Two months ago, Google released a 63-point patent document outlining how it examines historical data associated with websites and documents in its index. Since that time, we have witnessed changes in the algorithm which have become known as the Bourbon Update. StepForth has written a short whitepaper which studies that document and gives a short overview of the patent and how its contents may affect the Google organic search engine. It is important to note, this document does not cover subsequent announcements from Google such as Google Sitemaps. The following are a few paragraphs from the whitepaper, “Historic Data and Google Ranking: An analysis of the March 30th, 2005 Patent” Read more…

They say that today is the first day of the rest of your life. That makes everyday an important one though as we all know, some days are much more important than others. Today is one of those days. Read more…

Google is undergoing some of the most sweeping changes in its short, seven year history. As of next week, Google will have finished sorting what might be its largest algorithm shift ever as the final points of the 3.5 part Bourbon Update were installed last Monday. This update has been staggered into three and a half sections in order to avoid a massive amount of dislocation in established rankings as was seen in previous major updates. While changes stemming from the Bourbon Update have not actually manifested into a full reordering of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), many individual webmasters have reported fairly significant losses or gains in ranking over the past few days. Read more…

Michael Yang and Yeogirl Yun are two of the most interesting entrepreneurial engineers in the business of search. Representing the business brains and intellectual brawn behind the vertical shopping search engine Become.com, both Yang and Yun have storied histories in the industry. Read more…

Pioneering Internet marketer, Corey Rudl, aged 34, died in an auto racing accident yesterday morning. As the founder and CEO of the Internet Marketing Center, Corey was credited with creating enormous wealth through lengthy action-orientated website marketing pitches. His writing style has been studied, copied and used by literally millions of other webmasters over the years. The Internet Marketing Center generated over $7.5M in revenues last year and Corey often claimed to have made over $40M worth of Internet sales in the course of his decade long career. Read more…

Google is trying a little experiment. They already have the largest public database of documents found on the web but there is always more to see than meets their spiders’ eyes. Google Sitemaps is a good way to start finding it.

Google appears to be inviting webmasters and SEOs to create detailed sitemaps in XML format to invite, direct and re-invite Google’s spiders as the sitemap evolves with the site. Webmasters can set priorities and protocols to tell the spider what should be examined and how it should be seen. Google provides a highly detailed explanation of XML instructions, but only to those who’ve signed up for a Google account. More on that stuff later.

Get a jump on your weekend and start learning about creating and submitting sitemaps to Google today. In the long run, a lost techno-weekend following a pleasant long-weekend might not be so bad after all, given fun of playing with spiders.

Twenty years ago, the lead singer of the Irish punk band The Boomtown Rats, Bob Geldof organized two concurrent concerts, one at Wembley Stadium, London, the other at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, to send money and food to famine stricken Ethiopia. Known as Live Aid, the concerts were a follow-up to a global effort on the part of recording artists through the UK , US and Canadian Band-Aid recordings. On July 2nd of this year, musicians around the world will band together to do it again with five simultaneous concerts planned for London, Berlin, Rome, Paris and Philadelphia. Read more…

Google and Yahoo are eating lunch on what used to be the expense accounts of the largest advertising and information venues in the world.

Both Google and Yahoo reported record revenues last quarter, income that is expected to grow rapidly over the coming years. As the leaders of the search advertising pack, Google and Yahoo represent the wide end of an expanding wedge. According to Safa Rashtcy a senior analyst at investment bank Piper Jaffray, search revenues will increase by a staggering $18 billion over the next five years. Projected revenues are expected to surpass $10 billion in 2006, $13 billion in 2007, $16 billion in 2008, and $19 billion in 2009. By the end of the decade, revenues generated by search are projected to be in the $25 billion range. Read more…