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I’ve just notice today that google has been hit by a duplicate content penalty and dropped in rankings…

I’m lazy and wanted to log into google webmaster tool so I search on google for “sitemaps” (It used to be sitemaps before)…

Anyway for the last few years google has been #1 for the search term “sitemaps” BUT not today…

Here is a screen shot showing google has indexed google.com and www.google.com

We can expect more ranking drop for google’s page over the next few weeks until google works out which is the “real” url..

Here is the query.. http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=sitemap

I spotted this morning that a loads of top sites are returning today date as a cache date below the snippet..

If you search for the “bbc” your be able to see the following:

Its 15:58 here in london and the cached page returns the following:

Barry has already blog this and include and DC that also include time in Mins..

I never saw the mins and the DC isn’t working now.. ahhh well

Screen shots of the mins here http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/014350.html

Well it seem like another PR update…

 odd…

 I seeing an update on this blog of no deep links up to december ? ..

 This update isn’t imho making sense on the site so i’m not going to bother commenting on the flow here..

Other sites have had a PR update too.. some up some down .. some odd… (most odd) and some to be expected..

This update imho looks like a freshness PR bonus.. (fresh link are counting a lot)

What else…

Well …

Google bombing algo change…

The likes of “lair” (was tony bliar at no1 ) and “miserable failure” (was bush at no1) no longer at the top!!!

matt cutts has posted regarding this to confirm that this will only effect bombed sites and not and overall algo change..

Serps are moving none stop and as matt said which I post about just over a week ago that the data refresh is set to 1-2 days…

Watching the serps is crazy..

More to come tomorrow..

Just read this great post started by tedster over at wmw forums

Here a few quote from what he’s writen in regards to missconceptions (and a drinking quote from George Orwell)

1. Page Rank is not Ranking

2. Site has no technical definition

3. Page has no technical definition

Really like this one.. Such a bad habit (I always say tag tut tut )

4. alt is an attribute, and not a tag

5. title is either an attribute or an element

And so on …

 Bit of fun on a Monday morning ..

Read the rest here:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3208794.htm  

This quote is taken from SERT and a great write up by barry  from pubcon on yesterday

Aaron Shear from Shopping.com is next up, he did not have a presentation, but took the podium. He explains that highly trafficked sites that use load balancing can often run into problems with bad URL structures, with numerous URL “nodes.” He said if your site performs very slowly, it normally wont do well in Google. He said focusing on the long tail is very difficult to make sure all those pages are fully indexed. If you have to click 30 clicks deep to get to a product, it is not good user experience, and Google will see that. He said, consider inserting multiple navigational paths to get to the same product or landing page. A good approach is to sell the optimization as a giant needle mover for the company, but make sure the engineers get credit for it, will make them work harder, quicker and more for your department.

The depth is a very good point and i’m often playing around with nav’s doing tests and I really agrree .. google see the depth as a score!.

 Cheers barry keep them coming

Read the full article here: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/006704.html 

Gbot activity..

This is very cool..

I have 3 sites with ye-oldie google sitemaps and its really good to see the difference..

Anyway this is what google said:

Check out these cool charts! We show you the number of pages Googlebot’s crawled from your site per day, the number of kilobytes of data Googlebot’s downloaded per day, and the average time it took Googlebot to download pages. Webmaster tools show each of these for the last 90 days. Stay tuned for more information about this data and how you can use it to pinpoint issues with your site.

Here is my chart:

More info here: 

 http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/10/learn-more-about-googlebots-crawl-of.html

Great post from Mattcuts about checking  for google bot..

Quote from googles webmaster blog :

 Telling webmasters to use DNS to verify on a case-by-case basis seems like the best way to go. I think the recommended technique would be to do a reverse DNS lookup, verify that the name is in the googlebot.com domain, and then do a corresponding forward DNS->IP lookup using that googlebot.com name; eg:

> host 66.249.66.1
1.66.249.66.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer crawl-66-249-66-1.googlebot.com.

> host crawl-66-249-66-1.googlebot.com
crawl-66-249-66-1.googlebot.com has address 66.249.66.1

I don’t think just doing a reverse DNS lookup is sufficient, because a spoofer could set up reverse DNS to point to crawl-a-b-c-d.googlebot.com.

More info and links :http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/09/how-to-verify-googlebot.html#links