Previous chapters have covered how the growth of Google and fears of how it was reshaping the communication landscape led to the application of existing anti-trust laws along with new ones to force a Google breakup in 2010. This chapter looks at the immediate aftermath: the “Baby Googles” or “Googlets” that were formed in the name of greater competition and consumer choice.
Many sites have seen a big drop in PageRank. Some even from 9 to 6. Hours later, many others have reported on this.
Websites affected by Google’s October PageRank update:
SEO for keywords and content is relatively easy. Choose your keyword. Write content around that keyword. Use an SEO optimizer program to make sure you have done it right.
Long gone are the days of writing unrelated content, and then typing “Britney Spears” 100 times at the end of the article. Today’s search engine spiders can spot the “Black Hat” SEO techniques a mile away, and your site can be banned for life.
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We’ve improved Webmaster Central’s robots.txt analysis tool to recognize sitemap declarations and relative urls. Earlier versions weren’t aware of sitemaps at all, and understood only absolute URLs; anything else was reported as Syntax not understood. The improved version now tells you whether your sitemap’s URL and scope are valid. You can also test against relative URLs with a lot less typing.
Reporting is better, too. You’ll now be told of multiple problems per line if they exist, unlike earlier versions which only reported the first problem encountered. And we’ve made other general improvements to analysis and validation.
Imagine that you’re responsible for the domain www.example.com and you want search engines to index everything on your site, except for your /images folder. You also want to make sure your sitemap gets noticed, so you save the following as your robots.txt file:
disalow images
user-agent: *
Disallow:
sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
You visit Webmaster Central to test your site against the robots.txtanalysis tool using these two test URLs:
http://www.example.com
/archives
Earlier versions of the tool would have reported this:
See for yourself at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools.
As someone who tests Google products daily, I know that the simplest solution is often the one that works best. In the case of online storage, whether it’s a picture, a video or an email, you should just, well, be able to store it without having to worry about whether you’ve got enough space in each particular product. That’s why the Picasa team is pleased to tell you that in a few hours we’ll be rolling out extra storage that you can purchase to use across several Google products (today, Picasa Web Albums and Gmail; soon, other applications like Google Docs & Spreadsheets). That will help make storage really useful, like letting you upload lots of full resolution images to Picasa Web Albums.
When you reach the limit of free storage (i.e., 1GB for Picasa Web Albums, 2.8GB for Gmail), consider this your overflow solution. Plans start at $20/year for 6GB (yes, $5 cheaper than before), with larger plans ranging up to 250GB. If only testing everything were this easy. We’ll update this post as soon as we’re ready to take your order.
A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports spotting new Google AdSense units being tested. It appears Google is mixing a typical text ad unit with what are called link units.
Here is a screen capture taken from the forum thread:
Google AdSense Link & Text Ad Unit Mixed
Notice the links at the bottom of the ad. You can click on the image or go to the thread to see a full size version.
These ads are also being tested on other ad formats, as you can see on page two of the thread.
I was unable to reproduce the ads, but they seem to be real.
Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.
A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports spotting new Google AdSense units being tested. It appears Google is mixing a typical text ad unit with what are called link units.
Here is a screen capture taken from the forum thread:
Google AdSense Link & Text Ad Unit Mixed
Notice the links at the bottom of the ad. You can click on the image or go to the thread to see a full size version.
These ads are also being tested on other ad formats, as you can see on page two of the thread.
I was unable to reproduce the ads, but they seem to be real.
Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as we know and detest it is obsolete in this day and age. When some while ago Philipp asked me to write an article How do I optimize websites I couldnt do it: The way SEO works in Germany on Google.de can not really work for international websites in English. Moreover nowadays you do not need conventional SEO tactics to have success on the Net or in Google. In order to make a site succeed in these times you have to forget everything you know about on page optimization and link building first.
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Google seems to never catch a break when it comes to YouTube. Media giant Viacom, which owns Comedy Central, MTV, and Paramount Studios has seen the National Music Publishers’ Association join their lawsuit against YouTube. The companies claim that videos posted on YouTube keep songwriters, artists and studios from receiving due compensation for posting their music/films/etc.
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