Webmaster & Search Events

Search Engine Expert Directory

A New Google Job opportunity here:

A New Google Job opportunity :

We're a little obsessive about digging into hard computing problems, and we love finding more people like us. One way we find obsessive smart problem-solvers is by using a standardized test. Now standardized tests can suck, especially since you usually take them to become a broke student for years on end. Which can lead to starting a career that, if you're lucky, might eventually lead to a really cool job. But what if there were a standardized test that led, like, immediately to the really cool job? What if, for instance, there was a Google Labs Aptitude Test? There is. We enjoyed writing it, and if you're our kind of uber-geek, you'll enjoy taking it, and maybe you'd enjoy life as a Googler. Give it a try. The GLAT is four pages long; you can print them out here, here, here and here. When you're done, send your completed test to: Google Labs Jobs 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043-1351 Good luck. Take your time, especially with the essay questions. And no, on this one guessing doesn't help. -- Alan Eustace VP of engineering and research

Source: https://www.google.com/googleblog/2004/09/pencils-down-people.html

Google celebrating Ray's birthday,

Google celebrated Mr.Ray's birthday, here is the logo they designed for it,

Google Toolbar Input Validation Hole in 'About' Page Lets Local Users Execute Scripting Code

it seems google toolbar about Us page has some scripting error which is highly vulnerable, Following message was posting in the security tracker site,

Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 09:51:10 +0100 (BST)From: ViPeR Subject: GoogleToolbar:About -- Allows Script Injection

Affection Software : GoogleToolbar
Version : Tested on 2.0.114.1-big/en (GGLD)

Notes:
GoogleToolbar's About section allows injection of
script, since it lacks any checking. The following
code is a Proof Of Concept.

rgds,
Gregory R. Panakkal / Viper

Netbooster, Absolute Référencement, CVFM, Ability Référencement 1ere Position Banned

Some Leading European search engine marketing and search engine optimization companies were banned by google, The main reason for their sites removal and their client sites removal seems to be the use of excessive doorway pages ( pages stuffed with keywords and redirects to the desired landing page ) and excessive keyword stuffing, Google always frowns on these type of tactics and not they removed the sites from google's index,

Following companies were penalized Netbooster, Absolute Référencement, CVFM, Ability Référencement 1ere Position.

Google Browser, Google plans to launch new browser

Google the leader in search now seem to be focused on the Browser industry, There has been wild speculation on Google's new browser, But many information coming out are all just speculations, There hasn't been any official statement from google regarding this, The following Whois information was found for the domain gbrowser.com , it could be google's future browser site ,

Here is the whois information:

Registrant: Google Inc. (DOM-1278108) 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View CA 94043 US
Domain Name: gbrowser.com
Registrar Name: Markmonitor.com Registrar Whois: whois.markmonitor.com Registrar Homepage: markmonitor.com
Administrative Contact: DNS Admin (NIC-1467103) Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View CA 94043 US dns-admin@google.com +1.6503300100 Fax- +1.6506188571 Technical Contact, Zone Contact: DNS Admin (NIC-1467103) Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View CA 94043 US dns-admin@google.com +1.6503300100 Fax- +1.6506188571
Created on..............: 2004-Apr-26. Expires on..............: 2006-Apr-26. Record last updated on..: 2004-Apr-26 16:46:39.
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.ALLDOMAINS.COM64.124.14.32 NS2.ALLDOMAINS.COM209.25.143.102

Traffic power News Traffic power the funny web traffic generator company

Traffic power as we all know is a company which is involved in search engine optimization, Their marketing tactics has always brought a lot of anger and frustration among companies, Their main targeted customers are innocent website owners and webmasters, Traffic power just called them by phone and explains them about the nature of the SEO business and they give fancy offers to clients saying they will get very good ranking in major search engines, Many people have fallen for this type of marketing hype,

So everything was going on peaceful for traffic power when suddenly fake struck them, Traffic power has been using a bannable technique to raise ranking for their clients, They create keyword rich pages and add a javascript mouse over redirect to that page, So when the users land on the page the main page loads in certain seconds, The users ignore the page they land on and concentrate on the page they are finally redirected,

This technique is not appreciable by search engines, Google especially is very strict on these type of tactics, They are aggressive towards people who use these tactic and ban them if those SEO companies use it to manipulate their search results,

Traffic power has more than 2000 clients, 2000 clients for traffic power means lots of manipulation of google results, Google immediately woke up to this occasion and penalized many of traffic power's clients, This brought a lot of chaos among many of traffic powers clients and they started asking for money refund, Many many online SEO forums started bashing traffic power and their services, Penalty by google has brought a lot of loss for the Traffic power company, They had massive celebrations for their search engine success but now they must be suffering due to massive loss,

There are law suits filed against traffic power, Even The Best Business Bureau has posted more than 35 complaints sent by traffic power clients, Edward Lewis of SEO consultants has added specific section in his SEO consultants site to bash traffic power, Don't know what his motive behind that section probably he wants more business through traffic powers existing clients, But his service is really valuable and has saved many people for falling for traffic power's fake search engine optimization services,

In My opinion google did the right job by penalizing traffic powers clients, It will definitely teach traffic power company to change their tactic and stop spamming search engines, Google rarely penalize sites for any sort of spam but traffic power has really tested google's patience, SO in my opinion what google did against Traffic power if right,

So what does traffic power say about Online discussion SEO forums,

This is what they say in their FAQ page:

Are online discussion forums the best place to get your information?

No. Forums are not the best place to gain impartial information. Most forums are attached in some way to a marketing or SEO firm. This is not the best resource for getting an impartial view. There are some forums that are ethical and fair and allow all views to be heard. Most of these forums do not allow trashing of competitors or self promotion. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to distinguish the good from the bad.

This is what they say about Edward Lewis of SEO Consultants,

One of the biggest perpetrators of one sided scams is Edward Lewis. Mr. Lewis' SEO company, First Page Results, is a direct competitor of Traffic-Power selling ridiculously high priced search engine optimization and overpriced paid placement. He also secretly administers a one sided Website called SEO Consultants where he has orchestrating an extensive attack against Traffic Power. He is one of the most vocal users of the "one-sided forum" scam and specializes in trashing his direct competitors in forums all over the Internet. The reasons for his hatred of Traffic Power are clear. Traffic Power has been able to accomplish in four years what he was unable to do in eight, and that is dominate the SEO market by outperforming all other SEO companies in price and performance. Our rise has surely impacted the bottom line of our competitors, being that most of these companies are small one man operations and cannot compete with companies of our size and considerable resources. These fear tactics and smear campaigns should be an embarrassment to SEO professionals everywhere, but the truth of the matter is that these practices are widely used for marketing and lead generation by unscrupulous SEO companies. Mr. Lewis says that his SEO Consultants' smear campaign is organized by an anonymous "Consortium", but in the reality it is a desperate witch hunt organized by a threatened, small time, one man basement operation.

I personally don't have any hatred about Traffic power but I always wished search engines are never manipulated by any spammers, Search engines adds a lot of value to online non web savvy users, They are here to provide us an organized information on the net, So I wish all SEO/ Search Engine Optimization companies stick to search engine guide lines and make the search engines a great source of relevant information,

Google New PageRank Checksum source code Algorithm Page rank check sum code cracked

Google recently changed their checksum code which retrieves toolbar Pagerank from google's datacenter, Previously the checksum was cracked and released in public domain, due to this problem google changed their checksum generator code, They thought this code will be highly secure but it was cracked again by the same people who first cracked it and released it in public domain,

Sorry due to potential risk of making google angry we have removed the new checksum code from this page, Thanks for visiting, we cannot give the checksum code now, Checksum is available freely on the net. Do a google search,

Good day,

New Google Bomb - Worst president search points to Bush Homepage,

There is a new google bomb out in the web, When you search google for the phrase ( Worst president ) President Bush's Biography page ranks No1.

Similarly it is same in Yahoo, Searching in Yahoo for that phrase reveals president Bush's bio page,

Google bomb is the method of ranking a page based on Anchor text pointing to that page, a website will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page all use consistent text. For example if the word Google bomb is used both as a verb and a noun on the link text pointing to that page, that page will rank.

Google introduces new PageRank Checksum Algorithm with their new toolbar

I pointed out in one of my previous posting google didnt update their Pagerank because one reason could be that their toolbar pagerank checksum generator code was released in Open Source, I was available for many people in forums and blogs,

I think may be google woke up to this vocation and now have developed a new Pagerank retrival algorithm for their Toolbar,

toolbar.google.com/whatsnew.php3

Backlink update, Crap Backlinks updates again,

Google did their 3rd crappy backlink update yesterday in this datacenter 216.239.51.105 anyone willing to see the current backlinks can visit that datacenter and use the link:,

I dont see any improvement in what google shows as backlinks, They seem to show only a sample of the backlinks they know for a site,

Tired of Speculations - An interesting thread in WMW discusses speculation in SEO,

There is a recent thread in Webmasterworld.com where a guy mentions he is highly frustrated on speculations, People have been speculating on Google sandbox theories, Death of large sites, Large movement in SERPs, OOP( Over Optimization Penalty ) , Banning of affiliate sites etc, Some times these activities are kind of frustrating and that is what he mean to say in his post,

This is the post of that Member:

For over a year, I've been reading all kinds of speculations and strange theories. "Google doesn't like this, Google doesn't like that..." and there you go. A vast percentage of threads are started by somebody that had dropped three positions at Google serps and starts a theory out of thin air. There are no proofs (read it: Official from Google) about sandboxing, AWS or affiliate sites, AdWords publishers not ranking high, sites wiped out for over optimization, large sites not being "liked" by Google, and the list goes on. Why are so many webmasters so fond of these theories? Isn't that some kind of "over analysis"? Of course I do some analysis myself, and also I understand that Google changes its algorithm and makes it confusing to follow, but the basic rules haven't changed: Build a good site, get some relevant links and don't behave bad with any search engine. Spend more time looking for all the traffic opportunities that you have in the web. A good link from a good web site is a mine of gold. And it is not that difficult. I'm not telling you to forget about Page Rank, or exchanging links or deep analyzing. That's good. But if things change, don't start blaming on Google and do first some research around. Your competition is working as hard as you do. You are not alone. How can you start a project believing that Google doesn't like big sites? Tell that to the Encyclopedia Brittanica... Or Microsoft, or Slashdot, or Sitepoint, or Adobe, or About.com, or... It is not my intention to be flamed, but stop and think about this for a minute.
It is an interesting read, To visit the forum discussion copy and paste this URL:
webmasterworld.com/forum3/25618.htm

Google Toolbar New Feature - Browse by keywords and keyword phrases

Google's new Toolbar Feature includes typing keywords and keyword phrases directly into the Internet Explorer address bar to identify sites,

This is a handy feature especially for Amatuer Internet Users who are learning to search the web,

Google's 6th BirthDay, Logo Updated, Google sixth birthday celebrated with the new logo

Google the ultimate search engine celebrated its 6th birthday today, In a short period of time they have grown into a super power in search industry, Below is the Special Birthday logo designed by google,

New Google feature, Tips on searching for a street address from google,

Recently when i was searching for a particular information I saw google display a tip on top of the results saying "Tip: Find maps by searching for a street address with city or zip code" it looks like a new feature to me,

Screen shot below: -

Toolbar Pagerank is Dead, Google's Page rank update no more or not yet???/

Recently there is a lot of Buzz in SEO message boards and forums, Google didn't update their toolbar Pagerank for about 2 1/2 months now and everyone, especially full time Toolbar watchers are annoyed, I am personally a guy who is obsessed about Pagerank, I had given Lectures and presentations about Pagerank and its importance to rate a site in some software companies, computer training institutes and in some colleges, When I first learned about Pagerank, i was overwhelmed by its quality way of rating a site, But nowadays as we all know it is abused too much, People started rating a site quality based on the Pagerank of that site, This is 100% wrong, Pagerank is just one factor of google there are many other important factors,

Pagerank is exploited too much, Link mongers are excellent in exploiting pagerank and its importance, They just do brokering for people to buy high pagerank links from other industry established sites and the linking site will get a good boost of Pagerank, We know these things are pretty annoying to google since their results get manipulated very easily, So what is the real mission of google not displaying pagerank update on their toolbar, As a SEO market watcher i can speculate some reasons why google is not updating their toolbar Pagerank,

I am going to divide the speculation into 3 important categories,

Possible causes of lack of Pagerank updates, Benefits for google, Potential loss for google;

1. Possible Causes for not updating toolbar indicator for a long time:
a.) IPO Confusion: As Everybody knows Google is active into their Public offer, I have posted many updates in my Blog on the IPO Progress, Google didnt do too well as expected but still they didnt do badly in their first stock sale, Stock price reached more than 100$ and google should be happy with it, So will IPO be the cause of a delayed Pagerank update, I dont know but it is pretty confusing to say, it could be one reason, Google wouldnt have asked for more problems due to people loosing Pagerank or what so ever, I hope they would have been worried of all the blasting they get after a Pagerank update, We have seen this now and again where there is a page rank update in google everybody comes to forum to discuss their Pagerank changes and it ends up to be a Google bashing thread,

b), Google toolbar Checksum code released in Open source - Via SEO discussion forums: People who are active in forums should be knowing that Toolbar hack/Checksum generator code was released in open forums and many many sites started using the toolbar hack, This code will help to automatically retrieve pagerank from google datacenters, This should be a disaster for google, Many people used toolbar for Pagerank purpose and if that pagerank is calculated using automated tools why do people need toolbar then, So it could be a major reason google didnt update the toolbar pagerank indicator,

c). Googleguy a google employee once suggested Google might be moving into to quarterly toolbar Pagerank updates, Nobody took it serious at that time now everyone is speculating that it could be a reason google is not updating its toolbar, SO will it update in the end of september or middle of september who knows what is in google people's mind,

d.) Another possible important cause is the massive link brokering happening out there, As we all know there are a lot of link brokering companies out there, than it was before 6 months, it is due to the effect of anchor text search engines feel important for ranking algorithms, For google as we all know links from high Pagerank pages will boost the pagerank of the page it is linking to, So high pagerank links means high pagrank for target site and this is one big business tactic of all those link mongers, This is a major exploit in google's pagerank algorithm and this could be an other reason google didnt update their Pagerank,

e.) Another possible reason is the Stanford Patent on google's Pagerank, Pagerank was developed when Sergey Brin and Larry page were still PH.D Candidates of Stanford University, So the original Pagerank Patent is owned by Stanford University, Due to this google might be moving away from Pagerank and inventing better way evaluating the quality of a Page, As we know already they are doing this and Pagerank is less important these days and their part in google's ranking algorithm is pretty less compared to the way it was before,

Following extract is taken from the Google IPO Prospectus- http://www.ipo.google.com/data/prospectus.html#toc59330_15,
"The first version of the PageRank technology was created while Larry and Sergey attended Stanford University, which owns a patent to PageRank. The PageRank patent expires in 2017. We hold a perpetual license to this patent. In October 2003, we extended our exclusivity period to this patent through 2011, at which point our license is non-exclusive "

Original Google's Pagerank Patent with US Goverment

But to the contrast of this point we have proof that google still has Pagerank in mind, Recently the Google Directory was updated with the more recent pagerank of the site, So Pagerank is still there only Toolbar Pagerank is not there, But we should remember Toolbar Pagerank and Google Directory Pagerank has a complete different logarithmic scale,

f) Another Possible reason I could speculate is to stop people valuating link exchanges based on
Pagerank, Today as many of us have noticed when we send a link exchange request, we get reply from people saying your linking page Pagerank is too low or you have to have minumum Pagerank of 4 to exchange links, Many people do this because they have a bad opinion that google will value only links with Pagerank of 4 and above, Also some think linking to sites with lower Pagerank than their sites will hurt them, This is completely a Myth story, Google doest value all links they dont have any PR4 cut off of links, Google algorithm dont penalize/hurt sites for linking to low Pagerank sites, A link is a link it rarely hurts unless we link to a really bad neighbourhood, Link exchanges can be an other reason google is not updating their Toolbar pagerank,

h) Designing a different Toolbar Pagerank code and one that is not accessible to coders, This option directly correlates with the Checksum release, If google continues to use the same checksum code then lots and lots of more sites will be using automated Pagerank checkers and their toolbar Users will become less,

Benefits for google:-

List of benefits for google for not updating their toolbar pagerank:

a.) They can virtually stop people valuing links based on pagerank, It prevents a lot of exploiting
of their Pagerank algorithm, People will stop buying links based on Pagerank if they dont see any Pagerank update on the toolbar,

b.) Link Mongers cannot do link brokering business based on Pagerank, As we have seen many auction sites are selling and buying links based on the Pagerank of a site, This will be completely stopped and these text link brokers will have to find other ways to judge the quality of a link, A very big gift for google which they will be ready to take, The base Algorithm on which Pagerank was build upon can be stopped from a lot of exploit,

c.) Benefit of a quarterly Toolbar Pagerank update ( if it ever exists), New sites have to wait for
3 or 4 months for their Pagerank and they can concentrate more of increasing the quality of their site than building 1000s of links to increase their Pagerank and anchor text power,

d.) Stop Automated Pagerank queries, Many sites now use automated Pagerank checkers instead of Google toolbar and this will be really frustrating for google, So when they stop toolbar Pagerank update automatically news will be spread through forums and people will stop using automated Pagerank checkers,

Potential loss for google: -
a.) People who use Toolbar specifically for pagerank purpose will uninstall the toolbar, Most of the users who use Toolbar for the purpose of seeing Pagerank are webmasters/site owners/SEOs so i dont think it will be a big problem for google since their end users the search users are not affected by it,

b.) Pagerank display on their toolbar is high potential marketing tool for them, It has become
fashion these days to have high pagerank and if this attraction fades off google might potentially
loose many toolbar users,

c.) An other loss for google is they cannot misguide many Amateur SEOs/webmasters if they dont do a Pagerank update, This makes many Spamming SEOs directly targeting their search results and this is kind of dangerous,

Resulting consequences from normal toolbar users and my comments on it, I personally spread the word about pagerank display and google toolbar to more than 1000 people( all software people and software training institute guys ), Most of them were obsessed on it and started using just by my word, Almost 800 google toolbars were installed because of me, They were happy seeing the Pagerank of each other's sites and pagerank of other big sites, Now I told the same people pagerank display is no more a priority for google and they haven't updated it for more than 2 1.2 months, Now almost 500 google toolbar's were removed, Nobody were interested in other features since they are not SEOs or webmasters, They are just normal users they like to see the pagerank of different sites, Now without Pagerank updating they hate the toolbar sticking on their IE window, They seem to prefer Yahoo companion toolbar more now,
Dont know what the motive of google is, Google toolbar users are the same as google users, Most of them came through word of mouth, I bet there are 1000s of Non SEOs/site owners/webmasters toolbar users who are ready to remove their toolbar if they come to know there are no more toolbar pagerank updates, So lets wait and see what google does,

Google's www2 and www3 sites are broken

Recently I noticed a peculiar activity on the www2 and www3 google datacenters, Both of them redirects to google.com, So why is this happening, As usual many people in top SEO forums predict there is a big update coming on, They think probably google is testing their new data there and hidding it from us,

But my opinion that is not the case, Goolge took away all the other datacenters from us before 10 months now they removed this too, They probably think they are helping webmasters/SEOs too much, Probably they want to reduce a huge manipulation on their search results, We have to wait and see,

Microsoft to challenge Google

An ebullient Steve Ballmer, president and chief executive of Microsoft Corp, said yesterday that his company is "hell-bent and determined" to challenge Google Inc. for leadership in the Internet search business.

Ballmer also said,

Existing search tools still generate lots of useless results. Ballmer said Microsoft plans to invent new search technology that will change this, and make life more difficult for Google and other rivals.
Source: (boston news)

Google AdSense™: New features

Google now a public company is moving forward with their contextual ad program, the google adsense, I recently got this mail in my inbox since i am a Adsense publisher on some of my sites,

We're pleased to introduce a number of new features to your account.
Multiple ad units
To provide even more value to your users, and to help you further monetize your web pages, we're allowing publishers to place up to three ad units on every web page. Our system will automatically recognize the additional ad units, and will serve unique ads to each. Your ad units can each have different color palettes, formats, and alternate ad URLs, providing you with the flexibility you need to incorporate Google ads into your site design.
Collapsing ad units
An additional option for your alternate ad content, Google's collapsing ad units ensure that your page space is used to its maximum potential at all times. When targeted ads aren't available for an ad unit, the collapsing ad unit feature will shrink the empty ad unit, so that blank ad spaces are eliminated from your page. For instructions on implementing this feature, please read the AdSense FAQ.
New name for WebSearch
We're dropping the 'WebSearch' from 'WebSearch plus AdSense for search.' This monetized search feature will now be referred to simply as AdSense for search – but all of the same great features remain. For more information on providing customized Google internet and site search to your users and earning money from clicks on targeted ads, please read our FAQ.
Multiple domains for AdSense for search SiteSearch
Your Search Settings page now provides you with the option of specifying multiple domains for SiteSearch. Simply enter up to three domains when generating your search code - your AdSense for search box will list each domain with a radio button, allowing your users to choose the site on which they would like to search.
Ads by Goooooogle
We're currently running a test with new branding features on Google ads. You may notice some of your pages displaying 'Ads by Goooooogle' ad units. We welcome your feedback on this new look, and we'll be analyzing the results of this test over the next while.
How to contact us
We're very excited about these new features, and we're always happy to answer any questions you may have about them, or about the AdSense program. You can contact us at adsense-support@google.com.
Sincerely,
The Google Team

Google me: Neighbours from hell

NZHerald reports:

The story this week of a monkey apple hedge that caused such friction between Herne Bay neighbours that it took a High Court judge to lay the matter to rest would resonate among all of us who live in homes next door to other people. In effect, everyone.
A search on google for the term "neighbours from hell" brings up 77,000 matches.
Many of the websites tend to be in the country that invented manners and politeness - England. But an Englishman's home is his castle, and the world's most comprehensive website on "neighbours from hell" is based there. Neighbours From Hell came about due to the creator's personal experiences with "repeatedly anti-social, noisy, inconsiderate and rude neighbours".