It’s true! In what many can only assume is a purely desperate attempt to ‘buy in’ to the chase of Google’s Search domination, Microsoft have offered a bid to struggling Yahoo! worth about £22 Billion! That’s a lot of money and around 60% above the Yahoo! share price before this announcement (though shares at Yahoo have unsurprisingly now risen by about 50% as a result!)
Question is…why do Microsoft want Yahoo!? Well, everybody knows of the rivalry between Google and Microsoft and Google have moved into what many have assumed is an unassailable lead in the search market. But it’s not all about search. Yahoo have the popular, but distinquished photo sharing site; Flickr and also their own reliable webmail program and many forget that these guys were performing Search when Google was still a high school project! Recent years though have shown the paid search of Yahoo to be not only unreliable but also less profitable and Yahoo had recently issued a sort of profits warning and board members had walked. Last summers UK Paid Search algorithm and technology update saw many a loyal YSM! paid search supporter walk to Google where advertising costs are now closer and volumes a lot stronger.
If, and it is still a big if, Microsoft were to take on Yahoo!, we would have a Search Media empire which could seriously take on Google…if the right management was put in place to mould the new combined company into a streamlined and concentrated effort. Yahoo Search Marketing’s (YSM!) customer service is crap in the UK (fellow Brits using the service will be nodding their heads at this stage) and MSN have had a tendency to over engineer their search efforts much to the amusement of the boys and girls at Google, so £22 Billion would be an awful lot of money to waste just to scare Google for a month or two….
Those guys at Google have been busy again. Not long after the infamous November 07 reclassification of so many sites for PR, we’ve this last week seen many of our and our rivals sites re evaluated again. Whilst the movement was this time was less severe, we have seen one or two sites which we thought were unfairly devalued last year, boosted again and one or two sites belonging to rivals, rightfully devalued (use of farmed link directories). All this at a time when we’ve also seen Yahoo make more of our concerted efforts into Google SEO techniques than Google….
There’s a lot of talk and rumour floating around SEO circles at the moment regarding Google’s attitude and apparent clamp down on paid for links on websites. For those that don’t know the score: everyone seemingly wants a higher Google page rank (PR) because higher PR equals higher Search Engine positions (SERPs), right? So, using basic SEO methodology whereby sites with PR linking to other sites effectively pass a vote of confidence in the destination site, unscrupulous Webmasters have been buying up high PR links to point to their site using the Google bombing technique to strengthen SERP’s on specific key phrases.
So, what’s the problem? Well to be honest, it’s a bit rich coming from Google because at the end of the day, their paid for advertising business model is built on the fundamental principles of linking to sites through textual advertising. What’s annoyed the boys and girls at Google HQ is the apparent attempts to undermine their algorithm using these techniques.
But how do Google recognise a ‘paid for link’? Good question. How can they? We think it’s no coincidence that Google have actively increased their exposure and opportunities for webmasters to ‘grass’ on such sites either selling or benefiting from paid links, but is this all Google have? Having looked through Google best practice pages earlier today, we see that they don’t entirely want to destroy the paid link marketplace, but suggest this:
* Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the tag * Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
Google go on to explain that a site with good unique quality content will naturally attract sites linking to it anyway but the problem is, not all of us have unique content sites (I’d say very few do) and even those that do, still need to attract the linking sites in the first place - a bit of chicken and egg scenario.
Where will it all end? Google now say they don’t approve of active reciprocal linking, they don’t approve of paid for text linking to manipulate their algorithms, and they don’t like Directories very much either. This begs the obvious question: How important is Page Rank nowadays? There is a definite kudos value but anything tangible? Sites with low or even zero PR are appearing above sites with high PR. We can honestly say, the latest PR assessment has made very little difference to sites we monitor either in terms of an increase in SERPs for those with PR improvement or a drop for those with a decrease.
At the end of the day, some elements of SEO can be so borderline between being ethical and unethical, that we feel many a good guy is going to get penalised through unintentionally annoying Google, and some of the unethical black hat guys will still benefit from PR manipulation.
Will PR still be around 2 years from now? There’s increased talk that possibly not…but time will surely tell.
Late on Friday/early Saturday morning of last week (26th/27th October) Google systematically reassessed virtually every known or indexed website for Page Rank (PR). It wasn’t unexpected and they’d been rumours for a few weeks that the assessment would actually come between 1-10 November, so perhaps this was a deliberate attempt to catch us all on the back foot, so to speak.
This assessment was perhaps one of the most severe for many webmasters. Many sites lost their page rank entirely, and others took a fall. Of course, others benefited very nicely.
Sites which we’ve witnessed first hand doing very nicely seemed to have been sites which have ethically utilised the page redirect (301) rule in mass numbers…entirely ethical but nevertheless possibly an exploitation opportunity for others in future. Sites which didn’t fare quite so well were definately sites with poorer content and page copy. We’ve seen sites with good quality numbers of backlinks but poor page layout suffer. It seems that ecommerce sites somehow need to find a way of utilising content as well as their product range. Backlinks certainly still count, but seemingly now only when marred with good volumes of matching content.
Other surprises included the diversity of page data Google’s spiders are able to see and index. iframes don’t seem to deter the Google spiders as we’ve seen some good results of late in indexed content with sites using these, and we all know that Flash is no longer entirely invisable, and meta tagging certainly isn’t dead either!
Perhaps, Google’s new approach is to again re-establish some real value for their fledgling PR system. To be honest, sites with decent SERPs still have them post assessment regardless of the PR fluctuation, so what does PR really now mean? We’re guessing that Google have become cheesed off over the last year or two of link farmers and speculators who buy a cheap domain, point a few links to it and then ride off the back of the PR until the next assessment.
When Google undertake such a HUGE mass exercise of reassessing seemingly every site in such a short space of time, there are going to be casualties and there are going to be those who have tried to exploit the algorithms coming through with a result. But on the whole, we think Google are looking to recreate a level of integrity around PR and hence why a simple site with minimal value will no longer be able to have a decent PR quite as easily as it perhaps once could…
(wb) Russ