Archive for the 'Google' Category

Spam, confusion, and annoyance – welcome to SearchWiki

Posted by rob on November 25th, 2008 filed in Google, Spam

Even though SearchWiki is a very annoying service that adds clutter to the otherwise useful Google SERPs, I have to give it credit for a new hobby – SearchWiki comment watching. The comments are filled with helpful tidbits like “test”, “this is good”, “where does this comment appear?” and other enlightening information. Beyond TechCrunch’s porn [...]

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Electronics reviews = spam

Posted by rob on November 19th, 2008 filed in Google, Spam

Google’s search results for product reviews truly suck hard, particularly in the electronics vertical. To be fair, so do Yahoo’s. Recently I’ve bought a laptop, a new PC (custom built), and a new TV, and like many customers I like to read impartial expert reviews of products before I buy them. For cheaper products I [...]

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Yet more duplicate content fuzz

Posted by rob on September 16th, 2008 filed in Google, SEO

Read this post from Google on duplicate content, then read (and pay more attention to) Graywolf’s post. I was going to blog about this whole thing, but Graywolf has summarized it well. All I’d add is that Google are playing a dangerous game by pretending that they can handle duplicate content. What Google are effectively [...]

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Over-powerful domain authority in Google

Posted by rob on September 10th, 2008 filed in Google, Spam

Some interesting results for the query [airline tickets] in Google today – at numbers 3 & 4 there are 2 results from Bebo, the well-known airline ticket supplier. Hang on, Bebo – isn’t that a social networking site rather than an airline ticketing company? As outlined by Trend Labs recently in a post entitled Spam [...]

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Google tinfoil hat theory #1

Posted by rob on September 4th, 2008 filed in Google

I’m making a new resolution to blog less about Google from now on – they already dominate the online conversation about just about everything apart from hardware, and really don’t need the extra exposure. However I think there aren’t enough conspiracy theories about Google’s world domination (rofl) – so here’s another one: Google releases facial [...]

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Effects of being flagged as badware in Google

Posted by rob on August 27th, 2008 filed in Google, Wordpress

Just a quick note further to my post on wordpress and badware risks; the blog that this happened on had all of its PageRank withdrawn, which has just been reinstated. This indicates to me that there is a likely PageRank penalty of 6 months from the date that a site is flagged as badware. Of [...]

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Google Pagerank update

Posted by rob on May 1st, 2008 filed in Google

Google has updated their Pagerank reporting today – looks like Netvibes gets a nice bump up to from PR8 to PR9, along with Facebook getting the same increase from PR8 to PR9. Haven’t seen any big losers as yet…

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