Tag: google

July 13, 2014 / Technical Discussions
June 4, 2014 / Technical Discussions

I have all my main email addresses listed as alternates on my account page. It makes sense to me and I’m happy for Google to have that information about me.

google-calendarIt’s been a source of irritation, though, that Google haven’t recognised those otherĀ emails when used within their apps such as Analytics and Calendar.

December 23, 2008 / Technical Discussions

My NBO post has been the source of some attention lately, not the least by one woman who is unhappy to be mentioned there. We’ve spoken on the phone and as far as I can gather all the information is accurate – the only problem that exists is that her ex-employer still uses her details on some documents. I don’t think any of it is actually wrong.

She’s asked for some of the comments about her to be withdrawn and I’ve done that but now her lawyer is getting vocal because Google has not yet de-indexed the page. Given the 404s I find daily online I have no expectation that Google will de-index anytime soon so I’m expecting legal action over this one.

April 11, 2008 / Technical Discussions

I’ve just discovered the Goolag Scanner.

It’s a handy dandy tool for using Google queries to identify if there are any known holes in a website. Googlebot has already checked every crevice in the site, I just want to know what it knows!

Now Google, being all security conscious and that, gets a bit sensitive about you running these queries. They know that it’s possible you’re going to use the results to do bad things.

December 15, 2006 / Technical Discussions

A couple of days before the launch of WDANZ I thought I’d use the opportunity to analyse how effective Google Alerts are. I wanted to test the breadth of indexing and how quickly the reactions of bloggers might be picked up.

In the table below you can see how Google indexed the sites talking about this breaking news item.

Curiously, the reports seem to be out of date – the ComputerWorld example is the best – by the time the alert comes through the story had been buried in the archives.

This doesn’t spell doom for Google’s alerts – where they can direct you to a permalink – but it does render the homepage alerts virtually worthless.

June 25, 2006 / Search Engine Optimisation

A while back I mentioned how a short lived forum demo lasted months in the SERPs. Another effect I’ve found with new sites is that the sites you use for dropping links will kick butt in the SERPs for a couple of weeks until the search engines fully index and propogate the results around the data centers.

A couple of weeks is no biggie and eventually you’ll pop out on top. The thing is, you drop the links from sites you know are indexed well because they’re going to help you and quickly.

So, I was amused to see, on a forum I frequent, that one site owner was requesting link exchanges and a site review for his Nintendo Wii site.

June 23, 2006 / Technical Discussions

Back in the beginning of my web life, before OO and web frameworks and CMS systems and even blogs there were banner exchange programs. Being an honest kind of girl I never cheated the system but those who did used auto surfing programs to boost their hit counts.

The owners caught on and started tracking IP addresses and looking for trends so that they would weed out the cheats and reward the honest webmasters.

Then came paid online advertising,