Yahoo seems to be ratcheting out Inktomi results along with their standard Google results. We believe Yahoo will be moving towards Inktomi in the near future.

Hi folks,

it is 12:15 on Friday the 19th. As of 15 minutes ago, the holiday season started for StepForth staff. Here is our holiday schedule in case folks want to get a hold of us:

StepForth will be closed for holidays during the week of Dec. 22 – Dec 29. We will be operating with a reduced staff from Dec. 29 to January 5th. We will be closed for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.

From all of us at StepForth, have a happy and safe holiday season and thanks for an excellent 2003.

Please understand that this poem is tongue-in-cheek and that our staff is working harder than elves on a deadline. I needed to take some liberties with reality to make the poem work. It’s Christmas and my friends got together and bought me an artistic license. I thought I’d use it… Happy Yule y’all!

Read more…

It has been exactly one month since Google introduced its infamous Florida Update. As the Florida Update has brought about the largest and most comprehensive shake-up of Google’s listings ever, it has generated a great deal of interest around the world and genuine panic for the literally millions of webmasters who’s sites have been adversely affected by the change. Read more…

Lots of folks send money home at Christmas and Yahoo has introduced a service for people with friends or family in Europe. Pay-Direct International allows people to withdraw a specified amount of cash from one the 800,000 (or so) Cirrus ATM machines networked around the world. The service is available in English at www.paydirect.yahoo.com or Spanish through www.espanol.yahoo.com.

As far as an easy to use tool goes, Google has just given itself and the massive courier firm Fed-Ex a wonderful Christmas present with the introduction of Fed-Ex package tracking features from Google’s front page. Within two easy clicks, we were able to trace a CD-Rom being shipped to us from a client in Iowa. The same trace on the actual Fed-Ex site took four steps, cutting a significant amount time.

Try it yourself. If you have a package currently in transit through FED-Ex, go to Google and type “fedex (and your tracking number)” into the keyword window. The results are extraordinary and fast.

The Christmas/New Year holiday season is a great time to break bad habits picked up over the years. One habit I will be trying to shake this season is the habit of defaulting to Google each time I do a search. For me, it is a terrible but very real habit to automatically move to the address bar and type www.google.com when I need instant information. With the growing number of off-base results we’ve seen at Google over the past few months, I constantly wonder why I fall creature to such a habit, especially as I know there are better options out there. Read more…

Well, there is still alot of movement with Google right now. I am not sure if it is going to be positive or negative but the movement is real. Many in the SEO forums are talking about “the other shoe syndrome”, a rather fatalist outlook for a bunch of optimizers.

Again, this looks more like an experiment than a full algo shift. Let’s see what happens in the coming weeks.

Reports from WebMasterWorld have Google starting to show sites that had been hurt by the Florida Update. While we have not seen any major changes, we’ve only been at our desks for about an hour this week (pacific coast time). Will update frequently on this one.

Happy Monday. It rained all weekend. Today it is sunny. see below.

Looks like Google took over the weather bureau as well. Too much power…