19 March 2008 - the day Google's homepage broke!
March 19, 2008
Well maybe not entirely broken, but with only one image to get right you’d think they could manage that! Anyone else seeing this at the moment?
Here are the stats of the missing image:
Location: /www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif
Width: 276px
Height: 110px
Size of File: 0 kB (0 bytes)
Alternate text: Google
Has Google put a slash at the start of the location path that shouldn’t be there?
Google Website Reconsider Request, it only takes 3 days!
March 14, 2008
Well that's my recent experience of a big site that is well known worldwide. It may be just as speedy for smaller sights too and I've got to take my hat off to Google for being so quick off the mark. Maybe it's a coincidence, maybe reconsider requests were running low for March in Google, either way I think you need a genuine reason and here is how Google dealt with mine and a bit of a background overview:
- Big authority site gets redirected (301) from established keyword rich domain to newly bought exact match brand domain (three weeks ago).
- Organic traffic pretty consistent for a week whilst old site is still fairly well indexed. Organic traffic & rankings nose-dive at the start of the second week. Site can't rank in the top 50 in Google for its own brand with an exact match brand domain name and an established 301 redirected domain with the exact content that has heaps and heaps of backlinks pointing to it.
- Wait two further weeks with no further developments. Then put in a Google reconsider request explaining that the new domain has only recently been purchased and that the previous domain history/owner is unknown and due to extremely poor rankings over previous couple of weeks it is suspected that the site might have a penalty associated to it or maybe a duplicate content filter as the new domain had been significantly indexed before the 301 redirect was put in place {not my fault :)}.
- And as if by magic, 3 days later the site is ranking for its brand and many of the previous highly competitive keyphrases and pretty much back to where it was before the site migration.
- The ability to check all your email accounts from one location. I for one have a gmail, hotmail and work email account "“ so this in itself is very useful. No flaws there!
- The second, the ability to send an email from one location, for all your email accounts. This sounds awesome, but there are a couple of flaws that question my 'GMAIL the Great' post title.
I would have taken a month of organic downtime traffic at the start, but I was suspicious of the inability to rank for sites own brand name and after a courtesy of three weeks and reading Matt's reconsider request I thought it was time I should do something about it.
As Matt Cutts points out, it is no longer called a reinclusion request:
not every spam penalty results in removal from Google's index, so "reconsideration" is more accurate than "reinclusion”.
Needless to say I was very pleased and could wipe the sweat of my brow one last time when someone asked me why the site no longer ranked for its own brand name.
Coincidently, it appears that you can now get penalty notifications from Google Webmaster Central for future domain owners which may shine more light in these types of circumstances.
The reconsider request is there to help out when sites really do need it most and I hope it is used with the consideration it deserves as I'd hate for it to be removed due to “every man and his dog” whacking in a silly nilly request. If such a request is used inappropriately, this is probably a pretty good way to piss Google off. So here's a big cry out to 'all men with dogs', this is not the golden ticket for eternal Google love and you may do more bad than good!
{Sorry I have neglected the blog for so long, I will try to be much better in the future:) }
Add a bit of Vibrancy to your Google Homepage
April 8, 2007
I have been using Google's personilised homepage for some time and recently noticed a new feature that I thought I would like to share for those who have not seen it. It appears that the feature has been around for a few weeks, but it’s only until recently that my Google radar picked it up.
You can now add a little more colour and personality by applying a background theme. What I think is particularly nifty, is the fact that your theme can change lighting according to the time of day that you view it "“ so if you are the closed curtains type, at least you will get an idea of the sleep you should be getting or the sun that you are missing. Nice one Google!
GMAIL the Great
February 25, 2007
I have always had a lot of time for GMAIL and think Google really has got it just right (nearly) and it only seems to be getting better. This weekend I inquisitively clicked on the 'new features' link "“ to my delight GMAIL's new service offers the facility to check the mail you receive from other email accounts and even reply from those accounts.
This feature has two obvious great benefits:
The major flaw lies in the fact that GMAIL is sending an email on behalf of your other email accounts. This results in some instances of the receiver of an email seeing the “From customaddress@domain.com on behalf of yourusername@gmail.com.” as the sender field. This for me lowers the trust bar for the receiver regarding your email as being genuine.
The reason Google does this is to help combat against SPAM and although I understand the reason why, I have found emails sent this way, landing in my Outlook SPAM folder, so again there is a trust issue.
Although that aside, GMAIL gets another big thumbs up and it is definitely continuingly to move forward! I also recently discovered that you can add an HTML & image signature which great for Publicising your blog in emails.
Google’s Webmasters Tools
October 28, 2006
Google Webmasters Tools, formerly Google sitemaps, is slowly building up some really useful utilities.
You can now checkout GoogleBot activity stats:
The above stats are from one of my sites and you can see that on average GoogleBot looks at the site 23 times a day. There are also stats that show how many kilobytes are downloaded by GoogleBot and the time spent downloading each page in milliseconds. You can see in the third graph that there is a real blip where the time that GoogleBot spent downloading pages on a certain day went up by about ten fold. This is likely to be a problem with my hosting company. Useful stats!
Google Sitelinks
September 7, 2006
You may have noticed sub sections nested under a domain url. These are Sitelinks!
How to get Sitelinks?
There is no clear answer to this. Firstly, you have to be in the first position for specific a keyword or key phrase. Sitelinks are automatically generated by Google only if it believes the site has enough relevance and authority for the searched keyword. Sitelinks are often generated for brand keywords.
This is discussed in more detail at the seo roundtable and the search engine watch forum.
Google Conversion University
August 17, 2006
Google Analytics’ Conversion University is nothing new, but worthy of a mention as its such a great resource for marketing & content optimization, driving traffic and converting visitors. Conversion University is updated regularly by industry experts and provides some valuable search marketing and web analytics tips.
Google Analytics is absolutely free!
Google Trends
August 3, 2006
Google has released yet another valuable webmaster’s measurement tool in the form of Google Trends. Google Trends allows marketers to discover what the world has been ‘Googling’ in search terms and can be sorted by time, language and geolocation. It shows how search volumes for a specific search term varies over time and provides major news articles relating to the term which may help explain surges in volumes.
Google Trends is in the early stages of development and results are currently approximations. However, this tool is extremely powerful for identifying seasonal trends for specific search terms and I can not help but think this tool can be used to aid in Pay Per Click (PPC) local and regional ad targeting and much more!
