Is it just me or is anyone else having trouble with certain Google applications? I've been having consistent problems with Google Calendar for several weeks now. The items on one or more calendars often won't display, no matter how many times I refresh. What good is a calendar tool that doesn't work?

I've also had inconsistent render problems with both Google Docs and Google Mail. I have no plans to switch away from GMail, unless I'm absolutely forced to. But if the calendar problem goes on for another week, I'm forced to switch. Google, you really need to get on top of these problems. Then there's the AdSense reporting problems, as Problogger pointed out.

Anyone else seeing similar problems? Has Google grown too fast for their (and our) own good?

Not that I really care very much about the green pixels, but there's a Toolbar PageRank update going on right now. You might care. You might make money off the green bar. So go ahead and check!

There's one thing I know: Performancing was penalized from a PR 7 down to a PR 4. Despite numerous requests for clarification, and numerous "I'm your slave" reinclusion requests, Google has neither responded in word or deed.

So what's the lesson?

Google is failing to reward the sites, even relatively big sites, that genuinely try to play by the rules. By neglecting our attempts to conform, I think that Google is unintentionally sending a message like this:

We don't really care. Go back to your old ways of taking sponsored posts, and doing text-link-ads. You'll make more money that way, and since you're already penalized, why not make money in the process.

Really, we want to do things by the book. We want to be on Google's good side. But psychologically, it's hard to justify a large cut in revenue when Google fails to reward you properly for doing things properly.

A while back, Ryan posted a poll at Performancing asking Are You Afraid of Google? If you are afraid, you might want to check out InsideCRM's Tinfoil Hat Toolbox of 100 tips to protect your sites from the Borg Google. This article is relevant to those of you with multiple sites, or if you're planning to go that way. But even if you're a blogger with just one site, you might want to have a look, to learn how much Google already knows about you. There are also some good tips about what not to do if you are expanding your web properties.

Now, Google's logo was recently declared the most recognizable global brand. That's not hard to achieve, what with their search market share. But did you know what else Larry Page and Sergey Brin's baby has been up to? They've invested in solar power (under their philanthropic branch), electrical grids (for their own purposes), and they're now into EMR (Electronic Medical Records). They intend to index participating patients medical records and make them available from anywhere those people can get Internet access.

Then again, Google has openly stated that they intend to index the Earth's information, no matter how long it takes. (I mean, "googol" is a type of "infinity", so this goal isn't surprising.) It looks like they're on their way. Conspiracy theorists are probably wetting their beds like they did as kids, seeing bogeys in the dark corners of their electronic homes. Should you be scared, too, or do you think Google is harmless?

Note: Eventually I do cover 4 steps to take when your content is the victim of an over-eager algorithm. But it's towards the end;-)

SEO mastermind Graywolf took a look at my post on the negative consequences of a front page Digg. He concluded that my original source article is getting hit by a duplicate content penalty. His inference is based on this search:

"This question got serious consideration for the top spot"

What this search shows is that Google drops the original source of this quote all the way to the very, very bottom of the search results. When an exact-match search of a unique phrase see your content drop to the very bottom of the search results, you can be fairly sure that your content been penalized by an algorithm... and in this case a stupid algorithm.

While Graywolf is probably right, it's very hard for me to think that something else isn't going on. After all, a billion dollar company should be able to see obvious clues like "100s of backlinks" and properly identify the source as the one article that all those scrapers and editorial references link back to. It seems other-worldly that Google, the billion dollar beast, would fail in such an obvious case, to identify the original source of the content.

Which leads me to this conclusion: Google is trying to crack down on "scramble scrapers" - scrapers who take content from lots of different sources and piece it together. Why do I think this? Because the original source of content, referenced above, received a steady stream of comments that probably looked to Google like a scraper piecing together more and more content from different sources.

I'm not 100% sure about this. But I really can't think of any other good explanation.

But that's not the point of this article!!!

Read the rest of this entry

Correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I'm relatively sure that I've identified a patterned mistake that Google's algorithm makes.

Here's how it goes:

• You write a really interesting article and it makes the front page of Digg
• Your article is provocative enough to draw a steady stream of comments for the good part of 1 week
• You gain dozens if not hundreds of solid, editorial backlinks to your article from reputable sites
• A week after publishing, your article disappears from Google's index, while many of the articles referencing yours remain

So I've noticed that with my last five articles to make the front page of Digg (i.e. a pattern), the article disappears from Google's index completely, even on an exact search for the article title:

http://www.google.com/search?q=The+Ten+Worst+Job+Interview+Questions+Ever

The interesting thing to note is that on such a search, 70-100% of the first 10 SERP results return articles that reference the original. In such a case, you'd think that Google would clearly know the source of the article.

But apparently some penalty filter gets applied. Now, you might think that it's a duplicate content penalty. But hear me out, I don't think so.

Here's my theory:

Read the rest of this entry

Are you using i.e. Google personal maps?
How do you promote your maps?

Ongopongo is a specialized directory for maps with some digg-like features.

When Google made the 'My Maps' service public in April 2007 (Map-making: So easy a caveman could do it) it only took a very short while until Riley created Ongopongo. This Drupal driven site is a kind of specialized digg clone for links to maps. As far as I have checked out Ongopongo all of the submitted maps are hosted on the Google My Maps service. But you can submit every kind of map because Ongopongo takes links as submission.

Don't expect explanations for the name Ongopongo from me :)

Read the rest of this entry

• Do you use categories?
• Do you use tags?
• Do you offer a full text search?

Are you satisfied having three different search result pages inside your blog?

Let's say we have a blog with 300+ articles, 1,000 tags, about 50 categories and some archive pages. And maybe you are linking to your internal full text search results via search links too. All those internal links are good for SEO.

But are three different search result pages a good approach to offer a valuable site search?

I say 'No' because your site and archive pages are transparent but not all (!) pages are mirrored in the results. Only specific parts of your site show up when doing a tag/category/full text search. I am not even talking about the valuable content inside the comments (like here on performancing.com) which normally is not indexed internally at all.

Let's introduce the web 1.0 'fuzzy search' box...

Read the rest of this entry

There is a great interview with Adam Lasnik from Google over at stonetemple.com.

What follows is an interview with Adam Lasnik, who is an SEO Strategist at Google. Adam has become extremely well known in the community as a new voice for communications from Google to the webmaster community.

Eric Enge (President of Stone Temple Consulting) is pushing hard to get valuable information and Adam is handing out very concrete information about a bunch of SEO topics.

A must read for all the SEO hobbyists at performancing.com!

Check out the Interview transcript (Published: February 4, 2008):

Adam Lasnik Discusses WebSpam with Eric Enge

Over 6 months ago, I reported that Google was getting gamed on a moderately searched, but important health question: "Can women take Tylenol while pregnant?"

Six months later, not only are they still getting gamed, but their results are worse then when I made the original post. Now they have blank pages, non-existent pages, spammy pages. Check out the results yourself at the following link:

http://www.google.com/search?q=can+women+take+Tylenol+while+pregnant

I reported this issue to Google. They've not done anything about it in 6 months. So what does that tell me? That reporting spam and reporting dissatisfied results is an impotent action. It's a waste of my time. Simple induction: if it doesn't work once, then try again, if it doesn't work twice, start being skeptical, if it doesn't work the third time, assume it's just not going to work.

It's like your local government failing to tell you why they've set up a work-zone boundary around your local business, preventing customers from entering your door, unless the customer climbs the fence.

On October 8th, 2007 Debng of Performancing wrote the following linkbait:
66 Celebrities that Blog.

On October 9th, 2007 the article went popular (front page) on Digg:
http://digg.com/celebrity/66_Celebrities_that_Blog

According to Yahoo's Site Explorer, the article has 1,984 backlinks:
Page specific results from site explorer

A Google search for the title of that article (66 Celebrities that Blog) completely and utterly misidentifies the source:
http://www.google.com/search?q=66+celebrities+that+blog

In fact, if you follow the above link, you will see that the source is not listed on the front page (at least not at the time of this writing). The problem is compounded by the fact that the vast majority of sites on the first page of SERPs link to the source on Celebrity Cowboy.

This problem is not isolated. Time and again, I've seen Google misidentify the source for an extremely popular article.

So what can you do about it? Well, Google would have you believe that you can simply file a Dissatisfied? Help us improve quality report. But let me tell you, this does not work. I've been filing the report once each month since October when I first noticed the issue. And although the issue was temporarily resolved for about one week in November, it has since permanently returned.

So what's the problem? Well, there are many possibilities. The problem is that Google's words speak louder than their actions. There is clearly some penalty or buffer that's being applied to the source article in this case, for whatever reason. The problem is that I have no recourse (other than the remote possibility that Matt Cutts takes notice and institutes an non-scalable solution).

I personally don't want Matt Cutts to take action specific to my personal issues. I want Google to truly be committed to a policy of openness for webmasters who take the time to try to play by the book, even putting their sites into Webmaster Tools. I want Google to seriously work to clamp down on false positives in their penalty buffering algorithm, or to at least come up with a truly scalable solution for working with well-intentioned publishers to fix problems in a timely manner.

As it stands right now, there are thousands of good websites that are being unjustly damned to SERP hell, and publishers are left feeling helpless because, although they've completely cleaned up and consented to work on Google's terms, Google continues to ignore them, not even acknowledging that there is an issue.

Quite honestly, it's like your local government failing to tell you why they set up a work-zone boundary around your local business, preventing customers from entering your door, unless they climb the fence. That's what it feels like. I wish Google would realize the enormity of the issue.

Is Google going to be so close?

The data octopus may come closer than you wish...

A nice little science fiction video:

Two young men take a turn down the wrong street view.

Direct link

HAHAHA .. Super Fantastic SuperKalifragilistic... Expiala-Google !
One heck of a fine shorty dude - Well Done !

But what is the red light standing for?

Found here: Creepy Google Maps (Sci-fi Video)

Here's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen from Google. Literally.

In early December, Performancing launched Performancing Services ... a social media marketing and authority building service.

Embarassingly, Google decided not to index Performancing Services. Literally.

So a month later, I added Performancing Services to Webmaster Tools just to see what the hell Google was up to.

Here's what I found:

URL unreachable /robots.txt unreachable

Before we crawled the pages of your site, we tried to check your robots.txt file to ensure we didn't crawl any pages that you had roboted out. However, your robots.txt file was unreachable. To make sure we didn't crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. When this happens, we return to your site later and crawl it once we can reach your robots.txt file. Note that this is different from a 404 response when looking for a robots.txt file. If we receive a 404, we assume that a robots.txt file does not exist and we continue the crawl.

Now that is complete and utter nonsense. Since when do you need to upload a robots.txt file to get your site indexed?

If you quantify over the entire Internet, Google does a very good job. So let's give them their props before we look at how they can improve. Despite their great successes, there are some places where Google could really improve. Here's a list of seven things I'd like to see them work on.

1. Less False Positives

This is really my biggest gripe with Google right now. Way too many false positives in their filtering algorithms. Quality sites that did no harm are getting caught in the wide net.

2. Faster Re-Checks of Penalized Domains

To solve the first problem, Google might consider building a better algorithm for doing penalty reconsiderations. Especially for sites that have lots of quality indicators and might have gotten just one or a few things wrong.

Read the rest of this entry

TechCrunch has the news. And you'll want to prepare for this a few years down the road.

It's that time of year when the Internet goes into a virtual slumber. But we here at Performancing wanted to keep things a little spicy (just like that spiced butter rum you're drinking). So we're offering you a trivia question to keep your mind active (and free from complete holiday comatose):

Besides getting an explicit notice in Webmaster Tools, or an email from Matt Cutts, what is the clearest sign that your blog is not in the good graces of Google?

I have one specific answer in mind. It's really obvious and gets at the core of what Google is all about.

Here's a clue: what's the most important stat chart that an SEO can look at?

First person to get my answer gets a free submission in the EatonWeb blog directory. I've told the answer to Ahmed Bilal, so the answer is locked in.

Any guesses? Post your answers in the comment section. First person to answer correctly wins.