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Google have announced a free cross-product webinar for webmasters to learn more about three of their most used products, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer, and how they can work together to enhance your website.
The webinar will be held 8th July 2008, 9:00am PT (Pacific Time). To attend you need to register. Those that can’t make it will be able to access an archived version of the presentation via the same registration URL. This is the first time Google have offered a joint webinar for these products.
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Well I’ve long suspected it and now Matt Cutts has confirmed it: sites that get hacked are removed from Google’s index.
Blogger and mountaineer Ryan Stewart (who I’ve long envied not just for his lack of acrophobia but also for his Google PageRank of 9/10) complained that Google had wiped his blog from the index.
Turns out the removal occurred for security reasons shortly after Ryan’s site was hacked. Here’s an extract from Matt’s comment on Ryan’s blog about the situation:
“Sorry to hear that your blog got hacked. I know that it’s disappointing if you don’t show up in Google, but there’s another way to look at it. It looks like your blog was hacked to show “buy pharmacy”-type links, but what if the hackers had hosted malware on your site? Then every user to your site might have gotten infected just by visiting your site. That danger to Google users is one of the reasons that we temporarily remove hacked sites from Google.”
So be warned, if your site is hacked, you might want to keep an eye on your Google Webmaster Tools account and submit a re-inclusion request as soon as things are back to normal.
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Hi Kalena
We’ve been trying to move to #1 on Google with the keyword voip, however, we have been unable to beat Wikipedia - obviously because they have a lot of strong inbound links. We are #1 on Yahoo! and MSN and #2 on Google.
Two questions: 1. Any ideas of what to do? 2. Any ideas of how to have our Wikipedia page approved? They keep rejecting our submissions saying it’s too commercial. We re-wrote it many times, made it absolutely non-commercial but no luck.
Thanks
Ferenc
Hi Ferenc
Thanks for the coffee bribe, I really appreciate it.
Wikipedia has very strict rules on what constitutes suitable content for one of their pages. If your intent is simply to gain a link for the keyword voip, then your motivation is probably pretty obvious. From my experience in trying to get a client listed in Wikipedia, they generally won’t list a page about a company unless there are existing reference links to that company in Wikipedia already. In other words, you have to be a trusted source.
To be quite honest with you, why should Google list you higher than Wikipedia for voip anyway? What makes your site a better resource for searchers? Seems to me that position #2 is nothing to be sneezed at.
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Well I was checking the SERPs to see what all the current fuss was about regarding Google datacenters at the moment (is it an algorithm tweak or just a shuffle?), when I came across something amusing.
Check the current SERP for “SEO Training”, paying careful attention to the #3 result. Yep, you can now undertake SEO Training of the Smelly Kind. From the site:
“In the Precertification Academy, DEP and PSATS provide Sewage Enforcement Officer (SEO) candidates with the basic knowledge needed to work for a local agency and prepare them for the duties and responsibilities of an SEO. We are committed to providing quality training to assist SEOs with making decisions that ultimately protect the Commonwealth’s public health and environment.”
It all sounds pretty similar to the responsibilities of most SEOs, although protecting public health and the environment is going beyond the call of duty. Perhaps we now have a more appropriate anagram for SEO: the Sewage Enforcement Officer!
Gave me a chuckle anyway.
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SiteProNews have now published my 2 part article based on the Webstock 2008 presentation by Google’s Senior Research Scientist, Dr. Craig Nevill-Manning.
Here’s Part 1 and Part 2.
In his presentation, Craig, who is New Zealand born and bred, explained how Google uses science to develop more precise search techniques. I found his talk absolutely riveting and typed frantically during the whole thing in my hurry to blog it.
Here are a couple of classic excerpts:
Google used to do a terrible job of defining terms. Craig noticed people were searching for “definition of…”, or “what is a….” etc so he wanted the search engine to provide better results for these searches. He found lots of web pages that contained glossaries and definitions, so he hacked up a Perl script to get the glossary formats.
The first recall results were only 50 percent accurate. He wanted to improve this rate, so he did some experiments with the data. But he could never reach an accuracy level he was happy with. It was later he realized that most of the questions people actually needed answers to could be answered with his crappy little Perl script. He concluded that 100 percent accuracy is not important, that scale is much more important.
Craig says that once a week, a person at each data center has a list of all the failed hard disks and walks around the datacenter with a pile of hard drives, replacing them one at a time. Velcro is Google’s secret weapon! All Google’s hard disks are velcroed in. This allows super quick service and replacement time. So curiously, there is no downside to hardware failures at Google, because they are expected and managed via scale.
Fascinating stuff!
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