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This has been one of those crazy weeks where everyone here has been working flat out but we just don't seem to be achieving anything. Instead of being able to concentrate on just one thing we've been skipping from one job to another as we've waited for clients to get back to us with important information.

Weeks like that can be really disruptive because you can't get into the sort of routine you need to be in to get work done. Fortunately by lunchtime today we should see one website ready to roll out the door and there should be another ready to go by the close of business and tomorrow is a local holiday so we can recover ... I hope.

My partner on the other hand is still working on the preliminaries that he needs to get through before he can start the real work of improving search engine rankings for two clients. He's got spreadsheets and search pages open across all four of his screens and now he's cranking up an old computer to give him even more digital work space.

It's enough to make your head spin.

Have we seen a return of Panda
In case you missed the very first memo Panda was the update that Google sprang on webmasters back in February. Then around April 11 we got another dose of Panda and after two rounds of that update a lot of webmasters were left wondering what they had ever done to make Google so unhappy with them.

After that second update Matt Cutts ... the man from Google ... made an interesting comment when he was discussing the Panda updates and the fact that lots of webmasters were working very hard in an attempt to recover from Panda. I can't remember his exact words now but he indicated that people might find it very hard to recover from Panda because it was something that Google wasn't going to run again any time soon.

To me that sounded as though he was saying that Panda was something outside of the normal algorithm and if you had been swatted by round one or round two you just weren't coming back from where Google had sent you till they ran it again.

Now it seems that Google may have run Panda much sooner than Matt Cutts indicated ... a week or so ago a number of webmasters who hadn't been hit in the first two rounds suddenly found that their rankings were dropping so perhaps Google let the Panda out of the cage yet again.

Sadly I'm not seeing too many positive reports by anyone who had worked to recover from the first two rounds.

Patterns in search data There's much to be said for taking some time out of your site and gallery building routine and spending a little time doing the sort of thing my partner specializes in. While you don't have to go quite as crazy as he does with all that data there are some things that are definitely worth looking at.

Google's keyword tool, Google Trends and Google Insights for Search are good places to start and there's something new from Google that could be worth looking at too. It's called Google Correlate and you can read more about it over on googleblog.blogspot.com and the particular post you want to look at is the one dated May 25.

Google says that researchers told Google that they would like to be able to enter some real world activity and see which search terms people were using to search for information on that activity so Google came up with Correlate.

While that might not have a huge amount of application for many of the adult products we sell it could be very useful for anyone who is working in the Celebs area ... and I'm sure that if you looked beyond the end of your nose you could see some applications for other areas too.

I don't think I'll be telling my partner about it just yet or he'll lose himself in there four hours.

Scary Google tweet
If you don't know much then you might want to start asking questions because in a tweet yesterday a Google spokesperson said via Twitter that Google reserves the right to take action against all sites on a server or at a hosting company if they feel that the host is massively spammy.

The tweet specifically mentioned free hosts but it seems that it's not only free hosts that are in Google's sights here. So who are you sharing server space with? Are there any free hosts connected to your hosting company?

Maybe you're doing everything right but what about the other guys who are on shared hosting with you?