.com
“We’ve rolled out some changes to our index with fresh web data and updates to our crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms over the last few days. We have had two updates since last November: one in December, 2008, and another in late January this year. We expect the update will be completed very soon. Throughout this process you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index.
While we didn’t do Weather Reports for the December and January updates, we heard loud and clear that the community still finds them helpful, so we’ll continue to provide these reports.”
I hope your sites are doing better.
Good luck with update.

Site: operator reporting lesser number of pages.

I am sure if you run a website and actively monitor it you will be aware that sometimes site: operator reports lesser number of results. Site: operator is used to find the number of pages indexed for a particular website for example: site:www.searchenginegenie.com will reveal all the pages that Google indexed for the website searchenginegenie.com .
Few of our clients and some of our external users have reported that site: operator sometimes report lesser number of pages than it usually used to show for their website. Some of the people who come to us with this question are also concerned that this could be another penalty. Ok, from our experience there is no reason to worry if site: operator reports lesser number of pages. This has always been the case Google has 1000s of clusters of computers spread throughout the world in different data centers they have, and not all the datacenters are update some of them have old data some have standard data and some have very fresh data. So when you make a query you tend to hit different datacenters and this will result in you hitting different results so if you see that your indexed pages are showing different don’t worry about that it should just be that you are seeing a different set of results.
But you should be worried in one case if you see consistent drop of your indexed pages over a period of time then there is something you definitely need to worry. See if there is something wrong with your site and in case your site disappears after consistent drop in indexed pages 90% it’s a penalty check for potential penalty in Google webmaster tools. If you find your site is penalized submit for reinclusion. Other than that there is nothing to worry about site: operator.