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CyberArtisans Newsletter Vol 4, Number 11 Welcome to the November 2005 issue of the CyberArtisans monthly newsletter! Our goal is to present information that will be useful to you as a website owner and as a user of the web. If these newsletters are useful, please forward this to a friend. To unsubscribe, follow the directions at the bottom of this email. This Month's Topics One of the challenges of search engine optimization is that you are constantly trying to reverse engineer a complex system to figure out how to outfox it. Nobody really knows how Google works except the folks at Google and they aren't talking. Not only are they not talking but they are constantly fiddling with the algorithm. The latest change, dubbed the "Jagger 3 Update," is much more than minor fiddling -- it's a major change. One SEO website we monitor estimated that the Jagger 3 Update altered the impact of 18 characteristics of websites, ranging from the value of incoming links to the size of your site's content. Their advice if you discover your site has suddenly taken a dive in Google position? Do nothing. Yet. Give things time to settle down. Every time Google does a major shift there is a period of settling while they tune things and try to eliminate the secondary effects. So hang on and be patient. And watch this space. One effect that has been noticed in Google that is worth taking note of is that Google seems to downrate new domain names for about 9 months. The change seems to be an attempt to thwart people who were grabbing new domain names and trying to bring them up quickly in Google using shady techniques before Google could get a handle on what they were doing. Google's fix seems to be to suppress new domain names for a while. So if you have recently set up a new domain name, accept that you won't get a high Google position for a few months and either live with it or buy some Google AdWord space for that time. Everybody hates Spam but nobody seems to be able to fix it. There are several good ways to block it at the destination, but attempts at blocking it at the source so it doesn't clog up the Internet's backbone servers have so far not been successful. This is not for lack of thought about it, however. A couple of new schemes have been tried, with limited success. As you might imagine, figuring out a fix that stops the bad guys, doesn't penalize the good guys, and is workable for real folks will not be trivial. It will involve a change to the way email works at the most basic level, which means they also have to figure out how to manage the transition, when some users will have old email software and some will have new software. They also have to make sure that all the servers can handle both the new and old format. One scheme that is gaining popularity, but not without taking a lot of criticism, is called Sender Policy Framework (SPF). If you want to read about SPF and some of the controversy about it, there's a good summary at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework. It's unlikely we will have a solution to Spam in near future. But some of the best minds on the Internet are working on it, so there is hope. Watch this space. For the moment, don't ditch your Spam filters. And watch this space. Want to see back issues of this newsletter? Go to http://www.cyberartisans.com/newsletter and select an issue. Jonathan Spencer |
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