Everyone I'm sure you'll notice all your sites flying all over the place on www2.google.com Interesting stuff. I'd be interested to know how the rest of you are doing.

JDS I see that other than the two words that you put in your journal, GIDtopsites is no.1 for
search engine friendlier
Not sure who would type in friendlier rather than friendly yet it is still no.1
and:
friendlier topsites
So there you go.

It was (is going to be) a good Google update for me personally. A lot of SEO that I had done paid off but it would yield better results in March since most major changes happened only during the last few days of January.

How did your website(s) fare? I know that most links from here are not showing up as back-links for many of you but then these here pages have not (yet) gained any significant page rank.

Over time, this will definitely change and improve, I am certain.

I'm sure it will be another good one for the forum just look where this page is on google for the word googledance lol

Wow, that's impressive but (there's always a but) until the update is over, we still don't know where this page may end up eventually for that phrase ... and for how long.

It's makes me feel all warm inside though

It seems to be sitting pretty at number 3.

You're not doing too bad yourself these days... one of your pages already turns out as a backlink to this site these days! Thank you!

This auto referral script I found has turned out to be mega useful and the newsfeed has getting me some very crossflow traffic. The newsfeed talked about Saddam Hussein, but mispelled it like Hussain and I've been getting incredible traffic with other people who seem to mispell it to. I developed on that and added a few things that they may be looking for and BAM! I'm getting 300+ a day at the moment. This may not seem like much to you but I'm still used to getting 20-50 people a day until MSN and Google started feeding me in good positions. I've leaped on the chance Google has given me since it keeps refreshing my site every 1-2 days and then I get a completely different sweep of people.

One thing that made me slap my head was the fact that my host had caused mySQL failure when they were moving things and Google decided to crawl then and everything disappeared. I could have throttled it but thankfully it came back the next day.

I learnt a lot on this forum and I look forward to the next stages of your webmastering so the thank you should go to you.
Rob

Congratulations on getting the Freshbot visits to your website. you are living proof no one needs SEO companies anymore...

I feel a lot of irony going on especially in that if I try to get a keyword high up then it does okay, but other things that weren't intended are flying in at number 1 and these are the things that people are searching for. They may be searching for both, but the top 3 myth really seems to stand true on something quite specific unless someone is net savvy.
The key to my success so far and its boring to admit it is content content content, navigatable consistent layout and a couple of reputable links (this and a PR6).

It is nice to know that we all have it in us to compete side by side with the big guys although of course they can venture in the pay-per-click arena especially since Overture is commanding that post. I had a go with it on Google it only ended up costing me £1 with a £5 registration, but I can use that again on a phrase that wasn't being competed for and although I removed it now I feel it really helped the site just to get off the ground. Maybe it metaphorically put itself in the good books of Google who knows?