Udi Maber, VP of engineering at Google, is going to be a bit more transparent in how the search giant’s ranking algorithms work. On the GoogleBlog, he says “this blog post is part of a renewed effort to open up a bit more than we have in the past.”

Sounds promising, but as Google worry about giving away too much information for fear of their competition, I don’t think we’re going to read about anything too revealing. Anyway, it’s certainly a blog post to watch, read more here:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/introduction-to-google-search-quality.html

Google algorithms appear to change daily and whilst competing for popular phrases I notice who moves around and am always interested to figure out how a website got to the front page. I’ve been focusing on the term SEO Services for a while now – just researching, I’m yet to implement any optimisation until I launch my new site.

Anyhow I notice today there is a new player when you Google SEO Services. Number one is a company called Web Dynamic. They have a really good looking professional site, but scratch the surface a little and it’s no so professional.

If you click the first link you’re taken to a page titled SEO Services, still looks good, you’re in the Search Engine Marketing group, you click the tab and you’re taken to an equally as nice page talking about search, you can’t see a link back to the page you just came from, but that doesn’t really matter does it? Well, yes.

This is a well designed site, it doesn’t look like the kind of site that forget about a link. So a bit of investigating discovers there are more than 13 orphan pages all dedicated to the same subject:

1. SEO
2. SEO Australia
3. SEO Services
4. SEO Services Company
5. Search Engine Optimisation Provider
6. Search Engine Optimistion Consultant
7. Search Engine Optimisation Strategy
8. Search Engine Optimisation Company
9. Search Engine Optimization
10. Search Engine Optimization Services
11. Search Engine Optimisation Australia
12. Search Engine Optimization Australia
13. Search Engine Optimization Specialist

See them all live on Google and on their page, www.business-directory-online.com.au, where the SEO person obviously just got bored and just posted everything. They all contain pretty much the same content, just re-written in different ways and prominent use of the keyword.

I hear what you’re saying – it’s not spam and it’s not against Google webmaster policy to write the same page more than 13 different ways (I got bored of counting all of them). But, wait – there’s more!

These pages all have inbound links. From crappy domains. The spammy domains:

http://search-engine-optimisation.org.au/

http://web-designer.org.au/

http://online-marketing.org.au/

http://website-optimisation.org.au/ etc – there’s rather an impressive collection of .org.au’s.

All of these domains are registered to the same guy who has registered the webdynamic.com.au domain.

Whilst they may not have breached any guidelines what they are doing is filling the web with spam, actually no, they have breached, just looking at the Google Quality Guidelines – basic principles:

“Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

Mmm…I think not.

p.s. I’m not being a bitch – it’s all part of learning what makes a quality page one result. This ain’t it.

I was following up with our friends of Google to see if Rob’s Google maps business listing has returned to normal (read here). No, it’s got worse, the mother ******* Nestsoft people have hijacked my mother ****** listing as well.

If you do a search for businesses on http://maps.google.com.au/ and type in SEO as the service and Sydney as the location, you’ll see our friends of Nestsoft appearing in the number four spot : Nestsoft Web Development, Designing, Seo Services…mother ****** (Gordon Ramsey can fill in the *******)…

Now I’ve just noticed I can claim this listing – it has a sparkly “NEW” link next to it. Even though it’s already in my Business Centre, anyway I’ve gone through the whole claiming and filling in details again – thinking it will all be sorted when I get the phone clarification straight away – only to find I can’t do phone clarification – it’s disabled. Mother ******! I’ll have to wait weeks for the mother ******* postcard.

The race is on.

Who will be quicker:

• Snail mail or
• Google Maps or
• Google AdWords (yes, I also wrote to them as they disapproved one of my local business ads based on mismatching business name)

Sadly my bets are on snail mail.

Even sadder: it’s Friday at 7.55pm and I’m still at my computer…