Tag Archive for: Google

Google Knows What Your Boyfriend/Girlfriend is Thinking

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It’s not always dead on accurate, but by using Google in the right way you can often figure out what your significant other is interested in.  How?  By using what’s known as “predictive text”.  It’s the ability by Google (and Yahoo) to see what you’re typing in and try to predict what you might be looking for.  By only entering a few words in, you can often glean a lot of very interesting information.

For example, you can type in “how can I get my girlfriend to” and then let Google roll, see what it comes up with.  (Warning, even though it’s only text, it’s not all child-friendly content.)  Replace “girlfriend” with “boyfriend”, “wife”, “husband”, etc. and you have a new research tool.

Mind you, in many cases these results may not match at all with your significant other’s thoughts and desires, but it can still be fun to explore.  And for marketers, this is a gold mine.  These are the hot buttons that are looked for to prompt action by many marketers, and Google is just giving it to you.

If you want to see more detail and screenshots of examples of these, check out Vanessa Fox’s excellent article on Search Engine Land.

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Google is Not Immune to Error

As posted in article by PC World, even Google can make errors on occasion.  In this case, some statistics for users of Google Business Center were sent to incorrect Business Center users.  This included information such as how often the business had appeared in listings, how many times the business was clicked and follow-through clicks on the business site itself.

This error was found to have been by human mistake, not an error directly with any of Google’s systems.  Google was on top of it and corrected it quickly.  They published a written statement to acknowledge the error and that when they discovered it, said they paused all emails to Business Center users until they could determine the cause of the issue.

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Even Google Can Get Penalized

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Apparently Google in Japan got a big penalty placed on them by Google themselves, taking their toolbar PageRank level from 9 to 5 (Search Engine Land posted an update about this on an earlier story they had).  This is a huge sign – one, that Google takes bad actions by any site (even themselves) very seriously.

Only now has the penalty been removed, although the toolbar PageRank is only up to 8 (not 9).  That’s almost a full year of penalization (11 months, to be precise).

The malady that Google Japan performed?  They paid bloggers to review a new Google widget.  This isn’t the first time Google instated a penalty on themselves – it does go to show that Google enforces their rules consistently, even against themselves.

It demonstrates that if you want to be sure to keep good rankings, you do have to follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

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Real-time Search Example on Google

The news about Google’s real-time search has been out for a little while now, but many people are still wondering how this is affected by real-life situations.  Well – Matt Cutts was gracious enough to show by example.  He displays exactly how Google tracked a recent mild earthquake and how long it took to show results on Google.

It’s good to see that their real-time search update actually functions as intended, and I can see the potential for it to help in a variety of ways.  Being the top search engine and a huge point where people check on things every day, getting your breaking news from Google (for info relevant to what you’re looking for) may get info to some people (who don’t check the news so often) faster.  Whether or not Google should take this role is not something that’s universally agreed upon, but there are visible benefits.

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A Major Element of SEO: PageRank Explained

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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

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Google Shows URLs Blocked by Robots.txt

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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.

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Google New Year Easter Egg

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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.

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Google’s Christmas Present

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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.

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Power of Suggestion on Google’s Search Line

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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.

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SEO vs. PPC – Will Use of One Increase with Demand of Another?

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As companies begin using more and more online marketing, SEO is only going to get more difficult to do well.  In some cases, businesses are worried spammers are going to get the organic listings more readily and are starting to look to PPC marketing for their search result answers.

This is something that’s come to notice mainly from Google’s real-time search results that were recently added.  This addition favors fresh topical content, over quality results Google’s algorithm can find.  This is something that spammers can get into very easily, and this is why more companies are starting to consider PPC and AdWords, where spammers are not able to get into at all.

HighPosition.net has more detail on this story.

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