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Me and my big mouth! Only last night I mentioned to my partner that all the hassles that had been bugging me through the week had been sorted out and today I would be able to get back into a productive routine.

Yep sure ... that's why I've just spent an hour running around looking for a family member who has communication difficulties and who sent me a blank text message. Fortunately he was at work where he should have been and all was well but it sure has destroyed my plans for the day.

It's interesting to see how much we become creatures of habit when we develop work patterns and how badly disrupted we become when those work patterns are changed by outside influences.

There was a time when I used to wonder at people who complained when their work patterns were interfered with. I couldn't believe that they seemed unable to slip back into productive work once they had sorted out whatever had interrupted them but I'm experiencing the very same thing for myself now.

Perhaps I need to be like the professional tennis players that you might see on television. They have a little ritual that they work through before they serve a ball and if something like a noise in the crowd or a movement distracts them they go right back to the start of their ritual and go through it all over again because it gets them focused.

Perhaps when you or I find that our day is disrupted by something and we're finding it hard to get back into the work groove we need to go through a little ritual to help us get focused again. It might be as simple as making a fresh cup of coffee but if it helps to get you re-focused then it's definitely worth trying.

How do the search engines assess quality?
One of the underlying features of the Panda update is Google's idea that it needs to improve its search results by only listing pages that provide quality information. But how does a search engine actually do that? How can an inanimate algorithm look at words on a web page and decide that the site it is crawling is actually worth listing at the top of a search results page?

Well obviously search engines are going to be looking for keywords and keyword phrases and they've been doing that for years. They're also going to be looking at how many links point back to that particular page ... and that's something they've been doing for years too.

But as we all know both of those indicators of quality can be gamed ... you can stuff a page full of keywords and keyword phrases and you can buy all the links you need to impress the search engines. So it's no wonder that the search engines have gone looking for other ways to assess quality and they've turned to the people who use the search engines to show them what's quality and what's not.

Way back in 2004 Microsoft filed for a patent that they called "automated satisfaction measurement of web search" and it was granted earlier this month. Just because it took almost seven years to obtain the patent doesn't mean that they haven't used the technology behind the patent until now so don't think we're talking about anything new ... but it is still worth thinking about.

Obviously the technology behind the patent doesn't ask the user to tell them what the user has found. Instead it looks at, among other things, what the user has done or not done when they visited a particular page.

Some of the things that a search engine may consider as some sort of signal that a page has value revolve around what the searcher did when they landed on the page that the search engine sent them to. Did they stay for an extended period of time or did they immediately click back to the search results page? Did they click on one of the links that was displayed on that page to go further into the site that contained that page? Did they print something from the page or add the page to their favorites?

All those things can tell the search engines a lot about what a searcher thought of the page that they were referred to by the search engines. Obviously the search engines can't tell if a page really did satisfy a searcher but from those signals that I've just mentioned ... and quite a few more that I haven't mentioned ... the search engines believe that they can get a good 'feel' for the worth of a web page.

I should also mention that first point I mentioned is particularly important ... perhaps not to the search engines but to us ... because there's a lot of rubbish going around about bounce rate. If you look at that point you will get the real story about bounce rate and why some sites that have a very high bounce rate still rank really well in the search engines.

And why is all this important to adult webmasters?

Google is about to launch its +1 button as it tries to get users to give it an even clearer idea of whether or not a website or web page really does deserve the ranking that Google has given it.

Just how important it will be to get people to click that button (if you've installed it on your website) is yet to be seen but obviously there are other ways the search engines have of assessing quality and you shouldn't overlook them and just rely on a button.