Getting your pages cached by Google can be a nightmare at times. You’ve updated a web page and then you sit back and wait, wait some more and after more waiting GoogleBot decides index and cache your updated web page. It’s a problem that Dunkin’ Donuts had recently. They had a free iced coffee day in their branches put it on their website - but it was invisible in their search rankings as the page was not cached - GrokDotCom have posted on this recently.

Traditionally Google would index, and cache, your website based upon the number of links and the resulting PageRank of your webpages. Pages with more links and/or PageRank would be reindexed and cahced more frequently than pages with less links and/or PageRank.

It is possible to make changes to your website to help Google cache your website more often.

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Checking your SEO rankings in multiple data centres can be a useful thing to have a look at. Showing you how your rankings are in variuos Google data centres (DC) at the same time. As Google does a rolling update of its data taking DC into and out of their active configuration to be updated. Sometime the DC you’re getting info on isn’t using the most recent set of data. This is espescially useful when google are carrying out an algorithm update or during technology changes - as you can see the changes rolling out across DC.

Google Data Center tools on the web

McDar has traditioanlly been the palce to go and check out results. It allows you to check by IP block for results. I like the way the results are outputted but you can only check about 6 DC on one screen.

Bill just sent me a link to a new DC checking tool - they need to do some work on the output of the results as they scroll down for about half a mile. But you get loads of differing DC checked at the on time.

If anyone knows of any other tools that do this job stick them in the comments below and I’ll have a squizz.

I was just chatting to Nick Duddy @ Equator and he was telling me about the ‘Gmail Grimace‘ thing going on over at the Email Standards Project. I’ve recently been getting more and more into Email Marketing as a way to generate sales and have been amazed at the difficulties that email marketers are having with different mail clients have with emails (think IE Vs Firefox web design problems on a far larger scale and your probably still not close to the problems they can have). Can you imagine having to do all your styles inline and design in tables - its so retro.
They even have a gmail Grimace Flickr Group - which is cool. At last something on Flickr which actually interested me!

For a while I’ve been thinking more and more that Matt Cutts, aka Google Guy,  blog is becoming less relevant to me. It’s became a mecca for lots of non-seo noise that is starting to block out the good stuff that he used to post about Google and SEO.

In the past he posted some really cool stuff, that was useful to everyone from web developers to Internet marketers. Some great posts included:

• Backing up Aaron Wall of SEO Book
• 301 redirects
• BMW getting kicked out of Google

Increasingly I find that posts to be of less relevance. due to his I’ve started to use the official Google Blog more and more as a source of info about what’s going on at the search engine and referring less and less to Matts site.

Does anyone still think that Matt Cutts blog has the same level of information as it used to?

After trying to get into the Microsoft webmaster tools, again, and clearing all my cookies and clearing my cache I was getting really frustrated with it. The I had a brain wave what if I use Internet Explorer to try and get in. No way that Microsoft would make a website that webmasters who didn’t use a crappy browser would not be able to access! Yeah right - first time in IE and all of a sudden I can add sites like Xmas came early. Un-fookin-believable. To get into Microsoft Webmaster Tools you need to use IE.

Am well annoyed by this. I hate IE - I can’t use i. I like all my little toolbars, I like changing to a black and red looking browser on occassion, and sometime I even like my browser to look like its Internet Explorer. But I do not like being forced to use Internet Explorer.

Am sure Bill @ Spiderwriting will love this! Let the Microsoft webmaster tool bashing commence. There are times when Googles dominance seems like a good thing - not often but just occasionally maybe that do not bad stuff really does exist!

Oh and as an aside every XML file they want you to put up has the same name - nice! So I’m now going to adapt one of my spiders to check competitors sites and start seeing what level of usage these Microsoft webmaster tools are getting - guess the usage figures could be low.

Hmm. I’m not overly convinced by this but according to comscore the last month has seen MSN start to catch up with Google in the United Kingdom in terms of reach. I’m happily ensconced in a little UK Google Bubble and this may be why I’ve missed the surge of traffic coming to my sites from MSN.
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