SEM Guru

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.

According to Matt Cutts of Google – Part 2 of the Jagger update is about to kick in.

“I expect Jagger2 to start at 66.102.9.x. It will probably stay at 1-2 data centers for the next several days rather than spreading quickly. But that data center shows the direction that things will be moving in (bear in mind that things are fluxing, and Jagger3 will cause flux as well).”

He also states -

“Jagger1, Jagger2, and Jagger3 are mostly independent changes, but they’re occurring closely enough in time (plus they interact to some degree) that it’s clearer just to act as if they were one update for feedback purposes.”

What does this mean for you? Things in Google will continue to be in a state of disorder until part 3 of the Jagger update which is due to commence next week is completed. The purpose of the updates is to reduce spam listings in Google. Feedback on forums are asking amongst other things why Google are doing a major update so close to the holiday season when so many online businesses rely on holiday sales to survive. Many site owners are frustrated with Google.

As this update is outside of our control, the main thing we can do in this period of upheaval is to keep you informed. Updates to our client’s sites are on hold until after the update is complete and we see how things stand. News on the updates along with questions or comments will be posted on the Elixir blog

Thanks

Fionnuala Downhill

For those not in the know, Tomcat is a JSP interpreter that works with most webservers, but is primarily seen with Apache on Unix. OK Tomcat is more than that - see http://tomcat.apache.org/ for more details.

Anyway the problem with this site was it was setting session information on the home page that was then subsequently used on internal pages. This makes the site search engine unfriendly as any direct access to internal pages would reroute to the home page because the session variable wasn't set.

One of the many ways to answer this is to set up some search engine firendly internal pages that set the session variable. Tomcat has this handy ability to redirect requests internally without leaving and reentering the webserver (IIS has a similar feature). The following code shows this in action:

<%@ page import = "java.sql.*" %>
<%@ page import = "java.util.*" %>
<%@ page import = "java.text.*" %>
<%@ page import = "java.io.*" %>

<%
String URL = "/NewPage.jsp" ;

String productCode = request.getParameter("ProductCode").trim();

// Set up the internal URL with the passed in arguments.
URL = URL + "?ProductCode=" + productCode ;
RequestDispatcher dispatcher = getServletContext().getRequestDispatcher(URL);
if (dispatcher == null)
{
out.println(URL + " not available");
return;
}
else
{
session.setAttribute("MySessionVariable","Whatever" ) ;

dispatcher.forward(request, response);
}
%>

If you like to read regularly updated content on search engine marketing you should check out James Peggie's Search Marketing Blog.