Archive: June, 2010

Well its finally here.

The internet has finally made its own red light district.
ICANN approved the creation of a .xxx suffix. The design for websites under this extension will be those with pornographic content, as ICANN officials have stated.

The .xxx domain was first proposed in 2005. As expected,  it was rejected immediately, then un-rejected multiple times since inception. However the ICANN announcement means that it will actually become a reality. Unless there are more issues, .xxx will be live in about 9 months. How is that for irony?

ICM Registry Inc. finally got their wish for ICANN to sign off on the .xxx domain. ICM is the company that has been up to bat all these times since 2005, and got rejected over and over until now.

Members of ICANN’s board have argued that in order to maintain neutrality, it should create .xxx and allow websites with sexually explicit content to start using the suffix on a voluntary basis.

The basic idea as I alluded to earlier, is to create a virtual “red light district,” which could be monitored and set to official guidelines. The benefit would be to go to a .xxx site and know that it is safe from viruses or spyware. In addition, it would keep the porn sites in a known area.

Google released the Caffeine Web indexing system on June 8th, which according to Google, is 50 percent fresher search results from its previous index and contains more content than ever. This development is on the back of the Mayday update which here at Metamend we wrote about recently.

The basic explanation of how Caffeine works, is that it processes hundreds of thousands of Web pages in parallel and updates these results more regularly on a global scale. Google Research head, Peter Norvig was quoted as saying the company was updating its index every ten seconds now.

This represents a change from collecting big “batches” of Web pages to index for its search, instead Google is publishing more frequently, somewhat in real time; it processes the web in bits and pieces instead.

This means that new Web pages or newly added information on existing Web pages are added to Google almost immediately. This has resulted in Caffeine making Google searches faster than Yahoo or Bing at present.

This doesn’t mean Google changed its search formula beyond the Mayday algorithm update. These changes also will not make Google search results populate any faster; all that really changed is that Google has made it easier for you to find new content, and find that content more quickly.

A mayday situation is one in which a vessel, aircraft, vehicle, or person is in grave and imminent danger and requires immediate assistance. To many online entities, Google has put their long tail search referrals in imminent danger.

Each year, Google changes its algorithm anywhere from 350 to 500 times and if you are too narrow in your optimizations you will be at the mercy of each revision, and may find your rankings drop.

Specifically, if you check your search referral traffic between April 28th and May 3rd you may find that there was a drop in the number of referrals, pages getting traffic, etc,  due to the “Mayday” change, but any drops in traffic to your big terms are most likely unrelated. Search referrals (long tail traffic) is where you should look for change.

If you monitor your rankings for a handful of obscure tail terms, you may notice that your rankings suddenly dropped and indexation or crawl statistics suddenly changed.

There is much speculation about what elements of the algorithm were tweaked; to many that Google may have reduced the size and depth of the primary index and possibly broad link devaluation, and/or a shift in how phrase match is performed, increased bias may now be given to authority/brand sites, and many other unsubstantiated theories.

Google has put their search focus into real time results and while this would seem to be advantageous in most situations, it appears that in the case of Twitter and Search Engine Optimization for example, Bing has the advantage.

Bing handles real-time search results separately from normal search results and segregated these results into their own search page. Real-time search results seem to be the popular method, and by segregating results, it appears that Bing may have known something the rest of the Search Engine Optimization world did not.

In Bing, real-time search results are not displayed in the regular listings but if you are looking for information of this kind you can find it. So as a result, Twitter results are sectioned off in Bing.

As Twitter increasingly plays a more important role in search engine optimization, Google and Bing will increase its’ incorporation into search results.

Bing’s handling of these results currently seem to be the most beneficial from a search engine optimization standpoint.

Does this mean that Google is ineffective for search engine optimization uses? Absolutely not.

Here are some things to consider when setting up your Google presence.