Nikoport

Microsoft is offering this staggering money for buying out Yahoo – 44.6 billion dollars in money and share. They hope for a bigger share of advertising market, and i hope that this deal will fail, we need more enterprises in the internet area and not 1 or 2 which control the market completely. Right now, there are 3 major players out there in the internet: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft – and i see absolutely no reason for .

Last year there were rumors, that Google were considering into buying Yahoo – that is not a good thing either. I would welcome any company into competition with those 3 but not one of them buying out another one.

I know, that Microsoft’s offer is also about 62% premium on share price, but i hope for reason and greed (this one should work better then the first one in the major corporations) to resist this offer. I feel that if Microsoft will get their hands on Yahoo there will be nothing good for all of us: besides less competition i believe that Yahoo and all what it stands for will disappear in a couple of years.

This month, Google has released quite a number of updates to its services: Google Trends, Google Analytics and Google Maps.

Google trends has introduced a new area – “hot trends“, which display the hottest trends in the search, or the way i understand it – it should show those phrases which have received a sudden increase of the searches. Besides hotness (right now from “medium” to “on fire”), the results also displays related searches (similar ones), peak time and most used searches location. During an intensive web search engine optimization it could be quite an important criteria to look for.

Google analytics has launched a completely redesigned interface, completely based on Ajax. They are still maintaining the elder one, for a couple of weeks, but the users are suggested starting their “migration” to the new one. I found the new interface sometimes being quite unstable, crashing the Firefox completely, but since it must be a “beta” release, i hope they will improve the service very fastly. No webmaster or search engine optimizer, who uses Google Analytics will like to continue using quite buggy product. Besides some crashes (something to do with the Firefox extensions ?), the new interface is quite different, and one have to get used to it, so i confess, that for the most of the time i still continue using the old one, while trying to push myself into learning the new one. I hope to be able to “move” to the new one during next couple of days.

I am still fuming about Google Zeitgeist and the absence of Portugal from the results, and by the way, at this very moment they have 2 Irelands listed at the menu links, which should be quite a surprising fact to the united kingdom government. I gotta email to someone at Google, telling them to stop ignoring portuguese optimizers. =O)

p.s. I have forgotten to mention the Google Maps update, which includes now 360 Streetside Views. As usual, this update is for US-based map only(it will be available in Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and San Francisco at the moment), but in the nearest future. Some people over the net have already reported that it helped them avoiding traffic, so it sounds to be a good update, but since Portuguese map has arrived more then a year after american and british counterparts, i am not expecting any “important” info for me in the next months.

Today, while browsing an old book called “Designing Web Usability”, written by Jakob Nielsen in the far 2000 (some 7 years ago), i have found a reference to the idea of distributing site content to the search engines in the form of the. On the page 238 there is small subtitle “Integrating Sites and Search Engines”, where he discusses the idea of integrating sites more closely with search engines. The problem for its implementation was considered at the time of writing – the agreement of a standardized method for encoding the user’s query terms. Right now we know, that the Search Engines can agree on the way of crawling the websites, but at the same time we know, that they use a lot of own “meta-extensions” to the crawling, like Google’s “no-follow” or Yahoo’s “no-content” for example. While user’s query terms are really far away from being interpreted by the sites (at the moment of writing it seems that only Yahoo pays attention to the meta content tag), the search engines have already done the first step into the direction of a better cooperation with website administrators and into the assuring of a better quality and better search results content.

Interesting, is that recently the governments of Arizona, California, Utah and Virginia announced they would use Sitemaps on their web sites. Of course it is quite a publicity stunt with a support for Google in the first place (creators of the sitemap protocol), but at the same time it is a quite a recognition of the Sitemap protocol. First Yahoo, then Microsoft and Ask.com has recognized it, and now we have some “enterprises” from the public sector coming for its support. Way to go, Jakob, i am looking for your next book =O)

Google has done quite a lot of changes to Google Webmaster Tools console recently. Just in a couple of days such things as a “Page Analise Link Keyword” and “Content Removal Tool” have appeared there.

First the Page Analise Link Keyword and Phrases functionality, it is showing now name variations of the links. First the functionality of the external links has been implemented at Google Webmasters Tools, but it has shown only the name of the external links, with no details of how those names are written or variations between the anchor text, but right now there is a new part at the same page of the Statistics Page analysis, but with much more information about the links text to your site, and as usually all this information is available for download in CSV format. Links text is one of the most important criterias for the search engines, and every webmaster like to know with what text other pages are referring their site, and Google Webmasters Console gives exact information about top 100 links to your page, so this is some information you won’t be wishing to miss.

Secondly, there is new “Content Removal Tool” which comes in line with a whole sequence of the changes related to the robots.txt file. Google Webmaster Console has added a new functionality to remove content without altering a line in robots.txt, with a help of new interface, you can remove indexing from selected files to whole directories on your site. I see that this is a very good improvement, but as the web is not equal to Google (there are still Yahoo, Altavista, Ask and MSN around), every reasonable webmaster will still need to remove manually in robots.txt all those files and directories. But if you don’t have access to your server and need to remove some file or directory from Google just go to your Google Webmaster Console, select URL Removals -> New Removal Request, and then just enter its name, and you are done.

Google Webmaster tools started very slowly with quite a few functionality available, but with no shade of doubts, Google has improved it quite a lot in the recent months (first of all with exact links to your site) and it is exciting to see where they are going to take it next. With Yahoo’s SiteExplorer appearing on the horizon this is quite a powerful move, and i know quite a number of people who has “switched” from SiteExplorer to Google Webmaster Tools console in the recent 3-4 months.

A couple of days ago, without big announcements Sitemaps.org has released the final specification for sitemap protocol. A version 1.0 of the sitemap protocol now besides being supported by the big 3 search engines (Google,Yahoo and Microsoft) is also being supported by the Ask.com. I hope that the rest of the search world will join this effort in helping the search engines the website structure recognition.

The sitemaps.org site have also updated and published the information in 18 (eighteen) languages, which is quite a surprise for me. Portuguese language was not forgotten, so i am a kind of happy besides still complaining about Google Zeitgeist, but at the same time, the front page in all languages is still referring to the 0.9 version of the sitemap protocol, which is already an outdated specification =O)

Also a notable fact is that the search engine bots are supporting sitemaps reference from the world famous robots.txt file. The syntax is quite simple:
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml


This is quite an interesting and very smart way of sitemap publishing – this way you don’t really have to submit your sitemap to each and every search engine, when they visiting your site, they will find about the sitemap from the robots.txt, so it is a great optimization of time. No more manual sitemap submission is the most important change done to the way, the sitemap protocol is handled.

I am really disappointed with Google Zeitgeist, since they continue to ignore several major european countries by not including results in the reports. Portugal, Austria, Belgium are all major european countries and they are not at the list but at the same time Greece is present (i don’t think greek economy is up to compete with austrian or belgian), so i am thinking that may be the reason for this ignorance is the population. But after checking that Czech Republic has almost the same population as Portugal or Belgium, i really see no reason at all of ignoring those countries. I do not see any sequence in including one countries and excluding other ones. Also notable is the absence of Romania, with more 22 Millions of population, surely they deserve their place at Zeitgeist.
Two local search engines that i have used for years are Google Austria and Google Portugal, and since Google shows in Zeitgeist the results of other local search engines, i think it would be easy to include Portugal and Austria as well.

From programmers point of view, there is no reason at all of not doing it. From internet marketing point of view, its a terrible situation, for webmasters being excluded for quite some time, with apparently no reason at all. For example, for me the really interesting public is the portuguese at the moment, so without data from Google Zeitgeist about most popular searches i can feel a kind of ignored.

Finally, after much deliberation Google has finally allowed the webmasters to see which links it really indexes. As it was written today in “Discover your links” and “Google provides backlink tool for site owners” posts, Google has finally added this so much requested functionality to their Sitemaps tool. I know a couple of guys who went to register in Yahoo SiteExplorer just because Google’s link: has not worked properly for ages, and Google Sitemaps has not provided anything close to this functionality, but finally we seem to have it working. Still far from being perfect and even not reaching 80% in my opinion, but it is a major improvement.

There is an interesting fact, written twice with bold on the same page by Matt Cutts – “Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight”, and it makes a lot of sense for me, since for some of the sites i know there are quite a number of links but judging by the pagerank number – the most of them are still far from being counted. At the same time it is a kind of a protection for search engines against those who build thousands links by robot programs, because once the link carries no relation or significant connection, it should not be counted.

Now we have a possibility to trace all those who link to us, and it is a quite an important information. Of course one can always trace from which pages the visits are coming from, but there are a lot of pages, from which you wont get a click, but you might have a link, which could help you improving your pagerank at Google and final ranking in all major search engines, and in the end effect this is what all webmasters are looking for – to be at number one of the search results in all important keywords combinations.

I am looking forward of getting more information from the Google Sitemaps, especially since i can compare it with the one from Yahoo’s SiteExplorer and see which one sees which links.