Google

Google Tries Too Hard To Appear Useful, Starts Making Up New Words

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The Google Search feature that Google calls “Spell Checker” can be very handy at times. You know the one I mean… you type something hastily in the box, manage to inadvertently slip in a typo or two, and Google, very helpfully, asks you “Did you mean: {some other word}”. Aside from putting a dent in the revenue for all of those SEO’s who are cleverly banking on people making common typos, most people (like myself) probably

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Yet Another Link Test – Single Source Page, Multiple Links, Nofollowed Middle

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Last year I performed a couple of tests on what happens if you have multiple links pointing to the same page all from the same source page. Today a reader left a comment from one of the follow-up posts, which had to do with answering the question of what happens if the first link is nofollowed. He asked if I had tested with the second link being nofollowed instead of the first.

Well, no, I haven’t. So…

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How To Add 7 Billion Pages To Your Index Overnight

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A couple of days ago I posted my assertion that Rand Fishkin had lied about the details of the new Linkscape tool on SEOmoz. During the discussion that followed, Rand continued to maintain that they owned the bots that collected the data that powered the tool, despite several points on that being very unclear, and that his bots had collected those 30 billion pages.

Right in the heat of the argument, someone decided to drop a comment on my blog that struck me as a little odd

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Google Allows Ads Mocking Suicide

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Google jumper During the Great Depression, the suicide rate jumped over 21.4%. It was a sad time for all, and the unemployment rate skyrocketed. Many people lost their homes and farms. The shame of not being able to provide for their families was simply too much for some. Last June, “Good Morning America” did a segment titled “Recession Depression”, where reporter Chris Cuomo drew analogies between the events back then and our current financial crisis, warning that we could possibly see similar psychological impacts with todays economy:

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Google Fundamentally Changes The Way They Handle 302 Redirects (Welcome Back 302 Hijack!)

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Officer not-so-friendly 302 Redirect For years now, on an on-again/off-again basis, Google has had issues with the way that they treat 302 Temporary Redirects. Going back at least as far as 2004, you can find discussions about websites getting hijacked in the serps, all due to problems arising from the way that 302’s were treated. The issue was that if one site redirected to another using a 302 Temporary Redirect (as opposed to a 301 Permanent Redirect, which has come to be known as a “search engine friendly” redirect), often times

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Google Lowers The Bar On Customer Service Yet Again

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Can Google customer service get with the times? For the second year running Fortune magazine has named Google (GOOG) as the #1 place to work for in America. Their article last year states that Google “sets the standard for Silicon Valley: free meals, swimming spa, and free doctors onsite. Engineers can spend 20% of time on independent projects. No wonder Google gets 1,300 résumés a day.” Now, I don’t know about you, but to me numbers like that mean Google doesn’t have to simply settle when hiring employees… they literally can pick and choose from the cream of the crop who does and who does not work for them.

In fact, according to Google themselves,

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Why The Google Keyword Tool Is Useless For SEO, Even With Exact Numbers

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Not quite on target... Recently there was a bit of a hubbub surrounding Google’s Keyword Tool External (the keyword suggestion portion of AdWords that was made public a couple of years back). It started when a few people, like Barry Schwartz from SERoundtable, noticed that the tool was showing specific numbers for search terms instead of just green bars. Even though at first

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