Ok, so, looks like Rand and gang finally decided to reveal their top-secret recipe about how they gathered all that information on everybody’s websites without anyone noticing what they were doing. There was quite a bit of hoopla over the fact that when they announced their new index of 30 billion web pages (and the new tool powered by that index), due to the fact that they never gave webmasters the chance to block them from gathering this data. In fact, they never even
On The Ball-ness
Google Allows Ads Mocking Suicide
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:
Google Fundamentally Changes The Way They Handle 302 Redirects (Welcome Back 302 Hijack!)
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
Google Lowers The Bar On Customer Service Yet Again
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,
Write A Bad Check: Bond $1,500… Possession Of Cocaine: Bond $5 Bucks. Wtf?
I live in Largo, FL, which is located in Pinellas County. People and the way things work aren’t always what you would call “normal” around here. Not sure if it’s the incessant heat, or something they put in the water, or the fact that we live within shouting distance of Scientology Central (which is located in Clearwater). Either way, for whatever the reason, sometimes things just aren’t right around these parts.
I swear, you can only find this stuff in the St. Petersburg, FL area. Someone showed me this recently on the Pinellas County Jail Inmate search:
Why The Google Keyword Tool Is Useless For SEO, Even With Exact Numbers
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
How To Completely Clean Your Hacked WordPress Installation
Update 08/13/2015 – Please note: The following Do It Yourself guide on how to de-hack your website is designed for people who don’t necessarily know how to read php, but do know how to work their way through installing WordPress, themes, and plugins. It also assumes you know your way around whichever hosting control panel it is that comes with your host. Because malicious code can be very hard to weed out from the legitimate stuff, especially for someone who is not a programmer, this guide recommends that you start over with a completely fresh theme on your site. This means that for many, the customizations that were done to the theme will be lost, or will need to be re-done. For those of you who would prefer not to do that, or who have a complicated or ecommerce site, or one with heavy traffic and you would like to completely minimize the downtime, I do offer professional cleaning services. I can de-hack and secure your site without losing any of the design or functionality, and in most cases there is only a few minutes of downtime near the end of the process. For more information, please fill out my contact form.
Getting hacked sucks, plain and simple. It can affect your rankings, cause your readership to be exposed to virus and trojan attacks, make you an unwilling promoter to subject material you may not actually endorse, and in many cases cause the loss of valuable content. However, once it happens it is usually best to not procrastinate on the clean up process,
CNN Refuses To Discuss Kucinich’s Articles Of Impeachment?
Last night Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) introduced 35 articles of impeachment against George W. Bush. This would be, to most reasonable thinking persons, newsworthy. CNN, however,
Google Updates List Of Third-Party Ad Providers
Well, that was quick. For those of you not using my Free Google Third-Party Ad Providers Widget, which automatically updates whenever Google changes their list of third-party ad providers, it’s time to update your privacy policies once again.
If you are already using the widget,
Googlebot Creates Pages Instead of Simply Indexing Them: New FORM Crawling Algo Goes Bad
Last month Google revealed a new crawling method that they were testing out, whereby they were filling out forms on sites that they came across, in order to help facilitate the discovery of new pages. Matt Cutts discussed it here last month. I had noticed the phenomena
