I noticed today that I am finally number 1 in all 3 of the big search engines, Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Not only that but I also have the number 2 spot as well.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=t&ie=UTF-8&rls=SUNA,SUNA:2006-50,SUNA:en&q=Philip+Nicosia

http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=philip+nicosia&fr=FP-tab-web-t340&ei=UTF-8&meta=vc%3D

http://search.msn.co.uk/results.aspx?FORM=FREEWS&cp=1252&q=philip+nicosia

It’s the first time I have noticed this as before either Google or Yahoo would relegate me to 2nd or third position.

How long this will last for is anyones guess and could be gone by tomorrow.

One thing I did notice with Google is that if I didn’t write a page for a while and update the site I would drop down the rankings. Within a day or 2 of adding a page I was back up to number 1.

Maybe there is a lesson to be learnt there?

I had a pleasant surprise a couple of days ago when I received an unexpected parcel from Google. On opening it I found a card saying “Happy Holidays” and a cool digital photo frame.

Thanks Google, I’d always thought about getting one of these but never actually got round to it.

I have a site that according to Google Sitemaps gets crawled regularly. In the last 90 days it has crawled on average 2209 pages per day.

Now here’s the thing. I don’t get any visits from Google Search and Google has no pages listed in its index for the site.

So why is Googlebot crawling the pages and waiting my bandwidth?

Well it looks like I finally made to to number 1 in Yahoo!

I’m surprised that it took so long given that both Google and MSN took less than a few weeks.

Having said that I’ve been bouncing around all over the place in Yahoo! so it may be I’ll be demoted back down tomorrow knowing my luck and overtaken by the bogus Yahoo Shopping page with my name on it.

It looks like Matt Cutts has been busy pressing his red button and demoting previously high ranking sites to 31st place in the results. That is the top of page 4.

These sites are no longer able to score higher than 31st place even for their own company name. Google strives to give relevant results but in this case they are manipulating them to an extent that it is laughable.

How can you say scoring someone at 31st place for their own company name is giving you the most relevant results for that search query. This is particularly a problem for many users who have Google as their home page and go to their favourite sites by entering the name into the Google search box.

They will now have to go through to the 4th page before they can find it and that is if they haven’t given up in the meantime. Is that a good user experience of Google?

No-one knows for sure what is causing this phenomenon (except Google of course but they are unlikely to say) and speculation is rife amongst the many forum posts from effected webmasters.

Further reading can be found at:

Threadwatch
Digitalpoint
Searchenginewatch
Webmasterworld

just to name a few.

So if you can’t find your favourite site on Google anymore try going straight to page 4 or the results and check out Number 31!