Nikoport

No one is be surprised by the number of meta compilations available on the blogs all around the internet. What makes me worry is that the percentage of the information in relation to the meta spam is getting lower with every day. A friend of mine from Austria told me that he wont be surprise if one day a lot of those meta engines will disappear one day like dot com bubble has disappeared at the end of the last century. He is quite right, since all meta information providers do not have a real value behind them, besides being a servants, and we have a very big and a powerful one - Google, who already occupies this space.

I was just thinking, that in order to gain hundreds or thousands of users, spammers just create a new list of already existing css menus or html templates and put it somewhere on the digg or somewhere else. Then hundreds of users will “discover” it visiting and digging and dotting and whatever you prefer. It is quite disappointing, that the most bloggers in such way turn them self into spammers, or may be the truth is that they are not bloggers, but just meta spammers. I can not imagine someone working creating pages having time to check out 70 or 80 templates, and doing that in depth. This is absolutely unreasonable, because the time it takes to check out the code of the xhtml template tells me that in order to “process” them all one will need a couple of weeks, when already “behind the corner”, at the same blogs there are hundreds more templates and css technics and so on.

So, we arrive to the main question, how could someone check out 70-80 templates and post them each and every 3-4 days, my answer is - impossible, it is just a way of surfing through the pages of people, who create real content, and then collect it and put into a blog post, showing everyone, who deep and good your knowledges are. When i check blogs of really creative people, i see one or two good technical posts per month, cause it is difficult to discover something worth disclosure, but hey, meta spammers do 15 posts a month with one or two thousands references.

I guess i have reached the state of completely ignoring such posts and such posters (spammers). For me, meta posts are as good as dead, as they have no real information.

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.

A few days ago Google, Microsoft and Yahoo has agreed to join forces for defining a standard for sitemaps usage based on a XML which simplificates the work of the search engine bots, by distributing available site strucutre information. Originally developed by Google and already in use since about a year by Google Sitemaps has become a standard de-facto and as a matter of a fact, the version publicated on the sitemaps.org site has a higher version(0.9) then one i am using at the moment(0.7).

It is very nice to see, that the big 3 of the search are finally agreeing on something, which will make work of the webmasters easier. This way, we wont have to implement three independent solutions for each of the search engines, and i am more then welcoming it. The only question that i have in my mind is how much time will their stick to it and keep working together, since Microsoft is known for ignoring the common standards and defining their own, but in this case, because Google is the absolute market leader all over the world, i believe, that as long as microsoft dont have market controlled, they are most probably going go stick to it.

Another interesting thing about this organization is the license, under which they are distributing this information. I confess, that this “Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License” is quite a surprise for me, especially since a rant, made a couple days ago by Mr. Ballmer about Linux and its license.