Search Engine Musings

Earlier this year I wrote about the rankings that this blog had enjoyed dropping substantially despite the main site holding on to its positions. Yesterday I discovered a possible cause. A correspondent on one of my other blogs notified me that his anti-virus program had alerted him to an attempted trojan link when he visited my other site. I investigated and found that a section of JavaScript had been added to my header.php file which used character code to open an iframe containing a link to a malware site. I removed it and restored the original clean file. Naturally I then checked my other blogs and discovered the same problem on this one. (Interestingly another blog based on a different template was clean, though that may just be a coincidence.)

The dates on the infected header.php files were the 18th and 19th of January and I don’t know yet how the JavaScript code was attached, but I’ll be updating the Wordpress installation (ironically I hadn’t upgraded immediately to 2.3 because I thought 2.1 was stable and secure) and trying out a new security technique that I discovered last night. If you have visited the site since those dates then I’d advise you to run your anti-virus programs. I’ve checked my own machine and found no problems so my own security seems to have held firm.

Now for the SEO implications. I check some of my rankings every week. On the 17th Jan they were fine with a number of top 5 results. By the next check on 24th Jan they had dropped substantially in Google. This strongly suggests that Google had identified the malware link and marked the blog site down for it. The blog rankings continued to tumble, suggesting that each fresh visit from Googlebot was pushing it further down. However I haven’t had any messages in Webmaster Tools notifying me of any problems. The question now is whether I should wait and see what happens after the next couple of Googlebot visits or if I should send a reinclusion request straight away. Suggestions welcome!

One thing for sure. I’ll be checking the file dates on my blog files regularly and keeping an eye out for any JavaScript in the source code.

Be careful out there!

Interesting; midday on Saturday (UK time) and Google is down. A tracert command runs fine on both the .co.uk and .com addresses but the wewbsite doesn’t respond. Not only that but sites that I know run Google Analytics are slow to load, presumably because the analytics calls aren’t responding.

My first thought was to look for news on this but what do you do when your main source of news is the thing that’s not working? Nothing on the BBC News (probably don’t think that new-fangled internet thing is very important), nothing on the various blogs and RSS feeds I monitor. Let’s try Yahoo - nothing useful in their web search (stuff from an outage in 2005), and their link to news takes ages to load before again showing nothing current. How about MSN/Live - hmm, taking ages to load and then eventually appears with no CSS formatting or images. The search box is still there though - but nothing in the results. The alternatives aren’t doing too well are they.

Checked three SEO forums but nothing there; guess the Americans are all still asleep. Some UK blogs, nope nothing there either. Now in the old days we’d have had Fidonet…

If it wasn’t for the single hop tracert result I might wonder if it was an ISP problem. Hmm, just noticed the Sphinn feed isn’t responding either. I’m beginning to feel as if I’ve woken up in a parallel universe or a sci-fi story and people are going to reply, “Google? what’s that?” Like Beverley in ST-TNG when she’s trapped inside a collapsing warp field and people keep disappearing.

So, this all begs the question. What do you do when the company that has almost a monopoly on information disappears. Expect further thoughts on this. (Though you might not be able to find them if Google doesn’t come back up!)

(Edited to add that Google came back up around 3.45pm )

So the much speculated bid has finally happened. Will they say yes? If they do what will the search industry look like in a years time.

Recent figures on search market share in the USA suggest that Yahoo may be losing ground and MSN/Live gaining, though there seems little suggestion of it in the UK. Indeed there is a suggestion in some figures I’ve seen that Ask is finally beginning to make an impact and is close to MSN/Live, though both are at a very low level.

Looking at the respective assets of Microsoft and Yahoo there is a great deal of overlap that would seem to suggest that any amalgamation is going to be painful for both staff and users. Both companies have mail systems, both have instant messenger systems, and of course both have search systems. The chances of duplicate systems surviving the accountants’ eagle eyes seem to be low, yet a lot of brand loyalty could easily be killed off if it’s handled badly. There some areas that will be attractive to Microsoft - the Flickr photo archive for instance - but the conventional wisdom amongst most commentators (Aaron Wall being a notable exception) seems to be that they want Yahoo for search.

Now Yahoo search is a strange beast these days. Aaron calls it stale and there is something in that description. Their speed of response seems slow - at one time they were faster than Google but these days it seems to take weeks before they respond to site changes - and their results are often very strange. The odd thing is that they themselves took over some interesting search engines but don’t seem to have done much with them - Alta Vista may have been an odd takeover choice but AllTheWeb was a very promising engine that seems to have been sidelined rather than incorporated. Maybe that’s one of the things that Microsoft want. Certainly they seem to be getting nowhere with their own search system; it was promising for a while about 18 months ago but once Live Search arrived it seems to have become erratic and on some searches produces some of the worst results I’ve seen. Another possibility is that they want the Overture PPC part of the business to shore up their falling ad revenues

Quite honestly I can’t see Google losing any sleep over the search aspects of the combination - they are so far ahead in that area that it seems impossible for anyone to challenge them unless they themselves make some bad blunders. Not impossible, given the negative press they’ve been getting over privacy for instance, but fairly unlikely. But they certainly seem to have been stung into action given their hard-hitting comments about “illegal practices” being carried into the internet arena. Maybe that’s just a knee-jerk reaction or maybe they think Microsoft are up to something and are desperate to nip it in the bud. Apparently they were concerned enough to offer Yahoo a deal to stave off the takeover.

All-in-all my suspicion is that the war between these two giants is going to be more far-reaching than just search. Such is Google’s lead that Microsoft can’t win on just search and they are a company that doesn’t like to come second. They must also be worried that Google’s attempt to switch users to online-based data storage and office apps is threatening Microsoft’s traditional monopoly in the PC office suite and operating system area. If they were to lose that then they’d be in trouble. So the search market may not change all that much this year but a lot of other things might.