This week we launched our personalized kids DVD "My Christmas Adventure" at YourKidsDVD.com. Some of the employees have already received their copies for their children and from what I hear, it's a huge hit with the kids. We've got some terrific partners lined up to help promote this, including Pat Sajak's Wheel of Fortune, AsOnTV.com and numerous affiliate marketers. We've also partnered with Operation Gratitude which helps support our troops -- always a great thing to do. If you want to buy this and support our troops, go to Operation Gratitude�??s website, click on the My Christmas Adventure.

Thanks for blogging with me.

Your friend in ecommerce,
Brian Williams

It's been a pretty spooky month with all the algorithm and directory updates going on.

First Google performed a long awaited directory update. They followed this up with an algorithm update on or around October 2nd. Reviews were mixed with some SEO professionals being very happy with the new and improved page ranks, while others were quite upset with lowered page ranking. Many bloggers were cursing Google and making broad statements about how Google is losing their grip on search. See this interesting survey at DigitalPoint.com for ongoing vote ins on the Google update.

All month SEM folks have been all over the blogs with complaints and conspiracy theories regarding the updates and the fallout of the updates. With sites like Youtube.com having a mysterious page rank of 3 (now back up to 8), everyone is skeptical. Many threads are discussing the infamous �??Google human rankers�??. Hundreds and hundreds of sites have lost at least 1 point when virtually nothing has changed on the site (creepy). Many are blaming it on a crackdown on sites that provide backlinks, which in turn brings down your site ranking. Others believe that the rating scale itself has changed and what used to be an 8 is now a 7, a 6 is the new 7, etc. This would not, however explain why some sites have gone up in ranking as much as 5 points.

One of my favorites is the Chinese Spam issue. This is the phenomenon where, during certain searches, Chinese Spam sites were showing up in the results similar to the following:

Valid Title
Some valid description with what appears to be advertising truncated in
URL ending in .cn

It has also been reported that if you click on the results you �??get infected with a virus�??. Others have reported extensions of .it and .org with the same phenomenon. While Matt Cutts acknowledged that there was at least one infrastructure change in this update to address the Chinese Spam issue, bloggers are reporting that this behavior continues. The issue was even written about in PC Magazine, but mysteriously the link to the article isn�??t working (scary)�?�. http://news.yahoo.com/s/zd/20070924/tc_zd/215816

For more information on this Chinese Spam issue, please see the SE Roundtable thread.

The scariest fallout I can see from this update is that the concept of Google Page Rank has lost a great deal of respect from the SEO/SEM community. It looks like less and less relevance may be placed on Google Page Rank and keyword search results and traffic will become the key indicators of a successful site. Isn�??t that what we are all striving for anyway?

And, just when we thought we would make it through October, yesterday Yahoo announced that they were rolling out their own updates to the Yahoo crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. Yahoo states that these updates may cause some changes to ranking and some �??page shuffling�?? in the index. We will have to wait and see what the fallout from this update will bring, no doubt the blogs will be just as entertaining!

Sharewell Group can be reached by calling (818) 876-7550 Monday-Friday 8am to 6pm. Please visit our Ecommerce Web Development website at www.SharewellGroup.com to learn more about our company, services and portfolio.

A continuation of the battle between the paid link industry and Google:

Check out the post at WebProNews.com.