Archive: November, 2007

They say it’s not official until someone puts it in writing. Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, Google amended its webmaster guidelines to include a line reading:

“Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

The line replaced a less stringent warning which only mentioned the buying of links in order to improve a site’s ranking.

This is likely the last word on bought and sold links for the time being but it re-enforces the values of “whitehat” SEO Metamend is known for following. Our SEO work tends to focus on improving websites for spiders and live-user conversions and not as heavily on the acquisition of incoming links.

Those involved in the selling of links are urged to study up on the rel=”nofollow” attribute .

Google Webmaster Tools seems to be having some problems today with its web site verification process. Many of the sites we have listed in Webmaster Tools are no longer “verified” and the problem is reported as being due to “server timeout” and “domain name” errors. This is in spite of being able to navigate to the verification file using the link provided in the “Verify a Site” section.

This outlines the importance of frequently logging into Webmaster Tools to keep up to date on your sites search health and not assuming that this useful tool is “set and forget”. Google seems to be having periodic website verification and Sitemaps errors of late, has anyone else has noticed this?

It is the US Thanksgiving today so there is a serious lack of action or attention happening in and around the North American tech industry. Perhaps that lack of attention explains why this short item appeared in yesterday’s Barron’s Blog.
Google: The Evidence Mounts; They’re Taking Share

The piece outlines how Google holds almost 59% of the search market share in the United States and nearly 70% of searches globally using comScore and Hitwise data reported here and in other search blogs earlier.

To me, the brief piece points out and reinforces how far behind the curve the mainsteam media and investment communities are in understanding the true scope of Google’s dominance in search. Since 2003, Google has served a minimum of 45% of all search results, peaking at nearly 85% in 2004 and 2005 when it directly produced Yahoo! results and indirectly produced MSN results.

Google’s dominance has had an enormous effect on how the Web has evolved with results that could be characterized as both good and evil. Its existence helped pull the North American tech world out of the dot-com bust of 2000 and its innovation has propelled the tech world further than any company before it with the possible exceptions of Microsoft and Sun. For SEOs and SEMs, Google is far and away the most important venue and is the one first thought of when contemplating a search marketing campaign.

One day last week a situation occurred with a client’s site that demonstrated how fast the search engines react to problems with a website. This story illustrates the importance of constant vigilance and monitoring of the health of a website.

The website concerned has around 4000+ article pages indexed, with each article page consisting of templated boilerplate sections and the main article text pulled from a HTML include file. Unfortunately on this particular day the directory containing the article include text files was accidentally deleted from the web server. Every article page subsequently served reported an ASP sever execute error as the article text include file directory was missing. The article include directory was only restored from a backup around 12 hours later.

Within several hours of the problem being reported it was obvious that the search engines had taken notice. According to the Enquisite search metrics data for the site, there was a definite and almost immediate reduction in search referrals. As it turned out, there was around 50% less search engine referrals that day compared to the preceding and following days. This demonstrated that the article pages had a temporary reduction in ranking, resulting in the loss of search traffic for that particular day. So what happened from a search engine point of view?