Some people report that some datacenters report updated pageranks. This will stirr emotions and cause nausea for some, happiness for others. Personally, I prefer high pagerank above a lower one. Because pagerank is still some factor in the algorithm. But it doesn’t seem to be as great a factor as it used to be. If you have good anchor text for example you might do better then a page with higer pagerank. So I don’t think one should stare blindly at it: the value of a page in a search is determined by more than incoming links. Get those other factors right and you should do well.

One of the strangest phenomena in the Google world is the sandbox. Say you create a new site and are able to get it indexed in Google. A link to it from the right place is sometimes all you need for a page. So you see in your stats that Google has visited your site and a few days later you are about to check your site in the Google index. You carefully type in http://www.yoursite.com/, hit enter and yup, there’s your puppie! Awesome, in just about the blink of an eye you made it into Google’s index. Naturally, you are also eager to know what place you are in the search engine results. Take as an example that you opitmised the site for a three keyword phrase “word1 word2 word3″. So you type those three words in and let the results display. It appears you are not on the first page. That’s OK, since there is some strong competition going on for this keyword combo. You hit for the next results page. Again, your site isn’t there. In fact, it appears not to be in the first 100 of results. Guess things will be a little tougher than you thought. But you keep on searching and finally hit the last page. Your site isn’t there also. In fact it didn’t come up in the search results at all? Why is that?

The answer is: you’ve been sandboxed by Google. For some undetermined period, at least a couple of months, your site won’t appear in the search engine results for some more competitive keywords. Mind you, it is there. It is indexed and Google knows about your site. But it’s algorithm has decided not to show you for some terms while for others (the least interesting) you do show up.

Am I making this up? Not at all. Matt Cutts aknowledged there is such a thing as the sandbox on a PubCon conference. Brett Tabke, webmaster of webmasterworld asked the question there directly to Matt. His answer was that (and I quote from a thread at webmasterworld)

that there wasn’t a sandbox, but the algorithm might affect some sites, under some circumstances, in a way that a webmaster would perceive as being sandboxed.

I know from experience that it doesn’t have to be a whole site that is affected but can just be one page. I have done some testing where I put up a bunch of articles. A couple of genuine reviews I wrote together with some scraper reviews. I got a decent link pointing at it making sure Google would visit the site often and all pages would be indexed. All of the articles were indexed, but one genuine review got sandboxed. This review was in a really competitive niche and about buying something. I used the keyword “buy” in another review but as that was sort of the only real review of that product to be found on the internet it takes the first place in the results. Clearly it was not the specific keyword that triggered this.

Nobody really can tell whether your site will be sandboxed or not. There is speculation however, like when you point a link to it from a webpage with high pagerank you will avoid the sandbox. I can’t tell whether this is actually true.

And why does it exist? Debate about that too. Clearly, the Google folks are happy with this effect. Most webmasters aren’t and I am one of them. It is a lot less fun working on a website you know the next year or so noone will look at.

I once started testing how well google, MSN and Yahoo would index pages from Phorum, a bulletin board system written in PHP. I happen to have a test phorum installation somewhere on this site that is a showcase for my martha theme I once made for it. Now phorum uses dynamic urls by default though there are some plugins available that can transform these into neat urls. It turned out that google and MSN indexed those neat urls pretty good. Yahoo didn’t seem to like me and had only a handfull of pages indexed. Afterwards I removed the plugin that generated the neaty urls and left my test board alone, with the broken urls and the new (normally default) ugly dynamic urls with parameters in place.

Today I did a search on what pages of this site were indexed. It turns out that MSN and Google made the jump quite easily. All obsolete urls seem to be gone, and in its place are now the new urls you always get warned about. I must add however that google hasn’t indexed all of them properly. Some of them are just indexed with no description at all, just giving the url in its results. I don’t know whether this is due to them being dynamic or caused by my switching. I’ll leave them as is for some more and look again later.

Yahoo still doesn’t like me. It has indexed about the same pages it had when I first looked.

There are none I know of. Allright, there is one, tuxguardian, but it seems like development has stalled. I have seen nothing move on their website for almost two years now.

I’m still mainly a Windows user, unfortunately. And in Windows, I know what application is trying to access the internet. That’s nice, since I like to keep an eye on that and as we all know, in the world of Windows that necessary. I feel like I’m in control of my internet access.

In linux I can use a firewall too. Excellent ones like firestarter exist that make it easy for lay users like me to configure. But I always feel I have to keep doors open. If I want internet access I need to have port 80 open. And to me that reads like every other program trying to get access to the internet through port 80 will get that access.

I see the difference as follows: in Windows I control who can get in and out of my house through one of a few thousand doors. Every time one wants to get in, my house security system asks me if I want it to open the door so that that person can get inside (or outside). For family members I allow the door to be opened. For thieves I don’t. The same door can be opened for family members and closed for thieves. In linux I have to leave a door open for my family members to be able to get inside. And that doors stay open. If the thieve happens to try to get into my house (or transfer all furniture out) using that door, he gets in easily.

I know things aren’t so easy. If linux wasn’t secure it wouldn’t have gained such a widespread acceptance, especially for its security. But I also have tried on many occasions to get an answer to my concern and never got any. I’m sure there is one and I’m all ears if someone can enlighten me.

That’s right: big tits. With pictures, a free video and a free trial membership. Now let the money roll in.

When people ask what kind of sites I make I almost never tell them what they are all about. I always say: “about just anything”. And most of the time this seems to make them thinking I’m doing some porn sites. Probably my kind of smiling when I tell them that doesn’t really help (I actually start smiling because I know they will think in those directions). If they then ask if I do porn, I don’t lie and tell them “No, but if I knew for sure I would make loads of money with it, I would jump the wagon.”

I know some people have moral objections about doing something related to porn. I don’t have that kind of feeling towards it and would have no problem running a big tits site. Don’t ask me to shoot the movies myself, but I could be an affiliate marketeer. Get one big tits site up, optimize it a bit for the search engines, and never have to look at it again while you have some income and time to do something more valuable.

I always read that porn is one of the things you can make a lot of money with. So why don’t I just do it and create my dream tits site? The answer is bandwidth. I don’t doubt that such a site would generate a lot of attraction. From the time I was still looking for free hosting I remember one quit with it because some member created a porn site (against the TOS) and the host ran out of bandwidth because of that site alone. But aren’t a lot of visitors what we wanted? After all, if noone visits your site, no money will be earned. If many people buy your site, a lot of money will be earned, right?

I don’t believe it always works like that. Let’s say I have a site with all kind of freebies on it. Will it attract people ready to spend their fortune on some product I might advertise? Maybe I could have advertising for some free product that gets its income from spyware, so at least something would be earned. But I don’t think you could make a living out of that kind of traffic. And I also believe a porn site is essentially the same. Lots of traffic, low return of investment, because people are looking for free porn. It will cost you a lot of bandwidth (pictures and movies take up a lot of space).

Now I’m not a porn expert, and maybe there is a lot of money to earn with big tits sites. But I have my doubts and what I said above is the number one reason. Fortunately for me, there are other subjects for my sites. If you know better, let me know. ;-)