Most people view PageRank as that value from 0 to 10 that’s in your Google Toolbar, showing how much reputation your site has on the internet. There are some details that you should know if you really want to understand PageRank. Read more
Yes, Google will still show pages even if you have set them up to be blocked in your robots.txt file. Why exactly, you’re wondering, I’m sure.
Google is actually not crawling any of the URLs you have listed as blocked in your robots.txt file. What they are doing is displaying the page, just not showing your description meta tag or any information from inside that page. Matt Cutts gets into more detail about that here:
So to prevent Google from displaying your pages at all, you need to remove the page inside your Webmaster Tools or else use a robots meta tag with a noindex value in it for each page. Then your page will not show up in Google’s results at all.
You can get more details on this information from Quick Online Tips.
Just a quick post – try going to Google and hitting the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button without entering a query. You’ll see a big number pop up. Google’s waiting for the new year! I do wonder what will happen when that number reaches zero and you’re on the page.
Just a cool little easter egg.
Earlier this morning Google sent out a link to some recipients through email, to tell them what they’re doing for the holiday. I think it’s quite cool to see such a massive company giving something back, and giving in the neighborhood of very large quantites. Of course, to be non-offensive, they’ve kept their announcement totally secular. But that’s probably the safest way to do things.
Google’s been doing live suggestions for a while now. But did you know you can actually use wild cards on the search line? No asterisk required, but you can simply add one character to a word to find any similar words that are searched for. So looking for “tree”, you could add an ‘a’ to make it “atree”, and Google will potentially show you “apple tree” as a suggestion.
It’s quite powerful and easy to do. To see some screen shots of how this works, check out this post on Search Engine Land.
Just a quick post. I put a tip on DailySEOTip about Google AdWords’s Quality Score. I tried to make it short and sweet, although you do need to understand all of the acronyms (CTR, CPC, etc.) to understand it fully.
I do think it’s worth understanding because of the fact it can make a difference between a $0.30 click and a $5.00 click (seriously). So if you use AdWords at ALL, learn about it – if not from me, then somewhere else, but it’s definitely worth investigating.
I saw it – and it was good. It really was pretty good. They covered quite a bit in an hour, about the development of the company, how it got started, the main people involved. What impressed me was their coverage of some technical details (cloud computing, PageRank) while still keeping it easy to understand.
Naturally, the part I liked quite a bit was their coverage of AdWords. According to CNBC, Google makes 98% of their profit from AdWords, although I’ve heard differently. I don’t know for sure what percentage of their profits comes from AdWords – but right now, they’re averaging over 4 billion dollars a year. They’re doing okay with it.
They did talk briefly about AdWords, talked about how anyone can advertise, and touched on how it operates. They mentioned PageRank and how it affects positioning for ads (and how quality of a site affects it), but that was about it. It was impressive coverage for the limited time they had.
They did also talk about Google Goggles – the funny thing was that they mentioned it probably wasn’t ready to go into production for a while. But they did go live a few days ago – guess it’s in beta. Although that’s a safe bet for anything Google.
Hopefully this publicity from “Inside the Mind of Google” is something that works out for them. I really want to believe that they have truly good intentions, and that all of their machinations are to enhance the lives of their customers. We’ll see what kind of responses come from this extra bit of attention.
Google’s changes lately have been quite thorough. They’ve made changes for AdWords, they’re changing the way the search engine itself operates, and now they’re coming out to take a stand against online scams.
In particular, the schemes for how to “work-at-home” to use Google and make a ton of money are starting to get shut down by Google. Google is starting to file lawsuits against these companies to bring them down.
For most people, these are familiar schemes – you see them in banner ads, with text like “Use Google to make 1000s of Dollars!”. They generally operate by having a kit you send out for and then have you set up for automatic billing once a month (and many people don’t realize there’s automatic billing).
CNN has a bit more detail in this story. I did find it rather amusing that under this story in their sponsored links, one of the ads said “I’m glad I lost my job! Jobless Dad makes $6493/month working online from home. Read how he…”
Just a quick update for the news on Google’s real-time search results. They released a video to show exactly how it works. And it looks pretty good! Like it won’t interfere too much with other results, but will give people updated information on what they want.
Here’s the video:
Okay, this is just cool. I found this a little bit ago, and the concept is pretty solid. I’ve always wanted something similar to this to be able to do searches on certain things that I couldn’t really vocalize into text, and this looks like it might do the trick.
It only appears to work for the Android phone (for now), and who knows how effective it really is – but if it’s all that Google says it’s supposed to be, this will be awesome.
They have a nice video demonstration. Check it out! Google Goggles. (Or if you don’t want to bother clicking, see it below.)
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