This past week was all about the anticipated Google IPO, which we are still waiting to happen. But I tried not to discuss the financial aspects of Google and the industry, not that I am not following it. A major event occurring with Google is something known as the Sandbox Effect where new sites seem to be put on a hold before ranking well for any keyword combination. There was a bit of speculation on why this is happening, some of which is in the topic of purchasing expired domain names but that theory does not seem to be consistent with the reports at the forums. Other speculation was that these sites were seeded with Ghost PageRank, but I do not believe that to be true either. Theories are springing up daily, one thing that seems to be fairly consistent is that this hold period lasts for about 90 days.
It has been an exciting week for Google's AdWords department. Besides for the new Pay Per Click's Trademark Policies, where Google began allowing US competitors to buy trademarked names but those names can not be used in the ad text. Maybe that is why the Google AdSense and AdWords server had some technical difficulties, speak up who ever you were that hacked in. There was some good news this week on PPC, spending on PPC is up compared to other online or offline advertising media. That is what influenced my post named, Organic and PPC Are Friends not Enemies.
Continuing with Google, yea I know it was a big week for them, Google gave props to the earth. Soon after, Google gave back to the SEOs with a PageRank and backlink update. Some people reported that Yahoo! search was back to using Google's index, but that was rejected. We tried to figure out how to manipulate the description for ones site in the SERP but instead found Google was doing a heck of a job indexing Flash. Finally with Google, new look for Israel Google, "I am Feeling Lucky" Has no Referrer, and we tested hyphens and underscores in url and title.
On a more general search engine optimization we discussed the pros and cons of multiple sites with same database and linking between multiple sites on the same IP address.
Forum specific topics included Dan's post on his dissatisfaction with some forum threads. But I was able to find some of the more hot threads on the Internet. And we even talked about how AskJeeves is growing so quickly. If you think that is wild, to top it off we even had a thread on a Famous Subservient Chicken.
Looking forward to next week!
