Google’s April fool 2008 Joke project virgil

Google plays with people’s mind again with their new april fool joke named project virgil, If you can see from this URL http://www.google.com/virgle/index.html google has plan to send people to space. LOL that is a very cool joke . They claim to form a human colony in mars with the help of virgin airlines I am sure people dont fall for google’s april fool pranks anymore

Remember their previous prank like the Lunar job or the pigeon rank instead of pagerank

From their FAQ that was very well written statement,

How are you planning to reach Mars?

During the first couple of decades Virgle will use standard technology of the day – chemical rockets to ferry cargo and crews to Mars. As the bootstrap plan stands today, in order to reach Mars (once the tri-module is assembled in LEO) the Virgle 1’s cruise stage will start a burn for insertion into a lunar trajectory and then back toward Earth for final insertion into a modified Hohmann Transfer Orbit. This multi-day round trip will use a variant of the Oberth effect, the Krasnokutskaya periapsis maneuver, to increase the final Earth-to-Mars transfer velocity through a periapsis delta-v burn performed at the closest lunar and subsequent Earth approach, with the additional delta v gained on account of the potential energy from the mass of expended propellant. The total useful mass sent this way to Mars will be 569 metric tons, meaning (obviously) that it will take four launches to complete the assembly. The design does allow for easy reconfiguration for varying payload capacities and transfer duration times. This round trip is also a final test and verification of the cruise configuration, assuring mission support that all systems are running within their nominal values. The design also provides for several orbital abort modes, decreasing significantly the probability of any mission losing a payload, human or otherwise.

Google update April 2008- Update Dewey names by matt cutts of Google

Google’s web spam head Mr.Matt Cutts has asked for feedback on new changes being rolled out in Google. Google has done a major update to its index and it seems lots of sites are affected. I personally see none of our client sites affected in any of the ips mentioned . One DC to look out for is DC 64.233.167.104 , When I checked I dont see much difference does anyone figure out what’s happening.

Here is Matt’s post

“Hey all, I asked a few people to look into this and they weren’t seeing many large differences in rankings between these datacenters. The issue with discussing on this thread is that specific urls/queries aren’t allowed. If anyone wants to mention a search where they see large-scale differences, feel free to send feedback to Google in the usual way. I’m going to pick a random-but-pretty-unique keyword so that I can look up reports. Let’s use “dewey” as the word. So if you want to mention a search where you think the results are very different at one data center compared to other data centers, use the spam report form at ihttp://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html\ and make sure to include the word “dewey” in the “Additional details” text area. Or feel free to point out differences in other ways: do a blog post, leave specifics on the Google webmaster help group, or whatever way you want to point out specific searches that look different to you.
The usual rules of thumb apply: you probably won’t get a personal reply, but I’ll try to get someone to check out reports that get sent in. There shouldn’t be much difference between data centers, so I’m curious to find out what queries people seem to be seeing different results on. “

Dewey what a weird name for an Update, I hope people never forgot the great updates like Google florida update, Austin update, Jagger and more.

Forum discussion and ramblings as always here webmasterworld.com/google/3615693-3-30.htm

Google webmaster central full audio transcript raw unedited version

Hello Everyone,
Atlast we are done with audio transcript from the Google webmaster central live chat audio which was recorded last friday when webmasters around the world had live chat session with Google. we have posted that here its about 11,000 plus words which is equal to 20 plus 500 words article. Google did a great job and we were able to record the full audio ( transcript here ) as well as the full Q and A session as well as full chat log. The audio came out to be of very poor quality since it was recorded with a Mobile phone and the mobile phone was placed near the laptop computer through which we were monitoring and listening the session. Laptop’s speakers messed up the audio but still we were able to get the transcript read which you can read it here. Please read the disclaimer and NOTE before proceeding on reading the transcript.

Feel free to link to the document, don’t copy it.

Search Engine Genie SEO Blog Team,

Getting indexed in MSN checklist – MSN indexing criteria

So some of your have problems getting indexed in MSN that is why you are here, Here is a simple checklist how to get good indexing by MSN live bot, MSN’s search engine crawler. Few posts back we had a posting about MSN live bot hitting us hard which is actually good news for us so how did we do it here is a small checklist you can do to get the same love from MSN search engine crawler.

1. As always we say good backlinks are similar to guaranteed paid inclusion into any search engines. There is no exception for MSN search engine get good links get listed in leading directories like Dmoz, yahoo directory etc your site is sure to indexed.

2. Submit your URL through webmaster.live.com a platform like google webmasters where you can validate your site and submit your URL,

3. Create a good html sitemap and link it from your homepage most of the search engines including MSN live bot like to crawl a site not too deep unless you have very good site. SO make sure most of your pages are accessible from the top level important pages like the Homepage.

4. Get listed in Dmoz like google MSN too loves Dmoz a listing in dmoz will guarantee a listing in MSN search.

5. Sometimes MSN live bot have problem reading your robots.txt, make sure you don’t mess too much with your robots.txt file it could cause problem for MSN live bot in crawling your site.

6. Check for canonical issues. MSN live bot still has some problem with canonical issues. Make sure you just use one version of the site either www or non-www. You can redirect either one to the other one.

7. MSN has problem with affiliate links so if you are part of an affiliate or offer affiliate services make sure your links coming in our going out have any problem with MSN live bot crawler.

8. Also if you made major changes to your URLs like changing shopping cart then you need to wait since it takes time for MSN bot to pick up new URLs. if you don’t see good crawler activity try submitting a sitemap.

9. Make sure your site is not banned or penalized from MSN search. A penalty will definitely affect your website crawling by MSN search crawler.

Search Engine Genie Blog Team.

Yahoo sitemap – how to submit yahoo sitemap to yahoo search

There are some people who have trouble submitting their sitemap to yahoo or don’t know where to submit their sitemap. Yahoo accepts the standard sitemaps.org xml protocol. Sitemaps created with sitemaps.org protocol is much standard now and is accepted by yahoo, google and MSN search engines. They also accept urllist.txt through their site explorer.

Go to site explorer https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites authenticate your site by following yahoo’s authentication process and submit your sitereemap there, You can also submit your blog or your site as a feed to yahoo,

“What kinds of feeds do yahoo support?
You can provide the feeds in the following supported formats. Yahoo do recognize files with .gz extension as compressed files and decompress them before parsing.
RSS 0.9, RSS 1.0, or RSS 2.0,
Sitemaps, as documented on http://www.sitemaps.org/
Atom 0.3, Atom 1.0
A text file containing a list of URLs, each URL at the start of a new line. The filename of the URL list file must be urllist.txt; for a compressed file the name must be urllist.txt.gz.
Yahoo! supports feeds for Mobile sites. When submitting a feed that points to content on the mobile web, please indicate the encoding of the content—either xHTML or WML. (From the Manage Sites page, click the arrow to the left of Add Feed to select feed type.) Submitting mobile feeds directs our mobile search crawlers to discover and crawl new content for our mobile index. “

Ranking in First page in google not in top 1000 in yahoo – yahoo banned

I know many of you wondered why they don’t rank anywhere in yahoo but are in top 10 in Google results. Most of the time yahoo’s ranking criteria is same as google’s but there are somethings which will prevent your site from ranking in yahoo

Here is a simple checklist criteria that you need to make sure for your no rankings problems with yahoo:

1. Make sure your site is not penalized or banned by yahoo, Yahoo is very good at doing this they are more tougher than google when it comes to penalty. Check whether your site gets indexed in yahoo make sure your pages are there. If you just see your homepage and not your inner pages then its still a problem. If you feel that your site is banned or penalized file for a reinclusion into yahoo. We do offer a reinclusion services in our company for Google, yahoo and MSN. We don’t have any tie up with any search engine but we will make sure we follow all their guidelines clean up every single possible mess with the site and submit it to the for a reconsideration request. Have a banned site in yahoo or feel its banned feel free to contact us through our contact form and please explain what you did or doing on your site,

2. Remember to have backlinks from sites which yahoo feels are important. Both search engines don’t value backlinks the same way. For example yahoo places a lot of weight on their directory link much more than google. So you can possibly try adding your site to yahoo directory and see the impact.

3. See if your site has any redirect issues if your site has redirect problems and yahoo’s crawler is unable to pickup then still your site can be in trouble. Make sure to check all possible external links coming into your site for wrong 302 type redirects. If you feel suspicious about a link hurting you contact the webmaster and tell them to remove your link. Google has become very efficient in handling redirects I don’t think yahoo is doing the same way.

4. Add a sitemap and link it to your homepage ( if you don’t already have one ) as well as submit a sitemap to yahoo through yahoo Site Explorer it might show some difference.

5. You can fine your presence felf to yahoo by featuring in their articles, added to their newsletter etc.

6. Make sure your Web hosting company don’t have any problem with yahoo’s crawler sometimes this could a problem where yahoo’s crawler have problem accessing your site because of bad DNS resolving with your hosting company.

7. Make sure you don’t do anything against their guidelines on your site check for yahoo’s search engine guidelines policy

8. If you are an affiliate site you need to be careful, Yahoo don’t enjoy affiliate sites in their index.

9. Yahoo loves content rich sites unique content and not a directory type of site with millions of URLs without any added value to the users.

10. Last but not the least check for potential violations of yahoo’s guidelines on your site which google didn’t detect but yahoo did. Yahoo is more efficient and strict when it comes to some search engine spam make sure its not there on your site. Also check for any potential restrictions in .htaccess or robots.txt or other areas where you might cause problems for yahoo’s crawler.

Good luck
Search Engine Genie Blog Team,

Yahoo directory submission Is it Worth 299$

Everyone knows yahoo directory charges 299$ for regular site submission for a year and Adult sites it costs 600$. This is huge compared to what other paid directories are charging out there. So is it worth it? I recommend an Yes and a No

YES if your site a well established site and want to improve your yahoo search engine exposure to the maximum
YES if you are looking to spend money on a good paid directory. You can’t find a better paid directory than yahoo out there.
YES if you want google to treat you better, Both Google and Yahoo consider a yahoo directory listing an authority backlink since all sites listed in it are subject to manual review.
YES if get a good category to list your site listing your site 10 levels deep is not the greatest thing to do when submitting to a directory.
YES if you have an adult site and need a quality backlink. I dont think many sites appreciate adult sites other than yahoo directory.
YES if you want yahoo LOVE , they love your site if you pay them 299$

NO if you are a small Mom and Pop business and have limited budget on online business
NO if you have good cheap alternatives for backlinks
NO the sky will not fall and you can always have good rankings even if you dont have a yahoo directory listing.
NO if you don’t want editorial review of your site sometimes if your site is too spammy with too many affiliate links they will ban your site in the main index.

That is all I can think of for now

Search Engine Genie SEO Blog Team,

Checking backlinks in yahoo similar to google webmaster tools backlinks download

Many asked us whether we have an alternative for Google’s webmaster tools backlink tool where we can see atleast 30 to 40% of the links a site has. From what have seen no you cannot see more than 1000 backlinks in yahoo. Probably if they add a platform like google to validate a site and download backlinks as a CSV in future it will be great. But till now by far the only search engine that is even close to showing something accurate for a site is yahoo. We have not seen any other search engine show as accurate backlinks data as google. There are different methods to check backlinks in yahoo. We had an article written couple of years back based on this. Please read it here http://www.searchenginegenie.com/backlink-strategies.htm

Open Warning to content thiefs and copyright violators

MSN Crawler improved crawling activity on our website – MSN search engine crawler

Recently MSN Live Search crawler bot is hitting us hard its most probably because we are working hard on unique contents on our site, as well as the tools, blogs etc. We are getting lot of new natural backlinks and this could be an important reason we are seeing increased crawler activity from all the crawlers.
Also our SEO forum has started to pick up we have seen some new posters become regular in our forum they have posted some interesting postings. Also we have started 5 new blogs A web design blog, PPC blog, Link building blog, Programming blog, personal company blog etc.
Also we have a new search engine experts directory where listing your site is for totally free even you can include your phone numbers and email IDs. Only adding active URLs are chargeable its just launched with about 60 profiles are existing search engine experts.
Our Chief technical Officer who goes by the name Tara has started a blog on our own and she will be sharing her personal thoughts from tomorrow,
Also we are launching our newsletter from this month and we are accepting subscriptions from tomorrow, there are ton of new things coming to our website. This is just an effort to catch up to our competitors.

Keep visiting our site to see great new innovative things coming up,
Good day

Search Engine Genie Blog Team,