Recently I was working on an new website promotion plan and I noticed that there were no content. Instead there was strange text, beginning with Lorem Ipsum…. It reminded me of Latin, but as I tried to translate it – it seemed to be some senceless set of words. I asked the designer who created the mockup if he knew what it meant & he explained to me that this was the text web-designers usually use to fill the site with before actual content is written, and that it means absolutely nothing. So I got interesed and googled for “lorem ipsum”. Many of you may laugh & say that it’s a common knowledge, but for me it was a discovery. So, in case I’m not the only one who doesn’t know that – here’s what I’ve found out.

“Lorem Ipsum” or “Lipsum” is a standard dummy text used in printing & typesetting industry since 1500, when an unknown printer used it to make a specimen book. It has not only survived for more than 500 years, remaining almost unchanged but it has leaped into electronic era! But what is even more astonishing – Lipsum is not just some abracadabra. It comes from a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, which makes it over 2000 years old. Latin professor Richard McClintock discovered its undoubtable source: Lorem Ipsum comes from “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance.

But someone as ignorant as I were may ask: Why the heck should we use this? Why not simply type something like “text here – text there”? Right? But here comes the really common knowledge. Any readable content or text without normal distribution of letters will distract reader when he’s only trying to see the layout of the page. That’s it. If you’re interested in the source of lipsum, you may find some excrepts and translation “here”. And here’s the “almost” standard Lorem Ipsum passage, used since the 1500s

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do website design eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim seo ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut web development aliquip ex ea commodo web design consequat. Duis aute search engine optimization irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat offshore dedicated centre nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia web proramming deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.”

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The interview with Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos showed that Microsoft is holding far-reaching plans to come top in the Search Engine World. Here are some lines from the interview:

Asked whether Microsoft missed the boat in the field of search technology, Mr Gates admitted that he had to take the blame for losing out to Google.

“We took an approach that I now realise was wrong,” he said.

“Our strategy was to do a good job on the 80% of common queries and ignore the other stuff.”

Other stuff?? Dear Mr.Gates, do you mean the greatest S.Brin’s creature called “Unbeatable Google Algo”? Well, nothing personal, but the Google algo contains more than 150 intellectual techniques to determine who is the chosen one – who has the rights to be in the TOP of SERPs. Sure, MSN is working out their “algo” independently and let’s see what progress it has made:

1) The relevance has gone down up to 80%!!!

2) Spam sites with doorway pages are coming up in TOP10 results! (Good job, MSN!

3) Duel listing for same doorway page above.

4) Unrelated sites that contain ONE keyword in the meta-data. (No comments, either)

5) 3 pages site appears that has the search term in the url.

6) Blogs are valued greater than 5 years’ old quality sites!

Well, the picture of search queries is grey, deep grey… We couldn’t stand this: loosing top positions practically for all our keywords for a night is awful. The only way out was to join the angry webmasters community & contact MSN directly through their feedback form in the bottom of the site. Perfectly realizing that our “strong disagreement”, to put it mildly, with the SERPs results would not be taken in account, we tried all the same. Surprisingly, the situation has changed to the better – we are back again in the TOP! Respects to MSN!

Spam has always been underestimated by the G3 (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and billions of “day-fly” web-sites have been in the SERPs. But the situation is changing and taking MSN as an example, one can predict that sooner or later the Algos will clear out these scraper web-sites and those that are under work of black-hat search engine optimizers.

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Seo-guys have been waiting long for the Google PR Update… More than 3 months are gone already. Till yesterday – no signs at any datacenter. But today the figures of “green meter” on the toolbar are bouncing and two DCs (66.102.11.99; 66.102.11.104) are showing some changes. The results are not stable and the numbers change at the velocity of sound. But gaining a PR4 on the site that is only half a year old is great, anyway.

I wonder, Matt Cutts is not giving us any info until the PR update is over… Awkward but logical to the Google engineers’ conception. Mentioned above DC’s began showing new back links that the algo likes so much. All our projects have a favorable position regarding this, so, there’s no time to panic.

Three months over, no stable PR figures but this is temporarily and hopefully in some days we’ll be able to take care of business and continue our reciprocal links building campaign in the long run.

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Long time ago webmasters understood one important thing that enabled them to get enormous number of visitors to their web-sites. It’s not a secret that people make mistakes while searching for some services or widgets in the Net. The spelling mistakes can benefit those web-sites that are to be promoted very fast and beat the competitors.

If a webmaster has a web-site that sells, for instance, modern furniture and mattresses he/she could definitely use the keywords like “funiture” (162 searches a day according to Wordtracker), “matras” (34 searches a day), “matress” (346 searches a day) and so on. Just make the necessary changes in title, meta-tags and in the content body itself and you’ll reach the top! Outstanding results one can make out of people’s illiteracy!

Right now the situation is improving a bit as there are fewer and fewer illiterate searches in the cyberspace. It’s not a piece of cake anymore to reach the top10 even if you use, say, “bithstones” keyword instead of “birthstones”.

One can mention this “misspelling technique” as an old micro-strategy in marketing world, but the idea has transformed into a global direction in the Search Engine Optimization world due to its efficiency and marvelous results.

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Many of our clients express a desire to “push the envelope” when it comes to Search Engine Optimzation. Optimizing your website for search engines can be a bit like doing your taxes in that there are some black and white rules, but then there is that grey area that is a bit more discretionary. Stay out of the grey area completely, and you don’t get the results you want. But if you wade too far into that grey area you can pay severe penalties. Just ask BMW (article appended below)! If you’re concerned that you’re being too aggressive (or not aggressive enough) with your SEO tactics, contact us for a free consultation. Note that when it comes to SEO, the rules change almost monthly, so what was true 3 months ago may not necessarily be true today!

05 February 2006 – Google has flexed its muscles and dropped BMW Germany from its search engine following the German car manufacturer’s attempts to artificially boost its popularity ranking.

The move is likely to send shockwaves through the Internet industry over fears that one company has such power and effect over a websites access to the public.

The delisting was reported by Matt Cutts, a software engineer at Google, who works to stop websites tricking the system by featuring hidden text or different content from what the website visitor sees.

In his blog, Cutts wrote that the methods used by BMW were a violation of the search engine’s guidelines, and that a second company, camera maker ricoh.de will be removed soon for similar reasons shortly.

“Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users”, said Cutts on his blog entry.

The delisting will mean that searching for terms like “BMW” or “BMW Germany” on Google will not return a direct link to the car company’s German website, bmw.de, but instead the global site.

Moreover, bmw.com.de’s PageRank, the algorithms that assign every page on the web a sort of popularity ranking, has been reset to zero.

Many big publishers and website owners enlist the help of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) experts to help improve search appeal in search engines, and while most methods are acceptable, some are deemed to be unethical.

These so-called black hat tactics are commonly used by gambling or pornography sites.

BMW is thought to be one of the highest profile companies to have a website blacklisted by Google. –

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