Didn’t take Google to copy MSN on this one. Everytime you do a search on Google for whatever, right at the bottom of the page above the page links, it displays a related searches section now

Also to all UK residents, it only appears on Google.com at the moment, same as MSN. here’s a screenshot using the legendary search on cars:

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?

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

Threadwatch have found out that a few people from the Google spam team have left to work for a SEO company! Now this lucky SEO company will have an insight into how Google functions, probably not the whole algo but definately how they see spam, lucky buggers

Now the scarier part of all this is that they came from the Google spam team, which is headed by Matt Cutts, Google’s front man and face of the company, Matt Cutts is yet to respond.

Today Google declared that they have finally sorted out the Googlebomb, which means Tony Blair is no longer a liar and George Bush is no longer a miserable failure…according to Google.

Now well done to Google for sorting this out with there hand crafted algo update but I feel this isn’t over just yet, it could go one way or another:

One way is that they haven’t eliminated all Googlebombing due to some being harder to distingquish at the moment.

Second way is that this algo could handycap people who have a lot of links with the same achor text trying to promote there site.

Lets hope they got it spot on

regarding my other post, PR’s back, that really was a quick fix by the big G or it was simply a refresh… me thinks the latter

Today I’ve heard quite a few people and have noticed myself that PR has dropped for the majority of websites. In case you don’t know, Google has about 40+ data centre’s just for PR really and you don’t receive an average of all the DC’s no, you get the results of one of them and pretty much everyone is different.

Usually you can expect to see (for example) PR 5 on the majority of the DC’s and PR4 on others or even 0. So whenever you use the Google toolbar, your assigned a DC for the session, you sometimes can have this DC all week, sometimes every time your browser refreshes, Google like to keep you on your toes. The main way to check what PR DC your hitting (this has worked every time for me, if you know a better way, tell me! ;)) is to do a search with the Google toolbar (anything, as long as it’s a search and not a operator command) and mouse over the cached link by a search result, check the location of the link by looking at the bottom left of your browser for an IP and hey presto you have the IP. Then you can compare it to PR checker tools. and as a final note PR is seriously out of date, the toolbar only gets updated once a quarter and even that information is 3 months old and I find PR pretty pointless the way Google displays it, more of a marketing tool to make you install the toolbar than helpful.
Anyway lesson over and back on topic

As you can see on DaveN’s Blog, you can see that Google’s PR has gone seriously screwy and the majority of the results are 0 (this blog has PR 0 as it’s new so no point checking mine :p). It is about due a PR update but I’m disappointed with the results so far (where’s my PR 10! :))