Deverill

As Scott said, many SEO experts were commenting that the dance was dead and that it would be a continuous update. The whole thing with Google is that they keep stuff secret so noone can manipulate their programs to get unfair positions on searches. Because of this we just have to watch and see what is happening and go from there. As such, it is very unlikely that they will warn us of anything they do. A dance is a massive recalculation of where pages should rank on a search. It is different than Google crawling the internet looking for new pages or updates on existing ones. There is some info about the dance at dance.efactory.de but I don't really know too terribly much about it and can't vouch for its accuracy. Hope it helps!

If you go to the helpdesk section and submit a ticket, the admin guys can take a look at it for you. You can find the help desk at https://ssl.totalchoicehosting.com/supportdesk/

Those are the files used to create the Analog statistics reports which TCH no longer supports. Make a backup to be safe and then use the file manager from within your cpanel to delete the folder.

Ah, that's better - I'm down to position #10 now. Much better than #1! Thanks for the note about the pics - they are part of the template from the main site so the links need and extra "/" or something. I'll fix it when I get home.

Google has definitely gone goofy. My regular fishing site was 30-something and is now way further down while the page I optimized for corporate fishing trips comes in at #1 for "corporate fishing trip key west".... and I only added that page about a week ago! It's vory good to diversify because rank on Google goes up and down like the stocks on Wall Street and if you put all your eggs in one basket they may all break.

I give up trying to figure out Google. Just when I think I have everything figured out between posts on the 'net, info from Google, info from Scott, something happens that convinces me that I know nothing about Google! I have a client that's a fishing charter boat captain and built a site for him. I've tried to optimize it from start to now and I've gotten OK results for a pretty competitive field. He has a 1969 GTO (car for those unfamiliar) that he loves. He wanted to put some pictures on the web and let folks see his baby. Well, I noticed that a little over half of our search-engine visitors came looking for the car. That doesn't help determine if the fishing site is working so I split the car into its own subdomain to keep my stats pure. Tonight I just looked for the fun of it to see how it ranks for "1969 GTO" and it was at the bottom of a page -- page 1! This doggone mostly unoptimized (has a desc but no keywords), trivial content (3 small paragraphs), show-off-my-car site with 8 pics and links back to the fishing site, PageRank of ZERO, nothing page is page 1 in searching! And that's out of 53,600 results Google returned on that phrase! I give up!

What I was thinking, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is that it would be better to have people that are linked to him link to the correct pages instead of relying on the redirect. Am I wrong?

What I don't understand is what they hope to gain by spamming our referer lists. We (webmasters) are the only ones to see them so where's the benefit?

You can add a permanent redirect from your Cpanel if you want. You would simply tell everyone that abc.htm is now abc.html. It's not a great long-term solution but it will keep folks from getting "Error 404 - page not found" errors.

Thanks for the info and tools, Scott! I used and found that TotalChoiceHosting.com has 11.100 pages listed. Man, that's a lotta pages!

Check out optimoz.mozdev.org/ for a mouse gesture add-in.

The "dillution" comes into play when Google and others try to rank based on themes and a site like Sears has tools, furniture, clothing and lawn mowers. Yes, the individual page stands on its own, but remember how little the links from the other pages will add to it. I don't know how much they are using themes now, but when it first started we saw a lot of this kind of "you gotta be kidding me" ranking issues. Ultimately you are right, it's about optimization or the lack thereof... but it's only a large part of the big picture I suspect.

You are welcome. I actually learned a lot from doing it so it's mutually beneficial.

I see what you are saying and am also disappointed by my recent searches. In this particular example, though, it's no wonder. Look at the source to that page. There are no meta keywords or descriptions, the title is "D-560 Zoom" (without Olympus!), the first printable (and thus "real line" in Google's eyes) is at line 325 in the source (ouch!) and while it looks great it's a search engine nightmare. Even worse, "D-560" only appears once in the source! Unfortunately Google is fine, it's Olympus that stinks! I love their cameras and have one, but they need to hire Scott or something! I went back to the Belkin router example. On that page that does show up I found: no meta keywords or description "router" is only there 3 times and it's listed as routers, router's, and Router again, there's a lot of fluff to make it pretty and the real content is low in the sources. I think maybe these big companies have gotten so egotistical that they assume you'll come to their site so they can concentrate on making it pretty and wowing you with their designs instead of generating information for us.

I have seen scripts that will test their resolution and scripts that will redirect them to the version of a website that matches their resolution but I have never seen what you are looking for. In fact, I doubt it is possible because then a website would be controlling computer settings and that seems like a huge security problem. There are a lot of ways you can try to match your page to their resolution including the ones I mention above and probably some good CSS techniques. I hope you find something that will work well for you.

I can think of a few possibilities. The first is the scariest and that is that Google's algorithm stinks. Considering how peaple try to scam them all the time and that they are possibly focusing on stopping them more than promoting the best it wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility. The good news is that this is the most unlikely because Google has a lot of really smart folks there and their mission-goal is to provide the users with the most relevant search results. Another is that in their quest for relevancy they are being thrown off track. For instance, they are using themes from what I understand. I read a real interesting article I wish I could find about this. It was saying that Sears is the #1 seller of lawn mowers in the US. If you search Google for "lawn mower", Sears was on like page 5. The problem was that Sears has so many other things, from tools to TVs, that their lawn mower rank was diluted by the other things on their site. If you just search for "Belkin" you will find their site #1 so perhaps the diversity of Belkin's products is hurting it's ranking in some way. Also, when I did the search for Belkin routers I saw that the top site was a news article about the recent problems Belkin has had. This is also the top return from their news tab. Perhaps Google ranks news articles a little higher because they think people looking for a term will be searching for news more than just a static site. I don't know that any of these are the cause of what you are seeing but I've read about them and they make sense to me.

Just because one search engine or directory uses another for links, it does not mean they will rank the sites the same way. This could explain why they are different.

Oooohhh. While it sounds like a wonderful thing that would be quite bad form by most standards. When most people visit a web site they are willing to allow it to put things on their screen in the little window they give it. If it, however, starts changing monitor settings then people: 1. Freak out! 2. Get scared it's a virus. 3. Get mad at you for "hijacking" their system. 4. Get really paranoid. 5. Get mad at you again. I would advise against using any such script, for what it is worth.

Good to see you back as a mod, Jack!

One thing I found about contract work is when I went to a training center (Productivity Point) to take a class. I found that most of the instructors of those training centers and certification centers have "down time" and do consulting work on the side to help meet ends. These may be the best source of contract work and their reputation is important to them so they probably won't try to mess you over. It may be worth a try, but I'd find one local as was said.

Sorry I don't completely understand. Where exactly did he add a link?

You did the same thing I did the first time. Sorry I didn't warn you. It extracted ****** as the filename. Just stick a .txt on the end and you should be able to notepad it.

From your Cpanel you can click "Raw Log File" and it will ask for a file on your computer to save it to. It saves as a filename.tar.gz but there are tools to undo that. If you are on Windows, for example, you could use zipitfast.com's ZipItFast program.

Yeah, I hear ya!

Wow, that's a great page, Scott. Thanks! (Wonder why there is no entry for Florida though )