Christophe Bisciglia former hacker now a google employee

Christophe Bisciglia was a former hacker who hacked into his boss’s company and flood his customers with 1000s emails he was pissed off when a argument with his boss turned out to be a violent one for him.

Bisciglia, who graduated from the UW in 2003, went to Lazowska with his idea in October, and they worked with engineers in Google’s Kirkland office to develop a syllabus for 15 undergraduates selected to take the five-week class, which recently wrapped up. No proprietary Google software was used, no internal secrets revealed, Bisciglia said. Bisciglia enjoys his job in google now when asked he said there is no chance of dropping his job as of now. His highly paid google job gives him lot of great vacations.

I hope google doesn’t piss him off 🙂

Britney still leads in searches – beats Jolie and paris

Britney the troubled celebrity mother still leads 2007 celebrity searches compared with Angelina Jolie and Paris Hilton. Google trends a cool new tool shows graphics of the 3 celebrities
how often they were searched around the world for the past 4 years

Google Trends , Google trends comparision software

What is real keyword competition in SEO?

How many of you have searched google and found results showing more than 10,000,000 million pages. We at Search Engine Genie have worked on sites where the competition is more than 25,000,000 and still gain No.1 position in Search engines. So how come we rank a website page better than 25,000,000 pages. Actually the no of results showing up is not the real competion you will be facing when it comes to ranking a website.

When you are looking to rank in niche markets make sure you first do a complete research on your competition. You use a keyword and find millions of results I recommend go through the top 10 pages after 10 pages you will see results that are not exactly competing with you but random pages that are there just because keywords you searched somewhere occur on that page. This is true in many cases most of the time competition to get your site ranked is not more than 1000 websites. Competing with 1000 websites will be one of the most of difficult task to do. So most of time when we are doing regional search engine optimization we are competing with less than 100 sites even if the results show millions of pages.

Most of the sites that are there in internet today are not optimized for search engines so that eliminates majority of the websites from competing with you, even if they are optimized they need lots of links to compete with competitive industry. So you get good links and you eliminate most of your competition. Also never stop adding quality information for your site if you are going after a niche industry you are supposed to run a website that even evolves. It usa to evolve by itself or you need to make it evolve.

We at search engine genie make sure we add atleast 2 pages of content to our website everyday. So 6 months down the road we have a website with atleast 1000 new pages of contents. This is a major step when it comes to tackling competition. So I recommend don’t worry what google shows in millions keep working on your site eventually you will be on top of Major search engines

Is word tracker paid service still a beneficial one?

I feel word tracker had been one of the best tools when it comes to keyword research. We at Search Engine Genie had been using word tracker paid service for a very long time. But now there are lots of other tools to do free keyword research. Adwords sandbox, google suggest , yahoo search marketing keyword suggestion tool everything works pretty good and all of them are free.

The amount of keyword suggestions word tracker provides cannot be matched by the free service offered by them. I also think their paid keyword suggestion database is updated more often then their free database is. If you are going to use it for multiple accounts it will be a great time saver. but if your using it just for your own domain then you can get away with the free one no problem I personally recommend sticking with the free one unless you are SEO company who are looking for large scale keyword research for clients

Best domain for high rankings

We keep getting questions from our users is there a criteria when it comes to top rankings in search engines. Google and other search engines have advanced sophisticated algorithms to separate combined words in URLs. we don’t need specific domains with underscores or hyphens
Google is smart enough for e.g. to find words “good guy” in “goodguy.com”

Apart from words in domain age of domain plays a very important role when it comes to search engine optimization and search engine ranking.

Tried printing search result pages,

How many of you tried printing your yahoo, MSN and google search results. We always do it for research purposes in our company. Recently a bug with yahoo search was preventing us from printing their search results. Not sure whether it was a bug or a deliberate attempt to stop printing their results.
Things look of now we are able to print everything fine now,

Yahoo Update reporting late,

Yahoo Made a major update to their algorithm first week of this month. We saw some of our client sites slightly affected by this update. But the damage was very small we got more SEO benefit than loosing rankings.

Yahoo’s official update on the report

“Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update
We’re in the process of rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. While we 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. To share your thoughts on this with other Yahoo! Search users, please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.
Update: With this weather update, you might also experience spikes or drops in crawl traffic for the next week or two.”

MSN crawler team upgrades software that crawles

MSN search live team has upgraded their web crawler which crawls millions pages per day. They included some new interesting feature which reduces the load placed on some innocent servers.

2 important features as described by MSN search blog

HTTP Compression: HTTP compression allows faster transmission time by compressing static files and application responses, reducing network load between your servers and our crawler. We support the most common compression methods: gzip and deflate as defined by RFC 2616 (see sections 14.11 and 14.39). Compression is currently supported by all major browsers and search engines. Use this online tool to check your server for HTTP compression support.
The following links provide configuration information for IIS, and Apache.
Configure Compression in IIS
Configure Apache using GZIP or using deflate
Conditional Get: We support conditional get as defined by RFC 2616 (Section 14.25), generally we will not download the page unless it has changed since the last time we crawled it. As per the standard, our crawler will include the “If-Modified-Since” header & time of last download in the GET request and when available, our crawler will include the “If-None-Match” header and the ETag value in the GET request. If the content hasn’t changed the web server will respond with a 304 HTTP response
To check if your site already supports the “If-Modified-Since” HTTP header, you can use this online tool to check your server for HTTP Conditional Get support. Alternatively, you can check using Fiddler for Internet Explorer, or Live Headers for Firefox. Each of these tools allows you to create a custom GET request and send it to your server. You’ll want to make sure that your request includes the “If-Modified-Since” header like the following simplified sample:
GET /sa/3_12_0_163076/webmaster/webmaster_layout.css HTTP/1.1
Host: webmaster.live.com
If-Modified-Since: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 01:28:49 GMT
You should receive a server response similar to the following simplified sample:
HTTP/1.x 304 Not Modified
Check out MSDN for more information on using

Banned / lost your website in MSN Live search ?

Here is the solution to get reindexed and reincluded into MSN Live search. Register and login to webmaster.live.com , validate your website. Contact them and explain the situation what happened to your site and how it got penalized/ banned / removed from their index. Search quality team of MSN live is very responsive they take every message they receive through their webmaster channel seriously.
To get a prompt response describe as much as possible about your website more you explain better they understand about your website.

Microsoft Search Live index algorithm update

Webmasterworld guys reported a update my Microsoft live search to their index. It seems they did a major update to their core search algorithm which affected ranking of lots of websites. It seem to targeted against authority sites which tend to dominate most of the search results even if they are of less quality.

It reminds of the mess google did way back in November 2003 when they did a major update to their index doomed infamous florida update. Lets wait and see how it goes,