Google Dance or
Google Dazed?

I’m not trying to cause alarm, but do you realize that Christmas Eve is less than 99 working days away? Christmas shopping season starts earlier and earlier each year, and it is less than 73 working days until Nov 15th.

My friends at the MarketingExperiments.com team have a great web clinic coming up on Wednesday, August 9. The topic is MEC Merchandising Calendar for the Fall and Holiday Season 2006. If you’d like to attend, you may register here. MEC is recording the call if you miss the live call.

So, onto the big question on the board: Will Google change the game again this fall? Could it get any worse? I had a client complaining the other day about a news article that was ranked above his site on one of his favorite key terms. Actually, an Aljazeera article from March of 2006 was the first link on the second page and didn’t even have our search term in the article anywhere.

Aljazeera.Net - Rush to aid Iran quake survivors
Rescue teams are en route to western Iran after three strong earthquakes and several aftershocks left at least 66 people dead and around 1000 injured. ...

This was frustrating for us and the client because we had been working pretty hard to get a page one ranking on one of his ‘money’ terms, and here was the Google algorithm returning garbage results.

Then, there was also a blog, on page two:

things fall apart by petite anglaise
diary of an english thirtysomething in Paris. ... 18.07.2006 8:00 am. Tadpole rearing, working girl. I have hinted, in recent weeks, at events which were ...

Maddening. Simply maddening.

It seems Google has tweaked up news and blog value to virtually ignore and exclude actual page keyword relevance. Go figure. So much for providing meaningful content. Keyword nowhere to be found in content…oh bother. Then there was the article from The Economist. Then there was the nifty .PDF that had our search term glaringly absent. Well, at least it did have the term in the URL somewhere. Thank goodness for small favors…;-).

Economist.com
Repression did little to stop anarchist violence. But eventually the world moved on and the movement withered. BOMBS, beards and backpacks: these are the ...

Again, the keyword was nowhere to be found. Is the Googlebot on drugs? Or simply needing to be sent back to the Beta-land sandbox where Froogle exists in perpetuity? Or is it a plot to get us all to spend more on adwords? Are adwords really web-crack for business? Hmmm…you be the judge.

The lesson? Don’t count on things over which you have no control. I am not a ‘Chicken Little’ but the Google dance has happened before during the month of November . My advice: diversify your traffic now, do smart shopping search submissions, and do your best to get ranked on Yahoo!, MSN and others. I ask myself, is a page one ranking all it is cracked up to be? Do I want to be in a business where our success and failure is judged not on how much more profitable we can make our clients but solely on getting page one ranking on Google? I think not. Can we predict Google’s changes? They need to change, yes! Will the change be in a time that won’t affect e-retailers? Well, I simply don’t know.

Something we can predict is that the new IE 7.0 will come out of beta sometime in the fall. The word on the street is that it will be pushed out to windows users who have opted into auto update mode. I’ve found that the Gap and some other big players have some funky code incompatible with IE 7.0, but that’s next week’s topic. [more]

Google Sitemaps Renamed and Finally Compatible
with Y! Store
Introducing, "Google Webmaster Tools"

Ever since Google Sitemaps launched in June 2005, Y! Store owners have become frustrated at Google's choice of file verification and requirements of the sitemap format. Google Sitemaps allowed webmasters to "hand" Google a thorough xml document containing a list of all pages in their site to crawl.

Not only was Google's choice of format foreign to many store owners, but the required placement of such a file went against the basic hosting capabilities of a Yahoo Store.

Recently, Yahoo has added full Google Sitemaps functionality to the Store Manager. Google has also renamed its application to Google Webmaster Tools, which contains a series of tools showing off index information, robots.txt validation, top queries, crawling info, and more. You can read more about Google Webmaster Tools here.

For more information, and to learn how Ydesigns.com can help you set up the latest tools and analytics, email Leta Miller at lmiller@ydesigns.com or give her a call toll-free at 888.770.8883 X303.

Contact Ydesigns.com™ today and ask about:

Ydesigns.com and Web Store University now offer our Yahoo! Store Basics designed to ‘teach a man/woman to fish’ for shoppers with a Yahoo! Store net! This is the first in our series of classes we call our ‘Success Path” designed to help ease the learning curve in opening or managing a Yahoo! Store. Taught by Matthew Ledford to students across the US and beyond, WebStoreUniversity uses GoToMyPC webconferencing software and powerpoint slides together with live audio to equip store owners with basic tools to build a successful store.

Call Leta Miller at 888-770-8883 x303 for more details, or click here to register online!

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