Yesterday Google made a good post to their offical Google Search Blog http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/technologies-behind-google-ranking.html.

It is a good read, it does touch a little on SEO (search engine optimization) but it primarily discusses the search experience and how Google has improved search results over the years.

It is becoming more and more evident that Google is making some serious changes to their algorithm. Webmasters around the world are seeing very inconsistent results. It appears that most webmasters agree that wholesale changes began on June 4th 2008, and have been going on ever since. I personally agree with the general population on webmasters. I have been seeing some major changes in results, on a multitude of websites. Some sites that were in the top 10 for say 15 to 20 keywords, bouncing all over down to 30 back up to 2 and so on. Other sites, maybe number 4 now, in 1 hour will be number 9 and then 15 minutes later back to number 3. One day last week, I was just hitting refresh on my browser and I could see the rankings changing real time, I also noticed the search results changing from IE to Firefox although I assume this was just the rapid changes in results being diaplsy only a few seconds apart, although you never know?

One thing I have noticed is, that the shuffling going on seems to be primarily from number 3-10, sites with number 1 ranking are staying put and the number 2 seems pretty solid, but after number 2 your guess is as good as mine as to where your ranking will be in the next 5 minutes.

I have two primary theories, the first one is that this is the new way Google will be displaying results, nearly real time shuffling. This will be with the hopes that people and seo (search engine optimization) companies, will not be able to really track a website’s search engine results. It is quite disturbing to see a site ranked number 3 one minute and number 10 the next. The difference in traffic from 3 to 10 can be 1000%.

My second theory is that Google is making major changes, and attemtping to implement a large scale change to their algorithm. While they are doing this they are constantly tweaking, testing and changing and this is causing the massive swings in results.

On a different topic, I am seeing penalties being potentially thrown around a lot more often, I am quite certain that in the last month I have seen or spoke to website owners and webmasters that are certain they have gotten penalties for certain keywords. They wake up one day with a -30 or -60, the problem is they appear to be somewhat short lived. The next day they will be bouncing all over the place, at times they can be 9 and 15 minutes later -90. I am not sure if this is also tied to the algorithm changes or if this is the “new way” of Google doing things.

In summary some crazy things are going on in Google’s search results and personally they are not good. It really seems that Google is more interested in staying in control, then they are in giving their users a good experience. I think they better keep their eye on the ball, as their search engine directory (remember what Google is) is only good as long as users like it and continue to use it. With these types of results, I think most users will start to become disenchanted with Google results bouncing all over the place. Personally I often search for a keyword (say cars), and make a mental note  that the 3rd result was the website I wanted to go back to, but now I can do the same search and that site might not even be on the first page.

Just a quick one here, I discovered a very cool new tool called SEOquake.

This tool when placed in the hands of the right person very powerful, it can be used to examine a multitude of on site and off site SEO (search engine optimization) factors. I just discovered it, and it is fairly accurate and displays a lot of information required to get a quick snapshot or your current SEO.

Have a look, well worth the 4 minutes it takes to install.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

It appears that webmasters are beginning to simply write off Yahoo. Recently Yahoo started to scan websites and display the results within the search results:

Yahoo has labeled this “searchscan” and this with the over active crawl of Yahoo’s slerp is beginning to annoy webmasters around the world. On a thread in webmasterworld there are discussions about slowing down Yahoo Slerp and banning it all together.

Personally from an SEO standpoint, I am torn, traffic is traffic and even if Yahoo only gives you 10% of your traffic that is still good quality free traffic. Now the “gray hat” seo part of me, says block Yahoo Slerp, but not because of it’s over active crawl or because of its new site scan, but block it to stop your competitors from seeing what you’re doing with your link campaigns. Most software tools and competitors use Yahoo to check websites back link profiles. Your back links let your competitors have a clear picture as to what links you have, what links may be new and what links may be paid. Blocking Yahoo will eliminate the competition from seeing what links you have and what links may be new.

If you want to block Yahoo Slerp here is where you can do it.

If your heavy into link building in a highly competitive market, blocking Yahoo may be the answer to staying ahead of your competition.

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

Until now websites created from Flash (Adobe Flash (previously called Shockwave Flash and Macromedia Flash) is a set of multimedia technologies developed and distributed by Adobe Systems and earlier by Macromedia. Since its introduction in 1996, Flash technology has become a popular method for adding animation and interactivity to web pages. Flash is commonly used to create animation, advertisements, various web page components, to integrate video into web pages, and, more recently, to develop rich internet websites). It was invisible to all search engine spiders. This meant that a beautifully created flash website could not be indexed beyond and meta information or simple text included on the website.

Today Google and Yahoo announced that in partnership with Adobe they have the ability to index flash. This should come as a huge relief to high end web designers and site owners who have spent big bucks on beautiful flash websites. This technology has long been suppressed by the SEO (search engine optimization) community, because of this indexing problem.

According to Google software engineers Ron Adler and Janis Stipins:

Google can now:

Index text content within Flash

1) This Flash text can be used for the snippet that appears beneath your link in Google search results.

2) Flash text will be used to compare with keywords used in Google searches.

3) Index able Flash content includes text within Flash buttons and menus.

Index links with Flash

1) Links within Flash files can be followed by Google’s web crawler.

Google cannot index non-textual Flash content

1) Google can’t index images within Flash files.

2) Google can’t index text that appears in Flash-based images.

3) Google will not generate anchor text for non-text, Flash-based links.

Google is referring to this as the “Flash indexing algorithm” which is long overdue considering that flash has been around since 1996, and 12 years is not really the anticipated call to action that one would expect from 3 multi-billion dollar companies (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft).

The SEO community does not recommend creating websites exclusively created by flash, but using it within your site should be just fine now.

I spent this evening reading about Link Building. The question is now, what is acceptable link building? The all mighty Google has recent issued warnings to us yet again. I know what used to be OK, but nowadays Google has said that any link that is paid is against Google’s guidelines and that Google plans on penalizing sellers and buyers of links.

I never quite understood penalizing buyers of links? Are you saying now, do not buy links for your website to rank well, buy bad links for your competitors sites so they get penalized? I think I may have to run an experiment on this :-P.

Well it seems now that the masses are kind of fed up with Google’s rules, and I have read in a very popular SEO (Search Engine Optimization) forum that based upon Google’s latest guidelines that nearly every single SEO (Search Engine Optimization) company on earth is now going to be considered black hat (black hat, a term used to describe SEO companies that do not 100% obey Google). Google does not want people “optimizing anything”, they do not want link building, they accept link baiting (although link baiting it now the equivalent of fishing in a pond with 8 BILLION other pieces bait, even if you have the best bait in the pond how is the fish to find you? Google. Can you answer this?) So tighten your drawers, Google is going to change the rules, yet again.

Many SEO experts have been discussing whether anything is really going to change, or if they are just going to scream longer and louder this time? The truth be told that most sharp link builders are always going to be 3-4 steps ahead of Google, and Google will never catch up to these guys. So why bother, all Google is doing is increasing the profitability of the really good link builders. Links are the glue that keep the internet as one, and without them, the internet would be 100’s of 1000’s little internets all completely separate, can never do away with links Google.

Most SEO’s now know that Google does not look fondly upon: links in footers and sidebars, labeling links as sponsored ads or sponsored links, so these old school techniques are now fruitless and hardly worth paying for.

So what Google has done is raise the bar, what we are all going to see is the price of great links going way UP! In recent history, you could get a nice bunch of PR4-5 links for say $35 per month, well I bet in the next 6 months a solid PR5 link is going to be $250 a month, why you ask? Because Google is making it much harder to build out links that are going to pass link juice and count towards your search engine ranking and placement. Google has been applying discounts to nearly all links, footer links, sidebar links, site wide links and any kind of link floating around your website is probably only worth about 25% of what it used to be worth, because Google has been discounting these types of links further and further.

Knowing this a multitude of options and opportunities for links in text have been born. Google views these links in text as a premeditated link. Of course people are all over this theory. There are Pay for Review sites now (where you post a review of a site or product and they include links back to your website), there are 4 versions of software that will index a website and turn any piece of text into a link and so on.

So the next step in Google trying to stay ahead of the link market is relevancy. Not your old standby, a couple of sentences on topic, now you will be required to have an entire page probably 400 words or greater on topic (and you better not even try to have more then 5-6 links per page) or Google will probably not count those links.

Google is driving the price of good, under the radar links UP, so you better forget about the old stand buy link brokers, where quantity was the ticket.  Now you better look for quality, as this is all that will matter, 1 super high quality link is going to be all you need to get vastly improved ranking in the near future.

MSN, while lacking on its webmaster tools, has recently added some new tools in their MSN adcenter labs.

These are free tools, which are just fantastic!

If you looking to optimize your website, for particular keywords, or looking to micro manage your PPC ads; the tool for detecting commercial intent tool rocks. This basically displays the typical intent of the searcher (based upon their search query) and the probability of the user to actually buy. You can also use this tool to query URL’s or domains to see what the typical visitor’s action or reaction is going to be based upon statisics.

They also have a Keyword forecast tool, which will offer you details of internet search volume on daily and monthly bases, the search trends and the demographics of the searches. They offer this in multiple views, as detailed as one could possibly want (this is quite unusual for MSN or Microsoft).

The tools they are offering for free are second to none, everything: Text ad writing recommendations, keyword group detection, search funnels, product classification, even a tool for keyword extraction and keyword price estimation coming soon.

MSN has also created powerful new tool with API capabilities called the Keyword Services Platform. This information is so valuable to managing your e-commerce business, I am just starting to dig into this, but it has real promise.

I cannot recommend these tools highly enough, get in there and dig for the gold nuggets you need for your business’s future success.

Microsoft has outdone themselves with this tool and not even the master of the net Google has yet to create such useful tools, nonetheless making them free.

OK I thought I should circle the wagons on the webmaster tools, and show you something that will compensate for the short comings of all search engines webmaster tools, the software is called SEOAdministrator.

This has some very good tools. Best of all it will easily run ranking reports for your site, stores the reports and shows you updates each and every time you run it. This lets you watch your search engine rankings rise and (hopefully not) fall, it also shows you how many places each way. It works with nearly all major search engines and as long as your searches do not get too extensive, it runs smoothly without the use of proxies etc. It offers the ability to export reports, and an unlimited amount of URL’s and search terms.

The software does have lots of other functions/services like: link analysis, site index tools, link exchange tools, among other things.

I use this exclusively, I have tried most other software packages out there, and this seems to be the most reliable of them all.

Does anyone know if Microsoft’s search is called MSN or Live? I have no idea. They seem to be separate mostly, but there is no MSN webmaster tools, only LIve Webmaster Tools.

Live Webmaster Tools is Microsoft’s first shot at giving webmasters some information about their site, and it is weak. It does give you the ability to submit a sitemap, and validate your website (by adding an XL file or meta tag to your site). Once validated, Live does show you little pieces of good information (more than Yahoo). Related to how Live views your website, it will let you type in a search term, which then displays which pages from your site are displayed in Live search.  They have this weird scale 1-5 (little green dots) where it shows you how important your page is for a particular search query, which gives you a clue, but with a rank of 5 (your page being viewed as important to Live) you may only be in the top 25 search results. I am not sure why they can not just tell you exactly where you’re ranked? Anyway, they seem to have gotten married to teasing us, with this 1-5 rank, which is somewhat useless in the big picture, when you can simply search Live and find where your site is ranked anyway (who knows).

Unfortunately Live has maintained this dumb little 1-5 green bar thingy for all of their information. They have a domain rank, they will show you the most important external links on a scale of 1-5, your most important internal links on a scale of 1-5 , how many pages from your site are indexed and when the last time the Live spider indexed your pages.  All great info, except for the 1-5 green bar…kill that someone!

Overall, Live has the right ideas, but they really need to dump this 1-5 grading dot chart and give us the nuts and bolts. Show me exactly where I rank for say my top 100 queries and show me all the links you see both external and internal. If Live makes these changes, they may be onto something.

Do yourself a favor: do not disregard Live/MSN. Yahoo is giving up market share and MSN/LIVE is getting it.

Yahoo has its own webmaster tools, they call it site explorer. In theory it is to be similar to Google’s webmaster tools, although it is a half hearted attempt and really does not offer you much insight into your websites stats within Yahoo.

Yahoo site explorer does offer the opportunity to submit a sitemap to Yahoo, and to review what and how many pages from your site are actually indexed (within the Yahoo search results). It will also display your external and internal links, and this is one spot where Yahoo really shines. Yahoo displays all of your back links (links from external sites). Unlike (Google “traditionally’ only shows a certain percentage of your back links), your Yahoo back links can also be exported to excel so you can thumb through them and sort them efficiently. Lastly Yahoo does provide you the opportunity to remove pages or entire websites from its index which can be handy if Slurp (Yahoo’s search engine spiders name) indexes pages that you did not want indexed.

Yahoo has a signifgant amount of work to do to gets its version of webmaster tools up to snuff: offer the basic search results for your site and web site ranking would be the bare minimum.