Been Gazumped by Google? Trying to make Sense of the "Florida" Update!

Been Gazumped by Google? Trying to make Sense of the "Florida" Update!: "The following is an attempt to put down rationally (I hope) most of the information that is known and the (unproven) theories behind the update algo.

Starting on the 16th of November, a major shift in results was seen on Google...

In many areas all the top 20 ranking sites disappeared, including industry leaders, to be replaced by educational sites, news review sites, government sites, major shopping portals or directories. Something major had happened - but what?

After tests on over 500 phrases we have concluded that certain phrases kick in the new algo, and certain don't. The ones that do are always highly commercial and the ones that are not, are often also commercial.

Be aware these are theories, some are bizarre, some may be close to the truth - but only Google knows what they are doing.

Main theory; Google manages to identify sought-after search terms. It then, when the search term is looked for, applies an optimisation filter to redress the influence SEOd sites may have and reveals the adjusted, "authoritative" results. This is why you tend to see governmental, educational, shopping portal, business directory and news sites on many searches. However, some commercial sites will still be considered the authority on that subject and remain - many, though, will drop out. This is the theory we subscribe to. We believe this was, and is, the intention of Google in this update.

Google is trying to separate their results into non-commercial and commercial. Commercial results will be AdWords and non-commercial the natural listing, primarily used for research purposes. My conclusion - well, it was probably me who started this, with a rather cynical tongue-in-cheek remark on the High Rankings Forum. Well, in reality, this is pretty much impossible and would defeat Google's idea of returning the most suitable sites for all searches. But some searches do make it look that way. However, in my opinion, this is not true.


Google has changed their algo to suit their biggest advertisers. My conclusion - highly unlikely and I do not believe that Google has any wish to be seen as an unethical company, regardless of their growing unpopularity with "jilted" webmasters.


There is no separate algo for "commercial" phrases and this is a new over-all update. My conclusion - all evidence points to this not being the case. I'm waiting to be convinced I am wrong, though.


This is a result of a virus or blog results upsetting the standard results which can only be seen if you type in -mt-tb.cgi as revealed in The Register. My conclusion - this is confusing the results returned unfiltered as shown with our -waffle (or any other garbage word) with a method of getting rid of extraneous listings from Blogs in the search results by excluding from the search the signature of the most used blogger trackback script.

Conclusion:

Despite the furore, there is no great conspiracy theory. Google are trying to redress the balance by trying to eradicate obvious search engine manipulation from their most competitive results. Remember, it is what Google considers their most competitive results probably gauged by both value and number of searches. As such, certain types of site don't fall into this category. SEO sites, for example, may be competitive but are not searched for with huge frequency.

The results of the filter have probably surprised Google, but, for the moment, few surfers will notice anything - unlike webmasters. The quality of the results has changed, with searches for home alarm, web design Calgary, and medela breast pumps showing, variously, sites with nothing to do with home alarms, a hockey team being top for web design and a listing of pretty much nothing but shopping portals. (My thanks to some of the many people who have posted some of the searches they have seen and I have used - you know who you are!) Many feel this has been a severe downgrading in relevancy, others believe that this is an improvement in the surfer experience. It is your judgement!

It is certain that Google will be watching the result of their change and will adjust the algo if they think it will reward sites of merit and increase relevancy. Whatever happens, though, the days of easy rankings through simple SEO are over"

Google 'supplemental results'

Google 'supplemental results': "Hey, the supplemental results are a new experimental feature to augment the results for obscure queries. This is a new technology that can return more results for queries that for example have a small number of results. So it might not affect the results for a popular search, but for a researcher doing a more specific query, it can improve the recall of the results. The supplemental collection of pages has been collected from the web just like the 3.3 billion pages in Google's main index. "

Boston.com / Business / Technology / As Google grows, critics emerge

Boston.com / Business / Technology / As Google grows, critics emerge: "'Every few years there's another big fish,' he said. 'Nothing lasts forever on the Web.'
True enough. You remember AltaVista -- barely. It was the Google of the late 1990s, acclaimed as the world's best search service. But the tech-heads dropped AltaVista for Google and brought the rest of the world along with them. If Google makes them mad enough, it could happen again"

Fortune.com - Technology - Can Google Grow Up?

No apologies for quoting at length.... Fortune.com - Technology - Can Google Grow Up?: "We'll sing more of Google's praises later, but first the worrisome news: Google has grown arrogant, making some of its executives as frustrating to deal with in negotiations as AOL's cowboy salesmen during the bubble. It has grown so fast that employees and business partners are often confused about who does what. A rise of stock- and option-stoked greed is creating rifts within the company. Employees carp that Google is morphing in strange and nerve-racking ways. And talk swirls over the question of who's really in charge: CEO Schmidt or co-founders Brin and Page?"...

All are aiming for what they see as Google's weak spot: lack of customer lock-in. ...Google's foes have a much firmer hold on customers, argues Seth Godin, a well-known Internet consultant and editor of last summer's widely distributed online book What Should Google Do?... consider the way My Yahoo brings you information on everything from your portfolio to fixing your house. They will probably use that same information to tailor search results. Google, meanwhile, knows little more about you than what you are currently searching for.
...
versus...
In a short time Google has become one of the world's best-loved brands. Movie stars like Gwyneth Paltrow and ex-Presidents like Jimmy Carter drop by for visits. A thousand people apply for jobs at Google every day."...

Though web-search startups were a dime a dozen, investors couldn't hand money over to Google fast enough. When the founders showed Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim a demo in the summer of 1998, he wrote a $100,000 check on the spot. Brin and Page had to wait a month until Google actually existed to cash it. In 1999 top venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital invested $25 million. "It was very unfashionable to invest in a company like Google back then," said Michael Moritz, the Sequoia partner in charge of the deal, in an interview with FORTUNE last year. "But we thought Larry and Sergey were taking a fresh look." Soon after, Yahoo anted up $10 million...

Larry and Sergey spent more time talking about how they weren't going to make money—no user registration, no blast e-mails, no banner advertising—than how they were," says a participant in Google's early discussions. On Google's website, under the heading "Ten things Google has found to be true," No. 6 still reads, "You can make money without doing evil." Not doing evil is a common concern around Google and loosely translates into avoiding anything that mars Google's user experience...

Adsense, which puts ads on nonsearch sites. Read about the New York marathon on newyorktimes.com, for instance, and Adsense serves up ads for sports drinks, running shoes, or whoever else pays...

Those close to Google say that the company has begun to more closely resemble a madhouse than any kind of serene dot-com dream. It's a tough place to work, and a tough place to do business with.

Beyond the bean-bagged lobby, 12-hour days are considered standard, and an unspoken caste system has emerged. At the top are the engineers, people in the mold of Brin and Page. At the bottom are the contractors, the 30% of Google workers who labor alongside full-timers—yet without benefits, stock options, or access to the company intranet, not to mention to meetings or social events. That's fostered anger in Google's overeducated ranks....


The most immediate threat is Yahoo. It's expanding into new areas like product search (helping people to find goods, read reviews, compare prices, and buy) and local search (enabling users to find a plumber or landscaper in their neighborhood). Google has prototype sites that provide those services (froogle.google.com and labs.google.com/location), but they're not nearly as good. With about a 5% stake in Google, Yahoo goes quiet when talking about the company. Yet it's likely Yahoo will dump the stock after the IPO. Even sooner it will stop using Google's search on its site, relying instead on its newly acquired units. Says Jeff Weiner, senior vice president in charge of search: "We have every intention of deploying Inktomi and Overture throughout all our search..."

Then there's Microsoft. The company has an army of brainiacs working on incorporating web search into MSN and its new operating system, code-named Longhorn, due out in 2006. It plans to be able to index every user's hard drive and use the information to provide better searches. "All I'll say is that search is vitally important to us," says Chris Payne, Microsoft's executive in charge of search

Google: Current Algo Update-Dance -> High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum

Google: Current Algo Update-Dance -> High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum: "AND,.. this I like,... it means that in order to rank high,... a commercial site now will need to give much more content,. more information,... more general information,.. and I think that that is something many SEO consultants (like your self) have been preaching for many years already. That´s probably why you don't see that many of your sites effected."

Google: Current Algo Update-Dance -> High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum

Google: Current Algo Update-Dance -> High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum: "New type of message from google. When we type 'seo' initially it was dominated by commercial sites like topseo.com now they are gone disappeared. Now no.1 ranking is google webmaster warnings on SEOs.
www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html
So they definetely want to send a message to everyone. Dont use SEOs first read our guidelines on selecting an SEO.
oops this definetely looks manually manipulating the SERPs to tell people what they are not supposed to do. Got to see how long google sets the rules,
VIJAY."

Google: Current Algo Update-Dance -> High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum

Google fuck over conspiracy theoriesGoogle: Current Algo Update-Dance -> High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum: "QUOTE (Toadally @ Nov 21 2003, 12:36 AM)
I think this is the most reprehenisble tactic that Google has ever undertaken. AND I think it all has to do with their upcomoming IPO. By putting everything as far as organic placement in flux, right before Christmas, they make everybody start to pay PPC, which drives their profit margin way up (and ours way down) before their upcoming IPO early next year.


Hmmm...Very, very interesting, I had exactly the same speculation, as strangely enough my firm was contacted by Google to upgrade our adwards just today...as long as we maintain or increase our monthly budget that is...!

...targeting the same (competitive) phrase that we have dropped for....nerve... "

Google as a Public Utility? No Results in This Search for Monopoly - TechKnowledge Newsletter

Google as a Public Utility? No Results in This Search for Monopoly - TechKnowledge Newsletter: "technology consultant Bill Thompson in a recent online BBC News column: �Perhaps the time has come to recognize this dominant search engine for what it is�a public utility that must be regulated in the public interest.� Thompson adds, �A government serious about ensuring that the net benefits society as a whole could start by investigating Google and considering whether we should create Ofsearch, the Office of Search Engines.� Daniel Brandt of Google Watch / Public Information Research, Inc., has similar dire predictions. �It's way too powerful�It�s scary because if Google drops you, you could be out of business in no time.� "

Retailers Rise in Google Rankings as Rivals Cry Foul

I think that this example demonstrates the deep tension betweens the Google ranking philosophy & commerce, especially where resellers & affiliates are involved.
Retailers Rise in Google Rankings as Rivals Cry Foul: "Danny Sullivan, who is the editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, said the problem had hit other industries too, particularly as companies encourage affiliates, or online brokers, to sell their products. He worries about the impact on consumers.
'If I do a search for gift baskets, I'd probably like to get a balanced list,' he said. 'If I get 10 listings from the same company, that doesn't help me.'
But other search engine experts say that occupying multiple slots in search rankings may simply be smart marketing. Greg Boser, the founder of WebGuerrilla.com, a search-engine marketing consultancy, likened the Gift Services sites to GMC and Chevrolet. 'They have different logos and different TV commercials,' he said, 'but a Chevy truck is exactly the same thing as a GMC truck.'"

Google filters

Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine News, Blog Search: "Google recently introduced a new keyword phrase filter during its most recent update. Some phrases were unchanged, but many highly optimized and highly competitive phrases were drastically altered. Some webmasters saw their sites drop from top listings to not being in the top 1,000 sites. Unlike other filters, this spam peanalty does not affect a page or sites overall perceived value. The end effect is lowered rankings for various specific searches for that page."

The Search Light Vol.3 Issue 9, free search engine newsletter

The Search Light Vol.3 Issue 9, free search engine newsletter: "Speaking of rumors, this week I heard one from a very reliable source that a large online retail company in Pakistan has just launched a lawsuit against Google for alleged violation of their own TOS via the closure of the company's AdWords advertising accounts.

According to my source, if Google doesn't respond within 7 days, the Pakistani firm will apply for a ruling from a local court restricting Google from operating in Pakistan, including denial of access to Google search sites (and their partners sites such as Yahoo. AOL etc) from within Pakistan. I've asked Google to confirm or deny the rumor and I'll post more details to my blog as soon as I receive them..."

Google No. 1 search site in the world according to OneStat.com (OneStat.com) - Pressi.com

Google No. 1 search site in the world according to OneStat.com (OneStat.com) - Pressi.com: "News release 11/18/2003 10:55:19 AM GMT

Google No. 1 search site in the world according to OneStat.com"

What Future for Search?

Take heed...
What Future for Search?: "If Google were to continue with this model, (and in the absence of any other major competitor some might argue there's little reason why they should not) we could reasonably assume that for people who rely on organic search there's still plenty of time for a free lunch. However, with IPO on the horizon and the lure of even bigger profits, combined with inevitable shareholder pressure any existing 'free real estate' could rapidly diminish. "

Localized Google Search Result Exclusions: Statement of Issues & A Call for Data

Localized Google Search Result Exclusions: Statement of Issues & A Call for Data: "A note on search criteria: The authors' searches use standard Google search syntax to request 1) pages on the specified web site (using the site:stormfront.org restriction), and 2) pages that lack a phrase of gibberish (using the exclusion syntax -asdfasdf), since some search term must be specified. Similar searches for other sites confirm that these search criteria provide a reliable estimate of the number of pages indexed by Google on a given web site."

Localized Google Search Result Exclusions: Statement of Issues & A Call for Data

Localized Google Search Result Exclusions: Statement of Issues & A Call for Data: "The authors are studying exclusions from search engine search results, and have found some 113 sites excluded, in whole or in part, from the French google.fr and German google.de compared with google.com. Learn more about the situation and context, test the exclusions for yourself, and submit further sites suspected to be excluded."

Google News by CodingTheWeb.com

Couple of references to google dancing big style over the past couple of days. Canot access the webmaster world one without paying & other ref is on globalpromoter who promise No 1 placement....
so it seems to have the status of rumour for now but will be extra attentive...Google News by CodingTheWeb.com: "Google Update Florida - November 15, 2003
With all the changes in the Google update process the last six months, it is hard to tell what is and isn't a major update. By-all-accounts, this appears to be a major update - it is an old school dance."

K-Praxis - Pre-IPO Google Dossier: An Experiment in Opinion Mining

K-Praxis - Pre-IPO Google Dossier: An Experiment in Opinion Mining: "K-Praxis treated this as an opportunity to try out text analysis based opinion mining using a combination of text analysis software, methodologies and a text analysis processes-metrics to create what we call a 'Pre-IPO Google Dossier'. This is an attempt to understand a company, its technology and the buzz it has been able generate through and across the dot-com-boom and bust era. More than looking at just the business aspect of the company, this is an attempt to look at the whole phenomena of Google in a holistic and multi-dimensional manner...

Google's uniqueness also partly stems from a style that very often represents a spirit of non-commercialism yet in the end turns this perceived non-commercial attitude into a business proposition. Take for example Google Location Search, an attempt to provide a geo-spatial information retrieval solution rather than just providing a paid directory listing - something that eventually could lead to unleashing a huge revenue potential...

DeskBar. This could be seen as Google's bid to take control of users' desktop, getting Google inside the day-to-day workflow of a knowledge worker. There are suggestions that Google could create a "global command key" ('control, alt, G,') that could allow users to search through another application.

Since many businesses now depend on Google search and the decisions it makes affects the way people business, there are bound to be legal issues - as shown by the SearchKing Case that showed that a search engine has rights to present search results (invoking the First Amendment) in any order it wants. But the case underscores the importance of the issue in the minds of many Web site owners.

Another future search battle will be fought on the grounds of local search—Google will be fighting here for local advertising dollars from the Internet Yellow Pages vendors. Google has already started showing interest in this area launching a beta location based search through Google Labs.

"Problems with Google
Google users have reported a number of problems recently: some of them are related to the heavy influence of blogs in search ranking, problem with the behavior of the PageRank system, the vulnerability of Google to those webmasters who are ready to try every trick in the book to romp up the PageRank. Given these problems, Google's search supremacy and leadership is not guaranteed. There is a great deal of abuse going on of PageRank. People use link farms and redirect pages and identical mirror sites to improve page rank. "

"we need to think of relevance of a web page from a different perspectives other than PageRank. Wee may want to judge the relevance a page based on the user's personal choices or a particular field of knowledge/ domain /subject category the user is interested in. The new dimension of these combined efforts could be that the meaning and the philosophy of PageRank itself would get overhauled. Personalized and contextual computation of PageRank could mean you are able (at any given time) to compute three very important aspects of a web page a) its total rank across the web, b) its content -through content analysis c) its relative rank within a specific context.

Google as competition to Amazon & Ebay
"Companies like eBay too have started feeling the pinch of Google's expansion plans. E-Bay executives think that Google could prove to be a competitive threat. E-bay - a company adjudged by the analysts as one of the most successful dot.com survivors with an operating profit of $986 million in 2004 on sales of $2.9 billion and a company that spends a great deal of money advertising on Google itself - understands that Google could lure away advertisers from its site by directly placing ads on Google search or local targeted listings.
Amazon on the other hand, started its own foray into search recently with its new Book Search. Amazon unveiled this new book search service, including a keyword search that returns text snippets from pages of some 120, 000 books listed on Amazon.com. So it could be said that in a way Amazon too is looking to grab its own share of the search engine pie. Apparently it has started its own search company, iconically named: 'A9'. Just within few days of this announcement it came out that Google too was talking to publishers to introduce similar service."

Should always remain aware that: the other problems with Google is that not many of its features are either understood or used by the general searchers as many of their features remain in beta testing phase for long time - note that Google News is still in beta testing as are many other features.

Who owns Google? Some of the principle owners are: Larry E. Page 15%; Sergey Brin 15% ; Kleiner Perkins ; Caufield & Byers 10% ; Sequoia Capital 10% ;
Yahoo 2% ; David R. Cheriton (Professor at Stanford who lent some money to the founders when they started off) 1% ; Cisco Systems Inc 1%

Hypothesis: Google Brand and Google Business

Google's dominance in the search space is dependent on the perceived non-commercial attitude to Internet Information Retrieval that Google has exhibited. Non-commercial here means that they have tried to solve the problem of hyper linked web information retrieval without tampering (to a large extent) with results for plausible commercial gains. Even though it is unlikely that Google will lose its dominance in the search arena in short term, in the long run Google will have to play a balancing act between importance of unfiltered results and commercial gains.................

Growth in Google's revenue engine seen slowing

Growth in Google's revenue engine seen slowing: "analysts still forecast double-digit gains in the search industry as far as the eye can see, but they caution that as the market matures Google could also face tougher competition from big and entrenched Internet players like Microsoft Corp."

USATODAY.com - Gates: Microsoft aiming at spam, viruses

USATODAY.com - Gates: Microsoft aiming at spam, viruses: "Microsoft chairman Bill Gates says.
'We've never been in any talks with Google about any acquisition thing in any way, shape or form,' Gates told USA TODAY last week."

Playing Googlebot with Mozilla Firebird

Playing Googlebot with Mozilla Firebird :: Search Engine Optimization at ChriSEO.com :: Search Engine optimization and web site ranking tips, articles and news: "Firebird is now pretending to be Googlebot pretty effectively. Navigate to your web site and check the links. Look in the status bar as you mouseover links to check that none have parameters like sid=234aa3441235bb (or some similar strange string of characters). If they do, you have a problem.

Navigate to the various sections of your site. If you can't get to something then nor can Googlebot."

Russell Beattie Notebook

Russell Beattie Notebook: " Google AdSense has serious problems with its Terms And Conditions and it's transparency. "

SEM Adwords Customers rage at Google tweak

Customers rage at Google tweak | CNET News.com: "Sponsored ads also drove more sales than did ordinary search links, according to the research. About 1.4 percent of the people who clicked on sponsored listings became customers of the advertisers. In comparison, about 0.6 percent of the people who clicked on ordinary search results made a purchase"

"In mid-October, Google expanded broad match so that it now automatically matches keywords to a wider set of terms, including synonyms and misspellings. Advertisers might now see their ads appear in results for search queries that don't use their keyword at all. For example, an ad tied to the keyword 'hotel' might show up in searches on related terms, such as 'vacations' or 'car rentals.'"

Customers rage at Google tweak | CNET News.com: "In addition, Google changed a key measure it uses to determine an ad's placement, known as the 'minimum click-through threshold.' Although Google has not disclosed the new threshold, the company now disables any ad that has a click-through rate lower than 0.5 percent. Also, ads must now show a higher click-through rate than they did previously, in order to appear within a certain broad match phrase."

WEBMASTRY

WEBMASTRY: "Google often 'energizes' its word-of-mouth marketing by getting to information gatekeepers like journalists, teachers, key members of a company, etc. and demonstrating (or as Mary Ellen Bates puts it, politely 'getting in their faces') about what their service offers. Again, doing this costs only time."

Protect Your Domain Name From Cybertheft

Protect Your Domain Name From Cybertheft: "Protect Your Domain Name From Cybertheft "

More local search:
Internet Marketing E-mail Tip of the Week: "While Google's local search (called 'Search by Location') is set up similarly, they have also partnered with MapQuest in order to be able to show local matches on a map. If you're looking to get in a golf game around the Queenstown, MD area, a Google location search for 'golf' and 'Queenstown, MD' yields 326 results and maps 10 of them. Here are the Google Local Search results.

Google's Search by Location reveals tidbits of how it generates its results, which include site content with zip codes, town names, and addresses. Notice the second listing on the above search resulst page is for a bed & breakfast. It 'made the cut' because its site content aligned with the parameters of the search. If you are a local business that would benefit from these kinds of related searches, it seems it would behoove you to include keyword content not just related to your specific business.

Optimizing Your Site For Local Search

Along with basic search engine optimization (SEO), if you have a geographically-specific business you should be looking at localized SEO as well. Things may change in how the search engines eventually refine their local search technology, but it can't hurt to do a few simple things...and get a jump on your local competition.

1) Add your address in a prominent place on your web pages. Many sites use the very bottom of their pages for their address listings. Address location didn't use to matter. Localized search may change all that, so consider including all or part of your address nearer to the top of your page.

2) Add city and state information to your meta and title tags.

3) Add local information to your site's content. As demonstrated in our local golf search example, links to and information on other businesses and attractions in your town may end up helping to promote your own site.

The Kelsey Group which surveyed search and directory executives, the top four perceived obstacles cited were:

1) Most small businesses lack a web site so won't show up in local search results

2) Small businesses won't be able to bid for keywords against national chains

3) Pricing models for localized search may be too complex for small businesses to grasp (versus Yellow Pages)

4) Local search may be too labor intensive, like today's normal search results. Do small business owners have the time to keep up with localized SEO?

It may take a while for Google, Overture and the others to get their localized search solutions polished and refined, but you can bet that it's going to happen, and probably sooner than you're ready for. If you're not thinking about it now, get prepared.
"

The Art of Advanced Link Building: "Daniel Dulitz, a software engineer at Google, spoke candidly about PageRank and technical issues currently surrounding the use of the Google Toolbar, saying '0/10 is inaccurate at many times, and because data isn't on a consistent update schedule, it is unreliable, and a poor measure of content value.'
Of the Google toolbar, Greg Boser strongly says 'uninstall it!' Even though the toolbar offers a basic gauge of PageRank (and therefore link popularity), it's simply not worth the obsession if rankings are holding fairly steady and traffic has not dropped off.
When evaluating the weight of a link, Google wants to know as much as it can about it. Complicated issues such as Javascript, bad coding, image map links, and CSS hurt the process because these make Googlebot work too hard, which can lead to mistakes while spidering webpages. Link text puts sites into context, said Dulitz, and that's critical for determining places of importance related to a subject, even if a link doesn't contain the exact phrases associated with the web page it points to.
Google emphasizes that by placing a link on a site, you are associating your site with another, thereby lending credibility to the quality of content. However, certain linking situations can come with unwanted baggage, such as linking to trademark names while making false claims about the company or holder of the trademark.
But if it's fair comparison, it might not be illegal - so check with a lawyer. One trademark owner in the audience said you can take advantage of sites that mention your trademark or brand name fairly, and require a link to the official website in exchange.
When in doubt, it pays to follow Danny Sullivan's golden rules of link building"

A hub is what totaltravel will become...DMOZ & Googleshould be sorted, just Yahoo to pay...I recommend for each home page at the least
Rich Get Richer - Why Yahoo, DMOZ, Google and PageRank are Important: "Albert-Lazlo Barabasi's book, Linked, points out that 'power laws mathematically formulate the fact that in most real networks the majority of nodes have only a few links and that these numerous tiny nodes coexist with a few big hubs.'

The Rich Get Richer concept helps explain why Yahoo, DMOZ, and Google are at the center of the web and why Google PageRank plays a large role in determining which web sites become hubs.

Scientists over at Google understand Pareto's Law and they know that 80 percent of links on the web point to only 15 percent of web pages. This 15 percent of web pages are the hubs that guide us to the other 85 percent of the web...
"A Link from DMOZ or the Yahoo directory alone can give a site a PageRank of 4, which is an important number. Only web pages with a PageRank of 4 or higher are displayed in Google's backward links feature. Why? Google probably displays the 15 percent of web pages that are the hubs of the web.

Where To Report This? -> High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum: "try spamreport@google.com"

Google's future looking good / Bulked-up search firm beats up rivals: "Many small Web sites also have issues with Google. All of the owners want their sites to be at the top of certain searches to increase their visibility to potential customers, but some of them complain about being relegated to relative obscurity.


To avoid this, some companies hire firms that specialize in getting Web sites higher placement on search engines by trying to game the formulas they use for rankings. In fact, one such firm, SearchKing, in Oklahoma City, filed a lawsuit in federal court last year when Google fought back by penalizing it and its clients with lower search results.
SearchKing lost the case in May, based on Google's argument that it has First Amendment rights to present search results in any order it wants. But the case underscores the importance of the issue in the minds of many Web site owners.

'There needs to be some way for people to argue and defend themselves when Google makes decisions that can affect your business,' said Bob Massa, chief executive of SearchKing. "

Other possibilities
WOAI: SAN ANTONIO//NEWS: "Has Google Disappeared?
LAST UPDATE: 10/7/2003 7:31:30 AM"

Shut Up and Serve Ads (Google Weblog): "Google's terms of service requires that you not publicly discuss AdSense"

PageRank is Sick... Is Google Broken?: "Google has tried to deal with this issue for almost a year now but has not succeeded in preventing spam from reaching the top of its rankings...

Google seems to be focusing a lot of well-educated mental bandwidth on providing a personalized base for paid-advertisments through its highly profitable AdWords and Froogle features."

Will we see eventual seperation of any commercial sites from non-commercial in Google SERPS?

The Register: "On Sunday Google admitted to the Washington Post that it was working on a bug it had found which was withholding thousands of legitimate search results from its users. The bug was in response to another bug: Google's susceptibility to being gamed by spammers who set up 'link farms' to tripwire its PageRank� algorithm. 'Is Google starting to show signs of strain against spammers and Web scammers?', asked the Post"

Google Cache Redirected - Bad Guy Spammers Or Not? -> High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum:
Our site is experiencing some apparently random days of very low traffic from Google which is causing concern. We are looking at all sorts of possibilities, one of which is competitors sites pushing ours down the results but there seem to be a whole load of new spammy listings for some of our key phrases which previously delivered traffic.

A member of our team in Australia sent me a message saying "Check out the result with the blue stars! How do they do that???"

Now, I got no blue stars but there are some really rancid looking things going on with results that appear totally different at first read but all pointing to the same site & if I try to view the google cache they manage to redirect from the usual cache page with highlighted words to their home page quite quickly.

A check on their backward links & similar sites shows a network of "sex tourism" sites & gambling sites most of which employ similar redirects for their cached results.

Search string:
Accommodation Southern Highlands Australia
google search result

Australia are not at work at the moment but I guess that the results he meant include this one:

★ Accommodation in Southern Highlands Australia ★
Search: Accommodation in Southern Highlands Australia, Date: This
Month. Found ... Accommodation in Southern Highlands,Australia. Link ...
accommodation-in.gofuzion.com/Australia/Accommodation%20in%20Southern%20Highlands%20Australia/ - 101k - Cached - Similar pages

If I repeat the search with our company name the top 2 results are:

★ Accommodation in Southern Highlands Australia ★
... southern highlands hotels Found by: Teoma | NEW www.totaltravel.com/localguides/sou...ighlands/hotels 62 ... Accommodation in Southern Highlands. ...
accommodation-in.gofuzion.com/Australia/Accommodation%20in%20Southern%20Highlands%20Australia/ - 101k - Cached - Similar pages

★ Hotels in Southern Highlands Australia ★
... Found by: Teoma | NEW www.totaltravel.com/localguides ... coast (NSW) southern
highlands (NSW) sydney ... accommodation deals in Australia - covering the next ...
www.clevelandpd.net/Hotels%20in%20Southern%20Highlands%20Australia/ - 93k - Cached - Similar pages

Does anyone have any idea how & why our url appears in the results?
Is it worth reporting the cache redirects?

"The 'cloaking' is actually just a JavaScript redirect.

Disabling JavaScript, you can see that the cached page is a SERP for 'Accommodation in Southern Highlands Australia'. This SERP appears to have been generated by a human or robot using a meta-search engine (Copernic looks likely). Totaltravel is listed as follows:"

Where To Report This? -> High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum: "keep your site well optimized with good ethical techniques one day you will be on top of the SERPs for your keywords. What ever you are seeing is not a permanent solution to rank a site. The spammer knows this and some point of time these results will be totally removed from the SERPs,
Initially I used to jump around when I see a spammer do this to the results but after going through forums like WMW i just cooled myself. This is just part of SEO and the competation can be anything which we should be ready to face. "

Google Search: google-nack: "Infothought: infothought Archives
... I believe I've uncovered the cause of the 'Google NACK', a problem where Google
is returning no or very few results for certain combinations of search terms. ...
www.sethf.com/infothought/blog/ archives/cat_infothought.html - 101k - Cached - Similar pages
Google Spam Filtering Gone Bad
... The absence of expected search results was dubbed the 'Google NACK'
, from 'NACK' meaning 'negative acknowledgement' (ie no results). ...
www.sethf.com/anticensorware/general/google-spam.php - 16k - 8 Nov 2003 - Cached - Similar pages
[ More results from www.sethf.com ]
Whither the PageRank? : Gadgetopia
... The opinion Jeremy states, along with the GoogleNACK, the AdSense PR mess and the
apparently arbitrary approvals for the service, have really knocked Google ...
www.gadgetopia.com/2003/10/16/WhitherThePageRank.html - 10k - Cached - Similar pages "


Google Inconsistencies: "Google Inconsistencies
Last updated Oct. 11, 2003.
by Greg R. Notess.
Google does not always behave as advertised nor deliver the results expected. This page aims to document both ongoing and short-lived inconsistent search behavior on Google. Contact Greg Notess. with reports of any inconsistencies you observe. For more details about how Google works, see the full Google Review."

Watching Google Like A Hawk - Google News Watch Site: "
Business Scene - News - Rumors - Press Releases"

Fast Company | Schmoozing with the Enemy: "Some search-engine optimizers, or SEOs, earn a living by tricking Google's search engine into ranking a Web page higher than it otherwise would appear. In other words, they try to game Google. So the idea of Google throwing them a bash seems akin to Nixon inviting Communist spies for brunch in the Rose Garden.
But no, Google insists. 'This is all good. We want to work with SEO's . . . the ethical SEOs,' says spokesperson Nathan Tyler. 'This is like us extending an olive branch.'
Ah, of course. Ethical SEOs comply with guidelines laid out by Google on its Web site--and many encourage clients to buy sponsored ads, a big money maker for Google. They avoid such tricks as 'cloaking,' building one Web site to be seen and ranked by Google, then a second actually viewed by consumers. Every time such manipulation succeeds, it corrodes the integrity of Google's search engine and thus the Google brand. Google doesn't like that! Typically, offending sites are purged from Google's index.
The trouble is, such crimes occur in cyberspace. In the real world, it's hard to tell the good guys from the bad. So Google invites all SES registrants, ethical or not, and tells staffers to 'smile real nice.' But many attendees guess there's more going on. 'I think this might be a marketing stunt,' says Micah Baldwin, a Web marketer from Denver. 'I think [the] Google [code] is broken, and they know it. They just don't want any of us to know it, so they throw this huge party to make you think everything is fine.'
Or Google may be mining for information. Under a tent, guests get brief tutorials on how to improve a site's rank following the real Google Dance. Lots of people appear to be participating. But what are they really getting? 'No one is learning anything inside that tent"

Surprised Google & Microsoft Talked Takeover? You Shouldn't Be!: "Google used to say it was focused on search, but these days it's about 'organizing the web's information.' Email is information. And with email spam a growing problem, I could see Google seeking a spam-filtering company such as Brightmail or SpamCop (which I use and highly recommend). A plus to such a move is that this type of service would generate subscription-based revenue that Google currently lacks.
Perhaps Google might seek a company that lets people sell products online, which would then feed into an actual Google shopping or auction area...

"who's going to win" in the search race that continues to heat up. Don't expect this to be the service that uses "personalization" to prevent switching, as the article suggests. Yahoo and MSN already have personalization. That's not kept people from going to Google when they want to search.

Instead, you're not likely to see any clear winners. Why? Think television networks. In the US, there are four major networks that capture viewers. None of them are going to collapse overnight, though any one of them will gain or lose users depending on its programming.

Search is programming. As long as Google's programming stays substantially good, users are going to keep tuning in out of habit. Potentially, it is "easy" to switch from Google. But ask any smoker how easy it is to give up cigarettes.

"who's going to win" in the search race that continues to heat up. Don't expect this to be the service that uses "personalization" to prevent switching, as the article suggests. Yahoo and MSN already have personalization. That's not kept people from going to Google when they want to search.

Instead, you're not likely to see any clear winners. Why? Think television networks. In the US, there are four major networks that capture viewers. None of them are going to collapse overnight, though any one of them will gain or lose users depending on its programming.

Search is programming. As long as Google's programming stays substantially good, users are going to keep tuning in out of habit. Potentially, it is "easy" to switch from Google. But ask any smoker how easy it is to give up cigarettes.

while Google got Microsoft's pitch, there's no doubt Microsoft heard Google's. "Use us," Google would argue, "because we are far less competitive with you than Yahoo."

For the time being, both sides seem to be sticking with the status quo. But don't be surprised if we hear more about Microsoft and Google talking. It's unlikely to be about a takeover, but it certainly could be about working together."

Guardian | Google fights for top spot: "Against that, Google's search is stuck: its database is not getting bigger, and its search results are not getting better, they are getting worse. Things that were simple when Google had just a few geek users are now hard because it is under continuous attack from thousands of people who track its every move and will resort to any trick they can find to get their sites ranked higher. The technology that won the last search engine wars won't be enough to win the next one, as Google surely knows.

According to Pitkow, the one most likely to win in the long run is the one that can increase its "switching costs" by adding personalisation. At the moment, anyone can search at Google or Teoma or any other search engine, and there is no penalty to switching. That's different from, say, Amazon, where things like one-click ordering, intelligent book recommendations, wish lists and other personalisation features discourage users from defecting to rival sites, even if they are cheaper.

It's hard to switch from Yahoo if you use its personalised My Yahoo service, email, instant messaging, chat and shopping facilities. It's hard to avoid Microsoft if you use its operating system, browser and Hotmail email service. It's easy to switch from Google. Whether they know it or not, the people who plan to buy Google shares could be taking a gamble on it solving that problem, and soon"

Search patents:
United States Patent: 6,615,209: "Abstract
An improved duplicate detection technique that uses query-relevant information to limit the portion(s) of documents to be compared for similarity is described. Before comparing two documents for similarity, the content of these documents may be condensed based on the query. In one embodiment, query-relevant information or text (also referred to as 'snippets') is extracted from the documents and only the extracted snippets, rather than the entire documents, are compared for purposes of determining similarity. "

Adsense example:
UpMyStreet FindMyNearest: Reading, Reading: "Sponsored links" on right hand side.

Possibility for totaltravel adsense boxes to appear on other sites ( not thinking for tt to have ads for other sites - traffic probably too low to be eligible )

CHART
Google Search Engine Dominance: "This tells us what we already knew -- that Google is dominant. If you consider that Google also fed Yahoo and AOL search listings during this time period, then Google traffic amounted to 90% of the search engine driven traffic to my site. That's huge. No wonder Yahoo! and Microsoft are preparing to go head-to-head with Google in the future."

Key Google quotes by Google:

Google Corporate Information: Today: "It is a core value for Google that there be no compromising of the integrity of our results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results. No one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust Google's objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust."

Google Job Opportunities: "Google's goal is to do important stuff that matters to a lot of people. In pursuit of that goal, we've developed a set of values that drive our work, including one of our most cherished core values: 'Don't be evil.'"

Interesting re patentsGoogle & The Bad Guys Newsletter 077 -> High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum: " Google was just granted a patent (Oct 21) that I think will change a LOT of how the results are posted. It's a duplication detector that seems quite good, but will have huge implications for SEO's and copyright holders. Not all of them good. I'm saving it for a different post (and re-reading it several times to make sure I fully understand it)"

More re personalisation
It's in the algorithms - A glimpse into the future of mapping the Web
: "new technique for speeding up the computation of PageRank™ by 30 percent, and he proposed several algorithms for personalizing the ranking function to produce more relevant results for each individual searcher (see " )

potential competitors include WebFountain, Nutch and Netnose.

Developed by IBM, WebFountain (www.almaden.ibm.com/WebFountain) wants to challenge Google in the corporate market. WebFountain will collect, store and analyze vast amounts of information from unstructured and semi-structured sources including Web sites, news feeds, Weblogs, bulletin boards, enterprise data, legacy data, licensed content, newspapers, magazines and chat room text. The project's claim is that it can read and understand text, and use natural language processing, statistics, probabilities, machine learning, pattern recognition and artificial intelligence to keep organizations informed of emerging trends, competitive activities and "buzz".

Nutch (nutch.org) is an open source search engine that, unlike commercial search engines, will lift the veil on its ranking algorithms and demonstrate to users that there is no bias in its Web crawling and search returns. High scoring ranks will not be bought, sold or otherwise fudged.

Netnose (www.netnose.com) is the first search engine to claim to be "powered by people"; meaning search accuracy will be controlled by the voting public rather than a computer algorithm. Users will cast votes to determine what words should find what Web sites and as more people use the engine to match Web sites to search terms, the developers claim searching will get more and more accurate.

Google & theories of knowledge
Web Epistemology : References: "Search Engines
Web surfing as an epistemic practice
Democratisation of knowledge
Distributed Cognition
Miscellaneous publications "

Google dance :
looks like there is still some heavy duty filtering out of totaltravel pages...

Basic: G allinurl:www.totaltravel.com 37,500
Across 10 data centres: T10 allinurl:www.totaltravel.com 64,100 n/a 92,900 78,700 69,000 71,500 78,700 84,700 51,400 36,900

Google as Big Brother: "Google is one of about four search engines that matter."

Bit of a backlog here from when blogger was down...
fantomNews - the ultimate search engine optimization know how on fantomaster.com! Archives - 2003-11-03: "puts the issue of Google's search
dominance (or, as many will have it: monopoly) in a
global, political perspective"

Here's a fairly telling quote:
"If you have a 75 percent monopoly, and it's growing,
and perhaps there's an IPO around the corner, you keep
your mouth shut and hope for the best. That's what
Google is doing. The other problem is that geeks have a
poor record on social ethics, and Google is very geeky.
They don't know what the word 'public interest' means;
it's completely outside their frame of reference. Most
of those PhDs at Google wouldn't recognize a
philosophical principle if they ran over one in their
SUVs. It's all binary to them - either they're gaining
market share or they're losing it."
He also lets on about getting kicked from the Webmaster
World Forum some months back for taking a somewhat too
pronounced anti-Google stance. Interesting.

Read the full Counterpunch interview here:

Mark Hand: Searching for Daniel Brandt: "Searching for Daniel Brandt"

Lately, Brandt has been leading an opposition against what he calls the "hegemony" of the Google search engine. On his Google Watch website, Brandt says his struggle against the search engine's ranking system "feels like the right thing to do. It's the cyber equivalent of my draft resistance days...
It's always a moving target, and the game isn't always fair. But it's the only game on the Internet these days. Many webmasters who follow the situation are hopeful that Yahoo's recent acquisition of Inktomi will mean that Google may see some competition in 2003. Presently Inktomi provides results for the MSN network, and that may change as well.

To give you an idea of the scale involved with respect to search engines, from 1995 to 2000 we averaged about 300 page accesses, or name searches, per day. Recently we've been doing over 15,000 per day...

Brandt: No, Google is not responsive to public criticism. Rumor has it that they may file an IPO [initial public offering] in 2003, which could introduce some new variables into the equation. I have never heard directly from Google about anything. They use robots to answer email, so I'll just keep on nagging them, like a robot. I have noticed that other webmasters agree with me more often these days. Only six months ago I was a lone voice in the wilderness. I got kicked off of one of the webmaster (www.webmasterworld.com) forums for being too anti-Google. But recently I've felt that a fair number of webmasters have come around to my position on Google.

Still, this has had no effect whatsoever on Google. If you have a 75 percent monopoly, and it's growing, and perhaps there's an IPO around the corner, you keep your mouth shut and hope for the best. That's what Google is doing. The other problem is that geeks have a poor record on social ethics, and Google is very geeky. They don't know what the word "public interest" means; it's completely outside their frame of reference. Most of those PhDs at Google wouldn't recognize a philosophical principle if they ran over one in their SUVs. It's all binary to them--either they're gaining market share or they're losing it. If they're gaining, then all is well with the world. Ethics is too fuzzy a concept for Silicon Valley geeks.

PageRank is very important. The smaller you are, the lower your PageRank, and the more desperate you become to get Google to steer traffic to you. At the moment it's do or die with PageRank. I'm hopeful that things will loosen up in 2003 somehow, perhaps with some new competition from Yahoo."

greyed link pages
Very many link pages seem to be greyed out in PageRank - Best Practices Search Engine Forums: "Very many link pages seem to be greyed out in PageRank "

opping for the UK Marketing To The Uk -> High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum: "marketing to the UK"

Keeping up with the forum debates I started is heavy going, but as long as there are no more sleep-overs so I am not seperated from my keyboard it should get easier.: ..especially as it got a mention in Search Engine Guides "Forum discussions of the day" & Jil herself says "Hey all! Wow, this topic is being discussed everywhere!"
Cre8asite Forums
"The other more more important point Jill made is that she thought attempts to catch devious SEO tricks was something Google was diligent about catching. She's finding this may not be true. From an SEO perspective, why in the heck should ANY SEO bother to follow Google's own guidelines for SEO's when Google itself isn't monitoring what's going on?"

Choice quotes:

Relevancy factors:
Cre8asite forums. Google - Kudos to Jill Whalen and Wed Advisor. [ Search Engine Optimization, Usability and Web Design. ]: "Google certainly work constantly to improve their relevancy algos, however relevancy, as far as Google is concerned, is not defined soely in seo terms. Relevancy includes other variables such as timeliness, cultural bias, semantics, inter-relationships etc etc. They have certainly improved timeliness of late. It's obviously a pretty important factor.

It all comes back to Googles user centric model. If the user is happy, Google is happy. I'm a user, I always find what I want with Google and I couldn't care less how those top ten sites got there, so long as they are relevant to me."

Adwords:
AdWords are often more relevant, and more varied, than the serps and they provide a revenue stream. Something to think about

Economist.com | The next hot internet stock: "How good is Google?

Most of the article follows as it is an excellent analysis of crucial issues.

Oct 30th 2003 | SAN FRANCISCO
From The Economist print edition"

kaluta asks: "The [0]Economist has a typically clear and concise [1]story about bringing Google to the stockmarket. Basically, is it going to be the next eBay or Amazon, or will it 'simply be the next overhyped share sale to make its founders rich only to wither away miserably, either for lack of a sustainably profitable business model, or, like Netscape, because it finds itself [2]in the path of that mighty wrecker,
Microsoft?' Cool picture too."

"customer searches (now 200m a day) ... Google has clearly been a runaway success. Not only is its own site the most popular for search on the web, but it also powers the search engines of major portals, such as Yahoo! and AOL. All told, 75% of referrals to websites now originate from Google's algorithms. That is power. "

Yahoo! which still has about half of the $2 billion-or-so market - bought Overture 2003...
The next step is to take this approach to advertising from the results pages of search engines and on to other web pages. Increasingly, web publishers—from hobby bloggers to small businesses—allow firms such as Google to crawl through the content of their pages and place relevant text advertisements in the right margin. Once page visitors click on the links, the webmasters share the revenues with Google. At a stroke, this so-called “contextual advertising” makes much of web publishing self-financing. This may result in better web content by making hitherto unprofitable online activities economically viable.

Meta Group, a consultancy, reckons that the market for paid search and other contextual advertising will grow to $5 billion by 2006. This is Google's main market opportunity (although it also gets some revenues from licensing its search technology). Currently, Google is thought to make annual profits of about $150m.
... That means matching such internet stars as eBay (market capitalisation $37 billion), but without the natural-monopoly advantages that have made eBay so dominant—the classic network effect of buyers and sellers knowing they do best by all trading in one place. For Google to stay permanently ahead of other search-engine technologies is almost impossible, since it takes so little—only a bright idea by another set of geeks—to lose the lead. In contrast to a portal such as Yahoo!, which also offers customers free e-mail and other services, a pure search engine is always but a click away from losing users....
Yahoo!, in fact, will probably be the first to attack. It now owns rival search technologies including AltaVista, AlltheWeb and Inktomi. With the contextual-advertising technology of Overture, Yahoo! now has under its own roof all the elements of the business model that made Google such a success. It cannot be long before Yahoo! turns from a lucrative customer of Google's into a powerful rival...

Even more frightening (especially to those who remember Netscape's fate in the browser wars), Microsoft smells blood. It is currently working on its own search algorithm, which it hopes to make public early next year, around the probable time of Google's share listing. Historically, Microsoft has been good at letting others (Apple, Netscape, Real) pioneer a technology before taking over, exploiting its dominance in desktop operating systems.

Google the new-age advertising agency makes money, but it is Google the search engine that builds the consumer brand which makes the ad agency powerful. Whenever users click on advertisements on Google's own site, Google gets all the revenues. Whenever users stray to other search engines, even ones where Google has placed sponsored links, Google has to share the revenues with the site owner. As the competition between Google, Overture and others heats up, Google's profit margins will fall.

This may already be happening. Craig Pisaris-Henderson, the chief executive of FindWhat.com, a smaller rival to Overture and Google in contextual advertising, reckons that Google's operating margins on sites other than its own must be much worse than FindWhat.com's (23%) or Overture's (12%) because it has been wooing advertisers away from Overture by being more generous to webmasters.

One thing that might help against Microsoft, says Danny Sullivan, the editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, an online consumer guide to the industry, is Google's image of “niceness”—at least by implicit comparison with the forces of darkness in Redmond. Scott Banister, a pioneer of paid-search technology (and now a founder of IronPort, an e-mail infrastructure firm), thinks that Google has already built sufficiently deep networks with advertisers to mount an effective resistance to Microsoft's impending assault.

Even so, Google is no sure thing—as those who hope to sell its shares are no doubt aware. John Doerr and Michael Moritz, for instance, between them also brought Netscape and Yahoo! to market, and may remember their lessons. With luck, Google's owners will remember to work out a viable strategy for Google beyond the point at which they cash out.


After reading that I reckon a paid listing in Yahoo! has to be a total must... freee regional listings for the UK are no more.

Some feedback (!) from the forums re Google. As J Whalens approach so far has been based on being paid to get people free high rankings esp in Google I think she is talking Bull*hit.
Google & The Bad Guys Newsletter 077 -> High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum: "Does Google care about how a site gets to the top, as long as when it gets there it is relevant? That's what I want to ask them.

I used to think that they cared how one got there, but I'm not so sure any more. They either do care but can't do anything about it yet, or they really don't care as long as their users (the searchers) are happy.

As a searcher, I'm very happy with the Google results. I still think they're tops in that department. So, I guess that's all that matters.

As to all the Webmasters losing money because Google let's spammy results in, well that's not my concern and not Google's either. Any Webmaster whose business model depends on the free Google results for their livelihood, deserves whatever they get."

Case to keep an eye on:
CNN.com - Handbag maker Vuitton sues Google - Oct. 24, 2003: "The 20-page October 13 ruling by the court in the Paris suburb of Nanterre called into question the legality of the search system at the heart of Google's business model.
It said that when searches are done on registered trademarks, Google should 'find the means to block advertisements by third parties who have no right to these trademarks...

Telephone payments firm Rentabiliweb has sued Google for allegedly selling its trademark as a keyword to rival company Tel 4 Money.

An official at France's Software Protection Agency, which gathers evidence for court hearings on piracy and trademark infringement, said several major companies are preparing cases against Google. The official spoke on condition of anonymity.
"

Forum feedback of interest:
Google over 50,000 pages dropped: "The problem with PR sometimes not showing in the Toolbar when there is an ending backslash is a known Toolbar glitch, and happens to many pages on the web"

"My theory is that Google has figured this to be a "directory page", which it is! and therefore has decided real content is to be found on subpages. The page is in Google it just doesn't have any keywords linked to it. You can test this by going to one of the sub pages and if you have Googles Toolbar installed press on "i" and select backwarf links. You will see that http://www.totaltravel.com/travel/vic/baysandpeninsula/ does come up, but without description or anything.
The same is true for another page on your site:
http://www.totaltravel.com/travel/vic/greatoceanroad/
And probably many more.

I am just speculating here, but I think Google does this to make sure the users get directly to where the content is and not end up on a sitemap or similar.

I wouldn't worry about the "/" issue as long as you are consistent and only make your links point to the "/" pages. That way no PR is waisted on the pages without it.

"We used to have over 100,000 pages indexed. Now, we have just over
50,000 and dropping. "

How many pages does your site really contain? Maybe you eliminated a lot of double entries when you cleaned up your site. For example Google thinks that one of our sites has 80.000 pages. The real number is well below that, but because of dynamic pages a lot of them look different to Google. This is hurting us big time in PR. Wd have one page in particular where this is true. This single page is linked to by more than 100.000 different pages on the net, but because the links are dynamic and values are added - Google thinks this is 1000 different pages and PR is spread accordingly. This could probably be a PR8 site if we could make Google understand that this is a single page. "

A couple of PR observations:

Check out the PR for this page
http://www.totaltravel.com/travel/qld/tropicalqld/cairns/directory/cafes/

Compare to any other at similar directory level
http://www.totaltravel.com/travel/qld/tropicalqld/cairns/directory/bars/

Thanks to this page's deep link
http://www.icem2004.im.com.au/general.htm
The cafes I looked at all also appear to have PR3 compared to PR2 for pubs...
Here's to many more quality links!ICEM2004 - International Conference on Emergency Medicine: "The following websites highlight a number of Cairns restaurants:
Cairns directory: www.cairnsweb.com.au/directory/listings/restaurants.htm
Cairns Convention Bureau: www.tropcialaustralia.com.au/
Total Travel: www.totaltravel.com/localguides/cairns/cafes"

Adsense - About become "partner" so see any about site for examples of adsense ads.

PRIMEDIA's About Links With Google for Targeted Advertising: "As part of the deal, Google will become the exclusive provider of contextually targeted and search advertising across About.com, the Web's largest content site, and most of PRIMEDIA's Consumer Media and Magazines Group ('CMMG') websites. The deal extends the reach of Google's base of more than 150,000 advertisers to the targeted audiences served by About.com's 450 topic-specific Guide Sites that cover more than 10,000 topics and the CMMG 127 targeted magazine-related sites.
'Combined, the CMMG properties and About.com are among the largest providers of original content on the Internet today,' said Dean Nelson, Chairman of PRIMEDIA. 'Google's targeted advertising is a perfect match to our portfolio of high-quality content and large special interest audiences. Google's advertisers will benefit from this extended reach across a broad range of enthusiast-centric properties and on About.com's 450 Guide Sites and our users will benefit from relevant advertising.'"

The Guardians take on possible IPO:
MediaGuardian.co.uk | New media | Stock and search: "The only reason it really needs publicly quoted shares is to make acquisitions. That would go completely against the philosophy of largely organic growth that has made the company what it is today. Once it is quoted, it will have to meet Wall Street pressures to improve quarterly earnings instead of doing its own thing at its own pace. When you sell your soul, don't expect to retain your freedom. "

Wired News: Google Raring to Go Public: "Google's search for an investment bank to take the Internet firm public is widely seen as the type of seismic event that could help wake up the dormant market for new issues of technology shares.....A few Net-specific business sectors have emerged from the rubble of the dot-com bust-up of 2000 including websites that hunt for shopping discounts, online dating, online travel agents and the business of selling advertiser-sponsored search listings, believed to be Google's biggest revenue-generator"

More re Auction/ IPO
Slashdot | Google Considering IPO Auction Online: "HackerStickers writes 'An article in the Financial Times states that Google could be considering doing their IPO online via an auction versus the standard methods of raising funds early next year. The article points out that auctioning it could bring in a larger chunk of cash for the company. Would you bid on a piece of Google?'"

Google IPO
Features: "24/October/2003

We all knew it would happen - we all knew why it would happen - perhaps this week's 'news' has thrown us a little on how it would happen - but why is the slight movement on Google's inevitable float plans causing such a crazed level of excitement?"

A timely reminder of the Google commandments:
Top 5 Google To Dos and Donts Debate 2: "5) TIME & EFFORT, Tid-Bits:
Don't look at the PageRank in the toolbar
Don't make assumptions based only on what is happening with your site(s)
Don't sign with or continue to use an ISP that has bad downtime, research them well. A 404 crawl by Googlebot will cost you much more than you will save with a cheap ISP.
Don't stress
Don't expect instant results. "

Espotting Media: "Register now and drive targeted leads to your website
Espotting Media can help you access targeted leads from 72% of the UK's online population. To view some of the benefits of listing your site click here. By ensuring that your listings appear within our top 3-5 search results, you will benefit from highly targeted traffic from our entire network of sites and be exposed to over 850 million searches."

Old news but situation still stinks so it would appear the tinkering goes on...
a Web Site Design Web Development Network: Pixel Resources: Wisconsin-Madison-Milwaukee-Watertown-WI: "Google Confirms Introduction of New Algorithms
June 11,2003 - Courtesy of: Stepforth

Google has finally confirmed what SEO practitioners have been assuming for weeks now. For the past three months, Google has been tinkering with its ranking formulas in order to introduce several new factors in clustering, ranking and SPAM filtering. During this time, websites that had once received Top placements have found themselves bouncing around the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), often dropping as far as 50 - 100th place in Google's rankings. While Google has not issued any official statements, an engineer at Google who writes under the name, 'Google-Guy' has confirmed in the SEO Discussion Forum, Web Master World that the changes perceived by SEO professionals were in fact being made, 'on the fly' as Google attempts to work out the kinks in their new systems.

The changes being introduced by Google have made a significant impact on search engine rankings and has caused a great deal of damage to many companies dependant on Google listings. As Google is a private company with no contractual obligations to the websites listed in its directory, there is absolutely no recourse for companies effected by a loss of position. Unfortunately, at this time, Google is the absolute king of search engines being responsible in one way or another for over 70% of all searches conducted on the Internet. According to our pseudonymous source, Google-Guy, the changes should be complete by the end of July. We expect to see a fairly different Google when all is said and done but we also expect that Google will continue to be the dominant search tool for at least the next 12 - 18 months as they have several distribution agreements with other"

The Register: "It's been called a 'Google-NACK': you enter a particular search term and Google tells you that there are thousands of matching results, but fails to return many, or any results. "

The Register: "'I found your article on Google’s limited results kind of strange, so I ran the search myself, and was able to browse all of the returned results. The catch? I was using Opera (specifically, its built-in search box). I have since tried the Google search from Google’s home page using various browsers and got the same results you did.'

'It boggles the mind – the only difference with Opera’s search is that it adds a tag telling Google that the search request came from Opera. Why would that turn off Google’s anti-blog filter? I don’t know, but don’t let Google know or they may screw that up as well!' "


Google gossip
Mercury News | 05/04/2003 | Inside Google: "While they dream, Brin and Page also keep their eyes on the details: They use software to tally, to the second, how much money the firm is raking in.
They said the free, healthy meals only came about after calculating the time saved from driving off-site and reduced health care costs. There's even a Webcam trained on the cafeteria lunch line, so employees can avoid a long wait.
While most of the tech world buzzes about an IPO, Google's founders hold firm to their technological ambitions -- building, in Page's words, ``the ultimate search engine.''
``It would understand exactly what you type and would give you the right things back,'' said Page. ``We're pretty good, but we're nowhere close to being perfect. We won't be for a long time.''"

To understand is so very, very different from phrase matching or link popularity...

Links Are All About Reputation - An Interview with Mike Grehan: "What do you think about selecting sites as link partners based on their Google PageRank?
Mike: I've done a lot of research on this. I know exactly what PR7 means: It means you have one more than six but one less than eight. That's all it means. Stop obsessing about PR; get on with business!"

Website personalization:
Why personalization hasn't worked: October 20, 2003 issue of New Thinking by Gerry McGovern: "Personalization hasn't worked because most people don't have a compelling reason to personalize. It hasn't worked because the cost of doing it well usually significantly outweighs the benefits it delivers. It hasn't worked because managers have seen it as some Holy Grail of content management...

Not surprisingly, the Jupiter report finds that personalized websites are four times more expensive to run. It also finds that personalized websites are twice as likely to attract visitors who will never pay for anything. Worse still, it finds that 25 percent of consumers actually avoid personalized websites because they fear that their personal information will be abused."

A search engine (& tech change) to keep an eye on...

///ExactSeek makes use of Alexa ranking.
(October 18 2003) ExactSeek, a newcomer to the search engine scene, has announced that it is now using the Alexa ranking for a site for determining the position of a listing in search results.

Alexa, now owned by Amazon.com, is a search bar that tracks user activity. Based on the information gathered, it ranks sites according to popularity. Users of this browser plug in can therefore at all times see how popular a site is among the users of Alexa.

(To see a site's "popularity" without downloading the toolbar, go to Alexa.com and use their Google-based search engine. Click on the link named "site info" next to the relevant search listing.)

"With the exception of Google, the major search engines have offered little in the way of innovation," says Jayde Online CEO, Mel Strocen.

"Factoring user popularity into a ranking algorithm is ground-breaking. Link popularity, keyword density and content relevancy are subject to manipulation by savvy webmasters and SEO specialists. User popularity is a far more reliable indicator of where web sites should rank and gives the surfing public some input on the search results they see."

ExactSeek is definitely one of the smallest search engines around. The database contains some 2 million web pages, but the site receives and indexes some 30000 new site submissions daily. Unlike most search engines ExactSeek actually makes use of meta tag data.

ExactSeek.com: Web Search Engine and Directory
http://www.alexa.com/

Useful Google demographics (& website):
Increase website traffic methods for optimizing press releases from SEO-PR:

A "Fireside Chat" with Google's Sergey Brin: "Sullivan: 'What do you do to go beyond links as a way of improving results?'
Brin: 'There are completely new ranking technologies that we are working on. We try about a half-dozen a month and launch on a limited test basis. We fundamentally work with all of the world's knowledge. There are just different ways to approach that. There are many, many things you can do, and we're not going to exhaust them any time soon. Over time, our searches will only get better.'
Sullivan: 'Will you ever consider supporting paid inclusion?'
Brin: 'You want to keep any kind of payment separate from organic search results. I think it's important to distinguish those things.'
Sullivan asked, 'What do you think remains largely unknown about Google?'
Brin answered, 'The tilde operator,' a new search command that enables users to search not only for a particular keyword, but also for its synonyms. This is accomplished by placing a ~ character directly in front of the keyword in the search box. He also mentioned, 'The calculator,' which enables users to solve mathematic problems by entering numeric expressions into the google.com or the Google Toolbar search boxes. The engineer who created the calculator was supposed to be working on our 'spelling system,' added Brin."

Telegraph | News | Bags go by road for travellers on new Virgin trains: "Sir Richard Branson has come up with a novel way to make more space on his overcrowded Virgin trains: send passengers' luggage separately by road and charge them for the 'service'."

Google Guy - URLS & session ids

Google makes inferences about URL paramters: "Google can do some smart stuff looking for duplicates, and sometimes inferring about the url parameters, but in general it's best to play it safe and avoid session-ids whenever you can. ...A session-id lets a site owner give each user a unique identifier. That identifier can reference customer data like the shopping cart contents stored in a database, for example.
Some people would mention that you could use a cookie to do the same thing and keep the urls much cleaner. That's true, but not every user has cookies enabled. Using session-id's is one way to try to guarantee that you know that state of a user, even if they don't allow cookies, for example.

So what's the problem with a session id, and why doesn't Googlebot crawl them? Well, we don't just have one machine for crawling. Instead, there are lots of bot machines fetching pages in parallel. For a really large site, it's easily possible to have many different machines at Google fetch a page from that site. The problem is that the web server would serve up a different session-id to each machine! That means that you'd get the exact same page multiple times--only the url would be different. It's things like that which keep some search engines from crawling dynamic pages, and especially pages with session-ids.



"

New search syntaxes:
Google Help: "' ~' Searches
You may want to search not only for a particular keyword, but also for its synonyms. Indicate a search for both by placing the tilde sign ('~') immediately in front of the keyword.
For example, to search for food facts as well as nutrition and cooking information, use:

Phrase Searches "

Google IPO & search wars:
Fool.com: Gunning for Google [Motley Fool Take] October 13, 2003: "according to a recent Barron's article, the IPO market may see fireworks from a Google public offering.
Many forces are driving Google to an IPO. One is a technicality; there is a regulation on the books, crafted in 1934, that forces companies to report to the SEC if they have at least $10 million in assets and 500 shareholders.
Another force: greed. Venture capitalists desperately need to show their investors that they can make some money.
But perhaps the real reason is that Web search has become a war."

Ad sense & premium Ad sense explanation:
Contextual Advertising, Part 2 of 2: "Google has two programs for content publishers: AdSense for smaller publishers; and Premium for large ones. Ad Sense is easy for publishers to set up.
Susan's description of the process is as follows: '[Publishers] fill out a form. We [review] their Web site [for quality]. They log in, get a piece of code. They can choose different ad formats, customize the color [and background], and have access to [near real-time] online reporting so they can log in and see how much money they're making.'
Google works directly with larger publishers through the Premium Ad Sense program, and even offers a revenue share. In many instances, Google will actually buy the ad space on a CPM basis."

Overture Services Inc. Investor Relations: "Yahoo! and Overture Announce Completion of Acquisition"

Pandia Search World October 11 2003 On searching
"This means that Yahoo! is now the proud owner not only of its own directory (Yahoo!) and search engine (Inktomi), but also of a pay-per-click text ad provider, Overture, and Overture's two regular search engines, AltaVista and AlltheWeb.

Overture is expected to merge AltaVista and AlltheWeb into one search engine shortly. It is unclear, however, whether Yahoo! would like to joint the Inktomi and AltaVista/AlltheWeb teams, in order to develop another unified search engine"

Not recommending this tool in particular 9assume the stats could be recovered from site log files....but would be of interest to know how far google spiders & how often it shallow v deep crawls...

If you're interested in tracking spider traffic, Robot Manager Pro
is a killer program. It's a lot of fun to see how many times
Googlebot, for example, visits your site in a month, and how far
down into your site the spider crawls.
http://www.websitemanagementtools.com/robot.html

Now here's an absolutely KILLER strategy, compliments of Michael
Campbell (http://www.internetmarketingsecrets.com). Go back through
your Web site and change the "home" links pointing back to your
main page to "Keyword Phrase Home." You'll be amazed at what a
difference it could make in your Google rankings. One of our
workshop students did this with her site, and in a two-week time
period, her PageRank went from 6 to a 7! Go for it!

Greyed out inconsistent - So what is your site's Google PageRank? - SitePoint Community Forums: "PR is another thing- ive seen inconsistent greyed out bars one minute then restored the next kind of readings, even on google own pages during mid aug on the .co.uk. "

Ahmed Farooq @ ahmedf.com - Google spamming - the newest way!: "For the past few months, the big thing in spamming was to fire away at guestbooks. People would spend a huge amount of time just signing guestbooks. Of course with this, they would always leave their: 'Come visit my phentermine and viagra sites!!

Google, ever-based on sites linking to you, and the text they contained, would send these sites skyrocketing in the rankings. No where was this more evident than for 'web hosting' in which for the spots 10-20, about 7 were guestbook spammers.

Of course the dilemma posed is that it is very possible that a competitor could be posting your links, hoping that you get banned. So instead of simply banning such sites, google has to filter out these results.

It took them some time, but most guestbooks were eliminated. Of course this came amidst their disastrous April [and last real] 'google dance' and a lot of people missed it.

Spammers, being the ever resilient cockroaches they are, turned to the current poster child of the internet.

Web Logs"

The Register: "But a programming error by the search engine has compounded the problem: by inadvertently blocking thousands of sites from Google users.

It's been called a 'Google-NACK': you enter a particular search term and Google tells you that there are thousands of matching results, but fails to return many, or any results.

For example, a search for keyboard bracelet returns just five sites out of 'about 49,900'. (Your mileage may vary, as Google results differ depending on where you are, and which way the Segway scooters are pointing - but it's a fairly typical figure.)

What's happening? Award-winning researcher Seth Finkelstein has a theory why. Google's own spam filters, designed to weed out link farms created by pornographers and spammers and Scientologists, are crude, and are blocking many innocent sites.

'Technical solutions may have unintended consequences,' he says. "

Don't say how came to this conclusion..
The Register: "In an effort to weed out the noise, Google constantly refines its weighting algorithm, which it says is a combination of a hundred different factors. In an attempt to thwart deliberate gaming by link farms and blog noise (exacerbated by lossy software gimmicks such as 'Trackbacks', which generate reams of content-free pages for Google's crawlers), Google has stepped back from its trademarked PageRank� method and instead, emphasized more traditional factors such as anchor text. "

Using Adwords free tracking tool to measure keyword relevence:
Google Rolls Out Keyword Conversion Tool:
"Mobile-device software seller Iambic, one of the first AdWords' advertisers to use the conversion-tracking tool, said it would allow the company to better allocate its $1,500 per month AdWords budget.
'We couldn't figure it out,' said Iambic's director of marketing, Sebastian Dijmarescu, of the return from AdWords' campaigns. 'It was a guessing game.' " conversion tracking allowed him to see clearly which keywords were working best. Google's campaign management reports carry a keyword campaign's conversion rate and cost per conversion.
... The new conversion-tracking tool is free to advertisers, allowing them to insert a line of JavaScript into their Web pages to track whether users arriving via keywords convert. In addition to purchase conversion, advertisers can track if a user signs up for a newsletter, views certain pages, or qualifies as a sales lead by giving contact information. As an additional benefit, advertisers can have the value of each conversion sent back to Google and included in their reports. "

API tool to monitor results for search terms & any changes in SERPS - :
20 Great Google Secrets: "Google Alert (www.googlealert.com) monitors your search terms and e-mails you information about new additions to Google's Web index. (Google Alert is not affiliated with Google; it uses Google's Web services API to perform its searches.)"

How google spiders prioritise sites to crawl:
CanadaIT.com - News On The Web: "Nevill-Maning showed a pyramid diagram to illustrate how Google organizes its searches. At the bottom is 'main,' where there tends to be higher latency for pages that don't change very much. 'Fresh,' in the middle, includes portals that need more up-to-the-minute checks, like e-commerce sites during the December holiday shopping season. On top is 'News,' for CNN.com and other sites that change all the time.
To maintain the relevancy of its search results, Google hires PhDs with expertise in machine learning to create algorithms that look for links to other sites -- what Nevill-Manning called the company's secret sauce. "

"a company rule stipulates that 20 per cent of their work hours can be devoted to brainstorming. "We don't quite know what it will be useful for," he said of Google Sets, "but it's awfully fun."

Google CEO speaks out on future of search | CNET News.com: "'The primary mission of Google is to get you what you want, rather than what someone thinks you want,' Schmidt said. ..

Nurturing passion is another key area when building a start-up, Schmidt said.

"It's human nature people want to do something that will matter and change the world," Schmidt said. "And it's these companies that will be built on passion. Google has a rigorous hiring system to draw in people with these sorts of traits, from passion to a perspective of limitless boundaries.""

To save my breath & stop repeating myself I suggest everyone let Jill Whalen nag them instead..Search Engine Optimization Advice - Tips - Best Practices-Business Audio Book
Bet they move the file...

To get fresh version of toolbar & PR rather than cached & then check for Greyed out PageRank pages: delete search history from the Google Toolbar, from the Google search box, and from your browser

Google Toolbar FAQ: "Why doesn't the PageRank button display anything?
If you are behind a proxy web server or a firewall, it may be interfering with the Toolbar's requests to extract PageRank information from Google. Try out one of our experimental features, designed to fix this problem. Click on the Google logo, and from the drop-down menu select (or press the Options button) to access Options. Select the More tab in the Options window then check the box next to the option Fix PageRank through proxies (experimental). Alternatively, you can disable the Advanced Features entirely on the Google Toolbar. To do so, click on the Google logo, and from the drop-down menu select Help > Privacy Information. Uncheck the boxes listed under Advanced Features.
Note that the PageRank display will not automatically fetch information from pages with CGI arguments (that is, pages with a '?' present in the URL)."

If no-one else has time to read the full Google webmaster pages, here are a few of the most important points.

1) The basics:
Google Information for Webmasters: "Google's order of results is automatically determined by more than 100 factors, including our PageRank algorithm. Please check out our 'Why Use Google' page for more details. Due to the nature of our business and our interest in protecting the integrity of our search results, this is the only information we make available to the public about our ranking system."

2) Google's words on SEO & unsolicted emails:

Google Information for Webmasters: "While Google does not have relationships with any SEOs and does not offer recommendations, we do have a few tips that may help you distinguish between an SEO that will improve your site and one that will only improve your chances of being dropped from search engine results altogether.
Be wary of SEO firms that send you email out of the blue.

Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:
'Dear google.com,
I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories...'
Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for 'burn fat at night' diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators."

3) Checking PR automatically:
Google Information for Webmasters:

Fiction: Automated "ranking checking" programs are a good way for webmasters to save time and measure their "online presence."
Fact: Automated "ranking checking" programs violate Google's terms of service. They use server resources that should be spent on answering user requests. We strongly request that you not use rank checking programs to check your position on Google

4) On links, a cautionary tale quoted by Google:
Finally, we broke down and joined one of these programs. Unfortunately, the program used hidden links, and Google removed us from the index within a week. I guess it's true that anyone can get fooled into buying snake oil."
- Frank, owner of a limousine services company

5) Submitting:
Fiction: A website will be removed from Google's index if it's 'over-submitted'.
Fact: We do not require submission nor do we penalize sites for 'over-submission'. You are free to submit as often as you wish. However, given the nature of our inclusion process, your time is better spent improving the content and links of your site.

Google APIs Intended to improve search results for the topic being researched NOT to glean information about google technology & ranking algorithms.

Google Web APIs - Home: "Develop Your Own Applications Using Google
With the Google Web APIs service, software developers can query more than 3 billion web documents directly from their own computer programs. Google uses the SOAP and WSDL standards so a developer can program in his or her favorite environment - such as Java, Perl, or Visual Studio .NET."

Google Web APIs - Terms: "Terms and Conditions for Google Web API Service
By using this service ('Google Web APIs') you agree to be bound by the following terms and conditions (the 'Terms and Conditions').
Personal and legitimate uses only"

G 10
allinurl:www.totaltravel.com on all 10 datacenters
50,600
63,800
64,000
63,800
59,800
56,400
64,000
68,100
61,000
44,300

As Google is so crucial for traffic it merits seperate blogging so that entries about it do not get buried amongst the noise from all other SEO info.

Curiouser & curiouser... quick allinurl:totaltravel.com shows 61,000 pages BUT the cached home page is still Whale watching & no recently spidered date shows on Google serps (search engine results pages)