A while ago I made a post about crap Google results full of twitter and the like and good old Goog listened to me … Well me and most of their user base really, and moved away from it.

Well here we are with Google realtime, a real time search engine.

Not exactly todays news but newsworthy all the same

http://www.google.com/realtime

It appears that something is up with Google and their cache reporting.  A lot of pages seem to have  cache dates of August 12 or there abouts, sites that were previously cached regularly are reporting that they have not been cached.

So the questions now are :-

Is it the cache date reporting that is wrong or

Is it that Google has suddenly ramped down their caching? 

Are they ‘full’ again as they were a couple of years back?

Is something BIG, HUGE, MONUMENTAL, about to happen, are we in for another update of ‘Florida’ proportions?

Much has been said of late at the apparent worsening of web spam handling within the Google index. Could we be standing on the precipice blissfully unaware

The future is bright, the future isn’t Orange (as the advert says). The future is YOU viewing documents as GOOGLE wants you to view them after having rewritten the content to suit themselves.

A recent patent application buy Google  does just this. In short it is

A method of enhancing document browsing comprising:receiving personal information relating to a user;generating descriptive information based on a content of a first document and the personal information;identifying an additional document based on the descriptive information; and generating a second document that includes at least a portion of the content of the first document and including references to the additional documents.

Or in layman’s terms, they can grab a page, rewrite it to insert LINKS (paid adverts or otherwise) before you get to see it. In short, Google will ride roughshod over the advertising exclusivity agreements advertisers might have, or even WORSE would place advertising links to the COMPETITORS of the site owners!

This is not good, it is very not good, and the old ‘Don’t be Evil’ is becoming quite a joke of late.

Yep, according to Techcrunch  Google is to stop all development on Google wave! Well this  Old Welsh Guy has to say that maybe the reason for the almost total rejection by all but devout googlites or geeks was that we simply didn’t like the way it suddenly appeared in our private parts (ooer missus) without warning nor proper explanation.

Many people are starting not to trust Google as much as previously, little things like using toolbar feedback for URL discovery, or the automatic toolbar update changing privacy settings to personalised search, and feedback to google with information without asking did it for me.

Now all cookies from Google are blocked on my main browser, the Google toolbar has been wiped off the face of the earth, and I make sure there is nothing to sign me into Google at all. Which is a shame, as I really liked the simplicity of Chrome, now I don’t trust Google as far as I can throw them, and at 350 pound per share I struggle to lift them let alone throw them

So Wave has gone, which again is a shame, but whoever thought that launching a product that appears in someones face when they log into web mail REALLY should have read Dale Carnegie’s book on How to Win Friends and Influence People. Although they certainly influenced people to immediately hit the ‘NO THANKS’ option!

Not sure if anyone else has come across this, but if a site has the same page title sitewaide, it appears that in some cases, google is creating their own titles based on page content.

Impossible to say if this is the title being used for ranking, or if it is just for display, (as in when it uses the ODP (DMOZ) titles).

Interesting find though

In what can only be described as bizarre, Google appear to be about to offer SEO services to businesses.  Three years ago almost to the day, Google bought double click, and it was reported then that they had by default become an SEO company. Google rapidly sold off the arm, and claimed once again to be whiter than white.

Now though it appears that by May, Google will be offering SEO services? HOW?

The FIA ruled that search results must be clearly marked as paid, if money has changed hands to place a site there.  This is why the paid status is clearly defined, as consumers have a right to know what is an advert and what has editorial integrity!  By offering this service, Google have crossed over, they are going to ‘help’ a site get better rankings in an algorithm that only THEY know with absolute confidence. so in fact. we have come full circle and have gone back to where yahoo and Alta-Vista were all those years ago with PFP (Pay For Position) .

What next I wonder? Will Google come up with a fantastic ‘new’ ideal called PFI Pay For Inclusion. Seems to me that Google are on the slippery slope, and are sliding ever further into the ‘do not trust’ pond!

What next? The Google political Party

Don’t do evil?  Maybe we should send them postcards with this on to remind them of their motto.

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Today I thought i would mention the case of the curiously disappearing pages in google. I am now getting regular enquiries from people who are concerned about their site losing page saturation in the might G.  No indexed page = no traffic of course, which in turn = no money. 

having worked with a few sites who have suffered this, I have  found that the main issues contributing to it were

 Weak pages.
By this I mean that the pages were pretty much duplicated with only a small element changing on each page. This is especially a problem with E com sites as the header, nav footer all stay the same. Visible content might look a little different but when you look at the code, you see that in hundreds of lines, maybe only 4 or 5 are unique.

 Poor navigation/site structure
In this case I noticed that the actual site hierarchy was poorly designed. There was no clear structure for the search engines to apply weight to.

 Poor linking structure
here I saw poor linking, in as much as most pages were linked to each other from most other pages.  this only served to water down PageRank (link juice) to a point where the pages were all seen as unimportant (again related to poor structure/architecture

Too many links
This was a common theme as many carts have pop out or drop down option selections, which look innocent enough, but on further investigation can be seen to be causing problems . It is possible to have hundreds of links per page, and this isn’t good.,

While a flat file structure is OK for a small site, a clear linking and hierarchy MUST be evident in a large site. This allows Google to apply it’s weight to each page, its trust to each page, pro-rata.

Poor PageRank
Poor linking leads to poor PR spread, and that is not good in the eyes of Google. Despite what many say, actual PR matters to Google, it matters for many things, and gauging the value of a page is one of them.

 All the above serve only to confuse the search engines as to the importance of pages within your site. Each site has a page saturation level, it is worked out by the two main elements in the google algorithm (yes there are really only 2 when it is all boiled down)

1. Importance – this is a measure of value in the eyes of google and is pretty much page rank

2. Relevance this is a textual value.

 The above are further split in to the 250 or more sub elements that make up the algorithm, but when all said and done, it is those 2 that matter.

 With most of a shopping carts pages being near duplicate content, and the page cross linking structure being higgledy piggldy at best, how is Google supposed to know what is important or relevant? Put simply, they can’t.

The result of this is that wile a site may be showing some 1500 or so pages indexed, when you get to between 200-300 pages, the cached versions stop showing. So the reality is even worse. No cache in the main index, yet often times a cache when you visit the individual page?

While Google announced the scrapping of the infamous supplementary index, it appears that just like in the case of Mark Twain (Samuel Langorne Clemens, rumours of its death were greatly exaggerated.

Finally, I will say this. If you read the Google webmaster technical advice pages, it tells you not to make the errors above that contribute to page dropping.

It seems that Google have become victims of their own success of late, in that they feel they need to do things because they can!

When Google started, it had a simple interface, you typed what you wanted, and you got a nice simple set of results. We then had the google directory, and then came Froogle, image search and many other ‘alternative’ methods of searching (which is fine).

Of late though the Search Results Page of Google looks like something a party goer threw up after a drinking session of the ‘most colourful cocktails’ section of the menu at the office party!

IT IS A MESSS, and this mess just got messier. With (what I would refer to as) their new Consolidated Realtime Additional Presentation Fomat (C.R.A.P. for short)

At the top we have  PGA tour, below that we have news result, then below that we have a bunch of what can only be described as CRAP!

LMAO that Gatorade dropped tiger woods

“RT XXXXX Gatorade first sponsor to drop tiger woods”

“You know what? I also had an affair with tiger woods, THERE”

There is a scroll down box that is filled with ‘real time’ search results. You know what? If I wanted to read pathetic childish crap, then i would subscribe to pathetic childish Twitter accounts, I really don’t need to get it shoved at me from Google.

What Google HAVE managed to achieve in a single stroke is to attract MORE spammers to the twitter service that is already full to the brim of spammers!

Imagine what would happen if the ‘hot topic’ was a product, we would get mountains of results, tweets, news, more news, shopping feeds etc and what we REALLY want is below the fold.

Sorry Google but this for me is a step too far. I know it is panto season, and I know that you were going to perform Mother Goose, but I understand that it had to be cancelled as someone in product development killed the Goose that was laying the golden eggs!

Anyone who has been around the web for a while will have seen the rise in Web2.0 style sites with user generated content. This concept is a superb arrangement for all parties as the site owner gets free content, and the writer gets a platform to air their views. Everything in the garden is rosy, until the big old spammer arrives with his dirty tricks.

If it wasn’t for Akismet and my manual editing of comments here on this blog, many of my readers would have bigger appendages ‘down below’ shiny new watches(shiny for a while), a cupboard full of triangular blue pills, and would be corresponding with a 5′4 blonde beauty from Russia who is really 44 years of age and called Malcolm and living in Hull. Oh and they would also be planning on moving to Russia to live with Malcolm (AKA the blonde beauty) as soon as they get their money from the Nigerian dead oil minister deal and their Internet Lottery winnings (best £5000 they ever spent).

OK back to the real world. Google have just published a beginners post dealing with spam, but as ever there are a couple of Easter eggs in the content. Read the rest of this entry »

So there you have it, I am not a hamburger, I am a high quality translator! Or at least Google is now.

Announced on their blog is a new high speed ‘translate as you type service, along with some other changes to the google translate service.

The service actually had 3 services introduced (more in the above link), although I have to ask, how many people actually use it? Other than to learn how to swear at people in their own language