Google UK results remain in disarray after a major update at the beginning of the month saw results being flooded with non-UK websites.

Suggestions of changes being tested came up at the end of April and periodically through May, then from June 4th a major update went live across Google which brought a range of international sites to the fore of Google UK results.

Various rolling changes have since developed throughout June, but the search results still appear muddled and volatile.

Now it appears branding filters may be complicating an already bad situation, by ensuring big authority sites rank for irrelevant keywords, and major competitive keywords give prominence to websites which have little search-friendliness.

If that wasn’t bad enough, there are rumours that Google have been testing a new UI in Google Chrome that would remove the option to search results by UK only - excepting via a footer link once a search has been made.

The changes come at a time when Google is an undisputed monopoly in search for the UK, covering at least 80% of the user market. Yet Google remains under pressure after Microsoft revamped their Live search as Bing.com.

Fortunately for Google, Bing.com seems to have been treated as a general novelty - and in terms of results, they appear far too similar to previous Live offerings in terms of being over-sensitive to keyword URLs and link volume.

However, the current changes to the Google UK ranking algorithm come after a string of user-focused changes to the search engine that make it less friendly to use.

Google won out in the early days because of its simplicity - a plain uncluttered page to search from was a great home page to start with, when all around were trying to be portals.

Last year’s launch of iGoogle tried to portalise Google through personalisation, and then this year saw changes with search suggestion as a default feature, and an attempt to push Local Search into major traffic keywords.

Local Search so far appears like a dismal failure - the UK is so small and densely populated that user IP’s depend more on datacentre locations than actual user locations - making Google’s attempts at geolocating by city in the UK laughable. Users are presumed to be in completely unrelated locations, and various Local Results appear irrelevant or simply map spam.

Now it seems that Google may be looking to drop a UK-focus on Google UK results and push on these troubled Local Search results instead - if claims about the new UI tested in Google Chrome are true.

If they are, then it would suggest that Google has completely lost touch with itself, by not focusing on preserving the useful user experience, but instead on trying to completely change how that user experience is served in a way that does not benefit users - certainly not those in the UK.

In the meantime, there has been no word from Google as to what degree these changes have been intentional, or whether users and businesses have to suffer sitting through yet another volatile Google update as their techies attempt to figure out what may have gone wrong.

UPDATE: It is now being reported that UK cities are being listed with references for equivalent US cities instead of UK data.

However, defendmyname.com claims to be able to help protect brands, and showcases a number of big brands, as if implying that this is a high end company that knows what they’re doing.

Instead, I found someone from defendmyname.com spamming the Internet Business forums, trying to put up posts about lavoramarketing - who doesn’t have much good press on Google.

ORM I can appreciate - but if you ever find a company trying to spam forums with ads, that’s not ORM.

If you do work with a ORM, get them to show examples of what sort of work you can expect to get from them.

The danger is, like a lot of so-called SEO companies, you just end up with a campaign run by a clueless intern who can actually damage your brand instead.

That is, of course, presuming that defendmyname.com actually offers any real professional ORM solutions. :)

Bottom line is - be careful who you work with. For all internet marketing campaigns, you want experienced people with a professional understanding of the industry looking after your interests.

Otherwise, you could find yourself working with a company who damages you further.

The attacked then proceeded to delete three main tables from the forum database before security processes were able to lock the hacker out.

The result is that the only available backup to restore the forums was one of “last resort” from October last year.

Dennis Johnson (aka SoftWareRevue), revealed that the hacker was able to breach security measures in place via an arcane backdoor exploit.

He also made a point to underline that private user data was not breached, “We have no record or evidence that private message data was accessed. Absolutely no credit card or PayPal data was exposed.”

While WHT has been under attack before, it is the extremely targeted way in which the website was breached that caught owner iNet offguard.

iNet already had a disaster recovery plan in place, but despite three protected data back-up units, with one offsite behind a firewall, and a fourth physical data back-up layer, the hacker was able to breach all of these to cause serious damage to the website.

Dennis warns other companies to be extremely aware of similar potential sabotage attempts: “We advise others to consider a scenario of deliberate, malicious data destruction in their backup and recovery plans.”

I can certainly sympathise with them - database driven sites are very vulnerable to data loss, and data loss from an online community can be very disheartening for members, especially if this means loss of personalisation and community participation.

I thought I had it bad at the end of last year when a database corruption dropped the posts table from one of my big boards, only to find on-site backups had not been operational, forcing use of a two month old database.

The fact that a major site such as WHT can lose 6 months worth of data is astonishing, not least because of the extremely calculated way Dennis describes the site as being attacked.

In the meantime, all webmasters and website owners are warning to be extra vigilant in protecting their online databases and have clear and present backup systems in place. Databases can be extremely powerful yet fragile systems, with data loss often being irreversible.

The randomly emailed message claims to be from 123-reg, asking the recipient to update their payment details, but does not mention the user by name, and links instead to a subdomain on mxmfb.com.

As with all phishing attacks, just bin them, and if you’re unsure as to whether an email is legitimate or not, login directly to the site via a browser window, rather than email link.

Of course, the giveaway is always the fact that phishing emails usually do not name the person they are addressed to, due to their random nature, and the fact that they do not have your personal contact details in the first place, instead relying on mass emails to ensure some fraction of the volume sent arrives at potential targets.

As you can see, that’s a radical shrinkage, and almost certainly is a continuation of Google’s policy to try and diminish how PageRank is used and abused by webmasters.

Interestingly enough, most commercial SEO’s see little importance in PageRank anyway - with the Toolbar PageRank indicator serving no real purpose other than to indicate with a simple graphic an idea of the domain’s link profile.

While a number of people have made a point of chasing “high PageRank” links, as I advised at SMX London in November, an page on an old domain with a low PageRank score will probably pass more link benefit than a new domain with a high PageRank score showing in the toolbar.

Even still, a lot of people remain confused about PageRank - I still read posts on forums where people think the only way to rank for anything is to increase their PageRank score. In fact, I’ve even had people calling themselves SEO’s who claim that PageRank is a major ranking factor.

When it comes to SEO, PageRank scores on the toolbar are not significant, and actually tell you very little about a webpage - as the scoring is often more indicative of the domain than the page. Additionally, the score is usually out of date by around 3 months. Plus PageRank just isn’t a significant factor for ranking purposes these days - maybe 10 years ago, but not now.

Hopefully Google reducing the visibility of the PR bar on the toolbar will help diminish perception of PageRank, as part of a process Google has had on-going for a few years.

Perhaps soon webmasters will focus more on building great sites, and looking at other webpages on their own merits, instead of chasing little green bars which communicate very little if anything of use about a page.

This is something I try recommending to companies I work with, but unfortunately, is usually not taken up.

Companies who do leverage this do really well in the SERPs - just run a few finance terms and see how often MoneySupermarket comes up - many of the results of which are driven by its affiliate links.

It remains an advantage that many companies could leverage, but choose not to. Those who do have the competitive advantage.

I’ve already covered how the local search options are now being pushed on Google UK (even though a cursory test here shows the results to be poor - try searching for the HSBC branch in Inverness - I get one IFA, a B&B, and a couple of engineering companies instead!).

However, Danny Sullivan covers a couple of new features Google are adding in - one he calls “Pagelinks”, the other as links in Google Suggest.

PageLinks works as an enhanced feature for listings, allow users to jump straight into most popular pages, as well as webmasters provide specific information for Google to extract - the example Danny gives on CitySearch is very interesting indeed.

The new Google Suggest feature has Google adding direct links and even PPC adds into Google Suggest.

I don’t know about anyone else, but the rate of change Google is making with Google Search almost suggests Google feels their search offering is broken, or else being out competed, and is desperately trying to implement anything they can that “may” help the user experience.

This too easily looks like techies and programmers getting carried away with themselves, and simplying implementing features because they can, rather than because they are needed.

Most of us use Google for search because it’s easy to use and providers relevant results, with Google’s previous focus on the user experience as a key reason for its success.

So why as a market leader does Google need to keep pushing on more and more new features? Do they think we’ll stop using Google Search because the solid and dependable platform may not change often enough?

Coming on the back of the forced opt-in for ordering results for those searching while logged into a user account suggests that Google may be beginning to lose the plot a bit. I can understand Google wanting to take human user data and look for a useful signal, but with the above as well - it looks like over doing it. And if not careful, Google may end up sacrificing the human user experience.

The more bells and whistles Google put into search, the less likely these will be used. On my VCR I only need to play and record, I don’t need much more of that in my user experience.

The alternative suggestion is that Google really does feel threatened by Microsoft and is pushing on a big experimental phase, in order to see exactly what works so that when a serious rival finally approaches, Google can ensure it keeps in the lead. Trouble with that, is that whatever format Google uses is too easy to copy.

While I’m sure Google have every confidence in testing PageLinks and Google Suggest, it’s worth warning the company that people often don’t like change when what they ordinarily have works so well. Don’t break your own search box, Google!

The admin interface may look more cluttered at first, but it really does improve usability by reducing the number of clicks required for any single action.

The big news with this release isn’t just the massively ajax-ed admin interface though.

Matt and the team have added an auto-updated feature - so that with a click of a link, Wordpress will automatically upload the latest version.

This has been a much needed addition, and other software platforms such as Simple Machines have long proved that this can be done and workable - and be user-friendly.

It remains to be see how this tests in a live environment, but in the meantime, it looks like Wordpress has taken some major, useful, and much needed steps with Wordpress 2.7.

Time to update - and hopefully FTP an update for the last time. Download Wordpress 2.7.

Campaigns I’ve seen suspension emails for include the RAC, Prudential home insurance, and Legal and General.

Interestingly enough, a number of affiliate programs moved to buy.at after tracking issues with Tradedoubler last year, so the current issues could be potentially damaging for buy.at.

Hopefully we’ll see the issue addressed, because the number of affiliate programs in a number of sectors has shrunk drastically since the credit crunch hit, so affiliates are unlikely to welcome tracking issues on those which remain.

If this gives us a sneak peek at Wordpress 2.7 then it certainly looks like a more intuitive navigation system is in place and a release actually worth looking forward to.

While the upgrade to 2.6 left the navigation cleaner, it also felt like it required more clicks to get to any basic settings.

However, the Wordpress.com interface has options on most every page, with ajax-powered drop-down menus, so you can pretty much get to wherever you need in a single click.

The use of categories is much more intelligent as well - in 2.6 there’s nothing but a tiny iFrame which makes navigating sites with a lot of categories difficult and cumbersome. The Wordpress.com interface goes back to the original right-hand listing, which should be easier to use again.

I haven’t downloaded the Wordpress 2.7 beta, but if the admin interface is anything like that running on Wordpress.com, then we may actually have something to look forward to.

What I’m hoping for most in 2.7 is a fix to the cookie length issue - I used to be able to stay logged in a Wordpress-driven site for weeks, even months. However, since 2.6, I seem to be logged out after only days, which is a royal admin pain to work with.

UPDATE: There’s more info on this interface at Wordpress.com.