Online
Marketing Newsletter
- August 2004
It's been a few of months since the last
newsletter. Just a couple of things to report.
Google
penalizes large number of sites
The biggest news has been the large number of
penalties being applied to web sites by Google
over the last few months.
Earlier this year I mentioned that both Yahoo
and Google announced they would be focusing
on search engine SPAM, detecting and penalizing
sites that attempt to influence the search engine
results by various methods considered to be
unethical.
Many, many sites have been penalized by Google.
It appears that the penalties mostly involve
sites that Google believes are participating
in various linking tricks that many companies
have developed to try to improve their rankings,
such as setting up numerous domain names and
cross-linking the sites to inflate a site's
apparent popularity as well as other linking
schemes.
However,
many sites that do not appear to be involved
in any "unethical" practices have
also been penalized. We can only hope that Google
has "over penalized" and will correct
the situation quickly.
Both Google and Yahoo publish online guidelines
of acceptable and unacceptable practices for
web sites that wish to be included in their
databases. You should take a minute to review
the guidelines and make sure you don't break
the rules or your site may get penalized too.
Google
Guidelines:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
Yahoo
Guidelines:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-18.html
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MSN Search Engine
Preview
We've been telling you MSN Search has
been developing its own search engine for some
time now. Currently most of the search results
on MSN Search come from Yahoo.
MSN
has released a preview of its search site where
you can ”Give it a spin” and provide
feedback for a limited time.
MSN
Search Preview - http://techpreview.search.msn.com/
Previously
MSN announced they expected to launch the new
search engine in 2005, but don't be too surprised
to see it sooner.
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