There appears to be an increase in the number of Web sites with random, incoherent content that is aimed at attracting baffled and errant visitors. Some of these sites make use of public feeds and may have thousands of them. A pattern you might find:

http://.../feed275.htm

These sites will frequently try to sell something. Strong search engines penalise these sites as the algorithms sense unrelevance in the content. It sometimes seems like the World Wide Web is sinking into a jumble with more and more content spam, referrer spam, and comment spam (not to mention E-mail). This induces redundant traffic and frequent maintenance chores. What impact will high-speed connections have? Probably even higher capacity for the spammers.

hanks to a wonderful tool from Ben Hammersley, search results from Google can be delivered as RSS feeds. Similar projects seem to have been brought down, perhaps by Google, so exploit it while it lasts.

Vis-a-vis Google results en masse, I updated my Google Cron tool, which aggregates statistics, PageRank etc. in a text file, updates it overnight, and flags changes.

Eric Meyer pointed out the strange policies that some corporations instate:

We reserve the right to require you to remove links to the Site, in our sole discretion.

Linking to any page of the Site other than to the homepage is strictly prohibited in the absence of a separate linking agreement with Orbitz.

About a month ago I heard that Sainsbury’s require you to apply in order to get a permission to link. The only worry one can think of them having is a link name with an unflattering title, which then associates them with inadequate words in search engines. Try for example, ‘f**kwit’ in Google and the first result (as of the time of writing) will be John Prescott, the British Deputy Prime Minister. Ironically enough, the top SERP for this site is Teresa May, the Tory MP, though most visitors are after a porn star with the same name.
 
 

Google Desktop was made public less than a day ago. There is now a free 700k download for Windows.

Quoting the site, here is what Google Desktop offers:

• Find your email, files, media, web history and chats instantly
• View web pages you’ve seen, even when you’re not online
• New! Search directly from your desktop with the deskbar

ll webmasters show interest in the ranking of their sites. It is clear to very few, however, how the ‘Google clock’ functions. Answers to that are usually derived from experience.

According to Google’s information for webmasters, one might have to wait a month for a site to be indexed properly. PageRank (which directly affects traffic and search results) is updated/re-shuffled every 3-4 months according to a rumour at the SEO newsgroups. The rumour also says that the next PR update is in the beginning of April 2005.

A re-direct is said to be the safe solution to preservation of PageRank when moving between domains. Nonetheless, this may not work perfectly, not immediately anyway.

Google Suggest appears to have a long update cycle; Google Images likewise. I estimate it to be about 3-6 months.

If you are not familiar with syndication and aggregators, now is a good time to find out. Content is delivered to you, rather than you chasing content.

I am apprehensive of promoting MSN search, but their beta version has a nice feature that I am excited about. You can get common searches delivered to your RSS aggregator. The idea is very simple. Just replace the text in red with your favourite search query and replace whitespaces with a +.

http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=othello+master&format=rss