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.

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.