Is the Wikipedia editor culture slowly changing to the kind of self dictatorial politic bias crap we might expect elsewhere..? Or were the entries just genuinely badly written? It seems strange they were put up for deletion rather than simply noted for improvement.

Check out the open letter to Wiki by Danny Sullivan. It seems the general consensus so far is to keep the entry. What do you think? More chatter on Threadwatch.

I gave them a hard time a couple of weeks back which was picked up at the SEroundtable & I followed this up with a few more thoughts. Matt Cutts replied with a couple of amusing comments;

“I don’t have any inside insight on this, but maybe someone saw that Yahoo was doing tips and getting *less* grief than if they’d bought ads. ;) Barry, take your article and substitute the word “Yahoo” for “Google”. Now why didn’t you write that article? :) Because they’ve done it for years. :)”

A few more thoughts from Matt can be seen at his blog. I think Google do get a bit of a rough deal in comparison to the other search engines. Why? Simply because there is that much more expectation for Google to do no evil, so to speak. We expect it elsewhere, so its like a complement in many ways to Google.

Update – Matt has confirmed the tip removal over at the Blake Ross blog;

There’s a binary push going on that and the tips are removed in that binary push. It will take a few days before the binary makes it out to every data center. Blake, thanks for your feedback on this issue.

Matt Cutts has answered the question by denying any algo update. However, he did explain the differences between an algorithm update, data refresh and index update -

Algorithm update: Typically yields changes in the search results on the larger end of the spectrum. Algorithms can change at any time, but noticeable changes tend to be less frequent.

Data refresh: When data is refreshed within an existing algorithm. Changes are typically toward the less-impactful end of the spectrum, and are often so small that people don’t even notice. One of the smallest types of data refreshes is an:

Index update: When new indexing data is pushed out to data centers. From the summer of 2000 to the summer of 2003, index updates tended to happen about once a month. The resulting changes were called the Google Dance. The Google Dance occurred over the course of 6-8 days because each data center in turn had to be taken out of rotation and loaded with an entirely new web index, and that took time. In the summer of 2003 (the Google Dance called “Update Fritz”), Google switched to an index that was incrementally updated every day (or faster). Instead of a monolithic monthly event, the Google would refresh some of its index pretty much every day, which generated much smaller day-to-day changes that some people called everflux. Over the years, Google’s indexing has been streamlined, to the point where most regular people don’t even notice the index updating. As a result, the terms “everflux,” “Google Dance,” and “index update” are hardly ever used anymore (or they’re used incorrectly :) ). Instead, most SEOs talk about algorithm updates or data updates/refreshes. Most data refreshes are index updates, although occasionally a data refresh will happen outside of the day-to-day index updates. For example, updated backlinks and PageRanks are made visible every 3-4 months.

This pretty much suggests any movement we are currently seeing is a data refresh of somekind.

There’s nothing overly new there, but we can assertain a few things post. Firstly Google continually updates PageRank which acts like a floating point number rather than just a set 1-10 score. However, Google will export PageRank values using this 1-10 scale to the Google toolbar, which is a lengthly process. By the time they are finally visible, they are already outdated.

Well, John Battelle’s recent interview with Matt Cutts sheds further light on the subject. Matt Cutts explains in the interview -

“The W3C decided to add a “INDEX, NOFOLLOW” meta tag to their sponsor page, which has the benefits that the sponsor page can show up in search engines and that users receive nice static links that they can click on, but search engines are not affected by the outlinks on that page.”

Generally the ‘nofollow’ tag is used in conjunction with the link itself, rather than as a meta tag. In fact that meta tag predates the use of ‘no follow’ as we see it today. SEW looks at how this tag seems to have changed.

Theres more discussion over at Threadwatch too. I just wonder if the likes of SEO Book will be renewing their sponsorship next year?!

There’s been discussions over at SEW regarding Googles true birthday (perhaps the 7th!?), although I am not sure how much I really care.

Matt Cutts goes into more detail surrounding the true date and Google Blogoscoped looks at Googles official history.

Whatever the date, Happy Birthday Google.

Now give us a PR update. ;)