Archive for November, 2006

Last night, while listening to Net Income [mp3 link], Cshel brought up the site review panel at PubCon. Using his super secret agent laptop Matt Cutts called out a webmaster for having around 50 domains. From the sounds of it he was not interlinking them so no big deal right? Well maybe not. Why would Matt bring up the 50 different domains that where unconnected unless Google was using this information.

I’m sure the Google spam filters are much like email spam filters in that they use a point system to flag sites for penalty or manual review. The more points a site or page accumulates, the more likely it’s spam. I could see why Google would be wary of webmasters who have thousands of domains registered. Let’s just hope this is something that would only flag a manual review and not something that would cause an automated penalty.

So what are all my fellow tin-foil hat group members supposed to do?

• Private Registration - The public cannot access private registration data but can Google? On the same Net Income show, I think it was Cshel who mentioned a company she worked for that was a registrar had access to all private domain registration data from the main registrar database. If that’s true, there is no such thing as private registration when it comes to Google.
• Fake Registration Data - By using fake info when registering a domain you can avoid Google being able to connect your whois data. This does not mean that Google can’t still connect domains by use of Adsense, Google Analytics, or the servers you host on. Do you really have the time it takes to create a separate account for each and every domain for all of these services? While unlikely to happen, there is also the small chance of losing the domain for using fake info.

It’s up to you to decide how thick you want your tin-foil hat. I think this is definitely a sign to at least setup a new profile for any sites that are less than white. For example, I would have one profile for your white hat content sites and another for your MFA / black hat sites.

Update: Matt Cutts just posted the session details. A must read.

Update 2: It has been confirmed that Google cannot see past private domain registrations. That doesn’t mean they don’t have contracts with larger registrars to get the information for a fee.

Microsoft and Yahoo have announced they are joining Google in their support for the XML sitemaps protocol. All three engines will be upgrading to version 0.90.

I don’t personally use Google sitemaps often. I prefer to create a website that search engines love and let Google find the pages on their own. My method is a great way to determine whether a sites has been properly structured by watching how it is indexed by Google and others.

Yahoo is on the same level as Google and has no problem indexing all of my pages when a site is designed properly.

MSN Live Search on the other hand is horrible. This may be a godsend for people wanting to be completely indexed by MSN. It will be interesting to see if MSN actually indexes every page included in a sitemap or if they ignore half of them like they currently do when indexing a website.

Google has teamed up with StopBadware.org to combat spyware, viruses, and so on. If StopBadware flags your website as either hosting badware or linking to another site hosting badware, Google will flag your domain and warn surfers of a possible threat. It is unclear whether actual rankings can be affected by this flag. Maybe Matt Cutts or Vanessa can give some clarification.

The good news is Google Webmaster Central now informs webmasters if their website has been flagged for badware. While I don’t use the sitemaps tool often, Webmaster Central really is becoming invaluable to any serious webmaster. First they start reporting website penalties and now this.

Looks like MSN Live Search is having some issues. My searches are returning either zero results or just one result. Since Live Search tells me there are zero results for both the words “home” and “robots”, I must assume someone is erasing the Internet. Here are some screen shots.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/98687953@N00/sets/72157594363755195/show/

Anyone else seeing the same thing?

p.s. I’m new to using Flickr, so if anyone knows where the docs on how to embed these slide shows into my page, please let me know. I’m not finding it.