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4.17.08
Today I saw an interview in Popular Mechanics with Google's Guru of search: Udi Manber. It is extremly rare to see an interview with him so I was quite pleased when I stumbled upon it. There were some pretty interesting things in the article and I found one statement particularly interesting. He said "At Google we do not manually change results." What's that? Really? They say this all the time, but I just don't believe it. I made a post on WebmasterWorld on 3/6 and also discussed it here: Blog page two. You can't tell me that in a matter of about 30 minutes that they were able to tweak the algorithm, push it out to over 700 different datacenters, and have it go live. Google might be a technology giant, but I seriously doubt that even they can manipulate their index that quickly... unless of course, they do it by hand.
Anyway, here's the full article.
4.12.08
I am now editing another category of DMOZ. I'm pretty excited that I've already been granted editorial privelages in another category. I'm going to keep on applying for more and more so I can give back to DMOZ. The Open Directory Project has been so helpful to the positioning of my sites over the years that its about time I helped out!
4.11.08
I am enjoying being an editor of DMOZ. Since I'm editing the Internet Marketing Consultant category I get to see a lot of my competition... I mean a LOT. I've been through almost all of the 400+ sites that were backlogged in the category. I see all kinds of stuff on consultant's sites, but for the most part they are all sheep. With an inclusion request the requester writes the description they'd like to see in the listing. In today's review I saw my favorite one to date. This person submitted their site to my category which is completely in English. Their site was completely in an Asian language and of no use to my users. (There are related Asian specific categories in DMOZ where it fits better) Anyway, here's the description this person wanted: "Please give Socki different from the current measures to me skilled by all means." Made me smile... and move the site to an Asian category.
4.4.08
The more research I do into this Google update the more I’m convinced that it’s merely a software update for the datacenters. I’m seeing no major changes in number of results in any of my niches, I’m seeing no new cache date, I’m seeing no change in link count, and the organic results are, for the most part, unchanged. I think what we saw is a new way of caching and syncing the over 700 datacenters that Google has. It may be more than meets the eye, but it doesn’t seem like it.
Today when I was checking the number of indexed pages for SEOMike.com on Google it said 1-10 of about 2. Strange. When I hit search again it went back to 1-10 of 10. You don’t often see Google make a mistake. Another strange observation is that the cache date of my index page now says 3/29 when it said 3/26 yesterday. It sure took a long time for my DC to get a new cache if 3/29 is the most recent cache of the page. Strange that it showed up six days late.
These little curiosities reinforce that they are doing some kind of DC software update.
4.2.08
Google is going through a crazy update right now. Results are all over the place. I'm looking at Google's datacenter at 64.233.167.104 and I keep clicking refresh. With nearly every refresh the results in positions two through eight are jumping all over the place. I won't say what niche I'm looking at, but I was able to replicate the "dance" in the results for the search "car rental." This update is crazy... sites are moving all over the place in nearly real-time. I sure hope my new sites in my niches start bubbling up soon. I am seeing the number of pages indexed in a site: search changing for the first time in a while. I keep a daily tracking sheet of all my sites that keeps track of things like number of pages indexed, cache date, PR, backlinks, number of results for a search term, etc. Some things are changing. Matt Cutts commented on it at Webmaster World asking for people to send in examples of things that are changing. No thanks. I don't want Matt to know what industry I'm working in right now. Never a good idea to tell "The Man" where you are. I also found the wording of his post on WebmasterWorld interesting... he was asking for examples of differences between datacenters NOT about huge changes within the listings on any single datacenter. Of course he knows that the listings on one DC will be changing a lot, he's mostly interested in if one gets out of sync with the rest. I think there's something like 700 different Google DCs and keeping up with them has to be a pain. It's better for Matt to have lots of people doing that work for him. Anyway, I went to a website that querys several DCs at once and all the datasets seem to match within the same B of DCs with a few exceptions. Intersting to see the results vary. For instance, there's no substaintial difference, but a search run on the DCs in in the 72.14.*.107 seem to vary slightly. There's a bigger difference in results on the DCs in the range of 66.249.*.107. Very interesting to watch the differences and changes.
On another note, one of my sites accidentally got on a ROS link. ROS means Run of Site. Every day the link count on Yahoo is increasing by a few hundred. Oops. I'm up to over 12k links reported in a short amount of time. I asked to be removed from the ROS. Hope it doesn't blast my site out of Google.
I found a nice add-on for Firefox that works with version 3 beta 4. It blocks those SUPER annoying Flash ads that are all over the place which still allowing you to click "play" on the ads spot if you think the flash widget has something of value. The software still allows java scripts to run which is nice. Here's the URL for the Firefox Flash Blocker.
3.27.08
After many years of wanting to become an editor for The Open Directory Project (DMOZ) my application has been accepted! I'm so excited! My favorite part is that I am editing a category that I have a lot of expertise in; the Internet Marketing Consulting category! I'm pretty excited that I was selected for this category and it's quite an honor. Now to try to explain this honor to my non-nerd friends and family haha.
3.24.08
Today is my little girl's 4th birthday. Happy birthday sweetheart!
Today I was trying to figure out a way to embed RSS into HTML as static content. It was a total pain in the butt. I found a way to do it using a javascript but that didn't solve my need since only a visitor would see the java-generated rss feeds. Search engines can't parse something like that and the main reason I wanted to include an RSS feed in the HTML is to have relevant constantly changing content. I was able to find a bunch of RSS solutions for PHP but it was really hard to find something to take RSS and plug it into HTML using ASP. The method I found is great. A page on the server goes out and gets the RSS feed, reformats it into just the parts I want to display and then that page is called form another ASP page as a server side include. Works great. I got a whole page worth of fresh, nicely formatted content for just a little work. Hopefully it will be spidered correctly and indexed. Here's the download: RSS to Static HTML using ASP. It's a ZIP file and hopefully you can download it if you need it. Also, if you need to, you can use several copies of rss2html.asp by changing their names. I used two instances to populate a page with two different feeds. I used rss2html.asp and rss2html2.asp to fetch the RSS feeds and then called them both from the same page in the HTML.
3.19.08
Today is a sad day. Today is the day I dropped my iPhone on the ground. I've dropped it harder before, but it didn't survive today's fall. The screen glass is cracked and spidered. It's pretty bad. Amazingly enough, the phone still works flawlessly. It detects every slight touch that I make over any area of the screen. Now here's the bad part. The phone has never been elegible for the phone insurance from AT&T. I forgot all about that until today when I called to try to get the insurance on it. I was going to get the insurnace today and "break" it next week. Can't. Now I'm pretty well screwed. There are some glass and LCD replacement kits available online for about $200 but it looks like a complete and total pain in the butt to replace. Oh, and the replacement screen is non-returnable so if I can't get it to go in, I'm out the $200 for the screen plus the $500 or so for a new phone. Man... this sucks. A word to the wise: HANG ON TO THAT SLIPPERY iPHONE!
3.10.08
Today was the day I made my 1,000th post on WebmasterWorld. I've been SEOMike for almost 5 years now. Others have copied my name, but none compare to my experience. Ok, enough ego talk :) I've learned a lot over the past 1,000 posts. The first five years (97-03) of my career as an SEO are kind of blurred. It was a long time ago and I have trouble remembering specific clients (especially by real name, not site name) but I remember all the things that made SEO work back then. Almost five years ago I came to WebmasterWorld and started learning how to apply a set of Best Practices to my work. It took me from a cowboy SEO to one that is methodical yet spontaneous. It's a strange duality... a tech geek with a list of rules, while at the same time a free-roaming wanderer looking for loop-holes and things to exploit. I'd love to give a link to my 1,000th post but I put it in the supporter's forum where it belongs. My posts are usually not the fluff that some people put out there just to increase their post counts on the web. I try to give well researched and thought out responses to people's questions rather than "Yeah, me too." or junk like that. That's not worth a tick on someone's belt! That's what I call "net noise."
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