Category Archives: Google

The Bush Says He Uses The Google

“The Bush” says he uses “the Google”. On a recent interview, he said that he uses “the Google Maps” sometimes:

HOST: I’m curious, have you ever googled anybody? Do you use Google?

BUSH: Occasionally. One of the things I’ve used on the Google is to pull up maps. It’s very interesting to see — I’ve forgot the name of the program — but you get the satellite, and you can — like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It remind me of where I wanna be sometimes.

Damn, and now I’m thinking about people who sometimes say that French use “the” everywhere when they talk in english 🙂

Belgian Newspapers Are Still Angry

Do you remember when Google was ordered to remove all content from belgian french-speaking newspapers? Well, it now appears that Copiepresse has made the same kind of demands to MSN. (source: Seo by the Sea)
One of the newspapers that asked to be removed from Google index was Le Soir. I believe they forgot to ask Google not to bid on their domain name. As you can see on the screenshot below, a search for lesoir or lesoir.be on Google.be brings an ad from…well, Google News Belgium.

PR Update coming soon?

A Webmasterworld member reported that he has noticed something that may look like a backlink update on the following Google Datacenters: 64.233.187.104 and 64.233.187.99.

For example, this is what I see when I search for the number of links for www.techcrunch.com:

“Big Daddy DC“: 66.249.93.104: 10,600 linking to http://www.techcrunch.com/

64.233.187.104: 19,100 linking to http://www.techcrunch.com/

64.233.187.99: 19,100 linking to http://www.techcrunch.com/

A PR update is probably on its way, Matt Cutts will eventually comment about that pretty soon.

Google Sitemaps renamed Google Webmaster Central: new blog, new features, better communication

Vanessa Fox announced yesterday that Google Sitemaps has been renamed Google Webmaster Central. It’s not just a change of name, but rather a new platform to help webmasters maximize the crawl of their websites and also to make it easier for them to communicate with Google.

Google seems to be making serious efforts to improve communication with webmasters. Note that Vanessa Fox recently started a thread on WebMasterWorld where she invites members to ask question regarding Google crawling and indexing issues.

Our whole team is looking at better ways to communicate with webmasters, and the creating and submitting Sitemaps is just one small piece of that overall communication.

Google Webmaster Central comes with a new blog, a new Google Group, and new tools. New tools include a enhanced Crawl Report, Query Stats, Preferred Domain, an option that allows you to choose if you want to display the www. version of your site in the SERPS or the one without.
I invite you to read Rand’s Google Webmaster Central in-depth review to learn more about these new tools and see how they can be useful for your site(s).

I personnaly think some of these tools are very useful, for example the crawl report can help you spot urls that timed out when Google tried to crawl them or the “Preferred domain” option.

Andy Hagans on TrustRank

Over at Link Building Blog, Andy Hagans talks about the “index issue” he had with Google and tries to explain how he solved it. He recently launched a new site that had a “2003ish PR5 domain” he acquired hoping that the sandbox effect will not affect him. However, even if the site had more than 200 pages two weeks after he launched it, Google had only cached the homepage.

Apparently, it took only a few seconds for Andy to explain the problem :

Mama didn’t raise no fool, I don’t know why or how, but I know this domain has the proverbial “TR0”.

Translate TR0 by TrustRank 0. While the site may have had some links, Andy realized that he had no “trusted links”.

So I grabbed it every trusted link that I could (quickly) — Dir.yahoo.com, Sbd.bcentral.com, Business.com, a hosted adverpage on an older domain, and an in-content link from an old, ranking (trusted) related site that a friend owns (Thanks mate!)… Two days later, bam! 28 pages in, four days later, 160 pages in.

I think his experience reminds us that each site needs to pass the “Google Trust Test” before getting fully indexed and get the rankings it deserves.

Is Techmeme better than Google News?

Steve Bryant from eWeek published an article where he spotted Google News’ main problems “from a journalist’s POV”. While he recognizes that Google News help “infovores” find fresh information very quickly, he’s complaining about the fact that the News search engine “skips important news sources”, and sometimes prioritizes news that’s opinion.

But the problem is that Google News doesn’t (can’t?) distinguish between news and opinion.

He also notes that Google News isn’t good at ranking the original news source first.

For example, Ryan Naraine published the story about H.D. Moore’s Google malware search first. But today, when you look on Google News, the top story is an article by Information Week. (disclaimer: Information Week is a competitor to eWEEK).

The author concludes by saying that he prefers the Techmeme Model, since it credits “popularity and sources” while the other one “credits keywords”.