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So it's Thursday ... well it will be when you read this ... but actually as I write this it's Wednesday and I'm writing this now because I won't be able to write it tomorrow; instead I'll be on the road for a quick trip down to the State capital.

Both Steve and I have appointments down there so we'll be heading off around 6 in the morning and won't be back till the early evening and that means that we're working twice as hard today. Of course that also means that any of our clients who is likely to have a drama will do so and we've already been running around fixing problems that two clients brought on themselves.

Stop! Thief!
In other news today Google is crying ... in fact it's wailing its little head off because it has been the victim of a heinous crime! Yes Google has had something valuable stolen and they want the world to know that they are now a victim.

Of course Google is such a fine upstanding citizen of cyberspace that to have someone else come along and take its search results is terrible. I mean Google never steals anything does it ... that story that it took something that belonged to Apple a few years back was all wrong ... and Google would never steal or scrape our content would it?

Well of course it did take something from Apple but that was ok because ... well ... Google is so bit that it is above the law isn't it? And of course Google does steal and scrape our content but then everything on the Web is free isn't it? Well of course it is ... just so long as it doesn't belong to Google.

And that's why Google has worked itself up into such a righteous frenzy ... Bing is using some of Google's search results. Of course if it had been the other way round you wouldn't have heard a peep out of Google ... or its mouthpieces. It's sad for Google because no one really cares.

Headlines
Remember what I wrote about headlines last month? If you missed it you should dig into the archives and look for 'Your Headlines Suck'.

Well now there are a couple of genuine thinkers who are beginning to wonder if, instead of stuffing the title tag of your web pages with important keywords, perhaps you should be crafting an eye-catching headline that includes a keyword or two and use that as your title tag as well as a headline.

I'm not sure if they're right or not but these are people who I respect and so Steve and I are going to do a little experimenting with using the page headline as the title tag. It may prove to be of little or no value at all but then again we won't know till we try it.

Oh and as I write this that client drama number has just gone to three and I'm beginning to see a fourth one begin to appear in a chat window.

Anyone using article directories?
I know that a lot of webmasters who are dabbling in mainstream like to use article directories to pick up cheap content and you only have to look at one or two articles to know just how cheap and poorly written those articles can be.

However those directories have had their place in the past and they've been very popular with people selling pills and potions. Some people using those articles have even been able to rank quite well in the search engines for important terms but that may be about to become a thing of the past.

Last week Google announced that it was about to start taking action against content farms ... at least that's what a lot of webmasters thought that Google was aiming at. While there's no clear definition of what a content farm might be it has been generally accepted that Google was talking about sites like eHow.com and Suite101 and maybe even Mahalo but it's slowly becoming apparent that Google wasn't talking about so much about sites like that but was talking about sites that use content from article directories.

Now it seems that Google is going to do a whole lot more to identify the original author ... or the site where the article first appeared ... and give that person or site the ranking credit. Sites that use the same article from an article directory will lose any benefit that they might have had and this will have a negative impact on their rankings.

So if you've used syndicated articles in the past from those article directories perhaps it's time you stopped doing that and either started writing your own articles ... or paid to have original articles written for you.

And that's it for me today ... client drama has been confirmed at four and may even rise to five so I'm off to put out a few more spot fires for clients.