PayPal has problems

After reading a post by Alan Meckler of Jupitermedia (you can visit his blog at http://weblogs.jupitermedia.com/meckler/) I remembered how horrible my last customer service experience with the people at PayPal was and thought I would share. Although this isn't directly related to Search Engine Optimization, PayPal is used by many SEO and web development firms as a method of accepting payment.

As Alan pointed out, you never get the same representative twice. It was blantantly obvious that the people at PayPal didn't even read my question, but instead cut and pasted a generic response into their reply to me. I went back and forth about six times and it was like trying to grab a 5 year old's attention while he is holding a red balloon in one hand, cotton candy in the other, all while walking through Disneyland. I decided I'd wasted enough time and picked up the phone and called them.

Not only do they not provide a toll free number to reach them at, but it takes far too long to speak to an actual human. When I finally got a real, live human being, he was very helpful and fixed the issue in 10 minutes for me. I told him about my email frustration and I also submitted a formal complaint to PayPal about it. A month and a half later and I still haven't received a response. (I'm not holding my breath)

My advice is to nix email and get PayPal on the phone. You'll be pulling your hair out for weeks otherwise.

Google Algorithm Update in the Works?

So it looks like Google may be rolling out a new set of search results after half of their datacenters have been showing significantly changed results over the past several weeks. It's all just speculation at the moment as to how this will affect most web sites, or what the main differences are in the rankings and new algo specifics. My opinion is that this update will be related quite a bit to the recent indexing issues and the Big Daddy update.

Still no update to PageRank yet, or backlinks. The last PR update was on April 4th.

Speaking of PageRank, I still think too many people overemphasize the importance of it. It does not affect Google rankings directly but as part of the overall algorithm. I wrote this article a few years ago regarding Google PageRank, but it still has some relevance even today.

Speaking of indexing issues, as an example, a web site had over 600 pages listed in Google two months ago and then lost them all except for the home page. There were only white hat SEO techniques used and even Google friendly measures such as signing up for Sitemaps and Froogle were employed. The result is that a very visitor-oriented page, a Bratt Decor furniture category, was removed.

There are thousands of other people affected by the same issue. My advice to anyone in a similar predicament is to:

- continue to get good quality, relevant incoming links to the site.

- pay for directory listings at places such as Yahoo!, bCentral, Business.com as it adds an element of legitimacy to the website. Google even suggests on their Webmaster Help Center that you should pay Yahoo! for a directory listing. A very telling statement considering Yahoo! is a direct competitor of theirs.

- thoroughly analyze the code of the web site to make sure it is as clean as possible. Quicker load times, CSS instead of HTML formatting, and no broken links can go a long way in making your site appealing to Google's robots.

- and a no brainer, don't post to link farms, use doorway pages or cloaking methods. This is the quickest way to get banned by search engines.

If your site is designed and optimized by the book, there is no reason you shouldn't see any indexing or ranking issues resolved within time.