BigDaddy news

Bigdaddy status update: almost there

We’re down to just 1-2 data centers left in the switchover to Bigdaddy. It’s possible that the Bigdaddy switchover will be complete in the next week or two. Just as a reminder, Bigdaddy is a software upgrade to Google’s infrastructure that provides the framework for a lot of improvements to core search quality in the coming months (smarter redirect handling, improved canonicalization, etc.). A team of dedicated people has worked very hard on this change; props to them for the code, sweat, and hours they’ve put into it.

Gone Supplemental

Some site owners over at WebmasterWorld have been discussing an issue where on Bigdaddy data centers, the site wouldn’t be crawled as much in the main index. That would result in Google showing more pages from the supplemental results for that site. GoogleGuy requested feedback with concrete details, and several people responded with enough details that we identified and changed a threshold in Bigdaddy to crawl more pages from those sites.

I checked in that email queue tonight to see how the “gonesupplemental” feedback looked. I looked at an emergency responder site, a truck site, a ticket site, a karate site, a silver site, a T-shirt site, a site about memory, a site selling a type of document, a boating site, and a jewelry site. All were getting more pages crawled, and I expect over time that we’ll crawl more pages from these sites and similar sites that people mentioned. The biggest site that I saw had 711K pages reported, and I saw other sites with 40,400 estimated pages and 52,700estimated pages for a site: search.

So the upshot is that if you’re one of these people who was paying attention to this issue, I think it has already improved quite a bit, and I would expect to see more pages indexed in the coming week or two. Some sites may see improvements earlier than others because of where a site happens to be in Google’s crawl cycle.

Number of channels increased on YPN

Yahoo! Publisher Network made some changes last night during their Friday night maintenance downtime.

First, the number of channels has been increased from 50 to 100 for each of the reporting URLs and reporting categories.

They have also made it possible to remove ad style palettes as well as rename them. This will be great, as I will finally be able to remove one of the two channels I inadvertantly named JenSense back before YPN was in public beta.

There are also some cosmetic changes that avid YPN stat checkers should notice immediately.

Tags: YPN, Yahoo Publisher

Keywords

As you might imagine, good search engine optimization (SEO) techniques are extremely important for the single-page site. The page must target a specific keyword, ideally as narrow a niche as you can make it. Make sure you do all the standard SEO tricks:

* keyword in domain
* keyword in title
* keyword in heading
* keyword in bold
* keyword used near the top and bottom of the page

Check the keyword density of the page (important: do this before you place any ads on it) and make sure the focus is on the right keyword.

Getting the keyword in the domain name may be hard. You may find it simpler to use a subdomain associated with a domain you already own, since then you can name the subdomain whatever you want.

memwg

Firefox made $72M last year

The best piece of information I got out of BarCampLA was that Firefox, which is produced by the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, made $72M last year and is on target to have 120 employees this year. I have no idea if this is true (anyone?), but it makes sense. I mean, there have to be 72M people using Firefox out there, and making $1 a year seems low to me! Mark Pincus brought this topic up recently.

Mozilla Corporation makes all that money because of the Google Search box on the top right. If you search with that box (which I do all day long) and you click on the Google ads on the results page Firefox gets ~80% of that. They also have Amazon in the search box, and other services that I'm sure kick them back some affiliate fees.

calacanis

google search adsense, mozilla firefox

Buying text links

I've recently considered buying some links to my web site and have some thoughts on what the best approach is. I'll outline them here briefly and would be interested in hearing what you all think about these assumptions/guidelines.

1) Buying from a link broker is fine, but it is important to be aware of several things, including:

a) Link brokers are, ultimately, interested in selling as many links as possible - listen to what they have to say about what works, but take it with a grain of salt as well.

b) When PR increases, they'll likely be quick to point out the "new higher rates" for your links...but when PR falls, it's unlikely that you'll be contacted about your decreased monthly rates. You have to watch this for yourself.

c) They'll have plenty of links that are in unrelated categories or just on questionable sites. Choose how much you want to "walk the line" with linking. If you want a blast of links to quickly get to the top of the rankings in MSN and Yahoo!, you may have to buy on questionable sites. If you want to be more careful or "whitehat", choose relevance and be patient in waiting for the right opportunities.

2) Buy links on relevant sites - this conflicts with the options I've listed above, but in my case, I wish to only buy links that are from relevant sites with legitimate content. If the site appears to be fodder only for eyeballs and adsense clicks, I'll avoid it. But if it's related, or in an ancillary area of service (mine is a service business), I'll go with it. "Related" is grey area sometimes, but I have decided always to err on the side of caution.

3) Watch the IPs where the links are coming from. If you can't easily access a list of the IPs, it may be best to avoid that broker. You should at least be able to see IPs after you've signed up for an account and all links should be on different "Class C" IPs (e.g. - aaa.bbb.CCC.ddd).

4) Don't view a link from a PR 8-10 site as a magic tool to vault you to the top of the rankings. It likely won't happen, though in the long run it should have beneficial effects on your PR (in Google) and, more importantly, rankings and traffic.

5) Mix up your anchor text, using multiple phrases or words that are relevant and for which you'd like to rank well. Blasting many links using one set of anchor text may get you to the top in Yahoo! or MSN in the short run, and maybe even Google, but Google will likely "dislike" this as it doesn't appear to be "natural" linking. The current index update should be evidence enough of the strange things that can happen with the mother of all search engines.

6) Try to buy links that will actually deliver traffic by themselves. This may seem elementary, but with the clamor about buying links merely to increase PR or gain top 10 rankings, what is often overlooked is the traffic that can actually be delivered from links on relevant, high-traffic pages.

Canton , DP Forums

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