Search statistics released by comScore yesterday indicated that Ask grows it share of the search market by 20% in January 2008, however given the fact that Ask share of the search market is the statistically insignificant 4%, it would not be difficult to grow by 20%. The reported 20% growth in January 08 does not take them to the statistically significant 5% of the overall market share.

comSore top five search engines

* Google Sites – 7.7 billion searches * Yahoo! – almost 2.5 billion searches * Microsoft – 1.1 billion searches * AOL - 903 million searches (this is powered by Google) * Ask.com – over 400 million searches.

You can find out more information about comScore at their website

It’s been a very exciting time there at UKWW. With our community growing daily with new members of the SEO, Web Design, and Webmaster niches, I’d like to talk about one of the reasons why there is much excitement lately. You see, it is due to our February 1st kick off of the SEO Contest 2008, for which the winner gets a whopping $1,000 USD award. The roster has many SEOers (professionals and hobbiests) today, and growing.

This Search Engine Optimization contest which is being sponsored by the UKWW is being run and maintained by the forum facilitator and it’s admin to make sure both the rules are strictly followed as well as the custom scripts results are 100% accurate. And speaking of the scripts, we can give a big hand to our fellow UKWW members for it’s creation.

There has been a huge buzz with the SEO community over the cash prize that will be awarded to the winner of the contest. The prize itself is the icing on the cake for the winner, who gets the bragging rights on being the Best SEO of 2008. But of course the $1K is allot of icing!

Some of the contestants have purchased new domains specifically on their entries, while other have opted to create sub-domains and sub folders. One rule of the contest states that the entry URI must be newly created specially for the contest. I can’t wait to see the results, so we can see what techniques, work better than others as far as on page optimization goes. There is allot to gain as far as seeing what these techniques are that made it possible for the winners (as well as the top 5 entries).

Will that contestant investing heavily in back links see the $1k grand prize? Will on page factors make or break an entry? I can’t wait to see the results!

I would like to talk about the recent changes in the biggest Search Engine in the World. I am not sure if this happens for Internation websites or other regional websites ( UK based or Canada based ) but I do know for sure that it is happening in Romania, for www.google.ro

Recently there are a lot of changes in the result pages generated by google Romania. I can see SERP updates even once at 5 ( five ) minutes and that is not what I would call normal. The natural way of updating the SERPs for Google Romania was once or twice a week. So this makes me ask my self: What is happening ?
I decided to do some test on the romanian market and it is quite simple, you can also test this your self. Just pick 4-5 word you would like to play with and search the romanian Google ( google dot ro ) as often as your time allows . Pick a site to play with and see its positioning when you search. Also, do not forget to check the number of generated results. You will see sites moving arround like crazy, 5th position, after an hour check again and you will see it on the 9th position, after check again and you will see it first. That is not natural, indeed.

I first though this is another dance for a big update or something similar. After it crossed by mind that maybe Google is trying to implement a new algo. Now I have got to the conclusion that I do not know exactly what is happening, I can only have oppinions and I must test further to get to a conclusion. One other possibility would be that Google is returning on the same computer, at 5 minutes time between a search and another one, for the same keyword, results from different Data Centers. I have seen the case, one DC for Timisoara and another one for Iasi, but I have never though of it like this.

Now to go further, let us play a bit with the results from a romanian keyword.I have searched for tipografie ( it means print house ) on google dot ro and first I get over one million results and at the second search five minutes later I get under a million.
Rezultatele 1 – 10 din aproximativ 997.000 pentru tipografie. (0,08 secunde)

Another case was that for a keyword that used to generate arround 60.000 results, I got now over 400.000 results. One hour later I got arround 87.000 results. That, again, is not normal. And all these things cause problems. There is no way you can offer a client a good aproximation of what their website will be in 3 months time if Google keeps on playing with the results like that.
For some of the sites I am working on I get really bad results, the number of visitors coming from Google dropping quite much, while for other websites I got a higher number of visitors, but this only in certain days.

And now, the question is : why does google generates the result pages different for each browser ? A client noticed this while searching using IE. I ran the test in that moment and he was right. Now I can not get a similar result, but if the case will repeat, I will sure take a screenshot.

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