MSN search Yahoo and Google Join Hands atleast for one good cause

MSN webmaster live search blog recently reported how search engines have joined hands on using robots exclusion protocol to not only block them but also allow how users will guide the crawlers. I am sure this is not new but there are some tags described here which are definitely found by Google but not commonly used by other search engine crawlers.

One tag that immediately comes to my mind if the NOODP tag. If this tag is used in meta tag it will tell the Search engine not to show title and description of a Dmoz listing. We at search engine genie use this tag and this was first introduced before around 30 months by Google. Good to know that MSN and Yahoo too understands this tag.

NOODP META Tag

Then we have the crawl Delay settings in robots.txt first introduced by Yahoo. When we set a crawl delay we tell the crawler to fetch the pages from the server at the specified interval of time.
According to MSN Live search blog Microsoft now uses crawl delay and you can set the crawl delay and expect Yahoo and MSN to follow it. Google still doesn’t want to use crawl delay. Its understandable on Google’s point of view since a crawl delay is something very disturbing for a site.

For detailed reading follow the link above to MSN Live search official blog

Is Microsoft indirectly going for a Proxy fight?

BLB&G LLB group is taking on Yahoo on behalf of some share holders for not accepting Microsoft bid. this page has some very useful information that’s just revealed.

On February 21, 2008, BLB&G, on behalf of Plaintiffs, filed a Class Action Complaint against Yahoo and its board of directors (the “Board”), alleging that they have acted to thwart a non-coercive takeover bid by Microsoft, which would provide a 62% premium over Yahoo’s pre-offer share price, and have instead approved improper defensive measures and pursued third party deals that would be destructive to shareholder value. Yahoo’s “Just Say No to Microsoft” approach is a result of resentment by the Board, and not any good faith focus on maximizing shareholder value. Microsoft attempted to initiate merger discussions in late 2006 and early 2007, but was rebuffed, supposedly so Yahoo’s management could implement existing strategic plans. None of those initiatives improved Yahoo’s performance. On February 1, 2008, over a year after its initial approach, Microsoft returned, offering to acquire Yahoo for $31 per share, representing a 62% premium above the $19.18 closing price of its stock on January 31, 2008.

Looks like the proxy fight is about to move forward more aggressively. Lets wait and see

SearchMarketing Expo Conference – recap and write up

Barry of Search Engine Roundtable has a very good writeup of the recently concluded Search marketing expo conference organized by the Search engine industry expert Danny Sullivan. Barry also blogs for Search engine land Danny’s official blog. Please read Barry’s write-ups here

My favourite is the tip provided Roger on finding edu domains for links

“Tips in Yahoo Link Commands:
linkdomain:example.com site:.edu “bookmarks”
linkdomain:example.com site:.edu “links”
linkdomain:example.com site:.edu “favorite sites”
linkdomain:example.com site:.edu “your product or service”
More examples:
linkdomain:example.com site:.edu sponsors
linkdomain:example.com site:.edu donors
linkdomain:example.com site:.org sponsors
linkdomain:example.com site:.org benefactors”

Theplanet datacenter restored in batches

We reported here about the planet datacenter catching fire which resulted in about 9000 active servers going offline. It seems now they restored power and all the servers are back online. Official blog updates here service-update.theplanet.com

Power in H1 Phase 1 has been restored. We are starting to turn customer servers on in batches.

.info domains banned in Google – Webmaster reports .info domains getting penalized

Some active members of webmaster world are discussing about a potential penalty to .info domain names. It seems for about 2 weeks Google has been experimenting with .info domain names by removing from search results for a certain period of time to check how much spam it stops in their results.

“This has happened to my .info domain since last night and I am really upset at it.
All my 300 keywords have stopped working in Google but my site still appearing in Google with site:www.example.info and www.example.info searches.
Yesterday I received 600 visitors from Google and today only 4.
My .info domain is one and half years old. Till, Today I regularly update it with unique content and don’t promote it much as I am already receiving number of visitors.. I never did spamming or adopted prohibited ways to promote the site.
I do Free directory submissions and very seldom links exchanges.
Can any expert tell me please what why it has happened to my site?
Is it a permanent problem or temporarily.?
I will be thankful for any help and guidance “

Did Google really ban .info domains i doubt it its very difficult for Google to ever attempt something like that. If you check the search for Global registry you can see afilias.info ranking in top 3 this is an indication that .info domain itself is not banned. May be because that domain extension is abused too much Google might have removed some domains.

Theplanet’s datacentre – Largest dedicated server provider down

The planet’s main datacenter is down due to fire . According to their official update there was an explosion that caused due to a short circuit and that no one was injured and no data of customers were lost.

Update Note from them

“This evening at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost. We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department. This is a significant outage, impacting approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers. All members of our support team are in, and all vendors who supply us with data center equipment are on site. Our initial assessment, although early, points to being able to have some service restored by mid-afternoon on Sunday. Rest assured we are working around the clock. We are in the process of communicating with all affected customers. we are planning to post updates every hour via our forum and in our customer portal. Our interactive voice response system is updating customers as well. There is no impact in any of our other five data centers.”

As you know, we have vendors onsite at the H1 data center. With their help, we’ve created a list of equipment that will be required, and we’re already dealing with those manufacturers to find the gear. Since it’s Saturday night, we do have a few challenges. We are prioritizing issues as follows:
Getting the network up at H1 is first and foremost. We’re pulling components from our five other data centers – including Dallas – which will be an all-night effort.
Getting power back to the data center is key, though it is too early to establish success there.
Because Server Command is in H1, our legacy EV1 customers are blinded about this incident. We are in the process of moving the Server Command servers to other Houston data centers so that we’re able to loop them into communications.
We absolutely intend to live up to our SLA agreements, and we will proactively credit accounts once we understand full outage times. Right now, getting customers back online is the most critical.

More updates go here

Google has more than 200,000 Servers

According to a interview with Google fellow Dean its estimated Google has more than 200,000 servers in various of its datacenter around the Globe.

“Google doesn’t reveal exactly how many servers it has, but I’d estimate it’s easily in the hundreds of thousands. It puts 40 servers in each rack, Dean said, and by one reckoning, Google has 36 data centers across the globe. With 150 racks per data center, that would mean Google has more than 200,000 servers, and I’d guess it’s far beyond that and growing every day. “

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9955184-7.html

Danny Predicts HP Search Engines for the future

Danny Sullivan the owner and operator of Searchengineland.com and a well renowned expert in Search Engine industry has predicted future Search Engines will more rely on Human editing and decision making in Search results.

According to him Human Powered Search engines will be the future

Search 1.0 back in 1996 was concentrating on Onpage factors.

Search 2.0 ( Birth of Google ) around 1998 started off as a year for offpage Optimization

Search 3.0 2007 is the year for Universal results.

In future Search 4.0 will be more about Human editing in Search results to deliver best results.

Article is here http://searchengineland.com/080528-131813.php and its very interesting to read. Read the article and follow the link from it to Sphinn to discuss it.

Yahoo index update May 2008 – Yahoo search engine algorithm and ranking update

Yahoo has made some changes to its algorithm and ranking factors. Yahoo calls its index update a weather update and Yahoo Weather updates are posted in the their Official blog by some Search Engineer.

Priyank Garg & Sharad Verma both from Search had posted an update here

“We’ll be rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days, but 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. “

Is TPR Penalty back – Google’s Toolbar Pagerank Reduction Seem to be visible again

It seems Google’s TPR penalty is back, Google around February this year brought a new type of penalty for sites that buy / Sell links. Its called the TPR penalty. In this type of penalty Google will reduce the pagerank of sites that are suspected of Buying or Selling Backlinks. It seems the penalty is back and more sites are affected.

A member has reported Pagerank reduction to his website forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=862890 here.

If you see TPR affecting your site please post here. We are doing some research on this and would love to hear feedback from others. We want to see whether TPR penalty affects only sites that Buy and Sell links or it affects innocent sites caught up inbetween. We have seen some sites loose TB PR without any link selling or buying that is why we need to ASK.

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