WebmasterWorld is back online and functioning at its usual domain: http://www.webmasterworld.com ! Its been down for something like 6 days now, but sort of running at http://www.searchengineworld.com. Didn’t realize just how addicted I was to it until it was gone.

It was kind of nice over at searchengineworld.com for the past few days though. A smaller group of people and I found myself posting more than I usually do.

I feel bad for Brett having this happen to his site, but I’m sure it won’t cause any long term harm - with the site being as popular as it is.

I usually have a tough time writing. I just can’t get the words out sometimes. Consequently, it often takes me a really long time to write even a small amount of content for a web site. I found these tips for writing, that seem to make sense - maybe they can help someone else too.

Big discussion at WMW about how a scraper site is defined. Ogletree (and a few others) are of the opinion that Google and other SE’s are just bigger scrapers:

Google is a scraper site. A scraper site is any site that does not make their own content and uses a bot to crawl the web and publish snippits of other sites. Now when it is refered to here they mean some guy bought some scraper software and puts up several thousand pages with adsense on it.

I have to agree with this opinion. Not that I have any scraper sites myself (don’t know how, or I’d give it a try). Google is just bigger and gets more visitors. And just because you can opt out doesn’t change anything.

Not that I hate Google, but I don’t see how anyone can argue that it is not a scraper.

I also don’t think my sites are being hurt by scrapers. But - still I would like to see Google get them out of the serps. But can they? And without some innocent sites getting banned along with them? I came across a couple yesterday that were kind of hard to tell they were scrapers. Should be interesting to see what happens with them over the next few months.

Bourbon, the most recent - (and longest I believe) - update of Google started on Fri., May 20, and still isn’t quite done yet! Yesterday GoogleGuy posted the following at WebmasterWorld:

Here’s the advice that I’d give now: take a break from checking ranks for several more days. Bourbon includes something like 3.5 improvements in search quality, and I believe that only a couple are out so far. The 0.5 will go out in a day or so, and the last major change should roll out over the next week or so. Then there will still be some minor changes after that as well.

Since then he has been answering questions in another thread: Questions for GoogleGuy.

GoogleGuy’s patience at answering so many questions, especially from many who are new to SEO, is extremely impressive. Don’t think I would be able to do it.

So what has happened with this update? I don’t know, but some of the theories going around in the Bourbon update threads are nothing less than ridiculous! I don’t know how they come up with some of them. And unfortunately not many senior members have chimed in with a voice of reason yet.

Many people are speculating that all the Adsense scraper (and of course most of them spell it wrong!) sites that are linking to their sites is what is causing them to lose their rankings. That’s silly as hell. If anything, loss of those scraper site links - as they got thrown out of the index - is what is causing their problems.

But, I guess it is too early to draw any conclusions yet, according to GoogleGuy. So we will wait, and hopefully some more experienced SEO’s will share their thoughts about this update with the rest of the community.