Google me: Neighbours from hell

Third Google Crap Backlink update in a row,

We recently had the third Worst backlink update in google history, They started showing randomized and low Pagerank ( PR ) backlinks from the end of Jun 23rd 2004, From that day they has been 3 backlink updates and all of them are crap, Google mission to tackle link mongers is appreciable, But making themselves look funny in this process is the worst part IMO,

I personally like google to remove the link: command instead of a massive attempt to mess up with link mongers/SEOs and webmasters,

This post is not an attempt to criticize google but to show my personal frustration answering my SEO clients who keep asking me where are my backlinks,

Significant traffic change reported by WMW guys,

Recently a lot of webmasters in WMW forums reported a significant loss of traffic from google, Also they faced major drop in keyword rankings, Here is a brief post by a guy who started that thread,

Possible reasons speculated by the poster:

1. Are they affiliate sites with many links to the affiliate host.
2. Do they have satelite domains which they cross link/one way link with sites particularly on the same ip c-block.
3. Are the drop in serps keyword specific or site wide.
4. Are some inbound links on mass from single domains. For example, a great number links from a footer link on a major site.
5. Have changes been made to keyword density recently.
6. Is there a distinction in ranking between major and minor terms.
7. Has there been any PR changes or backward link changes.

Read a long 5 page thread here (webmasterworld.com/forum3/25465.htm ) if you are interested,

Ask Jeeves Launches Japanese-Language Search

Ask Jeeves has launched a beta version of a new Japanese-language search engine. Based on the Emeryville-Calif. search vendor’s Ask.com search portal, Ask.jp was developed by Ask Jeeves Japan Co. Ltd, a joint venture of Ask Jeeves and Japan-based transcosmos.

With the launch, Ask Jeeves joins Google and Yahoo as one of only three search portals in Japan that provide their own search technology.

Source: Yahoo News

MSN search revamp their service

Seekport european search engine takes on Google, Yahoo and other top search engine gaints

Google rules the world today but there is serious competition coming up for the search engine in European markets especially the non-English speaking ones. Not too happy with the US-centric search engines are the Germans and they are looking for alternatives that would be more relevant to them, says Ranjit Dhuru, chairman and CEO of Aftek Infosys. Source: financialexpress.com

Online Consumers Happiest With Google

Yahoo’s New Search Blog,

Yahoo the top rival for Google has launched a blog recently, it is really great to see both the top search players come out with a blog, Google Blog was launched before some days and now we have the yahoo blog,

visit Yahoo Blog here: http://www.ysearchblog.com

what *is* Google going to do with $1.8 billion?

There is an interesting Forum discussion thread going on in webmaster world one of the leading seo marketing forum in the world, People there started speculating what google will do will all the money they get from their Stock, This IPO has brought some good money into google and we are yet to see Google’s future plans on what they are going to do with all their money,

Ok Here are some pick from what people want from google from that thread…. – my comments are added as well,

1. Hire more PhDs(Search algorithm scientists) to find spammers. This is a point even I stress upon I hate Spammers winning in google and i would like Google to fight bad unethical practices more vigorously,

2. New Google directory: I would love to see one, I hate these Dmoz volunteers taking control of the whole directory and never accept many many quality site submissions, Instead we see lots of starter sites with only 3 or 4 pages accepted, That is too weird cant understand what criteria they use to accept site submissions but sometimes it looks pretty ridiculous, I wish Google comes out with an excellent human edited directory, But with real people who are paid to do their work, I wish Dmoz is dropped by Google soon,

3. Google branded browser based on Firefox or a G-branded IM client. Good ask from google, But I personally feel Internet Explorer is much more comfortable and adaptable than any other browsers, Many applications are built around the compatibility of Internet Explorer and it makes it difficult to use other browsers which lack in compatibility, Regarding I am client I would like to see one from Google, I personally use Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, AOL, Indiatimes messengers. I don’t mind using an other one especially from google which I love,

4. ISP business – I don’t want Google to get into ISP services just because it has a potential risk of loosing their Branding,

5. Google Auctions – Already lots of auction sites out there, Cant sit out to see an other one from Google,

6. Overture acquisition – Silly As if Yahoo is ready to sell it,

7. RSS desktop version MyGoogle – Good ask, wish Google comes out with something like this,

8. Google SEO – LOL, i had a Giggle on this, If Google is out into SEO business there are 1000s of companies willing to spend millions of dollars to them, But what happens their results will be completely corrupted and all junk sites will be on top, Anyway funny wish to google,

9. semantic web — Ahh that will be great, Google moving into semantic understanding of queries, it is going to be one difficult job to achieve this, hope to see something like this coming soon,

10. A better search engine – SteveB an experienced poster in webmasterworld suggested this, I think steve has to say this to yahoo, Google does some great job improving their Algorithm, They are constantly working on it but yahoo on the other hand sits of Onpage factor analysis and pushing lots of junk sites on top, I wish Google takes care of them selves to build a better search engine, I appreciate all their efforts towards it,

Recent Google Bug – Homepage dropped due to Duplicate content,

There was a recent bug reported by some webmasterworld guys regarding homepages of sites dropped from the index, Many sites out there lost their homepage due to some kind of duplicate content penalty, Google Guy who is mostly regarded as an important representative of Google replies to it, Here is his response:

Hey bakedjake, I think I’ve found your problem. There’s no penalties or anything like that; it’s because you’re splitting your internal linkage between two different root pages. Suppose your domain is yourdomain.com. Do the search [site:yourdomain.com inurl:https]. See those 912 https results? Click on the cached page for the first one. Now mouseover the link in the top left. Instead of pointing to http://www.yourdomain.com/, notice that it points to http://www.yourdomain.com/index.asp. All the https cached pages that I checked link to the index.asp version of your home page, and there were enough of your internal pages doing that that you convinced us that http://www.yourdomain.com/index.asp was the canonical root page for your domain. That’s why when you do the search [yourdomain] you see http://www.yourdomain.com/index.asp as the first result.

So your hundreds of internal https pages pointing to a different location is clouding the water some. If you fix them to all point to the same location (http://www.yourdomain.com/) then we’ll crawl all those pages in a little while, and you should be fine shortly afterwards.

I guess the takehome message for non-bakedjake members is to doublecheck your internal linkage. I’d pick a canonical root page like http://www.yourdomain.com/ and just stick with that by making sure any internal pages point there instead of to other versions of your root page.