may 2006 newsletter

This month's talk is that Microsoft and Yahoo have been throwing ideas around about how they could jointly challenge the Google domination. With Microsoft's control of the desktop and Yahoo's search and advertising platforms and patents, something significant might be brewing!

Watch this space!

Keeping you site content up to date and fresh is an essential ingredient in the success of any web site.

Your site reflects your business and if it never changes and worse still, is out of date, people may apply these attributes when thinking about your company.

A dynamic, fresh site indicates a dynamic, fresh company and importantly for some, those sites get serious brownie points from the search engines.

You can keep your site current and fresh with a content management system (CMS).

The Blot CMS takes an personal, tailored approach and provides you with an individual system specifically for your site and the information you want to update.

Recently we mentioned the last major Google update, nicknamed 'Big Daddy' which happened in January.

For some sites, this update has been an unmitigated disaster with all of their pages dropping from the index for no apparant reason and other pages being demoted to Google's Supplementary Index (so- called 'Supplementary Hell').

If your site seems to have suffered in traffic since January, check if you are still in the Google index. Just type 'site:your domain name' into Google and see what it comes up with.

The problem seems to continue unabated and no-one has yet managed to identify exactly why a particular site is affected. In our experience, the sites that have suffered are those that are very static, and don't have too many sites linking to them. However, there are also reports of sites being dropped that don't meet that profile at all.

Other theories are that Google's hardware servers are now full with junk sites that black-hat SEO practioners have created to further their own ends.

Our suspicion at Blot is that Google just made some bad algorithm changes with Big Daddy, attempting to cut out illegitimate sites, but at the same time affecting some bona-fide sites.

Can you do anything if your site is affected? The forums are awash with people coming up with ideas, but it may be that these sites will have to wait for the next update (of course we don't know when it will be!). In the meantime, updated pages and incoming links from other sites will always help.