JLH Design Blog

According to Google’s default #1 search result for [jedi mind trick]:

Jedi typically perform this ability with a wave of the hand and a verbal suggestion (for example, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for”). If the trick is successful, the victim will reply by restating the suggestion (”These aren’t the droids we’re looking for”) and will immediately think or do whatever the Jedi suggested.

Two days of ago Google’s most famous Googler said that the DMOZ home page had disappeared due to a ill conceived 301 redirect. Today the official DMOZ blog took time out of their busy schedule of not approving competitor’s sites to clarify the situation and say that the real reason was actually:

…changing the root domain from dmoz.org to www.dmoz.org. What we all witnessed yesterday and what was reported by the great sites above was part of an index recognizing, adjusting and updating in real time. This was confirmed in discussions we had with Google…

From this exchange I can only wonder about a few possibilities:

• Google waved their hand and said, “those are real time adjusting and updating” and DMOZ obliged and responded with, “those are real time adjusting and updating”
• Matt Cutts needs to talk to his crawl team who seemingly fed him some bad information
• DMOZ actually doesn’t have the skills required to institute a proper 301 redirect
• Google fell on the sword and decided to look like fools and said that they can’t handle domain canonicalization
• If you have a site with a home page with PageRank of 9 or less (that’s only a small percentage of the web) you should reconsider instituting a 301 redirect, lest Google will loose you for a few days of recognizing and adjusting
• Minty fresh results only apply to lower PageRank blogs and not older established sites
• Google actually had a big screw up, instead of sending Adam Lasnik out to say it was a Bad Data Push, they waved their hand and buffaloed DMOZ into doing their dirty work for them
• There are screw-ups, cover-ups, and foul-ups going on here

Note to DMOZ, if you have to continually remind people that you are not dead or dying, you are dead or dying.

• Today, “DMOZ is not dying folks. We’re growing every day. Globally.”
• Two days ago, “the editor community is very much alive and thriving”

Quick hitter: This is often asked by site owners.  There are millions of possible reasons, but usually the most likely is that other sites rankings have increased.  Study the sites that went up, the answer is usually within those results.  Seems like a simple enough concept but almost always overlooked.

Setup

The fire storm that got started when Matt Cutts made a simple call for webmasters to start submarining their competition with reports of paid links got me wondering. Is Google setting a trend here or following one?

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Update 4/18/07 - Adam hinted, Vanessa delivered. Two new tools rolled out in Webmaster tools. A much more involved content removal system to give you even more control and expanded page analysis that now includes phrases.

I believe you’ll see really cool new tools and information in Webmaster Tools which will answer an increasing majority of questions we now see in the forum.

Vannesa Fox elaborated on this a bit more in her uneasily casual conversation that was taped with Rand Fishkin. I don’t want to steal their thunder and paraphrase it, so suffice it to say it’s well worth watching and listening to.

This is just strange, strange, strange…but funny, it even includes the words “Butt Munches” which means its gotta be good.