Yahoo seems to be ratcheting out Inktomi results along with their standard Google results. We believe Yahoo will be moving towards Inktomi in the near future.
it is 12:15 on Friday the 19th. As of 15 minutes ago, the holiday season started for StepForth staff. Here is our holiday schedule in case folks want to get a hold of us:
StepForth will be closed for holidays during the week of Dec. 22 - Dec 29. We will be operating with a reduced staff from Dec. 29 to January 5th. We will be closed for New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.
From all of us at StepForth, have a happy and safe holiday season and thanks for an excellent 2003.
Please understand that this poem is tongue-in-cheek and that our staff is working harder than elves on a deadline. I needed to take some liberties with reality to make the poem work. It's Christmas and my friends got together and bought me an artistic license. I thought I'd use it... :) Happy Yule y'all!
T'was the week before Christmas and all through the office,
Not a creature was coding, not even the bosses,
The staffs' stocking feet were propped on their neighbor's chair,
In the hopes that their managers simply don't care.
The servers were nestled up high in their racks, all safe behind firewalls, in case of attack.
Ross in his jammies with rum in his cup, had just settled down to toast his good luck.
When suddenly the phones erupted with clatter, Ross sprang to the office to see what was the matter.
Over to his computer he flew like a flash, only to witness Google's great crash.
The Florida Update, like fast falling crap, had spammed out the listings and made us look bad.
And what, to his wondering eyes should appear, but a bunch of affiliate links selling cheap gear.
With midi music drivers and bangles and bongs, the spam sites abounded, exploded beyond,
Reasonable expectations of Google users, advertisers and such,
All Ross could say was "Gosh, how this sucks".
We had a problem, Ross thought at that time, something shared with everyone working online.
If Google is broken what would we do, our clients will blame us and they'll feel Scrooged!
More rapid than instant messaging generally allows, Ross called in the staff to figure it out.
The algo at Google has changed for the worse, they've taken submissions and turned out a curse,
Is it a filter, an algo, a joke or a blip? Whatever the cause, we need answers quick!
The staff got together and thought about where,
To conduct our good business, which is based on free air,
On Teoma, AltaVista, Lycos and Jeeves, Yahoo AOL MSN, Espotting and these,
Are not the only options, that's just absurd, We'll recommend Overture and even AdWords.
Jim's checking Google at least once an hour, he's pulling his hair out and wearing a scowl,
Scott's writing ad copy while Dave's selling plans, Ross is researching to see if we can,
Reverse engineer Google's Florida stew, before other listings start to fall through.
When from Jim's office the staff heard him laughing, uproariously giggling jumping and dancing,
"I think it's a mistake, misstep or a bug, Google had a major hole they were trying to plug,
If I'm wrong we are no worse off than anyone else, Google won't update before January 12th.
But if I'm right, we save clients some worry and we can tell them their listings will return in a hurry,
As soon as Google updates itself, the world should be normal and products will sell!"
Perhaps this will teach us that one basket is sound, provided the carrier has both feet on the ground.
Maybe search users will start trying the rest since Google keeps proving it isn't the best
In the end it should work out, we hope for the right,
'Till then, Merry Christmas to all after Florida's big byte.
It has been exactly one month since Google introduced its infamous Florida Update. As the Florida Update has brought about the largest and most comprehensive shake-up of Google’s listings ever, it has generated a great deal of interest around the world and genuine panic for the literally millions of webmasters who’s sites have been adversely affected by the change.
Not much has changed in the past week. We have noticed that Google seemed to stabilize last week but this week, the returns pages seem to be bouncing all over the place again. A couple of developments have occurred that are worth noting though.
At last week’s Search Engine Strategy Conference in Chicago, WebProNews Webmaster Garrett French elicited a brief acknowledgement and apology from Google's Senior Research Scientist, Craig Nevill-Manning. When pressed about the effect of Google’s algorithm switch on small businesses, Nevill-Manning said, “I apologize for the roller coaster. We're aware that changes in the algorithm affect people's livelihoods. We don't make changes lightly." As Garrett said, “that’s good to know”, but if you think your post-Christmas expense bill will be a shock, imagine what the small online retailers will face in January and February.
Many of the sites that disappeared in mid-November have reappeared but not in the prominent placements they had enjoyed before Florida was applied. StepForth’s site, for instance was oscillating between the #2 and #6 spot under the phrase “search engine placement”. The site dropped out of the Top1000 shortly in mid-November and has since resurfaced at positions #42, 48 & 52 over the past week.
There is still a great deal of SPAM and irrelevant listings appearing in the Top10 under most commercial keyword phrases. We continue to see Top10 listings that break several anti-spam rules posted by Google. A search of various data centers and ranking-servers shows that this trend is not expected to end in the coming two weeks.
Finally, we are starting to see search engine users moving away from Google. This is more than the wishful thinking that was floating about at the end of November; numbers from the website statistics company, Alexa show that both Yahoo and MSN are increasing in user popularity while Google is showing slight declines. We think this means that the users are perceiving problems in Google’s listings, both out of personal frustration and because the “experts” are noting the problems at Google with increasing frequency. Whatever the cause, Page and Brin and Co, must be aware of the symptoms and should be feeling some disease as searchers, businesses and webmasters are suffering.
Lots of folks send money home at Christmas and Yahoo has introduced a service for people with friends or family in Europe. Pay-Direct International allows people to withdraw a specified amount of cash from one the 800,000 (or so) Cirrus ATM machines networked around the world. The service is available in English at www.paydirect.yahoo.com or Spanish through www.espanol.yahoo.com.
As far as an easy to use tool goes, Google has just given itself and the massive courier firm Fed-Ex a wonderful Christmas present with the introduction of Fed-Ex package tracking features from Google's front page. Within two easy clicks, we were able to trace a CD-Rom being shipped to us from a client in Iowa. The same trace on the actual Fed-Ex site took four steps, cutting a significant amount time.
Try it yourself. If you have a package currently in transit through FED-Ex, go to Google and type "fedex (and your tracking number)" into the keyword window. The results are extraordinary and fast.
The Christmas/New Year holiday season is a great time to break bad habits picked up over the years. One habit I will be trying to shake this season is the habit of defaulting to Google each time I do a search. For me, it is a terrible but very real habit to automatically move to the address bar and type www.google.com when I need instant information. With the growing number of off-base results we've seen at Google over the past few months, I constantly wonder why I fall creature to such a habit, especially as I know there are better options out there.
Here is a short run-down of who else is out there and who is drawing from whom:
* Inktomi is a database that feeds spidered results to HotBot and, (coming soon) Yahoo
* AltaVista, while owned by Overture continues to produce strong and relevant results
* Teoma is the highly innovative search engine that powers Ask.Com (AskJeeves.Com)
* AlltheWeb is also highly innovative and currently powers Lycos
Try one or more of these tools next time you conduct a search in your free time, just to see if you find something you like better than Google. Perhaps Google will again show the highly relevant results we all became addicted to over the past five years. Currently we are not impressed with Google. I understand , on the highest authority that Santa is out-sourcing his delivery to the Googleplex this year to a coal mining operation in eastern Pennsylvania.
Well, there is still alot of movement with Google right now. I am not sure if it is going to be positive or negative but the movement is real. Many in the SEO forums are talking about "the other shoe syndrome", a rather fatalist outlook for a bunch of optimizers.
Again, this looks more like an experiment than a full algo shift. Let's see what happens in the coming weeks.
Reports from WebMasterWorld have Google starting to show sites that had been hurt by the Florida Update. While we have not seen any major changes, we've only been at our desks for about an hour this week (pacific coast time). Will update frequently on this one.
Happy Monday. It rained all weekend. Today it is sunny. see below.
I just heard the silliest thing. Ross the Boss is IM'ing with one of his oldest and most trusted contacts. The contact tells Ross the Boss that another SEO is claiming that use of ALT Tags and anything other than H1 and H4 tags will get you burned at the "new" Google.
This is total bunk and I repeat again... As SEO's, people listen to us! For the people reading our postings, this is not an academic exersize, this is real life! Don't waste people's time with garbage analysis. There is no way the SEO in question has had enough time with enough sites to make this claim. The FLORDIA UPDATE is only three weeks old. It takes at least one if not two full dances before we really know what is behind an algorithm change.
(Please note, I was up really late last night with my girlfriend and the flu. -- Girlfriend good, flu bad. I am tired, feeling under the weather, and have been thinking and writing about Google for ten days straight. I am kinda punchy right now)
Bottom line friends and colleagues... WE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT WE WRITE. Let's start acting that way eh?
Whether you are achieving top placements across the engines for all your main keywords, or are having trouble cracking the top 30, tapping into traffic generated by misspellings can sometimes be a valuable addition to your search engine marketing and paid placement campaigns.
By focusing on your main keywords, it is easy to forget that there may be some very common, and in some cases highly searched misspellings for your keywords. For example, if you manage a small hotel, 'accommodations' would obviously be a main keyword for you to target. A quick check on overture shows 'accommodation' with 86,499 searches for October, which would defiantly be a prime target, but take note of the common misspelling, 'accomodation.' If 5% enter this incorrectly, that's more than 4,300 searches a month on overture alone! Let's say just two percent of these result in a click to your site, that's nearly 100 visitors. That may not sound like a lot, but its still 100 additional visitors that weren't there before. Keep in mind not only I am pulling the 5% and 1% numbers out of the air, this would only account for one search engine. The actual numbers could be much higher!
You don't want a highly searched misspelling to pass you by. In many cases targeting the misspelling of a keyword, although searched less frequently, can direct more traffic to your site. Not only is it typically easier to achieve placements on misspellings, but if you are in the top 10 surrounded by a bunch of irrelevant results, chances are you will draw the majority of clicks on the search of that misspelling.
AOL is taking aim at one of the underbelly areas of the Internet, SPYWARE. Also known as scumware, spyware is often unknowingly downloaded piggybacking on other pieces of software such as file sharing software, Kazaa. Machines infected with Spyware transmit their every move to the maker of the spyware which often uses the information to serve pop-up advertising based on the topic being looked at. Bundled in AOL's new "9.0 Optimized" package is a feature that will allow users to identify and eliminate advertising and other forms of spyware. This indicates a growing awareness among computer users and programmers who are demanding to be free from an unscrupulous industry that according to industry watchers has grown by 13% over the past 12 months.
The impact of Google's Florida Update has not been fully realized yet but, with reports from some of our clients who have been hurt, the damage will be extensive. Literally hundreds of thousands of websites have seemingly disappeared from Google's listings, most of whom enjoyed a Top10 placement before the massive update which started on November 16th. Like most retailers, ecommerce sites that have faded from the listings needed a good Christmas season to remain viable into the next year and many of them staked their sales plans on a their previously strong placements at Google. The fallout will be noticeable, particularly among small businesses who's advertising options were limited by small business budgets. Small businesses, however, will not be the only companies facing an uncertain future because of the Florida Update. When the SEO community starts receiving calls from the mainstream media and people who are not clients, asking what is wrong with Google; one knows that Google itself has a problem that goes far beyond their data centers. As one of the pioneers of the web, Lee Roberts of The Web Doctor points out, "It was word-of-mouth that generated their popularity because people could find what they were looking for. Now, we only find sites with less quality content and less sites that offer what we want."
The Florida Update encompasses the most substantial changes to Google's famed ranking algorithm in the young company's history. There are several theories as to why Google forced this update. Some say that Google is trying to force small businesses to join their highly profitable AdWords program by making such a comprehensive update just before the Christmas shopping season. Others say that Google has always used the weeks around the US Thanksgiving holiday to make changes in the hopes that the sudden decrease in traffic over what is often a 4-day weekend will give their engineers enough time to introduce a new algorithm, (and fix any minor errors), without causing massive disruptions to their normal users. A third theory, (the one I lean towards), states that Google was simply tired of being gamed by the growing cadre of less ethical players in the SEO sector and has simply changed the rules overnight by applying this new algorithm. Whatever the reason, the damage is being done and now advertisers and web-users want to know what to expect next. Unfortunately, that is not an easy question to answer as Google does not comment on any changes to their algorithm, therefore the only thing we can do is offer experienced and educated guesses.
I suspect that the folks at Google know they have a major problem on their hands and are working to fix it. We have seen MAJOR spider activity from Google-Bot in the past 48-hours and see evidence that another Google-Dance is currently underway. We have seen updates to the algorithm in the past. The most recent happened earlier this summer and the one before that was in October 2002. Each time Google augmented its algorithm with a new feature or filter, massive dislocation was temporarily felt across the commercial web. Both times, however, Google began producing relevant results within a matter of weeks. The new filters added to this update were too comprehensive and penalized sites that Google couldn't have been targeting on purpose. Again, I suggest that Google's engineering staff knows this, and if they don't, their customer relations and PR departments are most certainly telling them. I expect to see parts of this filter retained and applied to the formula that eventually evolves into their new algorithm but I simply can't see Google keeping this algorithm, continuing to serving up spam, and throwing its hard-earned reputation out the window. Regardless of the number of MBAs they have on staff, Google's brain trust is simply too smart for that.
Google is not in the business of driving websites out of business. Google exists to make money by providing the most relevant listings possible, a goal they are clearly not achieving. As Lee Roberts stated above, Google was built on (and, implicitly can be brought down by), word-of-mouth advertising, a fact that can not be lost on the management at Google. Google is not in the extortion business and has in fact, built its reputation on being above reproach in the separation of paid advertising (AdWords), and the general free listings. I have a difficult time excepting the theory that Google is simply trying to increase AdWords revenues, or increase its own perceived value before issuing the expected IPO next quarter. In reality, what I think we are seeing is Google trying to reclaim its power when it comes to choosing how it will rank websites. Think about this update as a pendulum. Before the update happened, the pendulum had swung to one extreme where, with enough hard work, some could make Google do almost anything they wanted it to. Now, with the application of the Florida Update, Google has pushed the pendulum back to the other extreme. Eventually, and based on past observation, the pendulum will find its way back to the middle. As for those of us adversely affected by the Florida Update, StepForth's best advice is to continue making minor changes to your site as normal. We do not advise a full reoptimizaton at this point, a task that would not likely produce strong results before the end of the purchasing season anyway, until the SEO sector has an honest handle on what is happening at Google. As a wise and wonderful person recently told me, "... you can't push a rope."
I am tired of reading other SEO practitioners telling each other that this is the long-term algo from Google and we had best get used to it. Maybe they are right maybe they are wrong. Either way, I don't think there is enough evidence in yet to say one way or another what Google is really up to. Quick tip colleagues, we are considered the experts. People listen to us and take our words quite seriously. Before telling webmasters to recode their sites or other SEOs to retool their promotions, I think we should sit back, observe, analyse and draw slowly formulated conclusions. I realize how difficult it is to tell a desperate client that they will have to wait for accurate information but I assume they will appreciate me for preaching patience until we have a collective handle on what is happening. Anything else seems very irresponsible to me. It blows me away how many people read our words but there are about two dozen of us who seem to carry a lot of weight with the public. Let's be a bit more responsible and only give answers when we know what the REAL questions are.
FLORIDA UPDATE UPDATE
More major spider activity to report. Google-Bot is raging according to more client logs.
It has been reported in many search engine optimization discussion forums that Google is now using word stemming, or treating the plural version of a keyword the same as a singluar version of the keyword. Google seems to be slowly introducing word stemming as the results of our tests show. Generally, the Top3 listings under the plural and singluar keywords are the same but subsequent listings tend to differ.
It is still too early for the SEO community to announce with authority that Google is totally using word stemming. I think they are slowly introducing word-stemming or at least experimenting with its effect. It does not appear to cover the entire algorithm though.
This morning Ross the Boss was IM'ed by one of his contacts in the US mid-west noting that Google-bot has spidered his site several times in the last 36-hours. A glance at our logs and those of a few associates show the same thing, extra attention from Google.
That made me turn to Scott, our PPC expert and ask him to run a few common tests at Google. Our perceived link density is fluxuating as is the number of sites associated with the keyword phrases we are testing with.
This leads us to believe Google is working overtime for some reason. A good guess is that Google is working to fix the errors caused with the FLORIDA UPDATE. Scott and I will be checking every hour or so to see what Google's up to and will update this BLOG with new information when it comes.
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