Today I saw an interview in Popular Mechanics with Google’s Guru of search: Udi Manber. It is extremely rare to see an interview with him so I was quite pleased when I stumbled upon it. There were some pretty interesting things in the article and I found one statement particularly interesting. He said “At Google we do not manually change results.” What’s that? Really? They say this all the time, but I just don’t believe it. I made a post on WebmasterWorld on 3/6 and also discussed it here. You can’t tell me that in a matter of about 30 minutes that they were able to tweak the algorithm, push it out to over 700 different datacenters, and have it go live. Google might be a technology giant, but I seriously doubt that even they can manipulate their index that quickly… unless of course, they do it by hand.
Anyway, here’s the full article.
Archive for April, 2008
Google Says No Manual Updates to Index… Yeah Right.
Thursday, April 17th, 2008
SEOMike Lands Another Category in DMOZ
Saturday, April 12th, 2008I am now editing another category of DMOZ. I’m pretty excited that I’ve already been granted editorial privileges in another category. I’m going to keep on applying for more and more so I can give back to DMOZ. The Open Directory Project has been so helpful to the positioning of my sites over the years that its about time I helped out!
Editing DMOZ Can Be Entertaining
Friday, April 11th, 2008I am enjoying being an editor of DMOZ. Since I’m editing the Internet Marketing Consultant category I get to see a lot of my competition… I mean a LOT. I’ve been through almost all of the 400+ sites that were backlogged in the category. I see all kinds of stuff on consultant’s sites, but for the most part they are all sheep. With an inclusion request the requester writes the description they’d like to see in the listing. In today’s review I saw my favorite one to date. This person submitted their site to my category which is completely in English. Their site was completely in an Asian language and of no use to my users. (There are related Asian specific categories in DMOZ where it fits better) Anyway, here’s the description this person wanted: “Please give Socki different from the current measures to me skilled by all means.” Made me smile… and move the site to an Asian category.
Google Update Probably Just DC Software Update
Friday, April 4th, 2008The more research I do into this Google update the more I’m convinced that it’s merely a software update for the datacenters. I’m seeing no major changes in number of results in any of my niches, I’m seeing no new cache date, I’m seeing no change in link count, and the organic results are, for the most part, unchanged. I think what we saw is a new way of caching and syncing the over 700 datacenters that Google has. It may be more than meets the eye, but it doesn’t seem like it.
Today when I was checking the number of indexed pages for SEOMike.com on Google it said 1-10 of about 2. Strange. When I hit search again it went back to 1-10 of 10. You don’t often see Google make a mistake. Another strange observation is that the cache date of my index page now says 3/29 when it said 3/26 yesterday. It sure took a long time for my DC to get a new cache if 3/29 is the most recent cache of the page. Strange that it showed up six days late. These little curiosities reinforce that they are doing some kind of DC software update.
A wacky Google Update
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008Google is going through a crazy update right now. Results are all over the place. I’m looking at Google’s datacenter at 64.233.167.104 and I keep clicking refresh. With nearly every refresh the results in positions two through eight are jumping all over the place. I won’t say what niche I’m looking at, but I was able to replicate the “dance” in the results for the search “car rental.” This update is crazy… sites are moving all over the place in nearly real-time. I sure hope my new sites in my niches start bubbling up soon. I am seeing the number of pages indexed in a site: search changing for the first time in a while. I keep a daily tracking sheet of all my sites that keeps track of things like number of pages indexed, cache date, PR, backlinks, number of results for a search term, etc. Some things are changing. Matt Cutts commented on it at Webmaster World asking for people to send in examples of things that are changing. No thanks. I don’t want Matt to know what industry I’m working in right now. Never a good idea to tell “The Man” where you are. I also found the wording of his post on WebmasterWorld interesting… he was asking for examples of differences between datacenters NOT about huge changes within the listings on any single datacenter. Of course he knows that the listings on one DC will be changing a lot, he’s mostly interested in if one gets out of sync with the rest. I think there’s something like 700 different Google DCs and keeping up with them has to be a pain. It’s better for Matt to have lots of people doing that work for him. Anyway, I went to a website that querys several DCs at once and all the datasets seem to match within the same B of DCs with a few exceptions. Intersting to see the results vary. For instance, there’s no substaintial difference, but a search run on the DCs in in the 72.14.*.107 seem to vary slightly. There’s a bigger difference in results on the DCs in the range of 66.249.*.107. Very interesting to watch the differences and changes.
On another note, one of my sites accidentally got on a ROS link. ROS means Run of Site. Every day the link count on Yahoo is increasing by a few hundred. Oops. I’m up to over 12k links reported in a short amount of time. I asked to be removed from the ROS. Hope it doesn’t blast my site out of Google.
I found a nice add-on for Firefox that works with version 3 beta 4. It blocks those SUPER annoying Flash ads that are all over the place which still allowing you to click “play” on the ads spot if you think the flash widget has something of value. The software still allows java scripts to run which is nice. Here’s the URL for the Firefox Flash Blocker.
