Entries Tagged as 'Google'

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

Technorati Busted Modifying Google Ads?

My friend Paul a.k.a. SEOIdiot has drawn my attention to the fact that Technorati places Google Ads on their home page and what’s weird is they are all seem linked to Technorati itself! However, having looked deeper into it (as deep as the source code), I noticed they are fake Google ads - the source [...]

Sunday, January 3rd, 2010

Google’s New Year PR Update - and My eBook Update

As some of you who were not too busy celebrating already know, Google has surprised us with a toolbar PageRank update just before the New Year. As a result, I have just updated my Directory Marketing Reborn ebook - 4,700 directories listed in it now have the most recent PageRank.
How did this PR update treat [...]

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

Adwords Phishing

Webmasters and site owners, beware!
Lately I’ve been getting spam emails posing as correspondence from Google Adwords. They go like this:
We detected irregular activity on your Google AdWords Account.
Please use the link below to verify your account immediately:
https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=adwords
But the actual link leads to the phisher’s domain instead of Google. Of course when you enter your account [...]

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

Hidden H Tags by Google

Look at the source code of Google’s SERP page and you’ll see the following:

<h2 class=”hd“>Search Results</h2>

However, on the page you don’t see this bit displayed anywhere. Sure enough, you won’t see it because the stylesheet makes this bit invisible:

.hd {

height:1px;
overflow:hidden;
position:absolute;
top:-1000em;
width:1px;

}

And mind you, this is not the Ajax bit that can be hidden or shown by [...]

Thursday, April 16th, 2009

Google Starts (Secretly?) Sending Ranking Data in Referrer Strings

Patrick Altoft has voiced his guess about a change in Google referrer strings. It appears that Google now adds the ranking data to the referrer string (for those less technical, the Google SERPs page a visitor has arrived from to a site):
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw
Perhaps the cd=7 (click detail = 7th?) is the ranking and ct=res (click through [...]

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

Nasty Things You Can Do With Google Reader

Since I started using Google Reader I play with it quite a lot on a daily basis. Besides the obvious minor bugs I have discovered, you can also do all kinds of things with it, e.g. spy on people. Recently, while subscribing to more blogs, I have noticed the following:

This is what you normally post [...]

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

Google Reader Enables Interaction

I’ve been looking through my feeds in Google Reader when I noticed that my previously shared items have “Shared by: you” next to them. Well, it appears that this is the sign of what has just been announced on Google’s official blog:
…starting today, your friends will be able to reply to shared items with comments, [...]

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

Google Keyword Tool Gearing More Towards Organic?

It just caught my attention that Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool now has this interesting option in its filters:
Yes, as testified by the above screenshot I took, Google external keyword tool now offers you to include adult content in your keyword results. This is something people have been having trouble with for a long time, and [...]

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

Google and Nocache

This is the first of a series of posts about Google’s tools and options for webmasters - I plan to do several such posts about most popular features webmasters use as often there is misunderstanding of how these tools and features work.
Sometimes site owners believe it necessary to disable Google cache on their sites or [...]

Monday, December 24th, 2007

Google URLs for Different Countries

Those who know me are aware of the fact that I like messing with international markets. Now, Google may or may not be the search engine of choice for non-English speaking markets (what we know about Google’s share of the search market is mainly true about the English-speaking market - elsewhere results may differ), but [...]