Beanstalk's SEO News Blog

Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz takes some time to explain PageRank as it was when it first came about vs how it is today. Admittedly, it's greatly simplified in this video BUT it's probably the most easy-to-understand explanation I've heard to date and covers the changes in the system well. For those of us watch the PageRank on our homepage and internal pages it we've likely witnessed a lot of what he's taking about.

To candy-coat it even more, Rand covered the explanation as part of his Whiteboard Friday series so you don't even have to read. :) Here's the video:

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-Has Pagerank Changed? (visit for the comments) from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Labels: google, pagerank, rand fishkin, seomoz

This morning while checking some of my personal project websites I noticed a few had some extra green in the pagerank bar than normal. Most of these sites are rather fresh out of the box and were previously either a page rank zero or unranked. This comes as a surprise since the last update was not too long ago. At first I decided to look around and see how far this update had infected the data centres. Other SEO and SEM users have been reporting similar trends on many different search news sites. As of this writing the update appears to have affected mostly young sites and a handful of larger ones. This is definitely not a slap like the big penalty update at the end of 2007. As with all updates the search results are shifting around as we entertain another google dance.

On the contrary there is at least one large spanking that has certainly taken place. Technorati has been stripped of all it's pagerank leaving them with a pagerank zero. There are only a few sub pages that have held pagerank: Entertainment, Sports, Popular, Help (which is a sub domain) all still have something higher than a zero.

It would seem despite popular myth that the green bar is not going anywhere anytime to soon. The web master radio show today features a segment regarding this update. I suspect that another blog post will follow this one with more information and details.

Labels: google update, pagerank

Well the dust hasn't even settled yet on the three PageRank updates we were graced with in October and Google's launched another volley and a vast number of sites lost some (or more) of those little green pixels.

In our preliminary analysis there appears to be a bit more to it than the gaining or losing of some visual PageRank (mainly losing it appears at this point). In a chat I was having with Jim Hedger earlier when we were comparing notes both of us agreed that we've seen some shifting in the rankings over the past few days and both of us expect to see more in the near future (and by that I mean within the next couple days).

From Jim's observations a lot of the sites affected have had some association with SEO/SEM firms though may not be involved directly in the industry or sell links. I haven't seen that myself as some non-SEO related sites got the hard smack (again?) but an observation worth noting while we seek common trends in what's going on.

Now, lets be clear - what appears in the green bar is not a particularly relevant reflection of the value of a site or it's ability to rank highly (used to be - not anymore). That said, with all these major changes going on one can only assume that this is indicative of other changes in the way sites will be ranked. Or Google's just messing around with us for fun or because the rumors are true and they're going to dump the whole thing altogether and they want us to be thankful for it by the time it happens. :)

To be sure we'll be watching this carefully over the weekend and over the upcoming days and weeks (and months, and years ...) and we'll keep you posted as we have more time for analysis. Some useful reading and placed to keep watching are:

• here of course :)
• AndyBeard.eu - Andy has been following this closely since October and is reporting on it well. He brings up some great points in today's post titled ZERORANK. One of my favorite points is one I've griped about before, that there's no way to request reinclusion to Google without "admitting" that you did something wrong to begin with. Well what if you were actually penalized incorrectly?
• DigitalPoint Forums - A discussion on the subject.

So a thought for Google to close out the blog for the weekend - next time, please wait until our butts have healed from the first spanking before launching into the next round. :)

Labels: andy beard, digitalpoint, google update, jim hedger, pagerank

Well is was an enjoyable 12 hours but the folks over at Google are up to it again and the visible PageRank (that green bar) is on the move once again. This latest round appears to be an effort to correct some of the wrongs (basically, to give PageRank back to those that shouldn't have lost it). This leaves me with a big question, if we didn't see any change in the rankings and the site's aren't selling links then who cares?

While I don't put stock in what the green bar tells me, it is of course interesting to monitor what's going on (and of course to consider what must be happening at the text link brokers). Bought a PR7? Might be a PR3 but is it worth the same $30/mth you were paying? ;)

So all I can really recommend to our valued visitors is to do the same as I am (and this is coming from a guy who's site went from a 6 to a 4) ... relax, drink some Chai tea and check your rankings. They probably weren't affected and so in the end ... who cares? :)

And so from there I'm going to meander onto a new topic and one that's a lot more interesting - branding vs. marketing vs. advertising. Sometimes it can be very difficult to tell the different between one and the other and so I was happy to see that Neil Patel (apparently as funny as he is smart) posted a GREAT post to illustrate the difference. You can read it on his blog here.

Labels: google update, neil patel, pagerank, paid links

Today I feel sorry for my kids. Every parent reading this will remember those times when they heard a loud BANG and assumed incorrectly who had done it. TELI !!!

"But it wasn't me !!!"

A couple days later the milk's spilled all over the place. KAEMON !!!

"But it wasn't me !!!"

Well now I know how they feel.

I got into work this morning, launched my browser. When Firefox loads it starts with 4 tabs, one for each of the major engines and a second datacenter for Google - all with our primary phrase preset for easy reference. All looked right in the world. Then I went to our blog. It took a second to realize that the little green bar had changed. What was once a 6 was now a 4.

Hmmmm. This sometimes happens when the PR of the last page I was at holds so let's go to the homepage. OK, now the homepage in a new window. OK, let's try a different browser altogether. OK, now it's time to stop - You're a PR4.

What could I have done "wrong"? I don't sell links. I had couple paid links but I got rid of any that weren't producing some decent traffic ages ago so really I was using text links to buy traffic. Surely Google of all people can't have a problem with that. I did have a few outbound links from our left nav on our homepage but they weren't paid for - they just pointed to resources such as SearchEngineWatch.com. You know, resources I really did feel worth passing a vote for. Meanwhile there are sites I can see up against me that I can confirm buy links (and some that sell them) that actually attained increases in toolbar PageRank (though we still beat them in the SERPs so ... :) So why do I lose toolbar PageRank and my brother doesn't?

Well, for anyone who read my now ironic though well-timed blog rant from last week on PageRank you'll know that while I might be obsessed with search engines and I might be obsessed with Google, I care a lot more about where a site appears in the SERPs than I do about a little green bar.

A lot of sites have been blasted in the last couple rounds of PageRank updates. Here are some blogs and forums where you can go for discussion on this topic:

• Matt Cutts Confirms Paid Links & Google PageRank Update - SearchEngineJournal.com
• Real or Fake PageRank Update In Progress (round 3) - AndyBeard.eu
• Hilarious PageRank Update Impacts Google Badly - SearchEnginePeople.com
• Google Rumors: Google PageRank To Be Reset - GoogleLady.com

A simple search on Google's Blog Search Engine (should I rel="nofollow" that just to be cheeky? - you'll notice .... I didn't ;) for "pagerank update" will provide you many more hours of reading.

Good luck to you all as this continues. Maybe in the end my wishes will come true - the green bar will go away and we'll all be stuck building links for relevancy and judging our results by our rankings. For some reason the Beatle's "Imagine" is running through my head. :)

And Google, just so you know - I wasn't selling links ... it was my brother.

Labels: google, google update, pagerank

Yesterday I published a rant about PageRank. The post picked up some steam and was well read on Sphinn. And then there was Halfdeck. For those of you who read my subsequent post you'll know that Halfdeck is a Sphinner who whole-heartedly disagrees with my stand on the issue of PageRank.

After he read my reply he posted again as did Jill Whalen. As I don't allow comments in the Beanstalk blog (this is simply because I don't have time to moderate them) I'll post their replies here as well as mine to their comments. Their comments will be in blockquotes:

Jill:

PageRank is indeed very important to Google still. It's unfortunate that toolbar PageRank has nothing to do with actual PageRank though. I think that's why debates such as this one will continue to occur.

I have great respect for Jill as does the majority of the SEO community but I still have to disagree. PageRank is a factor, certainly more important than some but it is not, as Halfdeck notes, the equivalent to SEO that gravity is to human life.

Halfdeck:

"At the time of this posting there are PageRank 3's beating out PageRank 7's."

That is one of the weakest arguments against PageRank ever invented.

There are also sites that have no keywords in the title outranking sites with keywords in the TITLE element. So from that let's conclude that keywords in the TITLE doesn't matter.

I would say that titles are a factor among many. My response to your comment was based on your assertion that PageRank was to SEO what gravity is to humans. I said in my initial post that PageRank has weight, just not as much weight as it's getting credit for and certainly not what we're chasing after.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&gl=us&q=seo&btnG=Search

keyword: [SEO]
Wikipedia.org TITLE: "Search engine optimization"
Spanish Wikipedia TITLE: "Posicionamiento en buscadores - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre"

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&gl=us&q=ice+cream&btnG=Search

keyword: [ice cream]
haagen-dazs.com TITLE: "Häagen-Dazs®"
bluebell.com TITLE: "MyOrganization: Home page"

So its official then. Keywords in TITLE doesn't matter.

That's right. PageRank is the gravity after all, do titles even matter?

Actually I view titles as more important than PageRank. About equal from an SEO standpoint but more important in that a clickable title will get, well, clicked on more in the SERPs. But IT'S STILL JUST A FACTOR AMONG MANY!!!

I think this is perhaps what's being overlooked from my initial post. At no point did I say that PageRank was irrelevant. What I said is the the average person tends to give it too much importance (comparing it to gravity for example). It is a factor and it does carry weight but there are other factors and a low PageRank site can beat out higher PageRank sites if they "win" in the other factors.

"Really? Then why does Wikipedia (PR7 page) rank #1 and SEOMoz (PR7 page) rank #10 for "seo"?"

As I wrote somewhere else, the phenomenon of wikipedia ranking for just about anything and everything under the sun, in my opinion, is largely due to high link trust (most inbounds to Wikipedia are editorial, unpaid for, unreciprocated, many from trustworthy sources), sheer link power (just about every page has high TBPR due to millions of backlinks), relevant on-page content, laser-targetted anchor text on 99% of all backlinks, and internal, contextual anchor text.

"What? I have no idea what this means. A site with a PageRank 2 can have 100,000 pages in the index if the owners or contributers are very very busy people."

There, you just exposed your lack of understanding about PageRank.

A TBPR 2 site can create 100,000 pages of content, but you will not see 100,000 in the MAIN INDEX. They will sink into the supplemental bin. That should be common knowledge by now.

Admittedly you caught me here. I didn't catch the word "main" in the initial post HOWEVER I would argue that it's not PageRank that's doing it, it's trust. Unfortunately we could go on that debate for the next week-and-a-half and not come to a conclusion as it would be your opinion against mine and unless someone from over at Google wants to step in and let us know ;) it will just be one person against another.

Read the blog links at the top of this page if you want to go beyond repeating what's been said 1,000 of times already:

http://www.seo4fun.com/notes/supplementals.html

"Well I suppose that's it then. I suppose it's time to call up Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan, Neil Patel, Jill Whalen and all the other SEO's who contributed to SEOmoz's "Google Search Engine Ranking Factors" list and let them know that their work was for naught."

Oh?

I recommend you reading Dan Thies recent posts. Or read Rand Fishkin's
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/my-personal-opinion-90-of-the-rankings-equation-lies-in-these-4-factors

Where he lists "PageRank or link weight or link power" as one of the top 4 ranking factors. If you're the type of SEO to base your opinion on "expert" opinion, there you have it.

I'd seen Rand's previously but thanks for the other links. Rand is combining all the factors of link weighting into something called PageRank. If we reflect back to the beginning (my initial post)it might be a good time to split my reply in two. This is because there really are two conversations going on, one based on the intial article and one based on what the topic has become.

The initial argument based on the first post:
My intial arguement was based on people who email us/call us asking and obsessing about PageRank (why theirs isn't higher, what we'll do to increase it, etc.) This is obviously a discussion about toolbar PageRank. I don't think any of us has had to deal with questions about why a site's PageRank isn't higher where they weren't referring to the toolbar PageRank. It would be funny if we did though. "I know the green bar shows my PageRank is a 4 but I know it's really a 5. I don't care what the toolbar shows, what will it take to get a PR 7?"

What the argument has become:
The argument has now become how much PageRank influences results, and we're not talking about toolbar PageRank. One thing I would like to know is if you're counting PageRank as something other than what the toolbar shows when updates are happening (i.e. when there's isn't internal updating going on affecting results based on factors we can't see) or if you're actually referring to the toolbar PageRank when it's accurate (i.e. right after an update).

If you're referring to the toolbar PageRank (when accurate) then I am going to continue to disagree with you and will continue to maintain that PageRank is nothing more than a factor among others. That said, from some of the links and examples you've given it appears you may be referring to PageRank as something more than in which case this conversation has gone off on a major tangent. As shoudl be clear from my initial post, I am referring to the visually displayed PageRank that appears in the toolbar when the toolbar is updated.

"At the time of this posting there are PageRank 3's beating out PageRank 7's."

One last thing.

Internal PageRank is a floating number, not a number between 0-10. Matt Cutts has confirmed that in several posts. PageRank is a probability metric, or a number that describes chance: 0~100%, or a number between 0-1.

If your website was the only website that existed on the web, then the chance of someone landing on your website is 100% or 1.

If there were only two pages on the web, linking to each other, the chance of you landing on one of those pages is 50%, or .5.

The sum of all PageRanks of all webpages add up to 1. Therefore, the internal PageRanks of a page is really really tiny, something like .000000000000002000195010.

Of course Google can modify that for ease of computation, but we are still dealing with alot of digits.

So what is TBPR? Some believe that they are exponents of an unknown base.

base^TBPR = internal PageRank.

For example:

10^0 = 1
10^1 = 10
10^2 = 100
10^3 = 1000
10^4 = 10000
10^5 = 100000
10^6 = 1000000
10^7 = 10000000
10^8 = 100000000
10^9 = 1000000000
10^10 = 10000000000

We don't know the base. We don't know the actual PageRank. We only see the exponent (0-10). Obviously, that's just theory. But it does help you see there's a big difference between TBPR and internal PageRank.

A good illustration. But this discussion started with clients obsession about PageRank. By necessity this has to be the toolbar PageRank. You're example is good and I'm certainly not going to get into a technical debate when I'm willing to say that you're theories are easily as good as mine on the exact internal calculations HOWEVER this discussion isn't about how it's calculated, it's about it's value. I don't care if I have a PageRank 11 out of 10, it where my site appears in the SERPs that I care about and, as you point out above, titles also count. I would assert that so does content, so does internal linking, so does the physical structure of the site, so does the anchor text of incoming links, so does the trusted nature of the sites linking to you, so does ...

PageRank is not gravity, be it toolbar PageRank or internal PageRank. I've said it before and I'll say it again, it's a factor - more important than some, less important than others.

If you truely understood that, you would never talk about a "PageRank 3" URL outranking anything, because:

1) There's no such thing as a PageRank 3 page
2) You are clearly implying you know the PageRank of a page displaying TBPRX - you don't.

See notes above and first post. This started as a post about the toolbar PageRank !!!

Labels: google, pagerank, sphinn

Earlier today I published a post titled "PageRank Isn't The Questions; Page Rank Is". I got posted on Sphinn and ended up causing a bit of an issue with the user Halfdeck. His comments were too difficult to respond to in the chat area of Sphinn and so I will reply here. Below you will find his comments and my replies:

"So we'll focus on the real business and it's very clear that what we're really after is rankings, not PageRank. Once upon a time PageRank had a strong influence on rankings - that is not the case anymore."

This article is out of date. If it was written last year maybe it would have held some validity.

Last year I would have written that PageRank had more value. I don't quite get what you're saying as PageRank has, if anything, been declining in importance over time but to me it sounds as though you're saying that if I had said it was losing value last year I would have been right but to say it this year is inaccurate. PageRank certainly hasn't increased in importance over the past year.

While I agree that business owners would do better to think in terms of marketing, traffic, and brand awareness instead of bulk buying high TBPR links with keyword stuffed anchor text, PageRank is and will always be to Google what gravity is to you and me.

Then explain this: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&gl=us&q=seo&btnG=Search

At the time of this posting there are PageRank 3's beating out PageRank 7's.

If one reads the entire post they'll note that I do say PageRank is a factor, just one of hundreds not "the factor" as it once was and certainly not so important as to stand out as much as it does.

Authority, or high total domain PageRank (e.g. Wikipedia, with a slew of TBPR 5 deep pages), by itself may not reward you with any ranking boost, despite popular myth that authority is a dominant ranking factor.

Really? Then why does Wikipedia (PR7 page) rank #1 and SEOMoz (PR7 page) rank #10 for "seo"?

But who would argue against the fact that a site that has 100,000 pages in the main index doesn't have a huge advantage over a site with 10 pages in the main index, simply because that's 100,000 pages of real estate with internal anchor text that you can use to nail highly competitive rankings?

Deep index penetration is one of the most efficient, powerful SEO tactics. And what is the gatekeeper that keeps unpopular sites from getting 100,000 pages in the main index?

PageRank.

What? I have no idea what this means. A site with a PageRank 2 can have 100,000 pages in the index if the owners or contributers are very very busy people. Generally a site isn't going to get to 100,000 pages until it's been around for a long time and by then, it likely has lots of links which will undoubtedly lead to a higher PageRank. I think you put the cart in front of the horse on that one.

Should you chase after PageRank? No. But if you are trying to make the case that gravity - which you aren't conscious of - has no effect on your life then you're making an indefensible claim. Sure, you don't need to think about gravity to be able to drive a car to work. But without gravity, how will you manage to climb into your car?

Well I suppose that's it then. I suppose it's time to call up Rand Fishkin, Danny Sullivan, Neil Patel, Jill Whalen and all the other SEO's who contributed to SEOmoz's "Google Search Engine Ranking Factors" list and let them know that their work was for naught. PageRank is the gravity that holds sites in the rangs (despite that fact that over all the top SEO's they averaged it at 2.4 out of 5 importance).

BTW, Toolbar PageRank (TBPR) is NOT PageRank.

And here we agree. As I wrote, the lack of updating of Google's toolbar PageRank is causing many of the questions from people who have been doing link building recently but haven't noticed any increase in ages.

You bring up a good point I failed to include which was a note:

Google is constantly updating their internal PageRank, they only push it to the toolbar periodically but internally they're using up-to-date values constantly.

"If you had a thermometer that never moved"

Yes bwelford, but the green bar does move. If it doesn't move for certain pages, you can either assume that the toolbar isn't being updated as it should be or you can assume that the page isn't important enough to have an up-to-date green bar. As you might have noticed, popular sites tend to have their toolbar updates before anyone else.

Haven't noticed much of that anywhere with the exception of some sites losing PageRank a couple weeks back and that was about it. Maybe you have a different toolbar than the rest of us. ;)

As much tongue-in-cheek as I may have put across in this post I would sincerely like to thank Halfdesk for the feedback. He forced me to clarify and to include points previously missed. And also important to note, SEO - while based on math - is not an exact science and won't be until someone over at Google answers my emails and finally gives me the algo. ;) It's the exchange of ideas that keeps us all learning and while I may disagree, Halfdeck brings up some decent arguments that I'm glad were brought up so my readers can remember to analyze this debate for themselves.

I didn't become and SEO by copying others, I learned by reading, testing, and judging what others said and then using my own brain to figure out what made sense. I recommend the same for others.

Labels: google, pagerank, sphinn

I'm going to write this post in hopes that the influx of people who seem to be calling us lately asking about PageRank will read it. I'm not convinced that this is the case however it's worth a try. A trend I've noticed as an SEO is that questions tend to come in waves. Today everybody wants to know (or there's mass confusion on) links and PageRank (or more specifically, why they don't have a higher PageRank). And so this post is born. If nothing else, it'll offer me a link to point those people to down the road rather than explaining AGAIN why their website doesn't have a higher PageRank and why this isn't really the question they should be asking themselves.

So let's start from the beginning, why are we all chasing rankings (and since rankings predate PageRank - this is the beginning)? We chase rankings so that we can get traffic. Why do we want traffic? So we can get business. So let's take a look at what the questions we should be asking ourselves are regarding PageRank, the factors being - business, traffic, rankings and PageRank. Lets see if we can figure out which of the factors are unimportant knowing that the end goal is business. In this equation we will make the logical assumption that if you increase the relevant traffic to your website, you'll increase your business. Thus, for our purposes here: traffic = business.

1. If you have a high PageRank but low rankings will you have an increase in traffic/business?
2. If you have a low PageRank but high rankings will you have an increase in traffic/business?
   

If you answered yes to number one then perhaps you need to visit more SEO blogs and forums to get a better understanding of how Internet Marketing works. If you answered yes to number two but no to number one you get the point - PageRank is irrelevant.

Now, there will be a couple of you out there who will have read some statistics regarding people using a high PageRank as a yardstick to measuring the authority or trustability of a website. Putting things in perspective however we can all agree that this is a small percentage of the population (do you?) and if this trust is what you're looking for you'll find it much easier and cheaper (time is money) to attain by adding HackerSafe to your site and getting the roughly 14% conversion increase you can get by going that route.

So we'll focus on the real business and it's very clear that what we're really after is rankings, not PageRank. Once upon a time PageRank had a strong influence on rankings - that is not the case anymore. It is certainly a factor, one among a hundred. Certainly not something worth all the hoop-la.

But thus far I don't think I've really answered the question I've set out to - so let's do that now. Really there are two common questions I seem to get asked frequently about PageRank and they are:

Why isn't my PageRank higher?
The answer here depends on the site of course however the most common reasons are:

• The links you're building are horrible - sorry but it's true. If you come to me with an acne treatment site with a low PageRank and ask why, please make sure you haven't done mass recip link building with low PageRank car insurance sites (or worse), or
• Google's lack of PageRank updating is the "problem". I've seen a number or sites that actually have some good link building tactics in place but have a low PageRank. When I ask when the link building started I'll generally get the reply that it's been in the last 6 months or so. While there have been some hiccups in the PageRank displayed in the tool bar we haven't seen a real update since April. These are generally the funniest people to deal with and here's why. The conversation usually takes the following turn:
  "Oh, that's why my PageRank is still a 2 (or 1 or whatever). I was wondering as I'm sitting at #2 for my phrase." Which occasionally makes me want to forget I'm speaking with a prospective client and cry out "THEN WHO CARES WHAT YOUR PAGERANK IS !!??!!"

Which is really what this blog post (or is it a blog rant?) is about. The second question I get asked a lot is:

So what are you going to do to increase my PageRank?
The truth of the matter is, nothing. I'm not specifically interested in your PageRank. If you look at our guarantee page you won't see a "We guarantee to get you a PageRank of x over 6 months." We run ranking reports, not PageRank reports.

Now, we have to do a lot of link building and our primary focus is to get good relevant links so in the end, the PageRank of the sites we work on will go up however that's not really the point. PageRank doesn't pay the bills (unless you're selling links). Your page's rank - now that does. :)

So thank you all for listening to my rant. I do hope that it has answered some questions and please accept my thanks ... you've been a good counselor. ;)

And Matt (Cutts) if you're reading this PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE just help us get rid of the bloody green bar. paid links wouldn't be a problem for you anymore (or certainly less of one) and I wouldn't have to answer these questions anymore and could just be left to focus on relevancy. :)

Labels: google, link building, pagerank

Let's begin our post here with an update on Google PageRank. There is an update underway. Now, before any of you panic that your PR has just dropped, take a peek at your competitors.

During the last toolbar update I noticed a TON of sites making huge gains. While I'm always pleased to see my clients jump up a couple PR points, in the last update a lot of it didn't make sense. I had clients I would have predicted to jump to a PR4 from the 3 they were at but when they jumped straight to PR5, well it didn't make sense. At lost the current update hits and the client I'm thinking of dropped to a PR4 - right where they should be with my understanding of the way the world works. :)

If you noticed drops in your PageRank value it may well be due to the current corrections going on. Think back a few months, were you celebrating a little too hard with a huge jump? Now it's time for sobriety. :)

And BotNets ...

There's a great article that appears to support my 2007 prediction on Webmaster Radio regarding Google developing a diskless computer (or at least working with manufacturers to do so). Well in an article on the BBC website titled, Criminals 'may overwhelm the web', the first signs of it are appearing though you need to read between the lines.

Vint Cerf, Google employee and one of the developers of the TCP/IP protocol (if you don't know what TCP/IP is, it's the "language" that the web and most networks function on) referred to the proliferation of botnets as a pandemic and noted the following:

"Of the 600 million computers currently on the Internet, between 100 and 150 million were already part of these botnets."

That paints a pretty bleak picture. How can we combat this pandemic? Is there even a solution?
Fortunately Michael Dell (founder of Dell computers) offered the following:

"The future might bring "disposable virtual PCs", accessed through the Internet, that would minimise the threat of a persistent virus infection."

My prediction for 2007 (or perhaps 2008 but that we would at least hear confirmation this year) was that Google would develop a cheap home system that would connect to a network and network storage rather than a hard drive. Everything would happen online. It appears that's the "solution".

Am I the only one that finds it an odd coincidence that Google points out the significant threats that are present (and make no mistake, they are threats) and that Dell bring forth the solution of a dummy machine that is centrally administered and thus, more easily secured and managed? Oh, and need I remind you that in June of 2006 Dell and Google signed a distribution deal?

Hmmmmmmmmm. Methinks my predictions for 2007 might be in the makings. :)

With all this said, botnets are a HUGE security and web issue. While I like to point out that Google and Dell and likely positioning themselves for the launch of this new computer system that does not make the issue any less real. There is a quote, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you." Just because major corporations may take advantage and seek gains from this issue doesn't mean it's not real and that it doesn't threaten the very nature and function of the Internet. The article is worth reading and, if you have the time, researching. You can read the article on the BBC website here. You can also listen to Jim Hedger and I speak with Ryan Sherstobitoff from Panda Technology on just this subject on Webmaster Radio here (this is from December 21st).

Labels: botnets, google, jim hedger, pagerank, webmaster radio