p1

Hi All

Lots of things have been going since last edition, as we reach the middle of the year and wonder where the first part went; Google's 'Bourbon' update which began May 20th has cleaned out a lot of sites to mixed reactions, Yahoo launches Mindset enabling 'sliding' between shopping or research sites, AskJeeves introduces Zoom with options based on 'topic clusters'. Google charges towards $300 a share already running at 50 times earnings. We are still living without the Google page rank green bar I wonder when Google will switch it back on??? I also have a nice article about what to expect from your SEO/SEM firm.

Google Bourbon Update started May 20th and is only now apparently being completed, making this a significant update, with data centres still being updated through the course of this week. The update has been released in 4 stages over the last month, to soften the impact. Google's recent patent filing which contained 63 odd topics (takes some digesting and I could talk about for a week)  has been at least partly  implemented during this update.

Some of the pieces of it include;
when was the domain registered, how old is it?, more attention is paid to who links to a domain and the anchor text of the links, google looks at where the site is hosted geographically and the IP adresses, the number of pages the site has seems to be more important including how many pages were added since the last GoogleBot crawl.
So called Google employee the 'GoogleGuy' has been posting around the forums on this subject, and even has his own thread going on webmasterworld where he is answering questions!

Google is clearly trying to clean up SERP's (search engine result pages) and deliver quality results, what can we take away from this update? I have seen spammy sites including affiliate sites with large numbers of links fall in Google SERPS.  So the usual messages apply, keep adding new content, add on topic / themed links steadily, not in large bursts, check your reciprocal links are relevant etc etc . Over the next few weeks the changes made will be hopefully become clearer...