Gmail is one of my favourite mail systems. Why ? Well, I guess it true I never really delete anything and the storage capacity is huge. However, the outage I experienced yesterday was also huge: “We’re sorry, but your [Gmail]* account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to use your account while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.”

Temporary error 502

Google have had engineers working on the system to pinpoint the 502 errors. Was everyone affected or was it simply a subset of users ? I love the capacity and indeed functionality that Gmail offers but I guess the level of dependence I have put on the mail system is too high, I expect it there when I need it 24/7

Come on Google why was Gmail Down ?

It’s fair to say Google have been blighted by issues of privacy over the last few month’s. What could be a better time then to release even more information about its users search requests ? Meet “insights for search” a free service aimed at marketers which will be an extension of Google Trends. We will now be able to see not only what individuals are searching for but get detailed information about specific groups too.

The main difference from trends is that a much greater level of detail will be presented for those tracking both word and phrase popularity within search. Categorisation of search results information is now possible with the ability to separate out specific areas of data meaning distinguishing what people are searching for will be a lot easier.

Google Insights will display geographic information on search results allowing for more specifically targeted ad campaigns. Imagine the capabilities of this tool combined  with the demographic search information that Microsoft has too…

yer I know it’s against the grain at the moment to say that Knol should be ranking, but at the end of the day the how to backpack is a good well written article with over 74 comments, and our industry leaders like Danny Sullivan linking to it ..

and all the scrapers

DaveN

OK, let’s do a quick list of things that may upset some Webmasters :

Pagerank Drop: My Instant Messenger hasn’t stopped today with people saying things like “Honest Dave I haven’t done anything wrong yet I have dropped PageRank”. Don’t worry ME TOO. I was a PageRank 6, now I’m a PageRank 5 it seems pretty epidemic PR went down for most.

New Pages didn’t get indexed: Me Too again, we changed the structure on DavidNaylor.co.uk, and added our contact page into the pages section and created the SEO Services page which linked to search engine optimisation, pay per click management and search engine marketing pages.

Of course the links and pages have been around for 3 months but NO Google indexing, but it’s the contact one that hurts the most I guess, it should rank for contact David Naylor at least lol.

Pages that look like they have been hand removed: Google doesn’t show my page but it’s in Google Cache

To me it looks like that page has been hand removed. But why? I’m lucky. Even with that page excluded from the index I still rank for my contact details. Other pages that have suffered the same fate have dropped 8 or 9 pages in the rankings with no reason for those pages to be removed. No link buying had occurred ( in-fact no link building).

This is worrying, most people that have been in contact today and yesterday feel they have done nothing wrong. Yet in Google their sites have dropped. The fact that they were so scared that Google would do this made them stop link building altogether and watch over the last 3 -4 months their competitors that are link buying slowly overtake them.

DaveN

Recently I blogged about maybe links aren’t so important any more, I didn’t want to really give out the example I had found, but Richard Young and Myself where chatting about this early today, and I feel that google has created a Time Machine Bot :

ok let me try to explain what I mean you will most probably punch holes in this one .. lol

In the real world companies that have traded for many many years build up a natural authority, I’m sure that there are many industries that we don’t know anything about but could recognise a brand, in the UK Singer is a massive sewing machine brand , Singer has been around for 150 years !, but I don’t do sewing I have never SEO’ed a sewing website but I’m brand aware God only knows why lol

possible hole punch, So why don’t singer rank for sewing machines .. ( www.singermachines.co.uk ).. if my theory is correct 150 years of trading and a good aged web presence it should .. so you tell me why it doesn’t ;)

but what about Cheese http://www.teddingtoncheese.co.uk been on the internet since 1999 look at what they looked like in 1999

or Fish take http://www.tropicalfishcentre.co.uk/ look what their site looked like 2000
and finally Bras take http://www.amplebosom.com/ they have been around since 2000

Now Im not saying that these sites shouldn’t be there, in fact anyone who has been trading online for 8 years plus, should have authority of some kind, maybe google just dipped into the past and found sites that where authoritative in their day and are still trading online today.. it’s just a thought ..

Dave