DriveTraffic recently was commissioned by Transport Canada to provide training on “Writing for Search Engines” in order to analyze the departments current search engine visibility and techniques to increase that visibility when required.

I would like to refrain from mentioning the companies name in excess, so I’ll do it only one more time: KinderStart.

Thought you might enjoy some of the comments on the topic from Search Engine Watch:

• One of these days, there will be a main stream reporter that understands the terms used in SEO…. Being banned is now being in the sandbox, according to this ignorant reporter….I guess some reporters just love catchy names… even if they are wrong!
• I checked out the web site (the one suing Google) and it somehow got a popup past my blocker and offered to install a spy ware program. This is a site aimed at children for goodness sake …
• If I had a site with problems like this I would be looking at my webmaster, not at Google. I still have not seen where Google has done anything unusual to them, what am I missing?
• These guys have a sub par website that uses some ’shady’ methods and they are blaming google for not listing it at the #1 spots they want…. Like I never heard that story before working as an SEO.
• I can understand being out to make a quick buck, don’t get me wrong, but at the least, have some ethics. There site is loaded with garbage that is not appropriate for children.
• They even put Adsense code in their site. They never paid a penny for any sales generated by organic search, and Google did not ask for any percentage of their earnings just because Google was the referer that helped people find their site.

So it would appear that my views are shared by the masses and the problems with that website are well beyond title and meta tags!

A friend and colleague emailed me the link to a news item that Kindestart is suing Google for “without warning in March 2005 penalizing the site in its search rankings, sparking a “cataclysmic” 70 percent fall in its audience — and a resulting 80 percent decline in revenue”.

Is this company for real? Rankings go up and down all the time. The article implies we are referring to just the word “Kinderstart”. With all this publicity, the site itself now is being overshadowed by news articles relating to this lawsuit - think Kinderstart can sue Google for that too?

You have not been blocked from Google - you have 17 000 pages indexed. BTW Kinderstart, how about using the meta description tag on your site? Or perhaps writing unique page titles? It is obvious that you have not hired an SEO at all or at least not a reputable one (will I get sued for saying this?) - try spending the money on this industry that would get you keyword rankings for a heck of alot more than “Kinderstart” and if you were making that much money on the word “Kinderstart” I can guarantee you will be making a great deal more with the help of an SEO.

We’ll even give you a discount for being so naive :-)

A while ago Matt Cutts of Google, indicated that Google would be making some hardware changes and it may have an impact on search results. It has turned out to be a larger project than I anticipated, and the search results are so impacted that the project has a name - Big Daddy.

What does Big Daddy mean to you? It can impact your results in several ways. For starters, Matt mentioned on his blog a while ago that Google engineers tended to try things out during the week so they could tweak any problems that arose and usually went back to the pre- Big Daddy results on the weekends.

This means that if you monitor your rank or saturation you may see some differences between a weekday and a weekend.

There are several datacenters that return Google search results. Every time you do a search, your results could be coming from a different data center without your knowing. There are several sites out there that publish the different Google datacenters

I won’t go into details about different datacenters here but instead will point out what you might see:

• if you are trying to determine your saturation or how many pages you have indexed, you may find that using a tool such as Market Leap, returns a different set of numbers compared to your doing a search at Google yourself. This may be attributable to the Market Leap tool using a different datacenter than what you are seeing. If Market Leap shows a higher number of pages indexed than what you see, this is good news. You need to continue optimizing your site and ensuring your pages are spiderable, but it looks like you might see an increase in saturation down the road.
• try your search using site:www.site.com as well as site:site.com. I accidently did a search without the site: and saw different results! For the website in question, most data centers returned 1 indexed page without a description. A query of thatsite.com returned 2 indexed pages along with a description for one! Good news for sure and it would appear that to continue working on the site will bring important changes
• backlinks will vary. Many SEOs tend to rely on Yahoo! for backlinks since Google does not show all backlinks and tends to update their backlinks every three months
• rankings for various keyword phrases will vary widly from what I can see. There is nothing you can do about this other than to be sure you have optimized for a VARIETY of phrases and hope that one of these phrases always comes up for someones search in some part of the world :-)

On that note, I need to go and be sure to optimize for more phrases on a clients website!

Read more about Google Data Centers at McDar or check your results at a few different data centers using the McDar Datacenter Quick Check tool.

You may also want to keep an eye on Matt Cutts blog or the forums at Webmaster World or High Rankings.

A while ago Matt Cutts of Google, indicated that Google would be making some hardware changes and it may have an impact on search results. It has turned out to be a larger project than I anticipated, and the search results are so impacted that the project has a name - Big Daddy.

What does Big Daddy mean to you? It can impact your results in several ways. For starters, Matt mentioned on his blog a while ago that Google engineers tended to try things out during the week so they could tweak any problems that arose and usually went back to the pre- Big Daddy results on the weekends.

This means that if you monitor your rank or saturation you may see some differences between a weekday and a weekend.

There are several datacenters that return Google search results. Every time you do a search, your results could be coming from a different data center without your knowing. There are several sites out there that publish the different Google datacenters

I won’t go into details about different datacenters here but instead will point out what you might see:

• if you are trying to determine your saturation or how many pages you have indexed, you may find that using a tool such as Market Leap, returns a different set of numbers compared to your doing a search at Google yourself. This may be attributable to the Market Leap tool using a different datacenter than what you are seeing. If Market Leap shows a higher number of pages indexed than what you see, this is good news. You need to continue optimizing your site and ensuring your pages are spiderable, but it looks like you might see an increase in saturation down the road.
• try your search using site:www.site.com as well as site:site.com. I accidently did a search without the site: and saw different results! For the website in question, most data centers returned 1 indexed page without a description. A query of thatsite.com returned 2 indexed pages along with a description for one! Good news for sure and it would appear that to continue working on the site will bring important changes
• backlinks will vary. Many SEOs tend to rely on Yahoo! for backlinks since Google does not show all backlinks and tends to update their backlinks every three months
• rankings for various keyword phrases will vary widly from what I can see. There is nothing you can do about this other than to be sure you have optimized for a VARIETY of phrases and hope that one of these phrases always comes up for someones search in some part of the world :-)

On that note, I need to go and be sure to optimize for more phrases on a clients website!

Read more about Google Data Centers at McDar or check your results at a few different data centers using the McDar Datacenter Quick Check tool.

You may also want to keep an eye on Matt Cutts blog or the forums at Webmaster World or High Rankings.