As some of us have been trying to tell folks for a number of years now, Google does not pay any attention to the “keywords” meta tag. Now you can hear it straight from Matt Cutts himself: Hopefully that settles it once and for all. More »
The original Google “beta” home page, as of December 1998, and captured by the Wayback Machine snapshot: Click the image above to see the full version. More »
Microsoft recently announced that it’s willing to pay people money for using their crappy search engine, provided the people buy something, and provided the people live in America. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that Microsoft aren’t after Google, they’re actually after Yahoo. More »
I just noticed that Live now advertise on Google. How peculiar that a Google’s competitor would pay money to Google, just to have a user redirected back to its own search engine results page. More »
Like almost all websites, the overwhelming majority of our visitors come to us via a search engine. Knowing that Google dominates, I was nevertheless curious to look at our own statistics, just to see to what extent. Our top 50 referrers, over the last couple of years, look something like this: RankReferrerVisits 1google.com12,611 2google.com.au3,038 3google.co.uk1,888 4search.live.com1,279 5google.ca1,119 6blogs.smh.com.au878 7wordpress.org817 8google.co.in674 9google.de390 10google.nl336 11google.fr239 12basicthinking.de211 13google.it210 14search.yahoo.com202 15google.es201 16google.se199 17google.be171 18search.ninemsn.com.au168 19search.msn.com165 20google.pl165 21sitepoint.com155 22google.co.za148 23google.com.br147 24google.co.nz135 25google.com.sg118 26drupal.org111 27google.com.ph109 28google.dk109 29google.fi99 30google.com.my99 31google.ro97 32google.ch95 33google.pt93 34google.ie84 35google.no81 36google.co.id78 37google.com.tr77 38google.com.mx71 39blogs.theage.com.au70 40ask.com70 41google.gr66 42google.hu62 43images.google.com58 44google.com.ar58 45google.cz57 46sergey.gershtein.net55 47google.ru55 48stopbitacleorg.wordpress.com52 49google.com.hk48 50plagiarismtoday. More »
This is what happens when you get your website builders to make your brand new website and they forget to change the content meta tags: Googling for “dimmeys” returns the homepage of Dimmeys and Forges, the super-discount kings of Melbourne retailing. More »
Will Google’s collection of business office tools, combined with their brand new offline web application technology, make the operating systems on our PC’s irrelevant? More »
I have created a lightweight XML template for those of you using the Simpleton Image Gallery in conjunction with Picasa. More »
The other day I was looking at our website’s stats to get an idea of search engine referral ratios. While I fully expected Google to win comprehensively, the actual figures based on the last 10,000 page views were certainly an eye-opener: ALLTHEWEB: 0.13% ALTAVISTA: 0.24% AOL: 0.12% GOOGLE: 95.05% LIVE/MSN: 3.5% YAHOO: 0.95% OTHERS: 0. More »
If you want any proof that Google loves blogs, have a look at some specifics for our own website below: Rank Keyword 1 blog thieves 1 strip all whitespace php 1 who are bitacle 2 computing at hollywood 2 google invisible text 3 who are readnotify 5 readnotify 6 selling things on the net We’ve taken some random articles, on topics we’ve covered over the months. More »
If you want proof that there’s still a significant percentage of internet users who haven’t bothered to learn even the basics of how to use their browser, look no further than the Wordtracker top keywords list: Rank Keyword Popularity 2 google 4,670 3 myspace 4,029 5 yahoo 3,759 6 myspace.com 3,639 7 ebay 3,302 10 mapquest 2,332 11 yahoo. More »
According to the folks behind Merriam-Webster, google is now officially a verb, after having been submitted for consideration some three months ago. It’s approved meaning is: To use the Google search engine to obtain information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web. More »
According to Melbourne IT, while more than 90% of internet users get to websites via search engines, more than 50% of all Australian businesses who have a website cannot easily be found in a major search engine like Google. More »
It’s been over three months since the launch of Windows Live, Microsoft’s klutzy “Google killer” project. Like Google, Windows Live is offering “personalisation of your homepage”, with news, weather, mail, and (apparently) more. More »
Some fifteen months after it’s announcement, Google Maps have finally got Australia covered. The new version of the API makes it a snap to add a customised interactive image map, such as this one, to your website. More »
That’s what the people behind the “RankAttack SEO Technology” website claim anyway. Apparently, their “aggressive technology” (whatever that means) enables the overwhelming majority of webmasters to enjoy improved rankings with the search engines in a matter of just days. Yes, that’s right, days. Not weeks, not months but days. More »
Simpleton is an open source PHP application which enables you to view Picasa2 image galleries on the web, using nothing more than the Picasa2 XML “web export” feature and an FTP client. Simpleton parses the generated XML and renders the image galleries on the fly. More »
Got some SMS spam from my current spouse telling me she found the “chaise lounge” she was (apparently) looking for and “could she buy it while it was a bargain of a lifetime?”. “Chaise lounge?”, I said. “What’s that?”, thinking of a popular nightclub here in Melbourne. “Google it”, she says. More »
For those who visit here regularly, my views on search engine optimisation “techniques” are pretty much known. Recently, I engaged in an online discussion in a forum thread which attempted to get different opinions on whether SEO was in fact overrated. More »
I have to admit that I do enjoy getting stuck into Sony and their inferior software. According to US patent 7016940, Sony now own the exclusive right to make a piece of software which will: Make the recipient of electronic mail quickly and surely take actions desired by the sender. More »