As SEO consultants we know how much time and efforts it might take to achieve high positions for a site sometimes. That is why after receiving desired ranks being excluded from Google index because of the site’s being down during the Google bot crawling it is twice more unpleasant.

A thread from the updated Google Groups points out that

I’ve been having problems with downtime from my hosting company (am moving tomorrow as this is the final straw) and I’ve now practically disappeared from Google. I was in 3rd position for 5 of the more popular searches for my business and now - nothing.

It’s hard to imagine the disappointment of that site owner from his site being removed from Google’s index. But Vanessa Fox from Google confirms that if the site is down and its pages are inaccessible for Google crawler, then it might lead to exclusion from Google index.

If the host is down when Googlebot tries to access your pages, then those pages may disappear from the index until Googlebot can crawl them again. In webmaster tools, do the pages you want indexed appear in the crawl errors section? If so, then Googlebot was unable to access them.

The good thing to know about this is that you shouldn’t request site reinclusion. Google will automatically continue trying to access your pages and as soon it founds them, they will be back in Google index.

You’re right that requesting reinclusion is only for sites that have violated the guidelines. This isn’t the situation in your case, and there’s no need to contact us to let us know that your site has moved and is available again, as Googlebot will keep rechecking for it automatically.

The Google Sitelinks update that took place recently has lead to the appearance of Sitelinks to the sites that seem really worth assigning them, but haven’t got them previously (one of SimpleSEM client has also been assigned them after update).

However, those who haven’t seen additional links to their site in SERPs might wonder, what Google Sitelinks are and what could be done to achieve them. Here is how Google defines Sitelinks:

“The links shown below some sites in our search results, called Sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

We only show Sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good Sitelinks, or we don’t think that the Sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.

At the moment, Sitelinks are completely automated. We’re always working to improve our Sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future.”

What algorythims are used to choose the sites for sitelinks assignment? How are the particular pages within the site chosen to be shown among sitelinks? According to Google representative Vanessa Fox Google shows Sitelinks “when we think they’ll be most useful to searchers, saving them time from hunting through web pages to find the information they are looking for.”

To make some assumptions and recommendations on how to receive Sitelinks from Google, we aggregated the data known about Sitelinks, researched the sites that already have them assigned, gathered Google representatives comments on Sitelinks such as the following one from Vanessa Fox

“Ranking the plurality of links based on at least one of a number of accesses associated with web pages corresponding to the plurality of links, a number of web pages with a link pointing to a web page corresponding to one of the plurality of links, how closely the search query matches information on web pages corresponding to each of the plurality of links or the user’s history associated with accessing web pages corresponding to each of the plurality of links.”

Here are some tips that will not guarantee your site to achieve Google Sitelinks but will definitely lead to the increase of overall site quality and marketing efforts effectiveness:

• Structure site navigation clearly. Use special HTML and CSS features to achieve desired appearance.
• Define a limited number of logical destinations users might be interested in. Don’t overwhelm the visitor with too many choices.
• Include an XML sitemap of your site.

• Validate your site markup
• Create pages under semantic principles and naming conventions
• Provide the daily traffic of 1000 visits or more to your site
• Brand the web site with a unique name.
• Include useful and informative titles and META descriptions to the site

Check out your site in Google after the Sitelinks update. Maybe you already have them!

I assume you are familiar with Google Base already so we couldn’t ignore the update of this effective merchants’ resource. Online merchants are promoted to submit more attributes along with basic product description to give users more parameters to compare when searching for a particular item. Besides, Google reminds that “including as many attributes as possible will increase your items’ exposure in search results”. The required for each product attributes include:

• brand
• condition
• description
• expiration_date
• id
• image_link
• link
• price
• product_type
• Title

Google also “strongly recommend” the use of some additional elements which “will increase your items’ exposure in search results”:

• payment_accepted
• payment_notes
• pickup
• price_type
• quantity
• shipping
• tax_percent
• tax_region

While more sophisticated users can take an advantage of uploading additional information for their goods such as color, film type, focus type, megapixels, model number, resolution, size, tech spec link, upc, zoom for cameras or artist, department, material, occasion, style for jewelry.

The complete list of attributes defined by Google could be found here.

Check this screenshot out - as you can imagine we have Google Toolbars installed on all the computers here at the Office (being a SEM and all). But it seems that one of our Employees is having a recurring message appear in his browser, prompting him to reinstall the Toolbar again and again.

Google what did you do?

Looks like Google Checkout is testing a few ‘big’ icon treatments in Google Adwords listings - we are assuming the project goal is to compare & contrast user click response based on icon size.

We found these screenshots of the three ‘treatments’ or styles of icon Google is now testing: subtle cart, defining brand, and the ‘Daddy’ call to action or click to action button. Click here to learn more about Google Checkout Badges.

if you recall a few weeks ago, Jeremy Zawodny wrote a post about his thoughts on Google ripping off a certain Yahoo page design. Steve Bryant over at GoogleWatch thought it would be fun to create a Google start page that looked exactly like Yahoo’s current theme.

I guess this would be what Google ‘could’ look like if they we’re purchased by Yahoo!, instead of Overture…

Google Blog Search engine has got over the top other engines of the same kind. Not quite shocking news as we’ve all got used that for the previous several years Google has earned an unbeatable leadership in search industry. The heading that announces Google’s being the first again in search traffic or revenue will not surprise anybody.

What is interesting about Google Blog Search engine is how fast it became popular. As recently as September, it had a market share of 0.001%, failing to find an audience. However, starting from October, the Blog Search feature began to gain its popularity due to being placed on the Google’s main page. The marketing course has appeared so effective that Google Blog Search’s market share increased up to 25% by this time, having supplanted even the leader (former leader) among search engine for blogs, Technorati.

Well, I’ve never doubt in Google’s ability to promote their new search services!