...by a huge margin and at times there have been increase also.

The change, anyways, has left a lot of web publishers and bloggers discussing their changes in PageRank on this New Year's Eve! We have also observed PageRank change for a number of our clients.

But at the same, it is the fact that the PageRank which is shown on the Google Toolbar is not enough to judge as to how Google ranks your site. A lot of other factors are involved.

Matt Cutts confirmed it on Twitter that it was indeed a Google update. He also followed it up on his blog, "In case you didnt see where I confirmed it on Twitter, Google recently did a toolbar PageRank update. Its pretty much done now. If you want more info, Ive answered questions about PageRank and the Google Toolbar in the past."

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...a report coming from Valleywag yesterday. I've heard Mayer speak at Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Jose in August of 2007 where I took a few photographs of her conversation with Danny Sullivan, below. (Click the image for more photos)

SES-8-22-07

She seemed personable and intelligent there as she discussed Google search and displayed the iPhone interface on her phone. I've briefly mentioned her comments in a post on "previous Query Refinement" but don't recall hearing much from her elsewhere.

To get a better idea of what google is losing if she does indeed depart, I took a look at a video of her presentations at Google I/O Developer conference 2008. Here's that hour long presentation if you have time for it:

It's often odd to see executives leave successful companies, knowing that they have made major, substantial contributions to the shape of that success. The video above is a great way to become familiar with what Google is losing.

Gawker apparently wants to poke with the sharpest stick and they focus on her personal fortune as the 19th employee of the startup, fresh out of Stanford and her laugh! The laugh does surface a time or two in her I/O conference presentation above, but seems endearing and humanizing there.

Google is apparently about to lose a big talent. I've often wondered why people leave startups after they go public - those who help to build the vision over time. Sergei and Larry are clearly not serial entrepreneurs. They are staying. Is Mayer on the way out?

Included links: Barry Schwartz

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1. Google ignores all the low-hanging fruit, and easy-to-get links are rendered useless
2. Directories et. al. (low-hanging-fruit) hear final death knell
3. Content REALLY becomes King, as valuable links will only point at valuable content
4. Google goes on to dominate even more of the search space
5. Personalised search still doesnt gain traction
6. SERP ranking shuffles dynaically between searches - chasing ranking becomes even more futile
7. Social Media - links gained from social media users become more powerful as the low-hanging-fruit crap gets filtered out
8. The people who really get this social stuff \glances here\ will be in even more demand
9. Good creative folk - copy writers etc. - will see an increase in demand when the penny drops
10. More small businesses turn to SEO as chronic costs of PPC sets in
11. More businesses of all sizes get burnt by SEOs, you know the ones who havent got a clue, but promise you the Earth for a few hundred
12. SEO goes into mortal decline as search engines (all called Google) make it more and more difficult to game the results
13. The survivors online will have a deep understanding of multi-channel marketing, and beating customer expectations at every turn - its all about the marketing mix
14. Irish businesses, especially in lead-gen, turn more and more to conversion optimisation and testing
15. An Irish web agency starts offering testing as a core product/service (and not like every web designer now offers SEO)
16. One or more Irish web startups will come up with something that gains serious traction in 09
17. RedCardinal.ie releases some interesting tools -unfair insider knowledge ;)-
18. RedCardinal.ie turns off the server for good -more unfair insider knowledge...-

2008 Was a Weird Year

2008 was a weird year - Ive seen/learnt more than in any previous year, yet Ive not been blogging much about it. I could probably write as book about what Ive observed/done in 2008 - some really fantastic things.

And Ive been speaking to a few people about that point recently. So my New Years resolution is to try blogging a lot more in 2009.

At least until I flip the switch that is :O

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Google
November: 63.5%
October: 63.1%
Change: +0.4

January 2008: 58.5%
Change: +5.0

Yahoo
November: 20.4%
October: 20.5%
Change: -0.1

January 2008: 22.2%
Change: -1.8

MSN
November: 8.3%
October: 8.5%
Change: -0.2

January 2008: 9.8%
Change: -1.5

ASK
November: 4.0%
October: 4.2%
Change: -0.2

January 2008: 4.5%
Change: -0.5

AOL
November: 3.8%
October: 3.7%
Change: +0.1

January 2008: 4.9%
Change: -1.1

Source: comScore

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...interesting, this is something they recommend NOT to do on social media websites:

involving your site in schemes where your content is artificially promoted to the
top of these services.

For a long time Google endorsed viral link building on sites like Digg with no reservations. They figured the wisdom of crowds would naturally prevent undesirable content from becoming popular and getting links. Of course this is because the folks at Google tend to lead sheltered lives, and dont believe people would ever sell votes, links or social media influence for cold hard cash those of us living in the real world know otherwise. After living in denial though they eventually come around, and then start asking everyone to narc on other people, despite it being a really bad karma move.

How long before we see a How to report social media spam section of the google guidelines, and link to a form in webmaster central?

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...now or later on apply to SEO.  I maintain that is a matter of business necessity that search engines would try to more precisely measure user satisfaction with each result of each search phrase, and that bounce rates would be one metric they could use.  Frequent readers will also know that I do not view bounce rates as a simple number or as a static pass-fail type of calculation.  It would be a ridiculously simplistic algorithm that calculates bounces using such simple calculations, in my humble opinion. 

Recently, Web Pro News  reported that Google answers bounce rates questions.  In fact, two separate answers were provided, one that relates to SEO and the other that relates to Google Analytics.  Many webmasters will confuse the two and we all know thats how false rumors get started " the kind of false rumors that years from now will be reported as fact by many people calling themselves SEO expert. 

It is possible that Google Analytics and SEO are related or will be related, but dont bank on it.  Here is what Adam Lasnik of Google has to say specifically about bounce rates and SEO.

If youre talking about bounce rates in the context of Google Analytics, Im afraid you probably know as much as I do. I love the product, but dont know the ins-and-outs of it very thoroughly.

If youre talking about bounce rates in the context of Google web search and webmaster-y issues, then we really dont have specific guidance on bounces per se; rather, the key for webmasters is to make users happy so they find your site useful, bookmark your site, return to your site, recommend your site, link to your site, etc. Pretty much everything we write algorithmically re: web search is designed to maximize user happiness, so anything webmasters do to increase that is likely to improve their sites presence in Google.

The bottom line is that you want to do all the things that we talk about in Sticky SEO to keep people on your website, to engage them in your website, to send Google and other search engines signals that they found your website to be useful.  And, of course, you want to reduce the number of visitors who send the search engines signals that your website is useless.

Just for information, here is my post on objections to ranking based partially on bounce rates.

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...in those activities that it should not get into at all:

Here are some of the allegations:

Can Ebay and others actively attempt to control and influence what shows up in search results whether they agree or disagree with it? Unfortunately, yes.

Do I hate Google for this? No. Its not their fault that the above mentioned websites, companies and politicians have found yet another way to censor the truth and anything they disagree with. - Bluegill

In response to this post Googler JohnMu wrote down four things that some people think Google is doing, but according to him, these are never implemented by Google ever! These include:

• Googlers changing crawling, indexing or ranking of content they don't agree with. As a data point, check the search results for http://www.google.com/search?q=jew as well as the explanation at http://www.google.com/explanation.html.
• Large companies being able to encourage Google to change crawling, indexing or ranking of a site they don't like. Yes, they contact us, but no, they don't get any results.
• A site being damaged with regards to crawling, indexing or ranking, by someone else on the outside. I've seen sites run into troubles for getting hacked, but I've never seen them run into trouble because of something someone other than the owner did outside of the site.
• A spam report being taken seriously if the site itself was abiding our Webmaster Guidelines. 42,000 spam reports wouldn't change a thing, regardless of who filed them, if the site is compliant.

Obviously, any of these things could theoretically happen, but I haven't seen it happen, and I don't believe it's something a webmaster has to worry about. If it ever became obvious to Googlers that one of these things happened, it would be resolved immediately " so if you feel that it has happened, please take the time to submit a spamreport with the details. We take these reports very seriously.

We certainly believe Google on this aspect! Of course, the big daddy of search engines can not go wrong on these issues!

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...wrote that Palimpsests storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all.

Now, according to Alberto Conti, Google sent out the following mail:

Dear Google Research Datasets user,

Thank you very much for trying out Google Research Datasets, providing interesting datasets, and giving us extremely useful feedback. (...)

As you know, Google is a company that promotes experimentation with innovative new products and services. At the same time, we have to carefully balance that with ensuring that our resources are used in the most effective possible way to bring maximum value to our users.

It has been a difficult decision, but we have decided not to continue work on Google Research Datasets, but to instead focus our efforts on other activities such as Google Scholar, our Research Programs, and publishing papers about research here at Google.

The Google Research Datasets service will remain active until the end of January 2009 during which time any datasets may be downloaded. For those datasets that are impractical to download, we will also happily provide interested users with a copy via hard drive shipment.

Google confirmed the cancellation to me in a mail. Wired has a follow-up post about this with a quote from stem cell biologist Attila Csordas: Its a sad story if its true ... Assuming it is true that might mean that Google is still a couple years away from directly helping the life sciences (on an infrastructural level).

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...from the many pages of results. Users can now search for specific images that are either:

• News content
• Faces
• Clip art
• Line drawings
• Photo content
  

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