I know you see quite a few SEO posts like this saying MSN’s improving, then next week it’s lookout Google here comes Ask! It’s going to be one hell of a struggle for Ask to make the top 3 search engines, for one they need there own PPC engine and not piggyback off of Google.  A-n-yway, I’m getting off topic now, back to topic - I use Yahoo practically everyday, doing searches, checking positions, link checks etc etc.  I have to say that the results were pretty good, even when compared with Googles, could Yahoo be the underdog in the game or are MSN going to piggyback the success?

But that isn’t the part that really impresses me with the new Yahoo, the thing that really impresses me is how Yahoo has stopped being what I like to call a Judge, and has now become a referee. Now these descriptions are probably not the best ways to describe them, but there the best I got and here’s the way I see them.

Judge Search Engine
A search engine that is a Judge does one of two things when penalising a site, one is GUILTY! where you get banned, the other is NOT GUILTY where you are not banned and that’s pretty much all Judge Search Engine can do.

Search Engine Ref
The Search Engine Referee can do more than two things, they can do infinate things punishing you as they see fit with unique penalties just for you if you’ve been naughty.  They can still RED CARD you where you get banned, but they also have the YELLOW CARD too so they can penalise your site and not just ban it such as the infamous -30 penalty.

Now the point I’m finally getting at is I feel Yahoo has upgraded to a Search Engine Ref from a Judge.  I have always thought of Yahoo, MSN, Ask and the rest as Search Engine Judge’s with simple banning procedures where Google has been a Ref for quite some time and have a number of ways to penalise you, and now Yahoo has stepped up to this pedastool.

Yahoo took quite a beating last year with a number of problems but they seem to be a lot cleverer so far this year

The theme of this blog has changed from when I initially started up, I was going to post stuff to do with the search engines, SEO and all things similar, but I’m too lazy and all I up doing is quoting people, so this blog is going to still be aimed towards online stuff, but it’s going to be a bit more general, coming complete with a new re-design, one day, but not before I reach my 2nd decade anyway.

I’ve emailed Google regarding my account going AWAL and have received no reply, for a week, regarding my Google account that had everything attached to it

Come on Google, what happened?

For those who don’t know, Google’s Gmail is a free non-invite thing now, great!  However I had a few problems trying to get one with my Google account, for starters when I tried to sign up, somebody had already taken the name Dudibob

I was keen to find out how Gmail worked because everyone talks about it, but I’ve never been too bothered so I signed up with some daft ‘try these names’ name.  it went thorugh, Gmail looks good from my 30 second play around but my surprise was when I went back to my Google personalised page… it wasn’t there anymore.

Not only had all my RSS feeds from various places gone, I noticed I was logged out, fair enough I thought, something must of logged me out.  So I logged back in only to find out that the account doesn’t exist.  Oh f#@k.

Now, if it was only my RSS feeds, that’d annoy me but it’s easily fixed, but the biggest kicker is when I realised that this account was linked to my Analytics accounts, my Google reader (I can’t remember half the stuff in there off the top of my head :() and my adwords master account thing which had my certificate for being Adwords qualified on it… I lost absolutely everything to do with the Google account

Not a happy bunny, anybody know how to fix this or have been hit my this?

Well this really is a corker! Thanks to good old akismet protecting my wee little blog it found this great bit of spam:

http://www.google.com…

Google blog spamming! they must be desperate for those top spots.

OMG! Google have a new function in Google Webmaster Tools which show you how many links you have pointing to your site,it was announced eariler over at the Google blog.  This is pretty big news, Google sharing what they know about your links, this will help show what Google thinks as a links and what it believes isn’t a link, at the moment the linking information is prett small as it’s a brand new feature and no data like this was stored (openly) at Google so it has some work to do before it’s effective.

As Matt Cutts has tried to hammer into our head, ‘Just because they appear does not mean the links hold value’ which is something most SEO’s should know from doing link:www.domain.com commands in search engines that show all (such as All The Web)

But from Matt’s line, does that mean he confirms that links currently displaying in the link:www.domain.com search in Google does show links that do hold weight? I think he does

I’m pretty busy for a change, trying to get some ideas out of paper and into reality promise to post something proper soon