Computer Tips -Tech Info

Category: Google

  • Panda and Vince – Googles latest updates

    And… there was also a caffeine update.  Well, mid October there was an update to Panda – somewhere in there was a Vince update and then caffeine saw an update in early November.  Did you notice a change in the search results?  Do you feel like they’re better or worse?

    Panda Gao Gao in San Diego Zoo, USA
    Image via Wikipedia

    I’ve had several sites that have “fluctuated” through these updates, some better, some worse.  One or two were dramatically worse.

    I don’t seem to be alone in seeing some impact and here’s a summary of what the issue is and what to do about it.

    Panda is about lowering the importance of sites that are thin in content.  It has been easy to rank sites without much content for some time.  Just throwing a few back links (in many cases also thin on content) and you could do quite well.

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  • Google Trends Hottrends (Hot Trends) truncated to 40?

    Interesting – it looks as though Google may be limiting the number of results in their hottrends search page to just 40 now from the 100 that they used to. I’m not very surprised really…. in the last few weeks I’ve been using the hottrends to see which rogue antivirus was the biggest pain in the neck of the moment, but in doing so I see many rogue sites that are using the hot trends to cash in on the traffic by serving up malware. At one point 6 of the top 10 sites in the results for one of the rogue applications were malware and I’ve seen malware served up from sites that weren’t computer related searches either. I’ve seen one person speculate that it’s based on search volume and they trim it to 40 when there are fewer searches being made. Maybe it is a temporary change.

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  • Hot Trends – spotting the upcoming searchs and tomorrows news today

    The internet is an amazing place you can learn about most anything from carbon nanotubes stopping bullets to a duvet cover. In the last few weeks I’ve learned a few things over at Google’s hot trends page. Basically, about once an hour there is an autogenerated list of the top 100 things people are searching for right now. What I’ve found interesting about it is to see tomorrows news headlines being searched for today. Several times I’ve seen searches in the top 100 that I had no idea what it related to until I saw the news the following day, then it all made sense.

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  • AntivirusOnlineScan 6 v8? the next Rogue?

    I see a google hot trend right now is searches for AntivirusOnlineScan 6 and many of the results seem to be incoherent sites talking about antivirusonlinescan v8. It makes me wonder if we’re seeing the rumblings of the next big rogue security software push. Sure enough http://antivirusonlinescanv8.com/ is flagged as an attack site and has been registered in the last 2 weeks. Fortunately the server is not responding right now. I guess we’ll see tomorrow if it’s the next big thing in rogue antivirus.

  • Gmail down September 1, 2009

    Yes, Gmail was down today, September 1, 2009 for a stretch this afternoon. Really it wasn’t more than about two hours at the most from what I saw and from what I hear IMAP/SMTP access was working although the web interface was down. I found out a few interesting things during the outage though. …

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  • Google Voice Review | I got the golden ticket….

    Last Thursday I opened up my GMail and found to my surprise that I had an invite to Google Voice. I didn’t have time to deal with it at that time, so I saved it as new until Thursday evening and spent some time then playing with it. I had put my address in the waiting list some time back because the premise behind Google Voice (former GrandCentral) is potentially very useful for me. I’m self employed, I work from home, from the car, I’m onsite, I’m at clients locations and I also have some bits of time at a location that has wireless access. For many years I’ve had several phones to check messages on, and if I forget, then…. find a message when I get in at 8 or 9 in the evening on the house phone. It’s difficult to manage and I want to change it, Google Voice may be the way to make that change….. right now I’m just testing the waters though. It did feel kind of like a Willy Wonka moment of sorts though seeing that invite in the inbox! Read on for more….

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  • Ranking for a Search Phrase in Google

    I guess by now you’ve noticed that I’m not keeping up with the 1 post a week rate that I had for a while there. I’ve been thinking that at this point I’m going to be getting in one a month or so. More if the mood strikes, but from what I’ve been seeing that should be more than enough…. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately experimenting with getting good google rankings for search phrases and thought I would take a moment to give some details…. Maybe I should back up a few steps first though for some background….

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  • Google Analytics Feature Tease

    I just logged into my analytics account over at google and had a strange new view. It showed all the sites in my account with a summary of the code working, traffic up or down and percentage. It looked quite nice, so I tried changing the view so I could see all of my sites and …. it went away. I’m back to the old view. So, I started looking around and found this analytics blog post that talked about new features being rolled into the accounts. The new features include that new account management dashboard. I hope that returns soon to my account because I would LOVE to have a nice “at a glance” view of all my sites.

    I figured out what I was seeing – I have two google logins, both of which have access to my analytics account. One can see the new beta features, the other can’t.

  • Where did that 404 link Come From?

    For a while with Google’s webmaster tools they’ve reported to you which url’s they get 404 errors when spidering your site. Now with the sitemaps and webmaster tools utility they’ll show you where the link was woohoo…. I’m glad to see that I’ve been running into a few 404 errors from time to time and tracking them usually involves trying to skim through referral logs and it can get a bit messy. Here’s the official announcement.