Archive for the ‘Google’ Category

Quick WordPress Tip about deleted Tags Creating 404 errors in Google Webmaster Tools

If you delete a wordpress tag, it will create a 404 error if a visitor or possibly as important, Google Bot comes through to re-index your site.

Sure you can redirect that deleted tag link, but if you later create it again on the fly with a new post, your redirection will drive people away from the tag. 

Solution – Don’t Delete WordPress Tags!

If you have already deleted a WordPress Tag, think about adding it back in again so that you don’t get nicked by the Search Engines! 

Here is a great little video put together by Google that demonstrates how to create a Google My Map.  A My Map is a customized Google Map that can include your own journal of places you have been, paths or routes you have traveled, sites you have seen, pictures or video you have taken and more.  It can be kept private or published publicly to share with others.

These can also be useful for sharing or publishing out to your website to help share instructions to customers, clients, readers and more.

For a lot of detail on how to work with My Maps visit Google’s answer section.

I have a confession to make.  I love the childish images that many so-called news organizations use to suck in traffic from Google News.

This type of thing used to be a lot more rare.  These days it happens, well it happens almost every day.  People are not just using odd ball pictures to match up to different headlines, they are photo shopping images and making custom ‘avatars’ essentially to go with these stories.

The site above about the surgeon that used human fat to power his cars showing an apparently naked fat white man in a convertible mini, is definitely photo shopped.   Unlike many sites (Canada News) when you click on the image, you actually see a big image of the original on the subsequent page that offers up this story, along with Indian News, and Bollywood pictures, plus the obligatory heavy load of Google Adsense ads to keep the site in the black from the wave of heavy traffic this crazy picture will generate.

So I know its wrong to fall for this childish sense of humor.  It is akin to tagging or graffiti, but it definitely appeals to my inner comedian just above fart jokes and just below an over used pun.  I wonder what gaming Google News with stupid pictures will do for a person’s karma?  Will you come back as a cock roach if you photo shop too many fat guys into a mini?  Or will that laughing Buddha in a miniature car get you elevated higher in the universe.

I don’t know the answer to these questions, but for the time being I will continue to enjoy the joke.  The news is far too ugly these days not to appreciate a little humor from time to time.

More Gamed Images from Google

What does the iPhone have to do with a mostly naked lady taped up in bumper stickers?

I guess if Wal-Mart can’t actually sell iPhones at $100, they can at least market scantily clad women.  ;0  (I do realize that Wal-Mart didn’t write the article above)

This article on pledging to Abstinence was apparently just begging for a gamed up image, but Gaming Google News with a chastity thong with bondage implications? 

If teenagers are getting their news from Google, odds are they are not going to remain chaste for very long at all.

Microsoft this week unveiled an agreement with Hewlett Packard to have Microsoft’s Live Search Engine set as the default search engine on new HP machines.

Under the agreement, Microsoft’s search engine will also be the default on Internet Explorer, which is preloaded with HP machines.

Microsoft did not disclose the terms of the agreement, which will begin in January in the US and Canada. 

PC Pro: News: Live Search to be preinstalled on all HP PCs

Google has a little over a year and a half left on its own deal with number two computer manufacturer Dell, who is keeping their options open after 2009.

Whether or not this new deal will work for consumers will likely depend on the results.  If a person searches for President Bush’s Watch and comes up with results for Rolex President, consumers may not be terribly pleased.  However, as Google’s search results have been on the decline over the last couple years, this might be an opportunity for Microsoft to eek out an extra couple percent of market share and possibly break past the 10% range.

Today, I noticed a large rise in traffic on many of my sites.  As I have many political sites it was not surprising as today is Super Tuesday and people are looking for information and sharing information like crazy.

However, my adsense earnings for the day were off, by like 98%!

I was trying to figure out what was going on as I had not changed anything.  Then I noticed on one of my political sites an Ebay ad placement go through after I published an update about the election results.

Now these ads are not just an image, where if you click on it your readers goes to a single ebay auction or even some other site.  Each of those links by the prices are clickable, just as they look to be clickable.

Plus, you will also notice that these ads are SPAM.  The were posted in the Elections category, even those the things that are for sale are things like pendants and lapel pins and Hurricane Katrina garbage.  These things have nothing to do with John McCain or recent updates with Hillary Clinton in New York any more than chrome accessories have anything to do with Brittany Spears psychological condition.  Someone is obviously abusing Adwords and by extension harming my sites.

The url behind these ads was rover.ebay.com and that was along with ebay.com were the two urls that were added to my URL ban list in my Adsense setup.

It is ironic that Google one of the largest providers of blogging software is unfriendly to bloggers.  Google suffers the common bloggers of the world as a means to an end for serving up more Google Adword/Adsense ads across the internet.  They privately also use the writing of bloggers to help index the internet for their search engine.

However, Google looks at bloggers like a cruel child looks at an ant farm.  Casually observing the coming and going of the ants, and every now and then toying with the ants by channeling some heat from the sun through a lens, just to watch the blogger ants squirm.

It demonstrates a serious lost opportunity for Google.  Google prides itself on its intelligence.  That pride might be one aspect of their undoing and continued attacks on Google’s Adwords advertising platform offers up a glimpse of an example.

There is a virus spreading throughout computers.  The virus is a trojan and infects computers such that when the computer surfs the internet, the computer user thinks they are seeing Google Adsense ads paid for by Google Adwords advertising customers that link out to Google approved websites.  In reality the ads are delivered up by the perpetrators of the trojan virus.

They send people to unintended websites and may install even more malicious code or strip private information from those users. So you may see an advertisement for furniture stores, click on it and end up going to a site that serves up an automatic virus to your computer.

The trojan redirects queries meant to be sent to Google servers to a rogue server, which displays ads from a third party instead of ads from Google, BitDefender said in a statement. 

ITPro: News: Google ads attacked by Trojan

Now if Google were to look at bloggers as an opportunity for public relations as opposed to annoying ants, they could have benefited from the power of millions of bloggers to help spread the word about this trojan that is attacking Google’s primary source of revenue.

In the past, Google suffered from an integrity attack from click fraud, where a limited number of people worked to directly and fraudulently attack the Adword advertising system.  A person committing click fraud had to knowingly act to perpetrate click fraud.

However, this trojan virus has the means of potentially turning and unknowing casual internet browser into the source for click fraud.  This particular attack does not yet appear to be mature enough to cause Google serious harm (more than a billion dollars lets say).  However, it can and will cause harm.

The question becomes what will Google do to prepare for future iterations that will probably be even more dangerous.  It would surely help if Google had the ability to get the word out and fend off these attacks.  Unfortunately, Google has grown into a very large and very bureaucratic company with one silo operating independently of another and this level of coordination may be forever out of their reach.

  I came across a great tool on a website called Advertising for Success.  Unfortunately, the website advertising for success has to move because they found themselves in a bad neighborhood.  It would appear that Google participates in a practice known as redlining or blacklisting.  In the real world, these practices are completely illegal, but on the Internet anything goes unfortunately.

Google applies stigmas much more powerful than the common snobbery or prejudice that you might find in real life.  They block people from communicating with each other by excluding them from areas of the internet.  They have been doing this for a long time in China, but now it is starting to spread around the rest of the world including within the United States and they are doing it under the guise of only allowing the display of elite websites.

If you want to determine whether or not your site is being labeled as being present within a bad neighborhood, you might try this Great tool mentioned on Advertising for Success.  In some regards if you find yourself falling by no fault of your own into a bad internet neighborhood, that tool might help you get out kind of like drug treatment centers help celebrities get out of jail.

Just like in Philadelphia in 1936, when a web neighborhood is identified as undesirable, the web property is rapidly devalued.  In these situations it occurs whenever Google says so, or when someone reports the site to Google.  So if you have a competitor that wants to blacklist you, they can report you to Google and you could be deemed to be operating in a bad neighborhood.  With the processing of some automated robot script, your website is arbitrarily reclassified and you my friend are out of business.

I was going to reply on a discussion forum thread about the Google – terrorist Connection.   This was sparked by an article titled, “Is Google the New Terrorist?“  The thread was locked prematurely, and the concept was not fully covered, so I thought I’d open it up some more as I do find it very important to understand where certain actions fall in a sort of continuum of evil. 

There are different levels of good and bad and making a binary statement that Google is exactly like Hitler or Osama Bin Laden would not be correct.  However, categorically stating that Google is not like Hitler or Bin Laden is also not correct.

Google does have detractors that have found that they might be funding terrorism (just Google it and you will see).

Google is trying to influence the Internet industry by fear instead of incentive, stick instead of carrot. 

When a powerful authority influences people by fear, it is intimidation.  When a non-authority influences people by fear, its terrorism.  Influence by fear can be categorized differently depending on who is doing it and what end of the continuum they fall on.

Fear comes in multiple incarnations from the type of fear that Al Qaeda attempts to use to influence the world to the type of fear that the Nazis used to attempt to influence the world to the type of fear that we see in commercials every day by all types of companies that tell us that if we do not act, something bad will happen to us or our children, so buy this product now.

Google is telling webmasters, publishers, and bloggers that something bad will happen to them if they do not do exactly as Google says, so line up to get on board the Google cattle car express and take a ride into their reality and belief system where the Google Algorithm is God.

Now, they could have provided a competitive solution, an incentive.  Google could have chosen to take a direction where they provided webmasters, publishers and bloggers the financial incentive and reward system to go their way, but they chose (financially a cheaper total solution)  they chose to hurt webmasters, publishers and bloggers, they chose to take wealth, and money away from people, they chose to do all this to benefit their own bottom line.  They chose this to benefit their own algorithm belief system.

Just like Osama Bin Laden, Google is telling the world that it is their way or the highway.  They promise people that if they buy into the Google Algorithm Belief System (GABS), that people will be then protected by Google.  Good ol’ God Father Google will benevolently protect its children internet surfers, like a gangster extracting protection money through fear, Google is extracting share holder value through fear.

You can call it terrorism and it would be close to right.

You can call it fanaticism or fundamentalism and it would be close to right.

You can call it internet fascism and it would also be close to right.

But make no mistake about it, what Google is doing is definitely evil. 

They are justifying their actions, their evil, their fear tactics, with the rationalism that they will help the greater good (by harming a minority), whether or not they are rounding people up for slaughter, or killing people with jet airplanes, or taking food away from a poor family in the US or even the Philippines, they are still harming people.  Hitler did not start immediately by sending people to concentration camps, he ramped into it. 

Bin Laden did not start out by killing thousands of people right away, he influenced people, curbed them to his belief system and then kicked off a campaign to achieve his sinister goals.  Google today is harming people by taking away their wealth and their earning potential and they are harming the people that trust Google to provide uncensored information.  Who is to say what they will do tomorrow, when their software is running on everyone’s computer and Gphone and car.

If they can not avoid doing evil today, when they have a large amount of power, what will they do tomorrow when they gain even more power?

The answer, they will do even greater evil and possibly eclipse Osama Bin Laden and Hitler combined.

Google has been attacking publishers for the last couple months.  The attacks are coming as a result of an advertising industry that helps web site owners advertise in search engine ranking placements (SERP).

Google has a growing monopoly in search some investors think they may hit a 100% monopoly level soon.  That could send their stock up to $900 per share or better.

The EU is looking into Google’s monopoly in light of their acquisition of DoubleClick, but no one is looking at their anti-trust behavior as they attack other advertising companies for doing the same type of advertising that they do.

This is a discussion touching off a thread in the PPP forum.  The TLA community has been hit here as well.  Andy Beard mentions how long he has been tracking the attack, which I blogged about earlier with some of his shared and great stats on the changes in PR update.

Don’t worry, many top SEO observers have been making the same mistake and I find myself correcting them all over the net.

Having been hit in the first wave, as were a few other prominent posties, we have had to live through this just a little longer.  ~Andy Beard

Since then Matt C of Google  also tipped me off to a great article by Aaron Wall, who concludes his guest article on Google Blogoscoped with

Most of the SEO discussion is dominated by Google because they have the largest traffic stream. It will likely stay that way for years to come unless they do something that causes a backlash from webmasters, a lessening of user trust, or government regulation of some type.

The point is that its not just the small, new SEO types that think Google might suffer a backlash, but even the SEO types at the top of the food chain that think that Google could suffer from their recent jack booted tactics in monopoly protection.

We are not just talking about bloggers getting hit but lots of local news channels and other small to mid tier business sites are feeling the pain as well.

Couple points that are either missing or only lightly touched on in the thread so far.

To boycott successfully Bloggers and Webmasters and Family Need to

1. Get out of Blogger/Blogspot all together
2. Stop Using Google Pages and Google Docs etc.
3. Get Adsense code out of your sites   (Yahoo, MSN and others offer an alternative here)
4. Get Google Analytics Code out of your sites (SocialSpark will be free, Performancing is out there, there are others, but I’m so hooked on Google Analytics that I don’t have a good alternative on the fly).
5. Drop your Gmail crap
6. Feedburner is definitely a problem, (Feedblitz is an alternative for email subscriptions and you can always just let the old rss ride on a wordpress account without the feedburner tracking.  There are options here, but   )
7. Stop searching in Google
8. Stop Using Google Search embedded in other sites
9. Stop Clicking on Google Adsense Ads on other sites or in Google Search
10. Remove the Google Toolbar from your browser
1. For Firefox here is a nice tutorial at PeculiarPlace.com
11. Remove Google Desktop from your computer (Microsoft has a similar desktop search program ~ don’t know about Apple)
12. Use nofollow tags in unintended ways.
    1. Put nofollow on affiliate badges and other items in sidebars (not your internal links)
    2. Put nofollow on sites like wikipedia references and the new york times
    3. DO NOT put nofollow tags on sponsored links

That’s the White Hat Stuff . . .

Now if you consider the potential Gorilla stuff there is more that might happen to Google if a Backlash against Google happens.  

note I am not advocating this stuff, none of this is new, but this is the problem that Google has to deal with now that they are attacking people on the internet. 

This site Top10Tech/Web/ was one of the sites attacked by Google.  I suspect that a company covered on this website fraudulently turned us into the Google Gestapo Nark Line run by Matt Cutts.  I believe this because this same company has engage in other activities to discredit an expose that I wrote on top10tech/marketing/ another directory on this domain attacked by Google.

Google is Exposed to Black Hat Techniques in some of these areas.  If I have missed something, its because I do not engage in Black Hat techniques myself and I’m not terribly well versed in it.  I try and keep up as I work in the industry and sometimes advertise with Adwords and need to know how to structure my campaigns to avoid Google Clickfraud.

1. People that stop using Google Analytics and Adsense, and still have a Webmaster account have nothing to lose. . .
   1. They might start submitting sites that are doing nothing wrong
   2. Submitting big sites
   3. Fill the Google Nark line with noise and disinformation so that the nark line is no use to the Google Gestapo
2. Google is still very weak in the Click Fraud Department.  With 100,000 web masters, bloggers and businesses getting slapped down by Google, they could experience a lot of click fraud (That is a lot of upset former Google partners to contend with).  This is Google’s problem not the people that click on Google’s potentially fraudulent ads.   They are not doing anything wrong if they ‘ALWAYS’ click on stuff they are interested in, even if their interests are as wide as the wind.  Plus, all those click fraud weaknesses of Google start to potentially surface and be employed by the disenfranchised when they
   1. Don’t just click from their own computer,
   2. Borrow a coworkers computer,
   3. click from school,
   4. click from the library,
   5. click from a mobile device
   6. and when they don’t just click, click, click over and over again, but do it randomly
3. Drop their Google analytics code on other sites that accept java script (more disinformation)

To reiterate, I’m not advocating the black hat stuff.  I have not decided yet to engage in the boycott.  I have a feeling that Google is not going to be knocked down by a boycott, but I do think that innovation from other companies might be the thing that re-levels the playing field again.

Google is protecting a monopoly and they are not innovating any longer in any areas that take away from their monopoly.  That leaves the door wide open for other search engines to eat Google’s lunch.