A couple of weeks ago Matt Cutts from Google confirmed the so called “Mayday” update.
So what has this meant for you?
Some sites will see a decline in search traffic, others will see increases. Basically with any change there will be winners and losers.
What i’ve seen… It really depends on the site.
What have you seen?
Playing the latest game from Rockstar – Read Dead Redemption the game locked up. Restarting the XBOX, it booted the game no problems then before loading my profile it hung again. It was not looking good. So i thought leave it a day & try again in the morning.
Today I recieved this in my inbox:
SITE PROBLEMS:
Our site has been incurring ongoing unexplained problems. We are at this time, unable to stop this continued onslaught. We do not have the expertise to counter what has been happening.
Over the past week the site has been down several times. Bugs have been appeared to stop functions.
Saturday night they attacked admin to stop anyone logging in. It would take our passwords and allow admin to appear but once clicked on a function took us out to re login.
Our members could login but could not enter mywebuy to relist or execute any of their functions. If they clicked mywebuy a 2nd time they are taken back to login.
Then to top this off the site was out for the third time in 3 weeks. We were down for 18 hours.
SOLUTION:
We are working on the problems and seem to have things under control, and sincerely hope to overcome next lot as they appear. However our funder has put us on notice that “enough is enough”. He has given Kiwis a previously unheard of and generous opportunity “a chance to own something worthwhile and to create wealth with no outlay”. The results have been disappointing for three and a half years. The funder when setting the site up for members to own said 2 years was the limit “use it or lose it”. He funded for a considerably longer period.
Hopefully we will get on top of things but if we don’t do so in the next few days it will be goodbye from the Webuy team.
Wish us well as you own the site and if any site deserves support it really is Webuy.
All that this says to me is that the site is down and out. They don’t have what it takes to fix the issues and this email shows that there’s little chance that these issues will be fixed. If anyone trusted Webuy.co.nz I would seriously think again. Whats your thoughts?
Recently Google has made a change that allows you to see movie session times within Google. Just search for the movie name plus your town/city.
The information on Google is very basic, there’s no movie description, trailers or reviews. I’ll be sticking with Flicks for now. Check out their movie trailers, movie reviews and competitions.
Tonight the unthinkable for a lot of online New Zealanders happened. Trademe went down
In reply to this, twitter kicked into life:
Will this rock the reliance on such a giant?
Somehow I don’t think so. Picture if Google had an outage for a few hours. Would people stop using it? Probably not.
However in recent weeks sella.co.nz has increased their presence by partnering up as an online auction component for the Big Night In telethon. What’s the chances of sella picking up some of these disgruntled trademe users?
What’s your thoughts?
The sites tested were based on the top 50 New Zealand sites on Nielsen Netratings and also chucked in a few other NZ sites. From there performing a site search in Google for each of these sites enables us to get the Top 10 New Zealand sites indexed by Google.
Note: The figures reported were referenced on 24/05/2009. These figures change regularly
Checkout the most indexed sites in New Zealand.
| Rank | Site | Pages Indexed |
| 1. | trademe.co.nz | 10,300,000 |
| 2. | finda.co.nz | 1,570,000 |
| 3. | tvnz.co.nz | 1,440,000 |
| 4. | newzealand.com | 809,000 |
| 5. | yellow.co.nz | 614,000 |
| 6. | oldfriends.co.nz | 509,000 |
| 7. | zillion.co.nz | 479,000 |
| 8. | wises.co.nz | 424,000 |
| 9 | 3news.co.nz | 367,000 |
| 10. | sella.co.nz | 358,000 |
The numbers are gathered by doing a site search within google.co.nz and restricting to NZ sites.
Interesting, the powerhouse Trademe has a clear lead. Guess this helps in their turnover of new auctions getting listed. One issue that comes up a lot when it comes to Trademe is when listings are returned in search results majority of times the listing is expired. My guess would be that the number of ‘active’ pages would be a lot smaller that the 10million odd reported.
A little while ago I signed up to recieve emails from 3deals.co.nz - a 1-day.co.nz competitor.
Anyway like the early days of 1-day, 3deals has fallen short. Either the servers not responding and dishing up a 404 error page or the page is not there so returning a 404.
Things you should do:
BTW: Awesome thanks, now that the site loaded, i’ve missed out on getting an iPod for $1. Hopefully the site holds up better tomorrow.
Along side search results, some of the Google AdWords headlines are pushing the boundries for the headline character limit. In the image below for the 28 character search “Website Development Services” the ads running keyword insertion are able to push the 25 character headline limit.
Extending to 28 Characters!
For me this makes sense, only a couple of characters over the limit, relevant to the search term. Advertiser “WIN”, user “WIN”….we all can win. Downside is that more and more could jump on the keyword insertion bandwagon and end up with saturation of headlines exactly the same. Anywho, i’ll leave it up to you.
It’s finally here! Google Analytics app for iPhone. This has made my day!
Features
Find out more about the Google Analytics iPhone App
Download the Google Analtics App from iTunes
Will update this post once i have tried this app out and hopefully give it a raving review!
Webhelp Dofollow’s Blog Comments
The time has come for me to give back even more. I’ve decided anyone taking time out to post a comment deserves something. This blog is now decleared a dofollow blog.
So go on then what are you waiting for, drop me a comment and get a nice sparkly backlink.
I will still be filtering comment spam. But other than that you’ll be instore for a search engine friendly link.