Google Exec Spills the Beans! ; Search Engine News :: Search Engine Lowdown:

From Search Engine News by Andy Beal Search Engine News :: Search Engine Lowdown: Google Exec Spills the Beans!: Quote:

Branding: "28% of Google searches are for a "product name", 9% are for a "brand name" and 5% are searches for a "company name". "Brand" keywords also have a 8x higher ROI than generic keywords. Not sure if that is for all searches or just consumer-product related searches, but either way it demonstrates the importance of making sure your site shows up on the SERPs for your brand."

Reach: "Google admits that it can only reach 5% of web page traffic via Google.com and its search partners. With their contextual ad partners, that jumps to 80%. Kind of important if they are to meet that 50% annual revenue growth predicted by CSFB."

Google's ad rules complex, controversial / Documents reveal details about what popular search engine accepts, rejects

Excellent article "exploring many of Google's unpublished rules on what it will and will not accept in advertising
Google's ad rules complex, controversial / Documents reveal details about what popular search engine accepts, rejects

( read in conjunction with Google Ad Policies to Be Publicly Expanded: "Google Ad Policies to Be Publicly Expanded BY Danny Sullivan | September 29, 2004 "..." Google doesn't make editorial judgments about what content to accept in organic search results, with the exception of search engine spam."

WebProWorld :: Did Google Unleash Additional Googlebots?

WebProWorld :: Did Google Unleash Additional Googlebots?
Quotes:

"Apparently, Google has begun using another spider in their scanning and indexing of web sites...

Brett Tabke posted an interesting thought concerning Google's extensive crawling, "looks like "panic" based spidering… as if an index needs to be rebuilt from the ground up in a short time period (aka: the old index didn't work)." Another member believed these scans are apart of the PR re-calculation for the next PageRank update. Another poster, idoc, had also had an intriguing look at Google actions:

"I expect a lot of cloaking and redirect sites will be dropped soon from these new bot IPs and this crawl. It's what I had in mind in the post about hijacks when I said I think Google is on it. They have been asking for file paths and filenames with extensions I have never used before. I am hopeful anyway...

As it stands, the reasons behind Google's scanning efforts are unknown. The only things that are certain is they are using more than one crawler and that at least one of them performs a complete site scan. Is Google repopulating their index, or are they hunting out cloaked/doorway pages? Or are they finally getting around to doing another PR update? Like so many others have said, time will tell."

"quote]do you think it has something to do with clearing out doorway/cloaked pages?[/quote]

I think this makes the most sense. When you think about the fact that Google has reached a limit to the number of pages it can hold (4,285,199,774 since August 2003 I believe) and has had to drop outdated or obsolete pages from its cache, it would only seem natural that they would like to stop what they (Google) term SE spam.
There is a good article on this at http://www.searchengineethics.com/cloaking.htm if anyone is interested."

And on redirects: "sending the proper redirect code to this new Googlebot or should I be sending a 301 redirect or a 404 error? I'm afraid that this new Bot might see what I'm doing as spammy even though it is obviously there to help the users."

Google quiet period lifts, or so we think: Bambi Francisco: Behaviour mirrors general lack of communication

By Bambi Francisco, CBS.MarketWatch.comGoogle quiet period lifts, or so we think: " the end of the period may not really matter for a company whose raison d'etre is to turn convention upside down. Google has already stated that it will not be giving financial guidance. So, don't expect Google to mention how the fourth quarter is shaping up when it reports its third-quarter results on Oct. 21. That will be the first time Google will be part of the reporting-season ritual..

Andy Kessler, is quoted as saying:
"Google will be in a "perpetual quiet period financially but not PR (public relations) wise," .. "The quiet period lifting is not so much them telling us how things are going on inside, but allows them to be out in the press, marketing the company and new products and other ways they plan on owning the world.

"They have already suggested we won't get any real guidance on how the quarter is progressing, or what their business model really is. So, it actually may set up a period of more confusion, a PR and marketing machine blaring loudly (like every company does), but without a clear sense by investors and Wall Street analysts what their real plans are and how this hype fits into their long-run plans."

This dovetails with Googles secrecy about their algos, ranking etc.