SEM Guru

Google have announced free access to Urchin. This was previously $199 per month. Some strings attached, but not many! http://www.google.com/analytics/

This from a question originally posted on SEO Round Table

If you want to know what I think, personally.... Well, I do not think Google manually adds sites into the SERPs based on it being competitive or not. I do think they adjust the algorithm to ensure the sites they want in the top 10 for certain keyword phrases are there. But I do not think they manually stick a site in.

Do they pull sites out? If they are "spammy" they will. If not, they may adjust the algorithm to knock them out.

All in all, I think for the most part, Google keeps it automatic and does not use manual means to have the "most relevant" results in the top 10.

I have to agree that Google change their algorithms to ensure the sites they want are in the top 10, however they can't always achieve that using algorithms alone. I've seen results for searchs where around the 6th position there's a line and three different entries, then another line and then the rest of the organic results. These inserted results seem to be linked to the search term having more than one meaning, the second meaning this then displayed within the lines. Sometimes this is a trademark that is also a search term, other times I've seen it was when looking for a PHP command, and the official php.net site has appeared within the lines and no where else in the top 10.

From the BBC News site

More than 10% of net users are going online with the Firefox browser, show figures from analysis firm One Stat.

The global average of 11.5% is the highest percentage of users that the open source browser has ever reached.

What does this mean to you? Well if you've got a site that says 'Best viewed in Internet Explorer' or if you haven't checked your site in a browser other than IE you could be turning away up to 15% of all your visitors - 1 in 7!

Make sure you check your site in Firefox, make sure you don't use any Microsoft HTML extensions, stick to W3C compilant HTML and CSS. In short the days of assuming everyone is using one browser are hopefully coming to an end.

All candied up and nowhere to go except to look at what Google have done to their ranking software. As the update is still ongoing not much can be said for sure. The concensus appears to be:
- reciprocal linking is dead - has been for nearly a year guys!
- ranking is difficult - again has been for a long time.
- if your site isn't older than 2003 forget it.

OK so what should you do? PPC to gain marketshare has a low ROI and high cost. Best bet is still organic SEO however you'll need to change your linking strategy:
Articles - publish articles and allow others to republish your articles.

Press releases - anything and everything you or your company says or does should be a press release.

One way Inbound links -try to gain these as much as possible. Forum postings, blog postings, etc.

If all else fails write great content that other people will link to.

Getting to #1 for your keyword - Google Treat

Dropping 300 places because of update Jagger - Google Trick!

See post by Kamau at http://www.searchengineplan.com/blogs/2005/10/earth-to-google-or-is-it-just-me.htm about the furor caused by Google maps.

My comments:

Google already own a mass of personal information including all of your prior searches through their use of a 30+year cookie. With their new portal they would also know your name, age, personal preferences. Their toolbar tracks URLs accessed (when page rank is turned on). If Microsoft had this amount of information on anyone there would be a huge to-do, but Google is getting away with it. For how long though? People will wise up to the 'evil empire'.

If you haven't read the BBC News interview with Bill Gates Bill is quoted as saying

"It is not as simple, not as cheap, not as powerful as I thought we could achieve so now I get to come in and work with smart people to make that happen. It's the most fun I can imagine,"

I just brought a PC for my daughter for $299 (remember when it was $5000 for a basic PC) which came fully built including a AMD processor, 256MB ram, 40GB HD. Perfect for an 8 year old to surf the web and other things she'll want to do. It also came bundled with Windows XP Home. Looking up the price of XP Home on pricegrabber.com I found the lowest price for the full edition was $44, the list price is closer to $99. This represents way over 10% of the cost of the new machine, and at $99 represents 33% of the cost of the machine. Given that at the start of the PC revolution a PC cost $5000 and it now costs $300, the cost of the O/S is now becoming the major roadblock to a lower prices PC.With the huge profits Microsoft has just announced the price of this software is vastly inflated and hasn't fallen at the same speed as other parts of the PC. If Bill truely beleived in bringing the cost of the PC down he needs to take the first step.

Interesting article on the BBC website where they have an exclusive interview with Bill Gates. Appartenly everyone is underestimating their investment in search. As the BBC put it "The head of the software giant told the BBC that its ambition is to be bigger than Google in search.". Well from the numbers I remember at SES their market share has fallen back to where it was. This must be in regards to their integration of search within the operating system, when this happens over 90% of all computer owners will have MSN search pre-programmed into their PCs - sounds a lot like how Microsoft won the browser wars! Makes you wonder where the monopolies commissions are on this and why they're not preempting this obviously monopolistic move by Microsoft.