Google and duplicated content

All the SEOs know the regular speech, Google gives when it comes to duplicated content:

• Is bad
• It sucks
• We can detect it
• We are against it
• If you do it we are going to kick your ass out of our index and the asses of your childrens and grandchildrens
• If you do it an angel looses its wings
• yada yada yada

Ok. Some care about it some just yawn when they hear it. Today I am officially among those who yawn. I was looking for a freaking press picture of Joseph Barbera and all I got was the same endless press release. Look for “were the futuristic mirror image” to see how many duplicates Google is keeping (and yes I know in time they’ll be buried and only a few will appear…yada yada yada)

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Google starts promoting blogger

After the yesterday announcement that the new blogger is out of beta (quite a surprise to hear that from Google), Google has start pushing it to the SERPS. Do any query with blog included and you’ll get a tip like that on the screenshot (blog, blogs, blogger, blogspot)

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Google Adsense Team just announced on their blog that the old trick of placing images near your Adsense units will no longer be tolerated. Yeah, that’s right, not even with a line between them.

Well…that’s it, back to more work on content now

Posted in General, Google | 1 Comment »

Google Reader in Gmail

Mihai Paraparita, employed at Google and responsible of Google Reader, has released in his personal blog a Greasemonkey script that blends google’s rss reader into Gmail.

Even though he says:

I can’t really say what, if any, our integration plans are, but enough users have asked for something like this that I thought writing the script was the most expedient way to provide this (unofficial) feature.

suggesting that a final integration might not be done, the fact that the Greader’s list view looks quite exactly like Gmail’s GUI proves that this will be a goal in the near future.

Anyway is nice to see this feature provided like this instead of a private beta or a gradual roll out.

Perhaps this step leads to another where each item will be treated like a Gmail thread, where the responses will be either posts discussing the original one (opens a huge door to trackback spam) or we will have the option to track blogs converstaions like in Cocomment

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Google Private Videos

Perhaps in an unrelated move with yesterday aquisition, Google added a new feature to their own video service: private videos.

If you have a video you’d rather not share with the entire world, you can choose to restrict access to it by marking it as “unlisted”. Similar to an unlisted telephone number that isn’t available in public phone number databases, videos that have been unlisted are not accessible through Google Video search results. This option is especially useful for family videos. Just set your video to “unlisted” and email the link to your family and friends.

Link

This way, more and more users might become attracted to the unlimited file size and storage offered by them, and whi knows maybe next year premium accounts will be available.

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No Comment

Well is the first time I am not able to give a title to a post (is early in the morning anyway).

Now check this out:

We have had phenomenal response to the new version of Yahoo! Site Explorer we launched two months ago. Thanks to the many of you who have come by and used the new interface, authenticated your site, and asked us questions on the forum. We have been answering many questions on the board, and there are a few common themes that we want to respond to in more detail.
….
For those who are unable to upload our authentication key as a text file, we have updated our key file to be HTML with a .html extension.

Source

Now…how dumb do you have to be to do something like that?

Yahoo! Site Explorer is a tool for webmasters and its similar to Google Sitemaps. When Google Sitemaps launched they had a similar problem with webmasters of sites hoted on free providers (as blogger for example).Those couldn’t authentificate the site through a file because they had no upload possibilities. Now Yahoo! has this problem but they want to be original and instead of adding a freaking special meta tag, they make me the great service of letting me upload an HTML file.

HELOOOOOOOOO GENIUSES…..NO FTP RINGS A BELL?

P.S. While writing this I figured that the only users that are going to be happy by the new release are the geocities users. If this service is only for them well, hello and bye bye.

Posted in Yahoo | 2 Comments »

Google Maps/Earth updates

Googlified announced that Google Maps and obviously Google Earth got updated.

I can see that Romania got the main roads listed . Perhaps also other “uncharted” areas got updated.

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Supplemental Results…again

Is it just me seeing a lot of “Supplemental Result”s in SERPs? Especially on the site:www.domain.com comand

EDIT:
Is weird. I did a reality check to calm down my paranoia and seems to be true…
On site:www.techcrunch.com amd site:www.cnn.com are a lot of supplemental results. More than that site:www.amazon.com serves only 3 pages. What a hell? Somebody at google spilled a glass of water on a server and they use backups now?

EDIT 2:
Looks like the cache date of supplemental results is from July 2006

Posted in Google, Search Engine Optimization | 2 Comments »

Learn for free with Google

SAN FRANCISCO — Online video is no longer just fun and games: You might actually learn something.

The University of California at Berkeley said Tuesday that it is using Google Video to deliver college courses, including lectures and symposia, free of charge, the first university to have its own featured page on Google Video.

The site is at http://video.google.com/ucberkeley, Google and campus officials said in a statement.

As an initial offering, the university has put up a library of more than 250 hours of video for public viewing. Most of it previously was not available online, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a statement.

Source

While trying to submit this story to Digg, I’ve found out that Berkley offers free audio classes through itunes

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Froogle making its way back on Google SERPs?

On July Froogle got removed from Google’s homepage and the SERPs, the place being taken by the new wonder child, Google Video. Today I come across the new layout Google is testing for SERPs and surprise surprise Froogle is back again.

Unfortunately just at the bottom of the page

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