Yahoo launched a new video platform

If you are website publisher, just like videos on the flickr’s new mobile site you will be able to use Yahoo’s video platform to convert your user’s uploaded clips into great looking, iPhone-ready video files.

On Thursday, Yahoo launched an updated version of mobile website for Flickr with the ability to playback Flickr’s short, 90-second video on iPhone and iPod touch. Various other devices like mobiles will also be supported very soon. Videos on flickr’s mobile site are processed using Yahoo’s new video platform, which works on the backend to transcode uploaded videos into the high-quality H.264 format. There is also a web API for feeding Videos into transcoder and for collecting the results.

After the demo session was held, some questions pass to the development team responsible for new video platform by flickr’s. Since the web API was being developed the various queries goes like this.
Will the transcoder API be made publicly available to webapp creators so they can include video in their creations?
What are the player software options developers have available to work with? Flickr in the browser is using flash now. The mobile site launches the quicktime player on iPhone. On the Nokia N-series it presumably launches the Nokia video player? Real players?
What other Yahoo properties will take advantages of this new video platform? News? Movie trailers? TV.Yahoo.Com?
Yahoo Developer Network Website will give details about the video platforms public availability.

SEO experiment keyword rich links webmasterworld member

A webmaster world member asks “Hi guys, I am doing an interesting experiment on two of my more throw away domains. The experiment is testing to try and determine more information about how linking to the homepage affects rankings. The testing involves various controls – linking to the root domain from the nav only using ‘home’, linking from the nav using ‘main keyword’, linking from nav using ‘variations’ of keyword, linking from content only (while nav links saying home) to home using ‘keywords’ etc, etc.
First, I should mention some points about the domain.
4 years old Owned by me Dedicated IP Canonical comdomized HTML only Ranks top 5 in Google.com for main, second and third keyword phrases. Total of 90 pages, all unique content (written by me)
Testing was done over a 3 month period, with grace periods in between testing.
Here is so far what I have found. Might tell us a little about the threshold and re ranking filters
1. Linking home from every page in content using the same keyword caused 6 page drop in rankings.
2. Linking home using keyword in nav on all pages caused the same drop.
3. Link home from every page in content using variations caused a 3 page drop.
4. Linking home from the first 10 pages listed in google.com for site:domain.com/* brought increased ranking (from 5th to 3rd)
What is really interesting is that I gotten this down to the ‘by page’ factor. When I *slightly* cross the threshold and add links to two extra pages, and then wait until they are cached, I tip the scales and drop, to page 6.
What is further interesting is that linking home from content using variations of keywords WAS quite effective to a point, after which the site plummeted.
As well, this might point to a ‘hard line’ being crossed in terms of threshold, at one point I had the website going between position 4 and 51-60 for the same keyword every second day (flipping back and forth)
My test will be about trying to -950 the website by being ridiculously deliberate in nav linking, and then seeing if I can reverse the results by removing those (and how long it takes for the trust to be reinstated to the website) “

Google calendar officially comes to Apple’s iCal

On Monday, Google announced full support for the CalDAV protocol along with the release of a small piece of software for Mac computers so that users can easily link up their Google Calendars with iCal applications.
In July, CalDAV was previously launched by Google; however still consumer had to manually add their calendars directly to CalDAV- supporting application like Mozilla Sunbrid and Apple’s iCal. The newly launched Mac utility named “Calaboration” let the user to plug in their google calendar username and password to send the Google calendar over to iCal. It provides the benefits of two way synchronization that mean what ever changes you make on either end will appear to both in every few minutes.
After all the changes made to Calaboration, when it was started it worked without any problem. With this current implementation, we are able to see other people schedules, as well as reply yes, no or may be to calendar invitations. The only problem faced earlier was syncing errors which mean it dint allow to write data to Google servers, which was remedied with a closing and reopening of the program after the initial CalDAV setup.
If you are sunbird user, you can grab the Calaboration. As there is a simple provider extention that does the same thing.

Googlebot and if-modified since

New record in processing 1 PetaByte of Data

According to Official Google blog

“At Google we are fanatical about organizing the world’s information. As a result, we spend a lot of time finding better ways to sort information using MapReduce, a key component of our software infrastructure that allows us to run multiple processes simultaneously. MapReduce is a perfect solution for many of the computations we run daily, due in large part to its simplicity, applicability to a wide range of real-world computing tasks, and natural translation to highly scalable distributed implementations that harness the power of thousands of computers.In our sorting experiments we have followed the rules of a standard terabyte (TB) sort benchmark. Standardized experiments help us understand and compare the benefits of various technologies and also add a competitive spirit. You can think of it as an Olympic event for computations. By pushing the boundaries of these types of programs, we learn about the limitations of current technologies as well as the lessons useful in designing next generation computing platforms. This, in turn, should help everyone have faster access to higher-quality information.We are excited to announce we were able to sort 1TB (stored on the Google File System as 10 billion 100-byte records in uncompressed text files) on 1,000 computers in 68 seconds. By comparison, the previous 1TB sorting record is 209 seconds on 910 computers.Sometimes you need to sort more than a terabyte, so we were curious to find out what happens when you sort more and gave one petabyte (PB) a try. One petabyte is a thousand terabytes, or, to put this amount in perspective, it is 12 times the amount of archived web data in the U.S. Library of Congress as of May 2008. In comparison, consider that the aggregate size of data processed by all instances of MapReduce at Google was on average 20PB per day in January 2008.It took six hours and two minutes to sort 1PB (10 trillion 100-byte records) on 4,000 computers. We’re not aware of any other sorting experiment at this scale and are obviously very excited to be able to process so much data so quickly.”

Update from Google from our newsletter

The first and foremost update is: Suggestions in better targeting your Indic language site. It’s all about a multi lingual site. Few words said by them: We’d like to introduce the transliteration API for Indic languages (languages spoken in India) in addition to our Ajax API for languages. With this API at your disposal, content creation is simplified because it not only helps integrating transliteration in your websites but also allows users visiting your site to type in Indic languages. This Post also tells how to include the translation API and they have said “When it comes to targeting, don’t forget to add meta tags in your local language. And for your questions, we have a new addition to our already existing communication channels like the webmaster help groups and webmaster tools (available in 26 languages!)”. They also have their own official Orkut Webmaster Community where users can share their thoughts and discuss webmaster related issues. To do so one can sign up for the Orkut community and if any thoughts are there then it can be shared with them. On demand site map for Custom Search… It’s all about the custom search. Webmasters who submit sitemap to webmaster tools always get a very special treatment. The customs Search identify the submitted sitemaps and indexes URLs from these site maps into a separate index for higher quality Custom search results. They interpret your CSEs pick up the appropriate sitemaps and they figure out which URLs are relevant for your search engines for enhanced indexing. This brings you a dual benefit of great discovery for Google.com and more comprehensive coverage in your own CSEs. Today they have put a step forward in improving your experience with Google Webmaster services with the launch of On-Demand Indexing in custom search. With the help of this you can tell them about the pages which are new or which are significant and have changed and custom search will immediately schedule them for crawl and index and serve them in your CSEs normally within 24 hours, often much speedy. Further this also gives important points to be bared in mind. Third update is a very interesting one…Its all about the SEO starter Guide. It covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. They felt that these areas would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and kinds. All through the guide, they also worked in many instances, pitfalls to shun, and links to other resources that aid expand their explanation of the topics. They also plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with novel optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current. Spookier than malware… This update is all just fun. It’s about their Halloween celebration by the Webmaster central team! Reflections on the “Tricks and Treats” webmaster event: It’s about how did it go, what’s next, a big thank you and few presentations by people of Google Groups. It was an exciting, fatiguing, and educational event. They’re aware that the sound quality wasn’t great for some folks, and they’ve also prized quite-helpful constructive criticisms in this feedback thread. Last but not least, they are bummed to admit that someone but forgot to hit the record button. In what’s next well, for starters, all of us Webmaster Central Googlers will be spending fairly some time taking in our feedback. Some have requested sessions completely covering particular (pre-announced) topics or tailored to specific experience levels, and they’ve also heard from many webmasters outside of the U.S. who would love online events in other languages and at more suitable times. No promises, but you can bet we’re eager to please! And next is a big thank you where they thank all the fellow Googlers. And finally end up with few presentations as said earlier by people of Google groups. Malware?? Don’t need any stinking malware! This explains about a main sentence which we often find while browsing. “This Site May harm your Computer”. All in all it explains in detail the meaning of malware label and how one does gets rid of it when it is found in their site by Google Scanners. It tells out all the points so clearly and also tells how to request a review via Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update

Yahoo update coming, yahoo will soon update their search index and there will be changes to their existing algorithm,

according to yahoo blog

“We’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days and expect the update will be completed soon. As you know, throughout this process you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.”

Search-based Keyword Tool Google launch

The Search-based Keyword Tool provides keyword ideas:
Based on actual Google search queries
Matched to specific pages of your website with your ad and search share
New to your Adwords account (typically excluding keywords matching those already in your account)What is the Search-based Keyword Tool?
The Search-based Keyword Tool generates keyword and landing page ideas highly relevant and specific to your website. In doing so, the tool helps you identify additional advertising opportunities that aren’t currently being used in your AdWords ad campaigns.
Based on your URLs, the Search-based Keyword Tool displays a list of relevant user queries that have occurred on Google.com (and on other Google search properties, such as google.co.uk) with some frequency over the past year; these suggestions can be found under the Keywords tab, in the New keywords related to (site) section. In the Keywords related to your search section, you can see a broad list of keyword ideas that are also relevant, but aren’t necessarily based on your site.
The keywords are also organized by category. Click any category to expand and view its subcategories. If applicable, you’ll also see the keywords organized by brand names

you can use it here, http://www.google.com/sktool/

SEO firm sued by attorney General – Washington business

SEO firm sued by attorney General:

“
Visible.net and Captures.com accused of violating consumer protection and telemarketing laws
SEATTLE – The Washington Attorney General’s Office is suing a Redmond-based seller of e-commerce services whose failed promises to rev up Web traffic for small businesses drove many customers to file complaints.
“When it comes to Internet search results, every small business wants to pull rank,” Attorney General Rob McKenna said. “Merchants hoping to increase their online sales paid thousands of dollars to Visible.net and Captures.com but didn’t always receive the top listings and other services they were promised.”
The lawsuit announced today by the AGO was filed late Wednesday in King County Superior Court. It accuses Visible.net, Captures.com and their owner, Gilbert Walker, of violating state consumer protection and telemarketing laws.
The defendants also do business as WebMarketingSource.com and sell Web site design, search-optimization and other Internet marketing services, along with providing e-commerce services to process online purchases for merchant customers. They promote their services through their Web sites and by telemarketing. Packages include an initial startup fee of $3,749.99 up to $9,749.99 plus a monthly fee of $39.99 to $99.99.
Senior Counsel Paula Selis, an assistant attorney general who heads up the Attorney General’s Consumer Protection High-Tech Unit, said the Attorney General’s Office and Better Business Bureau have received nearly 90 complaints about the defendants, showing a pattern of recurring problems since at least 2005.
The suit accuses the defendants of the following violations, among others:
Failing to register with the Department of Licensing as a commercial telephone solicitor and failing to provide written confirmation of a consumer’s rights under the Commercial Telephone Solicitation Act.
Misrepresenting the ability to significantly increase traffic to customer Web sites by achieving top search-engine rankings and failing to deliver other promised services.
Falsely claiming an affiliation with other marketers including Specialty Merchandise Company, a so-called drop-ship wholesaler.
Claiming that its customer service representatives can be reached at any time when, in fact, customers are often unable to reach representatives and sometimes do not receive return calls.
Failing to provide refunds or honor cancellation requests.
Continuing to bill the credit cards of some consumers who have attempted to cancel and submitting alleged debts to collection agencies.
The state is seeking civil penalties and consumer restitution in addition to a court order halting the deceptive practices.”

Losing pages in search engine index a concern

According to a member ” I have been doing a lot of digging lately because of a site I have that has been losing pages in the index… at least I thought it was losing pages. In the coarse of investigating, I have been finding a lot of discrepancies and have come to the conclusion that though tools and search operators may be helpful, they seem to be far from accurate and do not fully portray what is in the data and returns. What I found fascinating is that while I perceived that I was losing pages in the index, I actually have been increasing position for some relatively hard to get keywords and phrases. In fact, the site in question just went to #6 for widgets. It seems the more I search and investigate, the more glaring the discrepancies.
I was having a lot of problems with the site and duplicate content. It seems there were several ways of getting to the same page (different URLs) and as we know, this can be a bad thing. The site has a forum that has generated 16,000 topics (some of them on multiple pages) so in essence, I am going to estimate that I have around 19,000 pages total on the site. Now at the height of the duplicate problem, when I did a site:mysite.com, I was getting over 80,000 pages returned. WOW! I fixed all the dupe content issues and now each page has one URL and each has a uniquely generated title, description, keywords and of course, the content is different since it is user generated. I used robots.txt to get rid of the duplicated pages and started to watch what would happen. This seemed to have corrected the problem. Pages started going supplemental and dropped, as far as I can tell. But the pendulum seemed to have swung too far! Within the past month, the number of pages returned using site: have been slowly dropping. Now when I do a site:mysite.com, it only shows 4000 pages. Huh? What’s the deal with that? Not only that, when I do a site:mysite.com/*, I only get about 800 pages. So I am confused, of course. But are the missing pages really not there? I conducted about 200 searches for the pages that I thought were missing and found every single one of them, though the searches were fairly specific. So what does this tell me? The site: operator does not work. All of my pages are there, it’s just Google doesn’t want to count them all with this operator. What does this mean? Not sure, but it is what it is. For every page I find missing, I can find in a search. The tool seems to be broken – like a lot of the tools on G. “

What causes drop of indexed pages?