Sometimes when checking your rankings do you find that the description of your site is outdated or incorrect? You may wish to check the cached version of your page in order to see if the search engine has simply been using an older, cached version of your page. But what if they do have your current page cached?

Sometimes search engines prefer to use the description of your page or site as listed on a third party site like the Open Directory. But what if you’ve been trying unsuccessfully to get the Open Directory to update your listing? MSN may have a solution.

If the results of an MSN search don’t match the actual information on your page and they seem to be using the Open Directory listing for your page, MSN reports that you can use one of the following tags in the header area of your page to show that you prefer that they use your site’s information rather than the Open Directory’s listing when they next visit tyour page:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”>
or
<META NAME=”msnbot” CONTENT=”NOODP”>

Currently this command only works for MSN. We can only hope that other search engines will follow MSN’s lead.

A couple of years ago, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch noted that in the competition for who had the largest index of web sites, Google had a new feature called the “supplemental index”. This supplemental index contains many pages from sites that will never see the light of day during a typical search. These pages are found only when the search is so unusual or narrow that only pages from the supplemental index seem to be a match for the query. Since the “Big Daddy” update began in November 2005, many web masters are finding that more and more of their pages are being relegated to the supplemental index.

As SEO Jim Boykin of webuildpages.com explains on his blog, these sites often have duplicate content taken from others, no real content such as fake “directory” sites that create a million virtually generic pages, or  “orphaned pages” which are those page that are not linked to from the rest of the website in question or linked to from other sites on the web.

Quite often “turn key” web sites like those in the real estate, nutrition, work from home, or other industries that rely heavily on duplicated cookie-cutter web sites have always had a difficult time obtaining rankings — but substantially moreso with this recent Google update.

It seems the lack of actual unique content really hurts these sites when competing with sites that have original, unique content and numerous relevant inbound links.

The major Web browsers are getting facelifts as they are increasingly used for handling business transactions and running programs over the Internet instead of simply displaying Web sites.

The upgrades are the latest skirmish in the browser war that started in the mid-1990s and led to Microsoft’s (arguably evil) triumph over Netscape. The battles reignited in 2004, when Mozilla’s Firefox launched and revealed many new features. Firefox has been steadily increasing market share since.

On Tuesday, Opera Software ASA is releasing its Opera 9 browser, while Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Firefox are in line for major overhauls later this year.

<read the full story from Business Week>

According to Security Pro News, researchers analyzed results of searches on Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Ask and found that “all of the major search engines returned risky sites in their search results for popular keywords” and that “dangerous sites soared to as much as 72 percent of results for certain popular keywords, such as ‘free screensavers,’ ‘digital music,’ ‘popular software,’ and ‘singers.’

Some sites contain nasty stuff like spyware, viruses and malicious code. In some cases, you’ll get spam if you give them your e-mail address. Increasingly, caution is the watch-word on the web.

Vigilance!

Suppose you have a web site selling shoes. If there’s a link to your site from a web site that also links to gambling sites, Viagra sites and the like then search engines might think that your web site is related to gambling and Viagra. The search engines look at the link pages and check to which other web sites the pages link. Your web site is construed to be in the same neighborhood or category as other sites that page links to. The theory is like this: If Bob is friends with Todd, Susan and Chuck, and if you’re friends with Bob, then chances are you’re also friends with Todd, Susan and Chuck.

In this case, it might be tough to get rankings for search terms related to shoes. And of course you might begin to show up on searches for gambling and Viagra — and that’s not going to help you sell shoes. Make sure that sites linking to you are somehow related to your products or services, and they’ll help your rankings.

Yahoo has filed a new patent with the name “Link based spam detection”. It’s another attempt from Yahoo to improve the relevancy of their search results by detecting links from link farms and other shady link sources so they can discount them. Links from such sites don’t count for your site’s link popularity if the search engines can identify them.

Yahoo uses PageRank and TrustRank to rank your web site, which is amusing because both terms are trademarks of Google.

How Yahoo tries to identify spam sites by using PageRank and TrustRank

In the patent application, Yahoo explains how they want to find spam farms  with the help of PageRank and TrustRank:

“A spam farm is an artificially created set of pages that point to a spam target page to boost its significance. Trust-ranking (“TrustRank”) is a form of PageRank with a special teleportation (i.e., jumps) to a subset of high-quality pages.

Using techniques described herein, a search engine can automatically find bad pages (web spam pages) and more specifically, find those web spam pages created to boost their significance through the creation of artificial spam farms (collections of referencing pages).

In specific embodiments, a PageRank process with uniform teleportation and a trust-ranking process are carried out and their results are compared as part of a test of the “spam-ness” of a page or a collection of pages.”

What does this mean to your web site?

Search engine engineers are not stupid. And search engine algorithms are evolving faster than ever. For that reason, it’s increasingly important that you don’t use “quick fix” solutions to get links to your web site.

If a service promises hundreds of links to your web site quickly and easily, then chances are these links are from a link farm. Search engines don’t like link farms and it’s been reported that some web sites even get penalized by participating in a link farm system.

Focus on organic link building and get high quality links that are beneficial to you and your web site visitors. If you use high quality links then you don’t have to be afraid of link-spam filters. With these links, search engines will see your web site as a useful resource and that will result in high rankings for your site.

The Open Directory, www.dmoz.org, is an important link source for any site, and is one of the general purpose directories we always submit our clients to. Its database is reportedly used by about 400 separate web site directories. Here’s a list. The Open Directory belongs near the top of your list in any link building campaign.

An attorney representing plaintiffs in a federal click-fraud class action suit pending against Google in California claims the $90 million settlement Google reached last month in a related case filed in Arkansas fails to penalize Google or fairly compensate advertisers victimized by click fraud.

The most that aggrieved advertisers can expect from settling with Google is about a half a cent for every dollar lost to click fraud, according to Information Week.