Some of the popular websites are Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, & Ask. Among these search engines Yahoo & Microsoft showed increment where as Google declined to great extent compared to previous years. The percentage of searches handled in US by five search engines are 61.5%, 20.9%, 9.2%, 4.1%, & 4.3%. Finally, a change - Google slips while Yahoo and Microsoft gain. Now there comes a question whether Google is in trouble?? The answer will obviously be no because of raw number of searches, June 2008 was another record breaker for Google. But Google dropped from 61.8% in May 2008 to 61.5% in June 2008, the first time a share drop has been shown over the past year since December 2007 (when it went from 58.6% to 58.4%).On other hand Microsoft showed its first gain in the past year. After many months of incremental decline, Microsoft rose from an 8.5% share in May 2008 to 9.2% in June 2008. This is likely a factor in Microsoft's rise. By this it has achieved great success but at the same time Microsoft is hoping that program will generate more than a 0.7% rise in its share, and that's all it has gotten so far. Clearly the program isn't a massive initial game changer that some thought it to be. Instead, if Cash back is going to be a success, clearly now it will be something that happens over time. Let’s see if that indeed happens in the coming months. The other hand even yahoo too is showing a rise. After months of drops with the occasional rise, Yahoo posts two straight months of gains, i.e. 20.4% in April 2008 to 20.6% in May, then 20.9 percent in June 2008. I think theres great rise in Yahoo & Microsoft. Lets see the actual number of searches each handled versus market share:
Google: 7.1 billion
Yahoo: 2.4 billion
Microsoft: 1.1 billion
Ask: 501 million
AOL: 471 million
By this we can tell that Google still shows a gain. Google went over the 7 billion searches served mark. Whereas Yahoo, at 2.4 billion searches, & Microsoft, at just over 1 billion searches, which didn't break any past records but at least got closer to territory it held a year ago. On the whole there is a great increment in yahoo & Microsoft compared to previous years & Google declined a bit but then too created a record!

YAHOO ANOUNCES SETTLEMENT WITH CARL ICAHN

Yahoo who is a leading global Internet company announced that it has reached an agreement with Carl Icahn to settle their pending proxy contest related to the Company's 2008 annual meeting of stockholders. Under the terms of the settlement agreement, eight members of Yahoo's current Board of Directors will stand for re-election at the 2008 annual meeting. In view of the settlement agreement with Mr. Icahn, and the termination of the proxy contest, Robert Kotick who is one of the board members has decided not to stand for re-election to the Board at the 2008 annual meeting & following 2008 annual meeting Yahoo board will be expanded to 11 members. Carl Icahn will be appointed to the Board. As part of the settlement agreement, Mr. Icahn, who owns an aggregate of 68,786,320 shares, or 4.98% of Yahoo common stock, has agreed to withdraw his nominees for consideration at the annual meeting and to vote his Yahoo shares in support of the Board's nominees. Yahoo chairman told that they are gratified to have reached this agreement, which serves the best interests of all Yahoo Stockholders. And they look forward to work productively with Carl and the new members of the Board in continuing to improve the Company's performance and enhancing stockholder value. Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jerry Yang told that agreement will not only allow Yahoo to put the distraction of the proxy contest behind us, it will also allow the Company to continue pursuing its strategy of being the starting point for Internet users and a must buy for advertiser. Icahn is very pleased that this settlement will allow him to work in partnership with Yahoo's Board and management team to help the Company achieve its full potential. He believes that this is a good outcome and he'll have a strong working relationship going forward. He is also happy that the board has agreed in the settlement agreement that any meaningful transaction, including the strategy in dealing with that transaction, will be fully discussed with the entire board before any final decision is made. On the whole both the parties are ready for this agreement & yahoo being a world-class company with an extremely bright future, and collaborating together, I believe, the Company achieves its ambitious goals.

Amit Singhal - Google Fellow and senior Google scientist has come up with a beautiful explanation on how well the technologies work behind the ranking algorithm of Google,

I agree with Amit that Search has come a long way from being a just a search engine to understanding more of users queries on what they want. Now Search engines can understand synonyms, complicated queries, language queries and a lot more of these type of stuff that were once far away from Google.

As per Amit Google has grown to a massive index from what it had been before. Now they have an index in multiple tera bytes before it used to be some Gigs Only. Now Google's advancement in understanding pages had come a long way before it used to just be the keywords on the page title, and the backlink anchor text now it has become much more better. As he points out in the article even without the phrase "galleria sprovieri londra" the site sprovieri.com ranks No.1 because Google has much more sophisticated system to identify the authority of
a site.

Some of the examples he has given for understanding queries is excellent. Kofee annan is for someone searching for kofi annan and Google does say whether you are looking for it, similarly when someone searches for Dr.Zhivago then he is actually searching for a Dr with the name Zhivago where as when he is searching for "rodeo dr" he is actually searching for Rodeo Dr a road . similarly he talks about other queries like "back bumper repair" ramstein Ab, b&b ab which searches for Bed and Breakfasts in Alberta.

The most surprising query is the one where he talks about the new york times square's famous church. Obviously New york times or Ny times refer to the famous magazine or website Nytimes.com. Now when a search like "new york times square church" Google has to figure out that its actually about the church in Madison square New york. Now when you check the query Google actually understands it pretty well and guides to the right site. Similarly as Amit Points out understanding the users are an other major factor. Google has to be the best in figuring out where the users actually came from that way they have the option to understand and deliver relevant results based on their local area requirements. Google does this very effectively.

Overall Google has been doing a great job and i wish Amit and everyone behind Google's algorithm to bring more innovative things

Official Blog post here
Vijay,

Requesting reconsideration in Google how to remove banned site – Video transcript


Posted by Mariya Moeva, Search Quality Team


Hai I am Mariya Moeva from the Google Search Quality Team and I like to talk to you about reconsideration requests. In this video we will go over one how to submit a reconsideration request for your site. Lets take a webmaster lady here as an example. Ricky a hard working webmaster who works on his ancient politics blog everyday lets call it example.com one day he checks and sees that his site no longer appears in Google search results. Lets see some things to know whether he needs to submit reconsideration requests. First he needs to check whether his sites disappearance from the index may be caused by access issues. You can do that too by logging into your webmaster tools account on the overview page you will be able to see when was the last time Google-bot successfully accessed your webpage. Here you can also check whether there are any crawling errors for example if your server was busy or unavailable when we try to access your site you would get an URL unreachable message alternatively there will be URLs on your site blocked by your robots.txt file you can see this by URLs restricted by robots.txt.

If these URLs are not what you expected you can go to tools and select analyze robots.txt here you can see whether you robots.txt file is properly formatted and only blocking parts of your site that you don’t want Google to crawl. If google has no problems accessing your site check to see if there is a message waiting for you in the message center of your webmaster tools account. This is the place where Google uses to communicate with you an put information to you on webmaster tools account in the sites that you manage. If we see that there is something wrong with your site we may send you a message there detailing things you need to fix to get back your site in compliance with Google webmaster guidelines. Ricky logs into his webmaster tools account and checked that there are no new messages. He doesn't find any messages if you don't find any message in the message center check to see if your site has been on is in violation on Google’s webmaster guidelines you can find that in the help center under the topic creating a Google friendly site how to make my site perform best in Google. If you are not sure why Google is not including your site a great place to look for help is our Google webmaster help group there you will find many friendly and knowledgeable webmasters and Googler's who will be happy to look at your site and give suggestions on what you might need to fix,

You can find links to both the help center and the Google help group at Google.com/webmasters to get to the bottom of why his site has disappeared from the index Ricky opens the webmaster guidelines and starts reading. In quality guidelines we specifically mention completing avoiding hidden text or hidden links on the page. He remember that at one point he hired a friend named Liz who claimed to say he knows something about web design and that he can make the site rank better in Google. Then he scans his site completely and finds blocks of hidden text on footer of all his pages. IF your site is in violation of Google webmaster guidelines and if you think this might have affected the way your site is ranked in Google now will be a good time to submit a reconsideration request. But before you do that make changes to your site so that it falls between the Google

S webmaster guidelines. Ricky removed all the hidden text from his pages now he can go ahead and submit a request for reconsideration. Login to your webmaster tools account under tools click on request reconsideration and follow the steps make sure you explain what you did wrong with your site and what steps you have taken to fix it.

Once you have submitted a request you will receive a message from us in the message center confirming that we have received it. We will then review for compliance with the Google webmaster guidelines. So that’s an overview of how to submit a reinclusion and reconsideration request. Thanks for watching and Good luck with web mastering and ranking.

Search Engine optimization URL change from static to Dynamic

Many have asked the question what happens if the URL is changed from html to PHP or ASP or vice versa. Well in Search engine optimization URLs shouldnt be changed often. Search engines recognize a page based on the URLs so once they are indexed its not recommended to play with them much. Google assigns pagerank to individual URLs based on backlinks to that page from other pages from the site or from external sites. So if a Url is changed it will affect Search engine optimization. The pagerank of that page is lost and Google also have to drop that page from the index. Also till the page is dropped you need to wait or Google will index the new page with the new URL which will result in lots of confusion happening. Duplicate pages will be created and at times the version you want to have will drop off. So its important to decide which version of urls you want to use whether php or asp or html or htm or what ever decide before you start designing the site. There is no difference between a PHP url and a html URL so if you think in future there will be dynamic contents in the page better name it PHP or ASp or any dynamic extension of the code you want to use.

Ok if you have unavoidable reasons where you want to change the page extensions then make sure the old pages are 301 redirected to the new pages that are created that way you won't loose the value of the old page. 301 redirect for all coding is available online you can use it.

Best recommendation don't change URLs unless you have unavoidable reasons. That is the best for Search engine optimization purposes.

Yahoo recently launched BOSS a new search service which helps to build your own search service.
A web services platform that allows developers and companies to create and launch web-scale search products by utilizingthe same infrastructure and technology that powers Yahoo! Search.It is a new platform that offers programmaticaccess to the entire Yahoo! Search index via an API.It also allows developers to take advantage of Yahoo!'s production searchinfrastructure and technology, combine that with their own unique assets, and create their own search experiences.
SUMMARY:
* Ability to re-rank and blend results -- BOSS partners can re-rank search results as they see fit and blend Yahoo!'s results with proprietary and other web content in a single search experience.
* Total flexibility on presentation -- Freedom to present search results using any user interface paradigm, without Yahoo! branding or attribution requirements.
* BOSS Mashup Framework -- We're releasing a Python library and UI templates that allow developers to easily mashup BOSS search results with other public data sources
* Web, news and image search -- At launch, developers will have access to web, news and image search and we'll be adding more verticals soon.
* Unlimited queries -- There are no rate limits on the number of queries per day.

USE FOR ITS PARTNERS & YAHOO:Its open up to infrastructure and technology to developers, entrepreneurs and companies coz boss blivs tat being openis core to Yahoo!'s future success, opening their network,opening their own search experience via SearchMonkey,and now opening their search infrastructure via BOSS.It will lead to innovation both on Yahoo! and powered by Yahoo!.For BOSS, there's a virtuous circle in which partners deliver innovative search experiences, and as they grow theiraudiences and usage we have more data that can be used to improve our own Yahoo!Second, we do see new revenue streamsfrom BOSS.In the coming months, BOSS will be launching a monetization platform that will enable Yahoo! toexpand its ad network and enable BOSS partners to jointly participate in the compelling economics of search.

ADVANTAGE FOR ITS USERS: BOSS will enable a range of fundamentally different search experiences.These new search products will provide valueto users along multiple dimensions, such as vertical specialization, new relevance indicators and ranking models,and innovative UI implementations.

FEW EXAMPLES OF WHATS POSSIBLE WITH BOSS:ME.DIUM-Medium is a start-up that's built an innovative collaborative browsing product used BOSS to build a web-scale searchengine that leverages its real-time surfing data. By combining the depth of the Yahoo! Search index with its insightinto where users are browsing, Me.dium can provide its users with a unique buzz-based search experience.

HAKIA-Its a semantic search start-up,which is using BOSS to access the Yahoo! Search index and dramatically increase thespeed with which it can semantically analyze the web. With BOSS providing this important infrastructure, Hakia is ableto deliver a language search experience that isn't available from any of the "big three" search providers or othersemantic search engines.

DAYLIFE TO-GO-Its a new self-service, hosted publishing platform from Daylife. Anyone can use this platform to generatecustomizable pages and widgets.It uses the BOSS API platform to power its web search module.

CLUUZ-This is a next-generation search engine prototype, generates easier-to-understand search results through semanticcluster graphs, image extraction and tag clouds. The Cluuz analysis is performed in real-time on results returnedfrom the BOSS API.

To learn more about BOSS and get started using the API, visit the Yahoo! Developer Network.BOSS is open to all.One can check out the documentation, get a BOSS app ID and start building the next generation of search!!

Webmaster tools Access provider pilot program,

Google has recently come up with a new option in webmaster tools where they enable hosting companies to integrate webmaster tools features into their hosting plans as well their servers. Google has recently read this new technology and it works great.

With the help of Google APIs webmaster tools can be directly integrated in web hosting control panel. For products like Cpanel its very easy to get something like running using webmaster tools hosting programme, Also hosting companies which uses Google webmaster tools will recieve a badge which says Google webmaster access provider which will help web hosting providers an other reason to promote their business.

"

Reason for denial

"

1. Yahoo!'s existing business plus its recently signed commercial agreement with Google has superior financial value and less complexity and risk than the Microsoft/Icahn proposal.

2. The Microsoft/Icahn proposal would preclude a potential sale of all of Yahoo! for a full and fair price, including a control premium.

3. The major component of the overall value per share asserted by Microsoft/Icahn would be in Yahoo!'s remaining non-search businesses which would be overseen by Mr. Icahn's slate of directors, which has virtually no working knowledge of Yahoo!'s businesses.

4. The Microsoft/Icahn proposal would require the immediate replacement of the current Board and removal of the top management team at Yahoo!. The Yahoo! Board believes these moves would destabilize Yahoo! for the up to the one year it would take to gain regulatory approval for this deal."

Board Decision:

"Yahoo! Board's conclusion that the current proposal is not in the best interests of stockholders is based on a number of factors, including:

-- The revenue guarantees suggested, which are conditional and subject to reduction, are well below the search revenue that the Company is expected to generate on its own and in association with its announced commercial agreement with Google. That agreement alone is estimated to generate $250 to $450 million of incremental cash flow for the first twelve months following implementation, while allowing Yahoo! to remain a principal in paid search;

-- The success of the remaining Company is critically dependent on Microsoft's ability to effectively monetize search;

-- Microsoft/Icahn's proposed Traffic Acquisition Costs rates are below market;

-- The proposal calls for Yahoo! to sell its industry-leading algorithmic search business and its related strategic and valuable intellectual property portfolio for no incremental consideration; and

-- Many of the components of the headline value that Mr. Icahn and Microsoft put forward, such as the spin-off of the Yahoo!'s Asian assets and the return of cash to stockholders, are steps that could be taken by Yahoo! on its own and the Board continues to evaluate these options.

Mr. Bostock concluded, "Microsoft and Mr. Icahn are trying to dismantle the Company and deliver our search business to Microsoft on terms that would be disadvantageous to Yahoo! stockholders. We are prepared to let our stockholders, not Microsoft and Carl Icahn, decide what is in their best interests and we look forward to the upcoming vote.""

Search Engine Optimization Blog Team,

Google has been very tough recently on sponsoring wordpress themes. I know at least one company who actively seeks business to place links on sponsored wordpress themes. I recommend to stay away from those shady tactics. Sponsoring wordpress themes and getting link from the footer is same as buying links there are lot of sites affected by this activity. If Google sees unbalanced links coming to commercial sites from wordpress themes. They will devalue it so there is no point in paying for it. Also there are situations where a site resulted in plus 60 or 950 penalty after sponsoring wordpress themes.

So is it worth to sponsor theme pay for it and finally get banned? I recommend instead of using your resources on tactics like that find innovative ways to make people link to your site. This is 10 times more benefit able than sponsoring themes.

If you develop a word press them you have all the rights to get the necessary credit for it. But if you are using it for commerical gains and manipulate search engine rankings then you should be ready to face the consequences. I recommend stay away from ideas that are hurting search engines badly. Search engines do have a tolerance level but if 1000s of sponsored links are damaging the reputation of results then they will act against it.

vijay,

Before it was not the case. We just see a bar estimating the competion and search volume for a particular phrase now we see real numbers. We can estimate traffic for a particular phrase for past month as well as average all time.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

I am sure all paid keyword tools will disappear now since google gives their own authoritative data and all other data are just a waste of time now.

Google recently conducted the Google trifecta seminar which was successful. First time webmaster tools, Website optimizer and Google analytics came together for a free online seminar. It was a grand success. Event is currently available as an archive. Enjoy it here

http://w.on24.com/r.htm?e=113541&s=1&k=CB05AB57071FCC9968D5BAE69762C198

Andy of webmasterworld made an interesting post on how punctuation in keywords affects search results and search engine rankings

Read the post

"Various punctuation characters have a noticeable impact on search results - mostly from a searcher perspective. As a webmaster, you may find that your users include punctuation in some keywords, and so it can be of use to know what the effect on the results they see is. And besides, knowing how to search Google is one step towards understanding how Google works. This is a spot check of the current handling of punctuation by Google.
Indexed punctuation
Key_word
Underscores are treated as a letter of the alphabet, which is why you can search for an underscore directly. Use underscores in content if your visitors include an underscore when searching (e.g. if you had a programming site).
Key&word
Ampersands or 'and symbols' have fairly unique handling. They're both indexed and also treated as the equivalent of word "and". If there are no spaces separating the symbol and the adjacent letters, the search results are an approximate equivalent of combining results for ["key and word"] and ["key & word"] (note the phrase matching). Use ampersands in copy as is natural for your target audience.
Explicit search operators
Many punctuation characters are explicit search operators, with a documented effect on results. Search operators are not indexed (or at least, they can't be searched for) and so are usually treated as word separators when found within website copy:
Key¦word
An (unbroken) pipe character is the equivalent of boolean OR: a search for [key OR word]. It can be a handy shortcut when conducting complex queries.
Key"word
A double quote triggers an exact or phrase search for the proceeding words (whether you include a closing double quote or not). So in this instance, it's the equivalent of a search for [key word] since a single word can't be a phrase. ["key word] is the same as searching for ["key word"].
Key*word
An asterisk is a wildcard search for zero or more words: [key ... word]. Putting numbers on both sides will trigger the calculator. Occasionally, Google delivers (strange!) results if you search for an asterisk directly.
Key~word
A tilde triggers Google's related word operator - in this instance, a search for both 'key' and 'word', as well as other words related to 'word' - like 'Microsoft', 'dictionary' and others.
Search operator oddities
Key-word
A hyphen (as is probably consistent with language use) returns a mix of results for the words both used separately, and joined together - somewhere between [key word] and [keyword]. It's the preferred word separator within website URLs, since other punctuation characters that are treated as a word-separator have specific functions within a URL.
Others
A few punctuation characters have a strange impact on results - returning far fewer results than for either separated or concatenated words. They are neither known search operators, or indexed characters. These are . / \ @ = :
As far as I'm, aware, all other punctuation characters are treated as simply a space or word separator.
So, do I have too much time on my hands? Probably. But why not confuse whoever looks at Google's search logs by trying a few punctuation searches yourself? ;)
Do you know any punctuation with an effect on results not discussed here, or more about the effect on results of the punctuation above? "

Following up on Viacom lawsuit where Google might loose their internet freedom , now the judge has ruled saying Google has to handle all username and IP addresses for Youtube account holders. This is an horrible situation for internet freedom.

"Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.
Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users' privacy, the judge's ruling (.pdf) described that argument as "speculative" and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four tera-byte hard drives.
The order also requires Google to turn over copies of all videos that it has taken down for any reason.
Viacom also requested YouTube's source code, the code for identifying repeat copyright infringement uploads, copies of all videos marked private, and Google's advertising database schema.
Those requests were denied in whole, except that Google will have to turn over data about how often each private video has been watched and by how many persons. "

I already said if losing this lawsuit will lead to various other lawsuits which will totally affect internet freedom and some point internet will be a whole regulated place than what it is now. I hope Google comes out well with this lawsuit.

Google Webmaster Central Team comes up with an other useful posting on how to submit your site for reinclusion in care you fear your site banned or penalized by Google. Google has recently been imposing lots of penalities to a site though they are not totally visible to users. If you suspect your site is in someway penalized read this post on how to remove the penalty.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/07/requesting-reconsideration-using-google.html

Yahoo Recently updated their Search index. As per their official announcement changes were made to the ranking, indexing and crawling issues. I have seen recent surge in Yahoo's crawling capabilities. Their Crawler Yahoo Slurp has been hitting hard on our sites and our client sites. Infact on somes sites Yahoo has more indexed pages than Google. Also traffic from Yahoo has increased in double the numbers i am sure this is due to the change in their ranking algorithm. Lots of our inner pages rank in Yahoo now which looks like a very good indication of top rankings for many inner pages.

I hope yahoo doesn't mess with the current algorithm since it looks very much rewarding.

Official News here ysearchblog.com/archives/000596.html

This post is a bit of a Marketing hype. We at Search Engine Genie had been helping Webmasters and Site Owners solve lot of problems with their site. Most of them come to us asking us to fix a flash or dynamic site in SEO point of view, with Search engine penalties etc. We do our best and guide them or work on their site to get it out of any potential Search Engine Problems. If you are looking for solutions to your Search related problems contact us by sending an email to our support team.

Google recently rewrote their SEO page in Google Webmaster help. Before it used to focus on unethical SEOs now they have a more standard document where they give credit to companies who help Search engines deliver better results and webmasters / site owners develop better websites . According to Google good seos

• Reviewing and providing recommendations on your site content or structure
• Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
• Content development
• Managing online business development campaigns
• Keyword research
• SEO training

Well those are good points are most of them are basic stuff handled by any SEO company or SEO consultant. Apart from this good SEOs provide ethical ways to build quality back links. As we know Back links plays a very important factor when it comes to Search Engine Rankings especially in Google. Getting natural links through traditional ways are an important way for top rankings in Google.

1. Write articles which are useful and unique for users. This will help relevancy of the website as well as attract visitors which will result in back links.

2. Provide widgets that are useful and for free which will pay by itself through quality back links.

3. Impress the big authority and GOV sites by providing what they want they will link to your site if you can provide things they want to see and use often.

4. Make your site link worthy by making it as a useful hub for targeted users / customers. Good contents, attractive graphics, tools, forum, blog will all help If you have regular repeated visitors then you have achieved something. Repeated visitors are important since word of mouth referral is important for spreading the word which will result in quality back links.

According to Google some useful questions you can ask a SEO company:

• Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
• Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
• Do you offer any online marketing services to complement your organic search business?
• What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what time frame?
• What's your experience in my industry?
• How long have you been in business?

I agree with all those questions they are pretty straight forward and covers a lot of things. If a good SEO gives a clear answer for these questions i am sure he can relied upon. I respect Google and will live by their stance on SEO even before this updation i never had anything against their rules. Its their search engine and they set the rules for it. We need to live by it. If we can't and if something wrong happens we need to face consequences. This is how it is and this is how it should be.

Vijay

Adobe in their recent press release said they have given Google and Yahoo their technology to access and crawl RIAs and flash files. Till now search engines had lot of restrictions crawling flash content but now we can see a lot of improvement and lot better crawling by Search Engines.

"Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the company is teaming up with search industry leaders to dramatically improve search results of dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs). Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently un discoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can now be confident it can be found by users around the globe."

Read press release here

Fighting web spam using effective tracking of logs and click through data.

Matt Cutts Senior Software Engineer and Lead of Web Spam Team in Google recently made an interesting post on how Google effectively fights spam using Data collection.

Web Spam is the most annoying part of Internet today. Especially more than 85% people uses search engines to land on any site for the first time Search Engine Spam should be totally avoided when it comes to user search experience. Search engines have always had the taunting task of fighting web spam from the day they came into existence. Google is one of the search engines which used effective anti-web spam methods to combat search engine spam. This is one reason they are keeping their position on top of all search engines.

First time i have seen Google really acknowledge that they are using log data in their algorithm to combat spam. According to Official Google blog

"Data from search logs is one tool we use to fight web spam and return cleaner and more relevant results. Logs data such as IP address and cookie information make it possible to create and use metrics that measure the different aspects of our search quality (such as index size and coverage, results "freshness," and spam). Whenever we create a new metric, it's essential to be able to go over our logs data and compute new spam metrics using previous queries or results. We use our search logs to go "back in time" and see how well Google did on queries from months before. When we create a metric that measures a new type of spam more accurately, we not only start tracking our spam success going forward, but we also use logs data to see how we were doing on that type of spam in previous months and years.

The IP and cookie information is important for helping us apply this method only to searches that are from legitimate users as opposed to those that were generated by bots and other false searches. For example, if a bot sends the same queries to Google over and over again, those queries should really be discarded before we measure how much spam our users see. All of this--log data, IP addresses, and cookie information--makes your search results cleaner and more relevant."

As per Matt cutts IP address and search logs do play a role in judging the quality of results delivered to users. I personally feel this is a good option i know there are some IPs that spam the search engines more than the regular IPs if Google is able to monitor the IPs pretty well they can effectively block automated queries and this can be used in search algorithm. Some keywords will always be spammed more than others, Google as they say can use these type of tracking to impose more filters to those kind of phrases. As a person with more than 5 years of experience with search engines i can see Google imposes stronger filters for certain phrases than others. For keywords like Cancer, mesothelioma more gov, org authority sites rank which for keywords like auto transport, real estate commercial sites do a better job. really enjoy the way the results are displayed since i don't like to see a commercial site when i search for medicine related information. Most of the time commercial sites provide much lesser value to users than non-commercial sites. There are areas where we need to see more commercial sites and there are areas that needs more information sites to be dominant. Only way to get this right is to check through the hysterical data and search logs and see what keywords are searched more from where, what the user did after clicking the data etc. User tracking can be done effectively using strong filters and effective methods.

Search Engines are facing problems every day. Apart from Web spam and search engine spam they see DDOS attacks, excessive bot activity, scrappers etc. To stand on top they need to keep working on stronger methods to combat spam.

Official Google Blog post here

Here in Google we are passionate about Search we are passionate about users and passionate about what they are looking for. obviously Google.com. As a search user you love the Google's powerful search platform but what about putting a custom Google search engine on your site and now our custom search offers more custom options than never before not only have you control over the look and feel of your search result you now have full control of what's being searched. Also with relevant search results Google will deliver relevant search results on what you are looking for where you can earn revenue as well as have a positive search experience on your own site. To tell you about some of our new features, i would like you to introduce to matt one of our search engineers who has been actively working on Adsense for Search.


Matt: With the new custom search engine you can customize Adsense for Search used just for your site. A collection of sites you specify say all travel blogs or the entire web we are also working on improving the color of site search so that you can
display a better format which will be good looking for your site.

That's great matt tell us about getting relevant Ads and results on your site. Ofcourse with the new keyword feature you can continue search engine to your sites topic you have an other website say that is looking for Yoga class. So when you search matt in search box instead of getting results for Yoga maps you will also get results for commerical Mats and forum mats. I am not sure you have the yellow color for the floor mat.

So you define your search engine for keyword such as Yoga, Excersise and Meditation. So next time when you search for results for mat you will get results related to Yoga. That's perfect

Ofcourse users will get quality and relevancy of Google search results. More customization means more control to you and better experience for your users. And its quick and easy to setup just click on the setup tab and under adsense account click Adsense for Search and if you don't have an account today sign-up under www.google.com/adsense or www.Google.com/afs

Vijay

Google has picked up its efforts to help out webmasters for their website related problems. They now guide webmasters to effectively maintain a website so that it gets its deserved rankings. Google gives support in Google groups and other various forums, by employee blogs ( Matt cutt's blog ) , Official Google blogs ( especially webmaster central blog ) , Google live webmaster chat ( 2 already over ) and now we have Google Trifecta: Webmaster Tools, Analytics, Website Optimizer coming up in July. We are very excited about this and thought we can create some cartoons representing Google's good work.

1. Matt Cutts , Adam Lasnik and other Googlers are Desperate in impressing webmasters with their active participation in various forums and Blogs.




2. Matt Cutts Speaks in various conferences to make webmaster understand the way Google works.

3. Google is becoming increasingly popular among webmasters and site owners for their effort to become closer to them. Two successful Google Webmaster Live chat is a proven strategy.

4. Matt Cutts Answering Q and A in Webmaster Conference

5. Google has been actively promoting Google Webmaster Central BLog them want webmasters and site owners to read it. Also their Webmaster Tools are becoming increasingly popular.

6. Calling all webmasters to participate and visit Google Webmaster help Groups.

Vijay
Search Engine Genie.

We have one of the best list of Useful SEO and website tools in Internet. All of them are free for use without any limitations and we have strict policy to never run ads in our tools. Please see our full list of tools here http://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-tools.htm

We recently launched 2 new tools to our ever increasing number of tools.

1. First is an outbound link checker this tool helps to track links going out of your website. Currently we show only 10 links but in future we will increase and will more number of links that goes out of your website. Please check this tool here http://www.searchenginegenie.com/tools/chkOutboundLinks.html

2. Next is the Pinging tool which will Ping your site and will provide the IP address of your website within seconds. Though this tool is pretty common most of the people who use Internet never know what is the IP where their website is hosted. It can be a shared IP or a dedicated Ip but its important to know where your site is hosted. You can use our new tool to instantly check the Ip address of any website which includes your site or your competitor sites. Enjoy the tools and please link to it only way you can support our tools is by providing back links. That is all we ask for all the free service we provide. We love the world of free stuff and we will continue to provide lot more free tools in future. We have 5 more tools in development feel free to visit us regularly to enjoy those tools.
http://www.searchenginegenie.com/tools/whatismyip.html

Remember you don't need any premium login or Gold membership to use our tools. We don't believe in stuff like that.

Search Engine Genie Team.

RDFa launched!

Recently Yahoo chat had an interview with a web expert Ben adida. As Yahoo has announced its intentions to support semantic markups. Yahoo has continued to work with the best semantic markup community. Ben is a one among the faculty in Harvard Medical School and at the children's Hospital Informatics Program well as a research fellow with the Center for Research on Computation and Society with the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is also the Creative Commons representative to the W3C and chair of the RDF-in-HTML task force, focusing on bridging the semantic and clickable webs.


Ben was questioned as to RDFa has been long in the process of making and the reply was that the delay was for a good because they wanted enough flexibility in the data management which would be useful for current as well as future use.

Y!: What can I do with RDFa?
BA: You can tell the world what various components on your web page mean by marking up things like:

* The title of a photo
* Your name and contact information
* The license under which you're distributing your latest MP3
* The ingredients of a cooking recipe
* The price of an item
* A gene on which you recently wrote a paper
* ... Anything that you want to make more machine-readable

With RDFa, you can reuse existing concepts, e.g. the title and price of an item, no matter what that item is. If there's a field you need that doesn't exist, you can create it.

This level of granularity encourages you to mark up your content as fully as possible, while letting applications consume only as much of the data as it needs.
Micro formats, eRDF and AB meta and RDFa all serve the same goal.
The advantage which RDFa provides compared to microformats, eRDF and AB meta are that while Micro formats do possess field conflicts RDFa doesn't have field conflicts the titles can reused. As concerned with eRDF has much lesser data content than RDFa.
To the critics Ben says that it is a matter of finding the right compromise and he considers that RDF and eRDF have the same level of complexities as far as authors are concerned. It is more difficult to write RDFa than microformats but that is because microformats are limited in scope and microformats are quite costly to use. For few months They are looking forward to assist the publisher's to produce RDFa tool and the tool builders to parse it correctly.

More information here

Google Yahoo MSN now have a common protocol for sitemaps and they also have same rules for understanding robots.txt file
As per live search blog,

"We at Live Search are pleased to announce another collaboration with Yahoo and Google aimed at making webmasters' lives easier. Webmasters have long used the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) to control how search engines access and display their content. The REP offers an easy and efficient way to communicate with search engines, and is currently used by millions of publishers worldwide.
Over the past few years, we have been working with Yahoo and Google to agree on common ways for webmasters to communicate with search engines. Our previous efforts include support for the Sitemaps protocol .While most search engines already comply with the REP, this is the first time the three major search engines have come together to detail how we actually implement the protocol. This effort makes it easier for webmasters to know how REP directives will be handled by search providers.
You can view the details of how we implement the REP at Documentation for the Robots Exclusion Protocol.
"

Barry of Seroundtable.com has been selling links on his site for a long time. If you go to www.seroundtable.com you can see a bunch of text links without Nofollow. Even he has the TPR penalty where his Toolbar Pagerank is reduced from 6 to 4 which is an indication that her has lost trust with Google. But it seems Matt Cutts doesn't care about all these stuff since Barry is his friend.

Barry is a long term friend to Matt Cutts and now in recent Matt's Post http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-webmaster-chat-tons-of-fun/ he gave a bunch of links to Barry for posting the 2nd webmaster live chat transcript. He does this because Barry is his friend and if anyone else posts the same script he just ignores them.

When the first Google webmaster live chat happened we were the first to post the script here . Even Matt Cutts knew we posted but he just ignored them as if it never existed. I can understand now how important its to attend Search Conferences and make Matt your friend.

You can have 2 advantages.

1. Sell as much text links as you want and still Matt cutts will ignore you and will be happy to be your friend.
2. Will give bunch of links from his blog since he likes you.

Lets follow the new rule of Text link advertising be friend with Google and you will be ignored even if you sell 1000 links.

Vijay,