Menu

• Dictionary
• Hot Shots

Directory

• Sponsors
• Billing Options
• Content Providers
• Web Hosting
• Traffic Counters
• Website Designers
• Resource Sites

This has definitely been another disjointed week for us. A family member is really very ill and our normal daily workflow has been disrupted for the last 10 days. It's been a real hassle but it is interesting to see just how much productivity you lose when at least two to three hours is taken out of every day for a week or more.

At first you think you can catch up by working later than you normally do each day ... after all sleep and the eight hours that you've become accustomed to are just over-rated. Then you think that you can catch up by working harder ... type faster ... don't let anything distract you ... cut yourself off from the part of the family that's not affected ... but that doesn't work either.

Then you think that you can catch up by trying to do two things at once and maybe if you plan what little time you have you could really multi-task and do three things at once. Of course then all that you end up with are major errors in those three things that you were trying to do and you have to spend even more time correcting them.

Finally you just realize that maybe there are some deadlines that you're not going to make no matter how hard you try and if your clients don't understand that you've done your best but circumstances have worked against you well ...

So if you're a content provider and family problems arise and it eats into your work time you just have to roll with the punches and do the very best you can and not sweat it if someone wants to take their business elsewhere. Family really does come first because they may not be there when you have some time for them.

Is it time to be worried?
A couple of years back Matt Cutts - the man from Google - was doing a site-review clinic at an SEO conference and to everyone's surprise was able to tell a Webmaster about another site, besides the one he was reviewing, that the Webmaster owned. Back then it seemed that Google probably had access to the records of all the domain name registrars and those records were what Matt Cutts had used.

That was certainly the consensus of opinion at the time although Matt Cutts never did reveal what he had used to be able to make the connection between the site he was reviewing and the other site that he identified.

However now it seems that even back then Google didn't need to have access to any domain name registrar's records because in August 2005 Google filed a request for a very interesting patent. Now the Abstract for that patent application may put you to sleep but do try to work through it because it does affect you.

This is how the Abstract describes what Google wanted to have a patent for:

The present invention provides methods and apparatus, including computer program products, implementing techniques for searching and ranking linked information sources. The techniques include receiving multiple content items from a corpus of content items; receiving digital signatures each made by one of multiple agents, each digital signature associating one of the agents with one or more of the content items; and assigning a score to a first agent of the multiple agents, wherein the score is based upon the content items associated with the first agent by the digital signatures.

When you cut through all that verbose language you will find the meat and that's what's interesting. What Google is telling you in the patent is that it can now identify the author of a website by comparing it to other websites.

In other words Google can look at two websites ... perhaps two of your websites that you had tried to convince Google were not related in any way what so ever, except by a one-way link, and see that they were both designed (and owned?) by the same Webmaster.

If you're new to the industry you may wonder why this is such a drama but for those of us who have been around for a while, and have built up a huge network of sites we have used to pass link juice to new sites, it really has the potential to be a major headache.

It is interesting to note that it's not a headache yet ... or at least it doesn't appear to be a headache to the owners of several large linking networks that I've been watching for some time. Google certainly doesn't seem to have penalized them in any way even though it's quite obvious that the one person has built all the sites despite them being spread across a number of hosts and domain name registrars.

Even though Google has only just received the patent there's no doubt that they have been using the technology for quite some time so you do have to ask yourself why they haven't done anything about it.

Perhaps the axe is yet to fall or perhaps it's never going to fall ... but if you've got a big network of linked sites and those links are what you've been relying on to get new sites indexed quickly then perhaps you should be just a little worried at this point in time.