Finally! Google has recomputed its panda index correction, and one of our websites, openweather.com, has just been allowed out of the panda penalty box. The graph below shows what this looks like in unique users a day

The start of the panda penalty was on the 12th of April, end of the penalty for openweather is the night of the 17th of June (GMT+0).

We had a major overhaul of the openweather content. Worked and payed for better weather and forecast information. Made the website as informative as most of the website's other competitors.

After 67 days and 2 hours with a Google Panda Update penalty, we are allowed out into the full index again. Thanks Mr. Panda at Google's Algorithmic Index Department; our faith in the world is restored.

Technorati Tags: farmer update , google panda update

Posted by Paul Salber at 8:08 AM | Permalink: Google Panda Update Penalty Lifted

None of the other presentations achieved a third of of Matt's attendance, which is not bad for a guy in jeans and running shoes. My panel, Exploiting shopping search in Europe got a tenth of Matt's attendance. Maybe next year.

The trends from Google are personalisation and localisation:

Chris Sherman: Crystal ball time, where do you see Google going in the next 3-5 years?

Matt: Fantastic question, in my own opinion – personalization, and localization. Also if you have your data, you can store it at Google. You can almost start your own business of 5-10 business for free. Google’s ambition to organize the worlds information, this is really where its going

Google desktop is also a huge benefit – no privacy issues. Helps to find old searches – makes things more accessible.

Yahoo's is progressing into User Generated Content with Y! Answers, giving them an edge over Google in certain markets. So, the next step in Search seems to be Social Search where community contribution to a knowledge base and community filtering complement algorithmic filtering of the index.

Overall attendance at this years London Search Engine Strategies was down because UK professionals preferred attending the London Technology for Marketing conference the week before.

Technorati Tags: matt+cutts

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 5:54 AM | Permalink: Matt Cutts Keynotes London Search Engine Strategies | Comments (1)

The Islington Business Design Center yesterday for the June 2006 Search Engine Strategies 2006 Conference

Excellent set of seminars. My favorite theme was the link building tips:

Link building is becoming a conversation. A personal relationship between your firm and its community, your entire value chain, partners, allies, press and media surrounding your market. Mike Grehan's emphasizes the need to ask for links, personally. Making contact with web sites in your local subject communities. Keeping to a theme. Clearly the cluetrain meme being picked up by the google algorithm.

Mike Grehan has been emphasizing for years the increasing skill with which search engines discount inbound links from outside YOUR SUBJECT. It is not just the anchor text of the inbound link, but also the paragraph, the web page and the subject context of where the inbound link originates.

Link Building has become about conversing with your subject environment, and writing quality content that is referenced by your peers. The academic referencing DNA of the Google algorithm showing through. Academic research scientists understand the entire link building reputation approach almost instinctively.

The upshot of a lot of the comments is that search algorithms look for natural community activity. Inbound links within subject paragraphs with all sorts of different anchor text, and web pages distributed around your subject community.

Superzu transcribed Google's tips about sitemaps which I missed

Aaron D’Souza on Google sitemaps:

• using Google sitemaps helps Google to discover more of your web pages and to prioritize for crawling.
• it drectly informs Google of the existence of all your pages
• iit enabls Google to crawl your site more effectively
• it helps you with crawler issues (you can see crawl success and error distribution).

Aaron repeated that the sitemap system is to alert you of any violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Technorati Tags: engine , google , linkbuilding , search , ses , strategies

Posted by Paul Salber at 12:32 PM | Permalink: Search Engine Strategies Conference: London 2006

The concesus is that the web sites with SEO and webmaster attention cruise up the alexa rankings, but don't necessarily have real traffic. As observed by Matt Cutts.

A great image of where things go wrong with alexa is shown below.

The figure shows that above the 50,000 ranking, all traffic figures are distorted. You dont get a straight correlation between ranking and traffic. Probably due to the low sampling data, with insufficient Alexa toolbars visiting sites above 50,000.

Matt's advise is "use the google toolbar". Enclick's advise for accurate relative traffic figures on your competition is: get NetNielsen or Hitwise service, or ask us.

Technorati Tags: alexa , competitoranalysis , webanalytics

Posted by Paul Salber at 11:07 AM | Permalink: Where things go wrong with Alexa rankings | Comments (1)

Microsoft is not happy with owning 99% of the PC desktop market. It wants to own all of the internet search too. Microsoft made unofficial approaches to take over Yahoo's search technology. Only to be rebuffed by Yahoo CEO, Terry Semel.

Semel said: "My impartial advice to Microsoft is that you have no chance. The search business has been formed."

The thought of another quasi-monopoly on internet search does not bare thinking about.

Technorati Tags: microsoft , monopoly

Posted by Paul Salber at 12:49 PM | Permalink: Microsoft aims to rule the world

CNET reports that Google's share of the U.S. Web search market continues to increase against Yahoo and Microsoft, according to April 2005 data from ComScore Networks:

"The search giant's market share among home, work and university Internet users climbed from 42.7 percent to 43.1 percent from March to April of this year–up from 36.5 percent in April 2005, ComScore said Monday.

In second place, Yahoo saw its market share hold steady at 28 percent between March and April, a decrease of 2.7 percent from last year. […] The relative number of search queries through Microsoft's MSN also continued to fall, leaving its market share at 12.9 percent in April of this year, down from 16.1 percent at the same time last year."

So there's a massive 15% between first-place search engine Google and second place Yahoo. Google is even more dominant in Europe, a trend that looks likely to continue based on this data.

Technorati Tags: google

Posted by Paul Salber at 9:16 AM | Permalink: Google maintains its market share

Google opens its search statistics with
Google Trends.

Specially useful for seasonal trends in particular keywords. Note the seasonality, strong peak in June for bathrooms searches from the figure below,

Google trends is a great complement to Alexa and Google Keywords tool analysing trends.

Technorati Tags: googletrends

Posted by Paul Salber at 9:23 AM | Permalink: Market Analysis with the New Google Trends

In response to popular request Google is looking to warn webmasters of an impending ban. Matt Cutts, the engineer responsible for the quality of Google's search algorithm is working on improving communication with webmasters to avoid banning of legitimate sites. The project works with the google sitemaps facility .

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO � Notifying webmasters of penalties

One of the biggest complaints from legitimate sites is Google's no-warning uni-lateral elimination from their results. Most business web sites with significant activity on their web site have fallen foul of this at one time or other, in spite following an ethical marketing methods. The most frequent cause in my experience with clients are old caches of content dating over a year that Google takes issue with. Google states the zero-warning policy is essential against their war against spammers. Giving spammers any tips on impending action gives the spammers too much of an advantage. A solution is at hand however from the creators of the google sitemap project. As stated by Mark

The Webspam team and the Sitemaps team have been working together for several months on a new approach: we are now alerting some sites that they have penalties via the webmaster console in Sitemaps. For example, if you verify your site in Sitemaps and then are penalized by the webspam team for hidden text on your pages, we may explicitly confirm a penalty and offer you a reinclusion request specifically for that site.

Now at last, Google has come up with a compelling reason to join the sitemap program. A heads up from Google on any impending listing problems for your web site is a real plus.

Technorati Tags: google , sitemap

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 1:00 PM | Permalink: Google to start warning legitimate sites before a listing ban

Alexa, the free traffic statistics site, has just upgraded its service. Alexa has been gathering data from users of its toolbar for many years. Yet the cumulative statistics of traffic to web sites was not available for more than two year periods.
In adition to improved features, the new upgrade offers a max button that offers its entire statistics history of a site.

One of the most popular alexa statistics feature is the ability to compare traffic from two sites. For instance comparing ebay with amazon traffic results in the following graph

On lower traffic sites the statistics can be distorted, and errors can be quite large depending on the alexa's base of toolbar users. Other than that, Alexa is an excellent alternative to payed traffic statistics services like Netvalue from ACNielsen or Hitwise.

Technorati Tags: alexa , webanalytics

Posted by Paul Salber at 12:49 PM | Permalink: Alexa upgrades its free statistics service

We all do the google dance every day, checking our google ranking every morning, now we have yahoo dancing. The Yahoo search department warns that updates will occur more frequently as the indexing system has been improved.

Yahoo! Search blog: Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update

Technorati Tags: yahoo

Posted by Paul Salber at 8:00 AM | Permalink: The Yahoo dance is here

Most webmasters are familiar with Googlebot's continual spidering of a web site. Sometimes googlebot traffic can be greater than user traffic, making some web sites like Slashdot to ban googlebot from their servers.

Google has recently addressed the problem. In a move aimed at reducing bandwidth consumption, the adsense spider is now also refreshing the main googlebot cache. The change is shown in the diagram below.

One consequence is that including adsense on your site might get your pages indexed quicker since the Adsense robot is extremely quick.

Matt Cutts, who is provides politic feedback to many a frustrated webmaster and marketing proffessional, confirms that the AdSense Bot is Helping Googlebot With Indexing

Matt warns that you that the Google algorithm will probably penalize those that serve different content to the MediaBot and Googlebot

Technorati Tags: google

Posted by Paul Salber at 9:47 PM | Permalink: New Googlebot spidering architecture