Well, one of my web directory’s Page Rank (PR) went down to zero last week. Not really sure what happened but it seems that it went from PR value of 4 to 3 and now down to 0. I was pretty shocked about that and I had known that a lot of web directories had suffered the same fate because of link buying. I admit that I did buy a few links here and there for my directory, but it was not excessive. In fact, I think I bought about 4 links in total. The simple reason - well, I don’t have the money to buy more links. And my web directory is a free directory without any advertisements nor does it have any paid links on it. So why did Google decide to yank my Page Rank? Well, I am not too sure of the reasons but seriously, when does Google has any reason to do what it does.

But I still have to find out the main cause of the drop in Page Rank. From what I know, Google has web directories in their sights for sometime now. Google had often discouraged webmasters from buying links and so I have stopped buying links for months already. My last purchased link was about 9 months ago! So, I doubt that this is the cause of the sudden drop in Page Rank. How about useless content? I have to agree, my web directory isn’t exactly one of the best in the web directory business. The sites listed on the directories are all submitted by my visitors and are usually done by SEO consultants who basically submit the same websites to thousands and thousands of directories using the same anchor text and description. Yes, that’s my fault and probably one of the reasons to kick off my Page Rank. But I am sure there are a lot of such web directories with the same content out there as well and they didn’t had their Page Rank kicked off. Why was mine targeted by Google?

One of the most plausible reasons could be because my Web Directory title had the words “High Page Rank” in it. Google has always wanted their users to ditch Page Rank and start concentrating on content. So my dip in Page Rank could have something to do with Google’s overall objective to reduce the importance of PR and start forcing their users to concentrate on something else? That’s possible too because my search result rankings didn’t drop. A few of my search terms were still ranking pretty high on Google, so I guess any penalty is still restricted to just the PR. Hopefully, nothing will happen to my search engine rankings as I really need them to get visitors.

Well, I guess the only thing I can do is to wait and hope for the best. Thank the gods that I am not like those commercial web directories who has to depend on their Page Rank for survival. Just imagine that one day the PR drops for some of the big commercial web directories and all of a sudden, the income for their owners becomes zip!

Are any of you guys using Wordpress for your blog? I mean, Wordpress as in the Wordpress script and not the blog hosting site. Yes, that would mean that you have downloaded a script and upload that to your webhost and somehow configure it to work. If you have done that, you should also take a look at this little plugin - Google Sitemap Generator. For all those who don’t know what is a sitemap is used for, well, I will not go into detail on that. Basically, it is a little map of your website and is usually in a link text, html or xml format which Search Engine spiders can easily follow. It just contains links to your entire site. Think of it as an virtual map and it tells your visitors which link to go to which portion of your website. And it is used often by Search Engine spiders, especially Googlebot in order for them to navigate a site properly.

I know that there are other sitemap generators out there. But unlike most, this is a script and it is especially designed for Wordpress. So if you are using Wordpress, why not try it? I am currently using GSite Crawler as my sitemap generator. I don’t have any major prolems with using GSite. However, the problem with GSite Crawler is that it needs to navigate my site in order to get the information it needs to create the sitemap. This of course increases the load and the bandwidth usage on my server. Using these online script sitemap generators will help cut down on the resources need to continuously update his sitemap.

Google Sitemap Generator for Wordpress is such “online” generator. Everytime you create a post or edit an existing one, the sitemap is automatically updated. And it also helps you inform Google, MSN and Ask.com that you have changed your content, inviting them to re-spider your site. And it’s easy to do the plugin. All you need to do is to upload the files to the Wordpress Plugin folder and then create 2 files (Sitemap XML files) and Chmod them. After that you go and let the plugin populate the sitemap files for you automatically. You don’t longer need to do anything more than write your blog post. Life couldn’t be much simpler.

If you are a webmaster, I am quite sure that you have faced before Search Engine bots. They are little programs sent by Search Engines like Google or Yahoo! to spider or to index your website in order for your webpages to appear in their Search Engine results. They are very important, especially nowadays when we are flooded with new websites everyday. You need to get visitors from Search Engines. They are one of the most important traffic generators for most websites on the Internet. However, not all bots are good. Some bots are sent by email harvesters or some unknown Search Engine whose purpose is just to index as many sites as possible in the shortest period of time. The problem with that is it may crash or slow down your server and thus preventing others from accessing your site. Worse are those bots which are improperly coded which may result in endless indexing of your site. This again creates problems for you and it certainly doesn’t benefit you (I doubt that you will get any traffic from such Search Engines), even if you have a lot of bandwidth and server resources. They are also bots which ignore normal spider “etiquette” and do their own stuff like indexing hidden files or follow links which are not meant to be followed. Don’t you just hate irresponsible bots? They ought to be shot.

The sad truth is that a lot of webmasters don’t know that they have been attacked by “bad” bots. I must admit I used to be one of those who thinks that ignorance is bliss. However, you will be surprised that one day, this ignorance can really hurt you when your server goes down or that your webhost refuse to host your site on their servers because of these bots hammering on their servers. You will have to spend time to search for another webhost, upload your files again and wait for DNS propagation. Big big waste of time and your site will not be accessible during this time. And it will just happen again as bots keep on attacking you. These bots will never stop unless you do something about it.

My advise to all of you webmasters is to do some basic protection early. Check your website logs and see which bots (and their IP addresses) have been tracking you and try to block them. These bad bots usually attempt to navigate the easiest prey, so you should make it as tough as possible for them to get through. If you need more information on how to block these bots, take a look here. It’s a very good site who a lot of information on how to spot bad bots and how to block them. Most of the solutions provided are easy to follow.

It’s been quite a while since I talked about Search Engine Optimization. Well, if you have been paying attention to the industry, you would realize that Google’s PageRank has been overwhelmingly devalued and it seems that PR has very little to do with how well you rank anymore. In fact, it has been devalued for over a year already. The reason why a lot of people is taking note that the PR devaluation is because of the recent public PR update by Google - a lot of webpages had their PR cut. Some webpages dropped from a PR7 to a PR4 in just one little update. Probably a lot of webmasters are cursing and swearing at their recent drop. I am pretty sure their revenue from selling high PageRank links has dropped a lot as well.

So I am sure what you are interested to know is what now? What’s Google’s great plan for the future of Search Engines? Sadly, it’s the same old thing - links. Links are still the most important aspect of Search Engine Optimization. Although PR has everything to do with links, the value of the link and the anchor text is still very important. And the content of the site which has the link is also important. Related sites will probably carry more weight in the eyes of Google. It tells Google what that link and the site it is pointing to is all about. And it is off-site, less easy to manipulate than on-site factors. And just when you expect big changes from Google! To tell you the truth, Search Engine Technology have become stagnant. You can see all these by just looking at Google and what it has been doing for the past few months - buying up some companies which are not directly related to Search Engine technologies. The most famous purchase is YouTube, and we know that it’s just a popular video hosting site. Nothing to do with Search Engines. I would expect more of the same from Google in the coming months (and years).

If you have been using Search Engines recently, I am sure you didn’t find much of an improvement in your results, right? What more can I say? Big companies often grow too big for their own good and now, we are the ones who has to suffer.

You won’t believe this, but apparently there are people out there who thinks that their sites are so important that they send threatening letters to people whose site ranks higher than theirs. Check out this link.

I can help myself but to laugh at such people and their behaviour.  Well, from what I can gather from the email, the authour of the letter claims that he/she is in a niche market and his/her site ranks number 1 for a certain phrase in Google due to good Search Engine Optimization. But apparently, the recipent of the email now ranks better. Funny thing is that the authour claims that the site is useless and has nothing to do with the phrase. Google, oh Google, where are you? And now, he/she is threatening the site owner with a lawsuit if the recipent doesn’t remove the site from Google!

“Can you please remove your site from Google, so that our site may go higher.” and “If you don’t agree to remove your site from Google for this keyword, we may go upto any extent and  may sue you for this.”. Wuhahahaha, yes, seriously, there are a lot of weird people in this world and now they are on the Internet and into niche businesses. Several of my websites rank pretty high for several niche keywords as well, I wonder will I be receiving a lot of such threatening emails soon? But it is always enjoyable to read aout stupid people on the Internet, isn’t it? I can help myself and wonder, what they are thinking when they send such emails? I mean, seriously, who in their right mind believe that they can force such a thing onto others and still get away with it? And how about ethics?

It’s been a long time since I have made fun of Google and I thought it’s about time we did something to show how good Google actually is. If you have used Google to do your searches, you will realize that Google differentiates between paid(or sponsored) listings and organic search results. So, let’s say you search for the term “fish oil” and you then be directed to a page where you can see all the results. However the first “result” is a sponsored link and you can easily notice it as a sponsored link by the words “sponsored link“. The rest of the results are from organic search. And on the left hand side, you will see more links, these are also sponsored links. They are just advertisements.

Why do you think that Google is doing this? Why do they want to differentiate between organic searches and advertisement links? Well, because Google has integrity. Really, they do. I am not making this up. As you can read from their editorial “Why we sell advertising, not search results“, you will understand more about this. “Honest G” doesn’t want to contaiminate their search results with advertisements (unlike other search engines). They definitely don’t want to “bias” their results on how much someone is willing to pay. The organic search rankings is based on a number of factors, none of which has anything to do with how much you are willing to pay Honest G. Of course, that doesn’t stop you from paying others money to get good results from Google. We call these group of people Google’s children or SEOers. Hey, no one can say Honest G is a miser anymore, can they? They are sure spreading a lot of their love around.

But in all seriousness, I still think that Google’s search engine is the best out there. Yahoo’s search results is okay, but still nothing compared to Google. Let’s not talk about MSN or Live. I had hoped for great things to come from Google, but alas, Google has failed miserably in everything else, except GMail. But even that, other email providers have caught up wth Google. So sad.

Information from this source.

What this article is saying is that spammers now use “bots” or automated software to post spam links on various websites, blogs and forums. Kind of like those you always see in the very popular forums and blogs where the message makes no sense at all but most comes different links to various websites. I am sure that you guys know that incoming links (links pointing to a certain website) and the anchor text (the words in those links) is very important when it comes to Search Engine ranking, especially for Google. The more incoming links (with the correct anchor text) your site has, the better your rankings in the Search Engines will be. For example, to rank well for the terms “smelly shoes”, you need to have incoming links to your website with the anchor text “smelly shoes”. The more you have, the better your ranking will be. Sure, there are a lot of other criteria in which Search Engine ranks a website, but these links are the most important.

However, from what I read, the most affected are usually less popular terms. The main reason is because most of such spam links are of less value and thus cannot compete with the serious ones which have done a lot of Search Engine Optimization for their sites. However, the effects of such Search Spam can be felt by a lot of people because a lot of such spam sites are actually full of malware and viruses. So an innocent searcher directed to a site with malware and then get infected could possibly infected others as well.

Well, yes, Search Engines are trying their best to get rid of such sites on their Search Engine listings, but I guess it is a losing battle. Removing one site, up pops 3 more. I think everyone has a part to play in this little game. Spammers have to have access to websites, forums and blogs in order for them to spam their links, but if webmasters are more vigilant in moderating their sites and remove those spam links frequently, I think such spam attacks will fail pretty easily. For this blog, I have installed Akismet which helps control the amount of spam in my blog comments. For the rest of the comments, I merely moderate them. This way, my blog is spam link free! I think every webmaster should do that, this way in helps cut down the amount of spam links on the Internet. Well, until the spammers start something new of course.

Seriously. I didn’t make this one up. I got it from a reliable source, you know people who study the Internet and know the ins and outs of the industry and they say that Internet Advertising is expeced to double by the year 2011! You can read it here. Well, what does this mean for us little baby crappers?  Does it mean that we will be getting a decent return from our Google Adsense advertisement? Does it mean that our webspace on our blog will worth more? Well, you wish! Whatever increase in spending on online advertisements will never trickle down to us. It will just feed the big bosses and make them even richer while the rest of us will look in envy and get pissed off. Some of us might even start a blog about it and try to get some money by placing Internet ads on it. Seriously, do you think that US$0.01 per click will suddenly change to US$1 per click? If so, then pigs will fly and I will be wearing a boy scout uniform this sunday. It just ain’t going to happen.

Anyways, it seems that traditional forms of advertisement like the regular media - radio, tv and print are starting to lose steam. Big executives are really starting to look at online advertisements as their prefered choice for promotion. Although the whole advertising market is expected to be stagant, online advertisement is looking to grow. They have started to shift their resources from traditional advertising to online advertising. And it looks like search advertising is still the strongest form of online advertisement. Yes, that means Google and Yahoo. And it looks like Google is not going to share that wealth with all of you. In fact, they may decided to bitch slap all of you (and me as well) just for the fun of it. Ahhh….my Google, it’s a real love-hate relationship.

Well, I guess I better stop my whining now. If something ain’t going to happen, no amount of whining will help. Good bye.

Looks like this update is causing a lot of webmasters a certain amount of grief. From my brief check of many websites, a lot of these sites got a big knockdown in their PageRank. And it looks like directories are the worst to be hit. Big famous directories like Aviva Directory and Alive Directory had their PR slashed from PR7 to PR4! Even Yahoo Directory dropped from PR9 to PR7. But I really feel it for a lot of directory owners, especially those commerical directories. After spending so much time, effort and money trying to get their PR up, Google comes along and start killing them with one brief stroke. I wonder what kind of loses are these big names directories facing as I am pretty sure the cost of administrating and running their commerical directories isn’t exactly cheap. And now with PR dropping like flies, the appeal of directories will not be that great anymore.

Anyway, I really don’t understand what is Google trying to do. And I think it is not fair to webmasters who had relied on Google and their PageRank idea to generate income. Yes, I know that “buying links” is not what Google had in mind when they started the PageRank thing, but it has on going so far already. Sure, it’s cheating and gaming the system. But it’s the system that is fawled in the first place. And ditching PageRank to another completely different “style” and not giving ANY information on what changes they have made is just not right. I think Google owes it to the millions of webmasters to explain what they have done and what criteria they use to calculate PageRank. I think it is not responsible for Google to do a slash like that without any explanation.

For me, I am not doing it commercially so it doesn’t affect me much. And I have faced only a 1 point drop in 2 of my 3 directories. Luckily, I did not spend thousands of dollars to set up my directory. If not, I would be nearly bleeding white just about right now.

I have been checking my Singapore business directory’s statistics and I realized one thing, it’s getting more hits than before. My business directory has many categories like food catering, restaurants, travel, education, beauty, health and so on. However, the increase in the number of hits come only from a few categories, namely travel and catering. The rest like restaurants, education and so on are not getting more hits. They remain stagnant more or less. Thus I think, one of the most important things in the web business directory is to cater for seasonal changes.

Since, the holidays are coming (in Singapore, it’s the school holidays where parents would bring their children for trips overseas), the interest in tours and travelling increased. Thus, more people are searching for tour and travel agencies. And so, the number of hits to these pages increase. We can use this seasonal “change” to do our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as well. So now, I am increasing my efforts on the terms “travel agencies”, “tour agencies”, “food catering” and ”christmas parties”. In the past, I don’t really bother about seasonal changes, but now, I realize that it is a very important part of SEO which a lot of people overlook. Knowing what terms to optimize and when to “jump in” are both equally important. Don’t expect a lot of people to search for holiday related terms when it’s the wrong time of the year for it. I mean, you will definitely get less hits unless you are optimizing for terms which a lot of people are searching for.

So my advice to you guys is to know the current market and situation. For example, if there is a important soccer match coming, it will generate interest in soccer. So optimize for it. Of course, you need to give it some time for your SEO to work, so plan ahead. Usually, it takes about 1 month or so. I mean, we all know when the holidays are coming right, so start optimizing beforehand.