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Well there goes another great weekend and even though where I live we're only 6 hours into the new week I think I'm already looking forward to next weekend. I really shouldn't complain though ... right now I could be getting ready for work and looking forward to a long commute in a crowded train or sitting in my car in peak-hour traffic.

Instead I'm sitting here in the home office watching the sun rise through the palm trees and later I'll spend all of four minutes driving down to the office in town. Unfortunately the view isn't as good from there as it is here but I guess things can't be perfect all the time.

We're having an interesting little wrestle with Google at the moment. Currently if you do a search for one of our mainstream clients you will find them at the top of the search engine results pages in Google but linked to another website we've just finished for a new client. I have no idea how that came about but it happened when we moved the new site off a shared IP address and onto its own - something we only discovered was necessary the day after the new site went live.

The server guys can't see what might have caused that at their end and there is absolutely nothing that we've ever done that would link the two sites together. One is virtually only a placeholder for a site that's still to come so and the other has no relationship whatsoever with the placeholder site ... but somehow Google is confused so now we're trying to see what we can do to help Google see the real situation.

Along the way we're also addressing some other interesting problems with that new site. Before we built this site the only presence the client had online was through numerous sites belonging to others that pointed to this client's business.

The client's business has a four word title but for some reason the client only wants the first word of the title to start with a capital letter. However all those other sites that have been pointing to the business for some years have capitalized the first letter of the first and fourth word and that is how people might type the name into a search engine to find a link to our client's business.

We're now wondering just what impact the way the client wants his business name to appear on his website will affect the way the site ranks for a number of terms. How much trust has Google got in all those much older sites that spell the search term in a way that's different to the site that it should really be trusting for those terms?

In some respects this problem has a lot to do with something called Pascal Casing and another odd term called Camel Casing and it's something that's not just important to mainstream. There's a psychological affect here that can have an impact on the number of hits you get from the search engines even if you're doing adult.

It's way too involved for me to go into here ... and I'm not even sure that I fully understand it yet ... but if you do a search in Google for Pascal Casing you'll find plenty of interesting reading listed right there on the first page. It's also interesting to note that it looks as though no one is actually bidding on that term for there are no Adwords ads on that search engine results page ... not even some of those totally weird eBay ads that used to be around and are beginning to appear once more.

One other issue that Steve is looking at with these two sites is the XML sitemaps. The placeholder site didn't have one and the new site had a sitemap that was submitted just before the site was moved to a new IP address. Steve has now produced an XML sitemap for the placeholder site and submitted it through Google's Webmaster Central and has deleted the first sitemap from the new site and re-submitted it.

Hopefully Google will soon realize that the two sites are not related in any way at all and we might begin to see even more pages of the new site get indexed.

I guess if you're not seriously interested in good rankings in the various search engines this probably all sounds like much-ado about nothing but it's been challenging us and a few interested friends for a week now and it's something that we'll go on looking at till the problem is solved.

As the Google and the other search engines go on evolving their algorithms achieving good rankings in those search engines is becoming more and more complex and what has been happening to this site is something that can teach us more about the way search engines look at, and rank, websites.