Everybody knows what Sitemap is. Sitemap is basically list of all pages on one site that are available to user or robot crawler. There are two types of sitemaps. One is standard html view of all pages, which help your visitors (also search engines) to find your content pages
Other types of sitemaps are xml sitemaps (just for search engines). This sitemaps are introduced by Google so site developers can publish list of their site pages and with that help crawlers to find them and index them all.
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I just mistakenly turned on iGoogle option, so I was forced to see iGoogle regardless if I am logged in or not. If I typed google.com directly in the address bar I again was redirected to iGoogle version. Since I found iGoogle to be ugly and not so useful as classic one, I tried to search in Options how to turn it off or disable it but…
But button for turning off iGoogle is on top left corner of iGoogle.
Just click on Classic Home and you will again have your classic bellowed Google D with new one turned off.
Yesterday at 28.05.2009, sooner then expected Google page rank update happened. It went very bad for me. Two of my important sites loosed page rank, others stayed on same level. Most important Sulumits Retsambew did not get page rank. We are still at the zero. Compared to other Sulumits this is catastrophe since they got PR 1 or PR 2 in most cases. However we are still in the first place which proves that Google don’t count PR so much in rankings and that Google algorithms are great since most relevant Sulumits are still on the first two positions. Strange things are that some pages that I worked on 10 days ago for some people went to PR 1 with less then 50 backlinks, and this Sulumit of mine with over 7k backlinks did not advanced. I can’t believe that I maybe did something wrong, since I played by the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Very strange.
Matt Cutts twittered that Google.co.jp was penalized for paying for blogger reviews. If you look at the FriendFeed details, you will see Matt first said, “Google.co.jp PageRank is now ~5 instead of ~9. I expect that to remain for a while.” And then when he was questioned if this was a paid link penalty, he said “yes.”
Google Blogoscoped has more details about the why with their story named Google Japan Reportedly Bought Blog Posts in Promotion Campaign, Now Issued Apology.
Akky Akimoto at the Asiajin blog recently reported that Google Japan was paying bloggers to review a new Google widget. Using pay-per-post service CyberBuzz, blog posts like the following popped up, strangely resembling each other, as Asiajin reports.
The Google Japan blog’s apology translated into:
Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products.
It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologize to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.
How long will this PageRank penalty last? Matt Cutts of Google said, “I expect that to remain for a while.” Any takers on what “a while” means?
Text taken from
http://searchengineland.com/google-penalizes-google-japan-16541
Remember play fair.
We are still holding the number one at Google, but it is interesting to see what other engines says. On Yahoo we are at number 8. Watching Yahoo first few results you can notice irrelevancy for Sulumits Retsambew contest. Some of them are almost empty, and some of them are on old domains dedicated to something completely else…
Watching msn.com results we see even more inconsistency. Our site is not on any of the first 10 serps… First page is filled with old blogs that just mention Sulumits Retsambew on their pages. My Opera blog is on second page and it almost don’t have any connection to Sulumits Retsambew contest except that I mention my .org entry.
Chinese Baidu is similar, with only 2 pages of indexed results. Russian search engine Yandex gave us surprisingly good results, almost similar to that from Google. First page is highly relevant with major contestants on first three pages. We are at number 2 there. Good work Yandex… Cuil (these days called as new wonder) does not have single one result indexed. It looks his owners are ex Google employees with the reason. And for the end Ask.com. We are there on the first place and their results are incredibly similar to Google. However I tried few other terms and they are defiantly not the same. Ask.Com pulls back results that are more relevant then Yahoo and MSN results. Very strange that they are not little bit more popular.
After showing my contest entry to my girlfriend, she noticed somewhere on the page term SERP. I know you all know what SERP is, but there are plenty of other webmasters that maybe don’t.
SERP is acronym for term Search Engine Results Page. Some people wrongly refer, as Search Engine Result Position. It is basically search results page returned to you by the search engine, for given term (red colored area on the image bellow). Given results page can contain other elements such as sponsored listing (in our given case from google.com, we can see adwords listings in the blue area, above the SERP results). Many search engines cache their results for better performance. SERP refreshing can take significant amount of times, in some cases it needs to pass few days or even few weeks before SERP is refreshed, so don’t worry if you don’t see any fast changes.
How these SERPs are generated?
They are generated according to relevance and page worth in search engine eyes. Algorithms for determining page relevancy are almost always well kept secret. But if you stick with this formula you can’t fail:
Good original content + healthy and good links = Good position.
This means that you need to write content for people, not search engines. Good original content will give you visitors, visitors will spread word about you and they will help you to get healthy and good links. Bunch of links will mean that people talk about you, and that will give you worth and authority in the search engine eyes.
