Indexing examples

Mike Banks Valentine has an article based on his experience on how spiders behave when indexing. For example he concludes:

1) Google crawls 250 pages on first discovery of links to site. Then they don’t return until they find more links and crawl slowly. Google has failed to index new domain for 60 days.

2) Yahoo looks for errors pages and once they find bad links will crawl them ceaselessly until you tell them to stop it. Then won’t crawl at all for weeks until crawling heavily one day and lightly the next in random fashion.

Even though I don’t agree with it’s conclusions on Google (see this example, the part on Yahoo it’s interesting.

The complete results of his analysis is here . What I see that he ommited is what submission steps he took if any. As far as I know no one will spider your domain out of the blue

Posted in Google, Search Engine Optimization, Yahoo | No Comments »

Search engines vulnerable to spam

Last night doing some research on the romanian real estate market I almost felt off my chair.
Google,Yahoo, MSN were spammed beyond recognition by a site using the old keyword stuffing technique.
Look for “chirii garsoniere” (translation rent single rooms) and see the results.

Google
Yahoo
Msn

Spammed results are those that include “Delta Dunarii”. What is more curious, all the other organic results seem to be gone.

Aparently the guy used a query like “allinurl: _post.htm” to identify old message boards that allow unmoderated posting. Because those results are from old sites their relevancy in all the search engines is higher.

So…what we have heard lately…big words like “human raters” “personalization” “anti-spam filters”and so on are just cheap PR.

The proof is there that any determined low life spammer can mess with results

Posted in Google, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engines News, Yahoo | 10 Comments »

Next search frontier: PERSONALIZATION

This week has been a busy week for PR people, journalists and bloggers. Google and Yahoo (and even Amazon’s A9) launched interesting and future will proove how usefull products.

Both Google and Yahoo made a step further in their ranking process and accepted the fact that any alghoritm can be partially replicated. To compete with that they are using the net users as volunteers raters. But the way they approached this is completly different:

Google:

Google’s way is somehow….cloaked. In order to use it you have to login to any Google service and the rest is on automated pilot. This is the G00d thing and the UGLY thing.

• Good: fits well the grandma test. You don’t have to be a power/medium user in order to rip the benefits. Sites you click in results pages are placed higher when you repeat the query. As simple as that
• UGLY. Well here is more. First of all I don’t know how many users will nptice that something has been added. That makes imposibile for them to pause the whole tracking process. Second I’ll tell you my searching bhavior. I use Firefox and when I do a search I open in new tabs all the first ten results and evaluate them. That means that in time I will have the same results on TOP 10 and I will miss fresh content. That is VERY ugly

Yahoo:

Yahoo’s approach is rather geeky. There is no automated process and you will have to manually save the pages you find usefull in a section called MyWeb (this time Yahoo has brought Google’s BETAmania to a higher level; both MyWeb1 and MyWeb2 are in beta….). They have also added tagging functions and social functions by connecting groups of users.

What both Google and Yahoo avoid telling is to mention how those features will affect the “public” results

P.S.

If you want to see a complete summary of this full week check out Guillaume’s coverage

Posted in Google, Search Engines News, Yahoo | No Comments »