Digitalpoint Forums Down due to overactivity

Today when I visited Digitalpoint forums I got the following Error,

“
Database error
The database has encountered a problem.
Please try the following:
Load the page again by clicking the Refresh button in your web browser.
Open the forums.digitalpoint.com home page, then try to open another page.
The forums.digitalpoint.com forum technical staff have been notified of the error, though you may contact them if the problem persists.
We apologise for any inconvenience.”

Its very rare to see such popular forum go down. I feel its mostly due to over activity recently Google made a Pagerank update. Most of the visitors in Digital point forum are very addictive and passionate about Pagerank updates. I feel this pagerank update made a crazy impact on their server and it let to database crash.

I think we should be hearing from soon about this,

Search Engine Genie,

Pagerank Update April 2008 Happening now,

After a lot wait Google is updating its Toolbar Pagerank data, You can check your Pagerank updated using our future page rank tool http://www.searchenginegenie.com/future-pagerank-checking.html . Remember Pagerank is updated internally before being like in Toolbar. First Pagerank was live on Google directory. Google updated its directory pagerank before 5 days now slowly some all the datacenters are getting updated with New Toolbar pagerank data.

Enjoy the pagerank update, Hope everyone are doing fine in this update.

SEO Tools to be upgraded with Ajax Technologies

We have the best , most comprehensive list of SEO tools for FREE here http://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-tools.htm , All tools are provided Adfree to give the best experience for our users. Right now we are in process of upgrading all our SEO tools to the latest Ajax Technologies. Remember we will continue to provide all our tools Adfree which has always been our policy.
lyfavor we ask from our loyal tools users is please link to the tools, that brings attention to the tools which will result in backlinks which will result in increased traffic and search engine rankings. We are more than happy to live with it. Currently we have around 50 tools. We will be expanding the number of tools to around 75 with an investment of 8,000$. We are happy to do it as long as our users are happy. Again though we invest we will not make the tools paid tools like our competitors. We are in a open source world and we love to give our stuff free.

Text link brokering companies and other Search engine related sites please dont contact us for paid text link or banner advertising on our site we will never now or infuture sell links. We do get lot of requests and all requests go into Trash without any consideration so don’t waste your time asking us to selling links.

Search Engine Genie Team

launching inhouse team SEO challenge

We have about 8 teams working on SEO, Currently we are organizing a small inhouse SEO challenge. The team that comes up with the best tactics that brings maximum attention to the client site/sites they work on will get a treat in one of the best local Star Hotel and one day outing to a favourite play they choose. We are running this challenge for a month and results to be announced around May 25th. May the best team win.

Tactics like Controversial articles, top level quality attractive articles, amazing tools, new innovative ideas are all allowed. We are waiting to see who is the best SEO team in our company. All teams have already started working hard and are doing lot trial and error ideas to come up with the best strategies.

Wish our teams good luck

SEG

Most recent SEO related Informative Thread in Google Groups.

I have already read this thread in detail but i keep reading it again and again. Just one single thread and it has ton of information from some of the best Search Engine Experts. Especially I enjoy the SEO expert’s friendliness with Search Engines. Most of the forums i see there will be a huge crowd ready to bash Google. But this thread is so much fun to read just because it has real valuable information from experts like Matt Cutts, John Muller, Aaron Pratt, JLH, SEO101 etc.

I recommend everyone to read this thread and understand how a webmaster was able to over come his penalty and get back his ranking in Google. Accept you are wrong and Google is always ready to forgive. We had a client who came to us with a penalized site. They bought links from TLA and Google has detected those links and imposed some sort of penalty. We reviewed the site and recommended client to remove all paid links and file a re inclusion. You know what his answer was?
“Google is the looser since it has banned his site. Google is unlucky because it doesn’t have his company site in their index” . Come on client if not your site Google has millions of sites to index and they are not worried if one aggressive site is not in their index even though it might be world’s best. It took us lot of time to convince him to clean up paid BLs. Finally he did but still he was not ready to give up his Ego and submit re inclusion. We on behalf of him filed a re inclusion and finally the site came back to Good top rankings. He was all praises for us but the truth we didn’t do anything all we did was explain in detail mistakes that was previously done on site and said that it will never be repeated again. Google accepted our words and included the site so lesson learnt if you want Google to send free traffic for your site play by their guidelines if you going to spam them face the consequences.

Read that thread again its better than my voice

Yahoo Search Index rankings algorithm update

Yahoo recently updates their algorithm and search engine rankings. They made major changes as reported in their blog http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000533.html . Update was reported on April 21st and it should be rolled out by now. We did notify some significant changes from our client sites as well as our sites so did you see it?

How was your site performance?

Effect of Stumbleupon

Stumbleupon has been a great hit in recent days. Some of our sites get huge number of referrals from stumble upon. I went through a webmaster world thread which showed a similiar experience with Stumbleupon

Pageoneresults explains here how to get started with stumble upon

Getting Started with StumbleUpon http://www.stumbleupon.com/guide.html
After you’ve read the Guide and fully understand the terms and conditions of being a Stumbler, then there are 3 Steps you’ll go through to become a Stumbler…
Step 1: Join StumbleUpon and become a Stumbler… http://www.stumbleupon.com/sign_up.php
Step 2: Connect with friends if you have them in that network.
Step 3: Install the StumbleUpon Toolbar… http://www.stumbleupon.com/download.php
Step 4: Start Stumbling.
As with any “social network”, you will need to develop a reputation within the StumbleUpon Communities and there are many. With 4.99 million Stumblers, there are all sorts of “arms and legs” inside the community.
Your goal is to of course become a Top Stumbler and that only comes with tenure. Don’t expect things to happen overnight. Think of StumbleUpon like a Digg or Sphinn…
Top Stumblers http://www.stumbleupon.com/community.html

Forum discussion in webmaster world, http://www.webmasterworld.com/link_development/3629897.htm

SEO for Beginners download powerpoint slideshow

Pagerank Grey bar for pages of a website – why do we see it

I have seen Greybar display in Google toolbar for quite sometime, I am sure people are wondering what causes it. Personally I can speculate some reasons though i don’t have any evidence it. Here are some reasons I see what causes Grey bar display,

1. New pages: When ever a new page is created i don’t see a white PR bar anymore. Its grey PageRank display when ever there is a new page created. So as we know if Google has not assigned a PageRank it used to show white bar now its not the case any more we see Grey PageRank display for all new pages which is definitely new with Google.

2. Abandoned Pages: Pages which are not updated for a long time without any update are showing Grey bar i am seeing it across couple of our pages / websites. So probably it has something to do with abandoned pages.

3. Duplicate Pages: When a competitor or some spammer copies contents of that page and duplicates in his site pages the main page might loose its existing value and can display Grey bar. Seeing this substantially duplicate pages do have some reason for Grey Toolbar PageRank display.

4. Potentially penalty to those pages especially link exchange pages since I see more and more grey display in link exchange pages. This is just a speculation though penalty is the least reason I can imagine of since I see lot of grey PageRank pages rank in search engines.

5. A standard reason which has always been is that the communication between your toolbar and Google data center which delivers PageRank to toolbar is some how interrupted. Though this has been a reason given directly by Google employees still i wonder how one page can fetch PageRank from Google data center and other page cannot at the same time. This is a reason but very rare unless you see grey bar for all sites and pages you browse it cannot be justified.

6. Some people speculate Grey bar display has something to do with supplemental index. Google has been into controversy for a long time on supplemental pages debate. Pages in supplemental index never rank and some have seen grey PageRank pages also never rank so it could be a by product of supplemental results. Just an idea only.

7. Bad PR distribution for those pages from internal pages of your site. If those pages don’t have good PR distribution then it could cause grey PageRank but for many sites i monitor those pages have ton of internal links. For Example our blog homepage has link from all over our site but shows grey PageRank display. We see this page is crawled regularly, contents from this page is indexed regularly but still it shows Grey PageRank very difficult to say this as a reason.

8. Lack of Good external links or consistent external links to a page: I seriously wonder whether this could be a reason. Most of the inner pages I have seen that shows grey bar has very less or zero external links from other sites coming into it. So i wonder whether this could be a reason for grey bar. PageRank algorithm probably sees that this page is important only for this site and is not a good page for Internet. I do have controversy over this too. Again our blog URL have good links coming to it from external sites but it displays grey bar don’t know why. But recently our blog never got Good back links we seriously abandoned our blog for about a year and never posted any new information. So lack of consistent back links could be a reason for Grey PageRank display.

9. TPR ( Toolbar PageRank Reduction ) : Another reason i can speculate is the infamous Toolbar PageRank Reduction penalty which Google applied to sites which buy and sell text links. Is Grey PageRank bar a side effect of it?

My final opinion is if a page is more than a year indexed in Google and has a PR grey bar it could simply be that the page is not of best value for its users. So they dont assign pagerank for that page which might result in that page not passing pagerank to other pages in other words not contributing any link juice to the pages it links to.

Search Engine Genie

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