The next big Google Index update is underway and can be seen in the following datacenter: 66.249.93.104. This update is not an algorithm update but a infrastructure update. It has new code for sorting the web pages of the index. This new update will be live across all Google datacenters in February or March.

This update is suppose to help in allowing less spam, 302 redirections issues and canonical URLs. It also includes a new search engine spider that is based on the Mozilla browser. The new spider should be able to index more files types and do it better.

How to transfer an existing domain name and keep your rankings

If you have a web site that needs a new domain name due to rebranding or a change in company name, and you don't want to loose your current rankings in the search engines then this article is for you.

Search engines don't recognize that your domain name has changed and they see a new domain name as a new domain which is subject to their aging delay which can put your rankings on hold for a period of 6 to 18 months depending. If you've worked hard to get your current web site traffic and rankings then of course you don't want to loose that.

In order to tell the search engines that your web site has moved you have 2 choices, you can do a 302 redirect "temporarily moved" or a 301 redirect "permanently moved". Both of these are done at the server level. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect that tells the search engines that you are no longer using the old domain and you want to transfer everything over to the new one. If you do this however the new site does not assume the same positioning as the old site. The pages are subject to the aging filter. The best way to keep your current rankings is to do a 302 redirect. What will now happen is your old domain will remain in the index and will keep it's position as if it still existed, but the viewers will see the new domain. By doing this you can retain your old rankings until your new domain is no longer being held due to the aging delay.

It will be important to have any linking partners update their links to your new domain. This will help establish a linking campaign for your new domain which is important to your linking strategy so your new domain gains popularity. Once you notice the new domain showing up in the search engines in 6 to 18 months then you can change your 302 redirect to a 301 redirect. Don't remove the old pages until all links on the web have been updated to reflect your new domain name.

Good Luck

The co-founders of Google were recently interviewed on what they thought of the Google SERPS (search engine result pages), and they rated their search engine result pages a 3 saying that the index needed to become better and more relevant to people's searches. If I were a betting man I would have to say that we haven't seen the end of Jagger type updates to the Google index. So that means that more people and business's are going to find their listings possibly change temporarily or permanently.

Following are ideas on what you can do to keep your site fresh and hopefully close to the top of the SERPS. Age is a good thing to Google, the older the domain name the more established Google feels a site is. An attractive web site with fresh content that has been around a while makes Google feel that you're here to stay. Inbound links have always been and will always be important. Relevancy to your demographic is still equally as important on inbound links. Sites that will link to you because of your rich content still remain the top way for a web site to have respectable inbound links. And last but not least make your web site easy to travel and navigate.

 Strangely enough a lot of web site owners don't take the time to have their web pages optimized for the search engines. The effects of optimizing a web site will pay off greatly over time, but some webmasters not wanting to invest the time in proper optimization resort to cloaking.

 Cloaking is the design of special pages that are written for search engine spiders. They identify a spider based on a set of IP address's and return special optimized pages instead of what a web surfer would normally see. If the search engine catches the cloaked pages they will ban a site from their index. It is just a matter of time before a site that implements cloaked pages will be caught.

 Search engines want to return the freshest possible content to the end user. To achieve this, high quality sites need to be indexed. To build a high quality site you need to have numerous pages on your web site with rich textual content. You also want your html code to be clean and well written. Poorly designed html can have an effect on how your web pages will rank. You should focus on one to two and possibly three keyphrases that each web page is optimized for. Trying to get many phrases per page simply will not work. The most important aspect of your web site optimization is building a good inbound link campaign, over time.

 If these simple time consuming steps are followed the rewards gained will far exceed the time spent. Happy Optimizing!

The latest search engine studies show that the #1 position in the search engine gets clicked 34% of the time while the #2 position gets clicked 12% of the time. This pretty much confirms what we have always known and that is the first 3 pages of a search engine are where you have to be if you want to get hits from search engine traffic. A previous study of the Georgia Institute of Technology found that 75% of searchers never look further than page one. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen pointed out: "Users almost never look beyond the second page of search results."

So if you want to get your web site noticed it's important that you do the following; Always choose the right highly targeted keywords for your web site, so you can attract your true customer, create a web site that has rich content that can be optimized for many different combinations of keywords, and build incoming links with like sites or sites that are related and relevant to your industry.

GoogleDance Pics have been posted at Google from the 2005 San Jose SES.

Read recap articles on the 2005 San Jose SES.

 Some web sites in the latest Google update were removed from top positions on Google that had been there for years. Webmasters were trying to figure out what had happened and couldn't figure it out. After further analysis of the web sites and the web servers that they were on it was determined that their firewall was blocking access to the robots.txt file which in turn was causing their site to be removed from the index.
 
 The firewall software by SonicWALL Inc. doesn't allow access to the robots.txt file because it considers it a security violation. In actuality I can understand why it does this since one normally puts files or directories in it's robots.txt file that surfers should not be allowed access to. If your host is running software by SonicWALL Inc. they need to allow outside access to the robots.txt file so the search engines can have access to it. All 3 major search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN need access to this file if it exists in order to spider a web site.

 For years it has been argued whether or not Google tracks click-throughs in its search engine. If you believe their patent filing then the answer to this question is a resounding yes. According to their patent, not only do they track them, but they reward them. The reward appears to be higher placement. People who have the Google toolbar installed may also have their bookmarks, cache, favorites and temp files tracked also. In relation to tracking Google may also use or track the the following:

 -- Make sure that your web pages have attractive page titles so they pop in the search result pages
 -- Analyze your web pages to insure the content will keep the user interested
 -- Optimize your web site pages