The Oracle of Mountain View and Googles PageRank Update

The recent PageRank™ updates by Google stirred up quite some talk within and outside the search engine marketing industry and opened room for many more or less far-fetched speculations about what this could mean. There no need to panic just yet, but it also does not mean that you should do nothing.  A list of facts was provided, followed by a few assumptions that are tied directly to the mentioned facts without going off too far into the realm of pure speculation. 

Summary and take away from the post:

“If you saw a PageRank™ drop as a direct or indirect side effect of all this, you will probably be affected by the things that are likely to follow, but so is your competitor, if he was affected by the recent PageRank™ updates as well. If all sites in your space were affected by this update, chances are that they will be affected the same way by any other changes that might come. If everybody is affected the same, nothing changes overall.”

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Spoofed Google Sites with Official Google IP. Got Google Hacked?

This was discovered by Heather Paulson and then published by SearchEngineJournal.com earlier today. 

There are sites that looks like Google and even have an official Google IP from their headquarter in Mountain View, California showing up in their domain registration records (Who-Is) and “Ping” results, but the domain is something like xxxdisc.net or ckopo.org.

Ckopo.org is even referenced twice by the Russian Wikipedia in the article about Firebug (Firefox plug in) and “Dozory.Forbidden Games”. The references made in the Russian Wikipedia point to sub domains of Ckopo.org, which look like the Russian Firefox homepage and Firebug plug in help pages.

• What does this mean?
• Got Google Hacked?
• What is going on there and what is the purpose of this?

Every answer found so far only raised additional questions and made the whole thing even more fuzzy and suspicious.

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Don’t Get Your Web Pages Filtered out by Search Engines

Search Engine RoundTable is reporting from the Search Engine Expo Advanced. Transscript from the SMX session about the duplicate content issue (Duplicate Content Summit) with representatives from Google, Yahoo!, MS Live Search and Ask.com.

• Information about what webmasters should and should not do.
• How each of the four search engines deal with duplicate content.
• Questions and answers.
• Suggestions and ideas to improve on the issue.

The workshop was moderated by Danny Sullivan
Speakers: Vanessa Fox, Google; Amit Kumar, Yahoo; Peter Linsley, Ask.com; and Eytan Seidman, Microsoft Live

Pictures are also available. If you are a web master, you should read this.

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