Google Adds Yet Another Way to AdWords Bowl
Every now and then Google adds new features that, supposedly, help users get a better experience from Google Search. More often than not, this has been a shameless attempt to explain some new hassle webmasters and Adwords advertisers must undergo so that Google can make a few more bucks. The latest in this list is that Google AdWords will soon be rolling out a modification to the Quality Score based upon your landing page load times. This addition, while seemingly innocuous, actually makes it quite easy for a competitor to force your Quality Score lower, thus causing you to pay much more per-click. All a competitor needs to do is send a ton of bogus traffic to your website and, voila, your page load times will increase due to server load and, subsequently,...
Googlebot Indexing Emails, What Will They Think of Next?
Sometimes I have to ask – Google, what the hell are you thinking? Googlebot has a way of sneaking into almost every crevice of the web (it is quite remarkable in all actuality), but in the process seems to indiscriminately publish items of all kinds of nature. While I am certainly not surprised, I recently came upon Google’s indexing of the .eml file extension. This is most commonly used for archived emails. As you can plainly see, Google is now indexing and displaying these files. No tags for this post.
I RickRolled 25,000 People.
If there were an island, named RickRollia, inhabited by wouldbe rickrollers, I would be the king of that island. If there were a “lifetime achievement” award, or perhaps a “living legacy” trophy for RickRolling, I would win it. And, perhaps, they would rename it to the Russ Jones RickRolled Award of Excellence, which they would then give out in the future to those who aspire to my torchbearing greatness. Why do you I say this? What have I done to deserve such RickRolling glory? I rickrolled Reddit. If you are not familiar with reddit, it is much like Digg.com, only it doesn’t suck. Reddit allows you to vote up or down on stories submitted by their users. Stories are then “promoted” to the first page if they receive a...
The 3 Simple Features that Make Reddit Better
Downvoting Reveals a New Story: This feature, singlehandedly, makes Reddit a more successful community. It seems very minor, but in actuality it is the cornerstone of a good promotion algorithm. The biggest shortcoming of any promotional site (digg, reddit, propeller) is that only a select few people, most ofen those interested in cheating the system, ever visit and use the “new” or “upcoming” sections. Subsequently, only already-promoted stories get the editorial oversight of the average user. At reddit, when a user downvotes a story and refreshes the page, the next-best result replaces it. Reddit keeps a numbering system so I know that I have downvoted other stories, but I still do not have to dig through the results, no pun intended, to...
Google & Matt Cutts Get it Wrong: First Priority Should Be Webmasters
While Matt Cutts promised us that his recent post would be “boring”, I believe that it actually raised one of the most important questions regarding search ethics: Our highest duty has to be to our users, not to an individual webmaster.Matt Cutts Unfortunately, Matt and the Googlers get this one very wrong. All relationships require some form of give and take. For a relationship to be properly functioning, it requires that consent be a prerequisite in that give and take. The balance of give-and-take between users and Google is heavily tilted towards the user. In exchange for the possibility of me clicking on an advertisement at some point, with no promises, I can use Google’s search. The goods being exchanged here are search results and...
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