Alex Gomes >> Blog

Google just launched Gbuy, supposedly a PayPal killer. This is not another product launch. It will define the web in the next few years. Its about providing backend from advertising to checkout for webmasters. This about leveraging the user base form AdCenter and Overture. If Google fails, this will be huge setback on Google brand and future potential of Google Inc. Well, enough said, I will enjoy the competition while it lasts. Join as a buyer. Join as a seller.

If you haven’t heard already, yesterday was the start of FIFA World Cup. 1.5 billion people will be watching.
So its no wonder, the search engines have attempted capitalizing on the game.
Google for starters have change there logo and added a special page for world cup.

Also for select searches they actually give you the score.

ASK did the most interesting thing. They actually put all the teams on there front page.

Yahoo, created whole section on World Cup.

MSN, ahh nothing.

Try each of them out. And enjoy the game.

The deal about Google MediaBot.

MediaBot (also known as Mediapartners-Google/2.1 ) is the Google crawler for AdSense publishers. What it does, is it indexes the pages which contain Google AdSense ads. Now since AdSense and AdWords are the bloodline of Google, webpages gets indexed more frequently by mediabot than googlebot. So that Google and the Publisher can show the most relevant ads and hence earn more money. This however did not help you in search engine rankings (claimed by Google).

But one thing changed few weeks back, Google search engine started showings web pages fetched by mediabot (which have not been fetched by googlebot).

Then Matt Cutts confirmed that indeed Google search engine will be showing results from mediabot.

Previously the configuration looked like this:

Now the configuration look like this:

What used to happen was that multiple bot would fetch a single webpage multiple time which lead to waste of CPU and bandwidth resources.

Now Google has a giant mirror of the Internet called cache. Your website is synchronized with the cache by the highest priority bot. The rest of the bot gets the content from the cache not from your website.

Matt Cutts from Google claims that your website does not get any advantage by using AdSense.

But I don’t agree with him. If you put AdSense on your website, mediabot will visit your website. So in practice, since mediabot indexes frequently because it’s related to the bloodline of Google, your website will be indexed faster and more frequently if you put AdSense. Now that does not mean you will get better ranking. But lets say you write an article about some rare new xummmmbuuu widget and you have AdSense on the webpage. Your competitor writes about the same widget but does not have AdSense on his webpage. Lets also assume there are not lot of webpages about the rare widget. Who will have better rank? You will. Your website will get indexed faster and hence get authority.

Remember you heard it here first, about this Google Hack. Now make some money.

New Page Rank algorithm.

There is a rumor that a new page rank algorithm is out with bigdaddy.

The new formula looks like this:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

In laymen terms:

It means real Page Rank is calculated over time.

Initially you home page where all the links are usually pointed gets high PR relatively to internal pages. Over time and many iteration, PR flows from to your internal pages and your home page drops PR and rank.

So initially your new website rank well and over time it loses rank because of the flattening effect of page rank. Also this might be sometimes misunderstood as “Sand Box Effect”.

Are you tired like me, about Google this, Google that, but not finding those in Google.

For all you Googlers here is Google Sitemap.

I am pretty sure I missed some Google stuff, but will update when I see something new.