Udi Maber, VP of engineering at Google, is going to be a bit more transparent in how the search giant’s ranking algorithms work. On the GoogleBlog, he says “this blog post is part of a renewed effort to open up a bit more than we have in the past.”

Sounds promising, but as Google worry about giving away too much information for fear of their competition, I don’t think we’re going to read about anything too revealing. Anyway, it’s certainly a blog post to watch, read more here:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/introduction-to-google-search-quality.html 

Google algorithms appear to change daily and whilst competing for popular phrases I notice who moves around and am always interested to figure out how a website got to the front page. I’ve been focusing on the term SEO Services for a while now - just researching, I’m yet to implement any optimisation until I launch my new site.

Anyhow I notice today there is a new player when you Google SEO Services. Number one is a company called Web Dynamic. They have a really good looking professional site, but scratch the surface a little and it’s no so professional.

If you click the first link you’re taken to a page titled SEO Services, still looks good, you’re in the Search Engine Marketing group, you click the tab and you’re taken to an equally as nice page talking about search, you can’t see a link back to the page you just came from, but that doesn’t really matter does it? Well, yes.

This is a well designed site, it doesn’t look like the kind of site that forget about a link. So a bit of investigating discovers there are more than 13 orphan pages all dedicated to the same subject:

1. SEO
2. SEO Australia
3. SEO Services
4. SEO Services Company
5. Search Engine Optimisation Provider
6. Search Engine Optimistion Consultant
7. Search Engine Optimisation Strategy
8. Search Engine Optimisation Company
9. Search Engine Optimization
10. Search Engine Optimization Services
11. Search Engine Optimisation Australia
12. Search Engine Optimization Australia
13. Search Engine Optimization Specialist

See them all live on Google and on their page, www.business-directory-online.com.au, where the SEO person obviously just got bored and just posted everything. They all contain pretty much the same content, just re-written in different ways and prominent use of the keyword.

I hear what you’re saying - it’s not spam and it’s not against Google webmaster policy to write the same page more than 13 different ways (I got bored of counting all of them). But, wait - there’s more!

These pages all have inbound links. From crappy domains. The spammy domains:

http://search-engine-optimisation.org.au/

http://web-designer.org.au/

http://online-marketing.org.au/

http://website-optimisation.org.au/ etc - there’s rather an impressive collection of .org.au’s.

All of these domains are registered to the same guy who has registered the webdynamic.com.au domain.

Whilst they may not have breached any guidelines what they are doing is filling the web with spam, actually no, they have breached, just looking at the Google Quality Guidelines - basic principles:

“Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

Mmm…I think not.

p.s. I’m not being a bitch - it’s all part of learning what makes a quality page one result. This ain’t it.

I’ve just taken an SEO quiz from SEOmoz and it turns out I am a dark lord - which is good thing…
SEO Dark Lord - 95%

Are you an SEO Expert?

I was following up with our friends of Google to see if Rob’s Google maps business listing has returned to normal (read here). No, it’s got worse, the mother ******* Nestsoft people have hijacked my mother ****** listing as well.

If you do a search for businesses on http://maps.google.com.au/ and type in SEO as the service and Sydney as the location, you’ll see our friends of Nestsoft appearing in the number four spot : Nestsoft Web Development, Designing, Seo Services…mother ****** (Gordon Ramsey can fill in the *******)…

Now I’ve just noticed I can claim this listing - it has a sparkly “NEW” link next to it. Even though it’s already in my Business Centre, anyway I’ve gone through the whole claiming and filling in details again - thinking it will all be sorted when I get the phone clarification straight away - only to find I can’t do phone clarification - it’s disabled. Mother ******! I’ll have to wait weeks for the mother ******* postcard.

The race is on.

Who will be quicker:

• Snail mail or
• Google Maps or
• Google AdWords (yes, I also wrote to them as they disapproved one of my local business ads based on mismatching business name)

Sadly my bets are on snail mail.

Even sadder: it’s Friday at 7.55pm and I’m still at my computer…

Jill Whalen has finished another piece of her excellent “how to” series of articles at Talent Zoo. This one covers writing a killer title tag. I agree with all she says, and would add that after I’ve written my title tags I’ll do a quick search on Google for each of the keywords I’m targeting to compare my tag with those that appear on the first page. I want to make sure that whatever I can control to appear in the search results is more clickable than anyone else’s title tag and description.

Read Jill’s article here: http://www.talentzoo.com/website/columns/ColumnContent.aspx?Id=2140

I was meaning to write a post last week about the newly launched Ecocho.com as I had another of those “Why didn’t I think of that?” moments. Ecocho combine Google and Yahoo sponsored search listings, and allows people to search and feel good about the environment. Everytime once of their searchers clicked on a sponsored listing in the results, Ecocho would receive a tidy payout from Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher. From some of their enormous bucket of money they would plant some trees so everyone feels warm and fuzzy.

But I read today in the SMH that Google has pulled the plug on them, saying it’s against AdSense policy. As Ecocho is founded by Tim Macdonald of the Found Agency I kind of thought - oh - how sad (in a somewhat green-eyed manner), he already made a mottsa last year by selling to the Photon Group. But reading through the article, I feel it’s somewhat unfair and I’m wondering just what is going on in Google Australia.

This is the second major company this year who has shown Google Australia what they are doing before executing it and not being told it’s against Google Guidelines.  I’m referring to the Flight Center debacle at this years SMX - they too had shown their stuff to Google earlier in the year, were not told it was against the Guidelines, then made to look rather silly in front of crowd of eager optimizers.

So I take back my oh - how sad attitude. If I was Mr Macdonald I would be rather peeved that someone’s standing in my way of earning another million this year…

Argh! My client, who just happens to be my husband, has had his Google maps listing hijacked. And this time it’s not a case of him not registering his maps listing in the local business center and it being unverified. It’s really hijacked!

We created the listing a few weeks ago for his newly launched website, CodeSense, and added all the details together. His listing was doing pretty well for web development Sydney, when this morning I discovered overnight he’d transformed into an Indian software company called Nestsoft. Interestingly my husband is a director of a company called Netsoft, however they are not in India and whilst their website is not pretty, it’s certainly not as tragic as Nestsoft.

See in the listing - it’s the second one down - it’s got a phone number that’s switched off (we’re presuming fake), but it’s still got our original CodeSense description. The title is different too. It’s on the first page page if you search within Google maps

And when you click into it, it’s just mighty confusing…

See the CodeSense description and email address are still there, along with Nestsoft and their crappy logo.

We’ve checked out the local business center to see if it had been hacked and no, it looks normal - no sign of Nestsoft at all. So at this stage we’ve lodged an enquiry to Google and will wait to see the response.

Has anyone else seen this happen before?

I know you’ve all been waiting, and even performing your own Google searches on the peeps at My Website Designer, and alas, these searches are returning nil poi.

I think their site must be fairly new, the archive is only bringing up a Plesk page from last year so perhaps they are just hanging out in the sandbox…nothing’s going to happen to them for a while so recheck in a few months to see how the keyword stuffing is working out for them.

Interesting title hey… yes the subject is exactly the same..yawn…

Don’t scratch your head any more. iProspect has just released a study on all the meaty information you’ve been asking yourself. It’s no surprise to learn that people don’t go past the first page, but it is interesting to note that a whopping 68% of search engine users click on a result on the first page.

And 92% click on a result within the first three pages. If you’re not in the first three pages the only clients you’ll be getting are those 8% with lots of time on their hands - and we all know what a joy they are to work for…

The study is actually about blended search results, aka universal search and it’s obviously changed our tolerance for results. Now, 49% of users who don’t find what they are looking for on the first page change their search query. So rather than click through those extra 2 pages, they’ll just type something else in. Our desire to go deeper into the black hole (past the first three pages) has decreased from 22% in 2002 to 9% in 2008.

Do we really trust that each of the big three search engines are returning the best results on the first three pages?

I certainly don’t, this survey makes me want to dive into the black hole more often.

Make up your own mind by reading the report.