. . . continued from Hot News Meta Refresh Woes It appears that when using this hole or bug, someone could rank #1 in Google for Yahoo or anything with an affiliate program. Couple that with Google's apparently botched indexing update at several of its data centers, and you've got the makings of a disaster brewing at the offices of the massive and dominant search engine czar. Check the meta refresh bug yourself by doing a search for AdSense. The first result on the page is for a site at www.all-in-one-business.com/adsense/ with the actual Google AdSense page in #2 position. It looks as though Google is somehow now redirecting the link to itself. Isn't it nice to have that power? The so-called Bourbon update is another matter altogether—apparently a very costly one too for AdSense users. It's a wonder nobody hanged themselves last weekend (May 20-22). WebMasterWorld reports legitimate site after site showing AdSense revenue drops ranging between 30%-90%! Indexing Engine Fouled Overnight for all intents and purposes, Google's latest indexing engine update has destroyed months (and in some cases years) of effort on the part of dedicated content creators and producers. A search for some Kickstartnews reviews tells the tale. If you search using the phrase Review of Village Sim, Google's results place the review on page 12 of the results, well behind idiotic irrelevancies such as the Learning Village Educational Software Review of SimCity 4 (all the keywords being there, but completely unrelated to the Village Sim game). WebMasterWorld has dubbed this latest Google update "Bourbon" for obvious reasons. It appears as though a drunk was in charge of this one. By the way, the same search in Yahoo!, MSN Search, AltaVista and DogPile all put Kickstartnews near the top on the first page of results.

Would someone please interrupt the fatuous reveries of Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (President, Technology and President, Products respectively) to point out that rolling out a new indexing engine is probably best done only after statistical modeling and testing on internal staging servers has been completed.

I checked with some business associates in England and Germany and it appears that they're getting mixed Google results over there. Some results are dead-on accurate, some are wildly wrong. What that might mean is simply that an indexing engine update is taking place at a limited number of Google data centers. Once the bugs have been worked out and corrected, the full rollout will take place. Here's hoping.

Would someone please interrupt the fatuous reveries of Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (President, Technology and President, Products respectively) to point out that rolling out a new indexing engine is probably best done only after statistical modeling and testing on internal staging servers has been completed. While Brin and Page and the rest of the board are reveling in Google's US$255 share price, perhaps they might part some of the clouds beneath them and observe that the latest sloppy rollout has cost the rest of us little folk some serious traffic and some serious financial action.

If Kickstartnews is placing at or near the top on Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista and DogPile for relevant searches for most of our product reviews, why should Google be trusted when it suddenly and without warning demolishes the hard earned rankings of Kickstartnews and tens of thousands of other good sites and replaces them in some instances with irrelevant nonsense?

This is by no means the first time that Google has fouled things up. As WebWorkshop reported eighteen months ago (along with a thousand other tech web sites at the time) "on November 16th 2003, Google commenced an update (branded the Florida update) which had a catastrophic effect for a very large number of web sites and, in the process, turned search engine optimization on its head. In a nutshell, a vast number of pages, many of which had ranked at or near the top of the results for a very long time, simply disappeared from the results altogether. Also, the quality (relevancy) of the results for a great many searches was reduced. In the place of Google's usual relevant results, pages [were] listed that [were completely] off-topic, or their on-topic connections [were] very tenuous to say the least." FUBAR. The end result was that over the following four to six weeks, Google had to correct the mess and things gradually got back to normal.

Money Makes the Difference

There is one crucial difference between Florida and Bourbon and that is the AdSense program. AdSense didn't exist in any particularly trenchant form in 2003, although the Florida escapade certainly affected plenty of AdSense customers. Fast forward to May 2005 however and you have an order of magnitude more AdSense customers, many of whom will suffer with vastly reduced income from Google, while the search czar reaps big money from AdWords until the programming mavens in Mountain View get that pesky indexing thingy all sorted out again.

It's enough to make a grown man cry.

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