December 2003 SE Updates
December 1st, 2003
Search Engine Updates for...
| Overture (Inktomi/Fast/AltaVista) | Lycos | ODP | LookSmart | Yahoo | MSN |
In this month's issue...
- Google's Over-Optimization Penalty
- MSN Launches Newsbot beta
- Yahoo switching to Inktomi soon?
- Google looses sight of GoDaddy Hosted Sites
- Overture caves in and rejects pharmacy ads
- Lycos Sues Overture, swaps to Google AdWords
- NBC new search will feature Overture listings
- LookSmart Adds Article Search
Google Update - http://www.google.com
What's new
Google's Over-Optimization Penalty
Oh boy, where do were start on this one. This past month showed us the mother-of-all-changes at Google in many ways. If you didn't get knocked out or lose position on your important keywords, count your blessings because a great many commercial web sites did! ...and incurred serious loss of traffic in the process.
In last month's Google update we discussed an Algorithm Update that turned out to be the preliminary sign of an impending results shake-up. And, frankly, we were spot-on in our analysis – perhaps not in wording but most definitely in results. Our test sites that we DID make changes to, in response to the new algorithm, are now doing extremely well for the keyword phrases that in the end-of-month October had lost serious ground. Perhaps we were just lucky. Regardless, we made our changes before the majority of analysts even saw what was...
