Google Earth now available for Macs

Google has always been focusing their products to windows users, Its true windows users are the major users which use their search results,

but google has drifted a bit and is now offering google earth mac users,

Google says

” “Available in beta for 10.4.x OS [that’s Tiger], Google Earth for Mac offers the same features as the PC version, such as animated driving directions, zoom in and out capabilities, 3D buildings view, and more. Google Earth Plus and Google Earth Pro are not yet available for Mac.”

Google earth download page has the following message,

“Download Google Earth – Mac or PC
Google Earth is a broadband, 3D application that not all computers can run.
Desktop computers older than 4 years old may not be able to run it.
Notebook computers older than 2 years old may not be able to run it. “

http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html

Google update bigdaddy on and off, – Google’s upcoming update is being tested repeatedly,

Google’s upcoming update “Big Daddy” named by matt cutts of google is being tested, The test datacenter http://66.249.93.104/ comes online and goes offline repeatedly, As matt says these results are expected to be live in an other 2 weeks, so people check your rankings in this DC,

Matt cutts asking for feedback or various issues related to google,

Mattcutts of google has asked for feedback on various topics related to google,

He asks feedback on following issues,

Feedback: Webspam in 2006?
Feedback: Search quality in 2006?
Feedback: Products/features in 2006?
Feedback: Webmaster services in 2006?
Feedback: Communication/Goodwill in 2006?
Feedback: What did I miss?

Give your feedback in matts blog,

mattcutts.com/blog/

Review on the New Google Update – Big Daddy – New year special Bigdaddy

Review of New Google Update

Big Daddy:

Matt Google’s senior engineer has asked for feedback on the new results which were live on test datacenters 64.233.179.104 , 64.233.179.99 etc,

Matt cutts has asked semiofficially for feedback to their new index, Currently the new results are live on http://66.249.93.104 , http://66.249.93.99 etc, the 66.249 range is steady and is showing new results from 1st of January 2006, Even as matt said 64.233.179.104 will also be the test DC we don’t see that datacenter to be a steady one, Test results come and go in that particular DC,

Seeing the results on the test DC we see many issues fixed ,

1. Better Logical arrangement of sites in site: and domain only search,

Whether deliberately or by mistake google was unable to logically arrange site: search and domain only search, Homepage has been the most important page for many sites and google buried homepage when doing site:domain.com search or through domain only search, Now in the new datacenter we see a better logical arrangement of sites and pages in sites are listed in proper order compared to other Datacenters, Yahoo has been excellent in arranging site: search for a site, they show the best URL arrangement, Yahoo still shows best arrangement of pages for a site: search, Google has been known to hide many good information from end users, especially the link: search for a site, Google purposely shows less than 5% of links through link: search confusing many webmasters, so probably they do the same with site: search but atleast they have a fix for the homepage in the New big daddy datacenters’

2. Removal of URL only entries / URL only supplemental.

For a very long time Google has been showing URL only listing in SERPs( search engine result pages ) for some sites, Most possibly reasons for URL only listings / supplement results are duplicate pages across a site or across sites, pages which doesn’t have any link to it, Pages which are once crawl able but later not crawl able, pages which no longer exists, pages which were not crawled by google for a very long time possibly because of some sort of automated penalty, pages which was once crawled well but due to some web host problems is not crawlable by search engines, redirect URLs etc, It seems Google has fixed this major issue, URL only listings don’t add value to google’s index and good that it has been removed from the search results, Though we see some supplement pages hanging around here and there most of those pages seem to be caused by duplicate content across sites,

Recently google is very severe on duplicate contents especially syndicating articles, if there are lot of copies of same articles published across sites google makes some of the duplicate copies supplement results, Only these results seem to stick in the new DC other than that no supplement results are found,

For example this is the result of the main www.google.com DC
<

Result in updated Datacenter New DC: 66.249.93.104 ( Verified )

Good indexing of pages for a site:

Recently google has been showing vague page counts for sites they indexed, For one site we work google has been showing 16,000 pages indexed where as the site itself doesnt have more than 1000 pages, But the new DC shows only 550 pages indexed which is a good sign, And all the 550 pages are unique pages without supplementals and we can expect them to rank soon, this is a very good improvement, we have seen the same accuracy across many sites we monitor, the new DC gives much better page counts,

Better URL canonicalization:

We see big improvement of google’s understanding of the www and non-www version, we have checked it across a lot of sites, for example for the search dmoz.org and www.dmoz.org google lists only one version of the site that is dmoz.org, before they show one version URL only and the other one real since it causes a lot of duplicate issues, we see the same fix across sites we monitor, Most of the results are now very good due to google handling redirects pretty well, that is a very good sign for a lot of sites, best advantage are IIS hosted sites which don’t have .htaccess site, lots of sites were unable to to 301 redirect to any one version of the URL, either www or non-www now they don’t have to do that google can understand that both URLs are same for a site,

Better handling of 302 redirects:

the new datacenter is doing well in handling sneaky 302 redirects which used to confuse googlebot a lot, there has been numorous discussions on this 302 redirect issue, google has been closely monitoring this problem and finally they came out with a good fix in the new big daddy update DCs,

For example check here,

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=nigerianspam

you can see the page of anybrowser.com having the same title as nigerianspam homepage

http://66.249.93.104/search?hl=en&lr=&q=nigerianspam&btnG=Search

you can see the page of anybrowser.com having the same title as nigerianspam homepage is removed / missing

Pagerank of canonical problem URLs not fixed,

Google has not fixed the pagerank of sites with canonicalization, Hope it will be fixed in the coming dates,

some jump scripts which uses 302 redirects are not fixed,

hope it will improve soon, example:

http://66.249.93.104/search?q=inurl:www.searchenginegenie.com+-site:www.searchenginegenie.com&hl=en&lr=&start=10&sa=N

Search Relevancy not accurate both in current results and new DC,

When we searched for DVD ( digital versatile disc ) in google we found google.co.uk ( google’s UK regional domain ) ranking in top 5, that is too bad google doesnt have anything to do with DVD, we hope it will be fixed soon,

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=dvd

http://66.249.93.104/search?hl=en&lr=&q=dvd

Possible duplication caused by new improved page indexing by google,

Google used to have 101 kb indexing limit for a page, now they relaxed that limit and they can crawl more than 500 kb, But it seems the 101 kb limitation index is still available and is visible often is search, we see it across our client sites, here is an example on wikepedia page:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22en.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake

Not fixed in new datacenter too,

http://66.249.93.104/search?hl=en&lr=&q=%22en.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake

That is all for review now more review will follow soon,

SEO Blog Team,

danny sullivan? – Who is danny sullivan? Editor of Search Engine Watch.

Who is danny sullivan?

Danny Sullivan is the Managing Editor of the famous Search Engine Watch. A well known authority in search engines, he is widely known as the “Search Engine Guru”. His creativity and knowledge in writing articles is indescribable. Danny is also a well known speaker in conferences and is known for his eloquence.
Danny worked in news papers like LA Times and Orange County Register and then turned his concentration over to web. Danny Sullivan started his career in the web world in 1995, managing a web marketing company which later became Search Engine Watch.
Danny strongly believes search engine marketing has a future. In a conference he spoke, Dannie compared search engines to a ‘reverse broadcast network’.
Danny successfully provide website consulting services, from site conception to internet publicity. He also authors the monthly search engine report newsletter. In the search engine strategies conferences focusing on search engine marketing issues, he writes expert session content.
Danny Sullivan is climbing heights in the field of search engine marketing, alert of changes in trend and making newer innovations in the field.

tim mayer – who is tim mayer? the search king of yahoo.

who is tim mayer?

Behind the product direction of Yahoo! Search technology is the brilliant brain of Tim Mayer. He has over 10 years of search experience in Yahoo added to his achievements in Overture, Inktomi, FAST Search & Transfer.
Tim was the Project manager of the SAEGIS and NameStake search platforms. A literature Graduate with an M.B.A. from Babson College he has been successful in all his career endeavors.
Tim spent two years in product management and product marketing in the web search division at Inktomi. Then Tim became the Vice President and General Manager of the FAST Web Search division.
At overture he successfully did production direction and also managed the major web search affiliate partner relationships.

matt cutts AKA googleguy – who is matt cutts ?

Matt Cutts is no new name in the online search engine marketing industry. Matt’s name is not limited to one specific field. His credits include a respectable job in Google, a blog that interests all kind of traffic, and a commendable fondness on insects!

Matt Cutts joined Google in January 2000 as a software engineer and got a fabulous chance to implement the first test of the AdWords user interface. Matt spent most of his time in the quality group of Google and eventually implemented Google’s SafeSearch, the family filter.
Matt has an M.S, from UNC-Chapel Hill, a double degree in Mathematics and Computer Science.
The blog developed by matt has become a great resource for those fascinated by search engine news. It provides a channel of communication with webmasters also.

Matt used to post with the nickname Googleguy in searchenginewatch and webmasterworld, even now he continues to post with that IDwww.mattcutts.com/blog/

Scottie Claiborne – who is Scottie Claiborne? review on scottie of successful-sites

Who is Scottie Claiborne?

There are some people, who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other and Scottie Claiborne matches the third.

Right from her childhood, she was in touch with sales and marketing and took her first lessons in marketing from her mother’s jewelry shop. Thus her sales ideas grew, found out new strategies in the game of marketing, caught the tactics behind the career and finally employed it as her vocation.

She enjoyed the fun in watching different sales techniques, how it worked and how it failed at times. Scottie found interesting how the chain of marketing ran successful that started from message, and ended up in audience through merchandise.

Scottie placed her first step in online marketing successfully when she became confident of managing sales in any stage. Since 1998, Claiborne has been developing corporate intranets and was managing online content management system for Levity Technologies, Inc. as Vice President of Product Development. She then started Right Click Web Consulting in 2001 with the idea of maximizing the potential of the web.

Right Click Web Consulting is a result of clear planning, right management and bright execution of ideas. She knew what a website was in need of and was upright in the decisions she took.

“Succeeding on the web is all about timing, creativity, and usability. It’s more than marketing since a website acts as the billboard, storefront, and processing center all in one,” says Scottie with a deep and strong knowledge about the networking world. Her Masters Degree in IT is an added feather to her colorful success.

Scottie Claiborne also contributes to newsletters and articles and takes an authoritative tone in the concepts she deal with. Staying ahead of Competitors, Web Analytics Terminology, Hiring a Search Marketer etc are right examples for her creative contributions to the field of online marketing. Scottie’s articles carry an experienced pitch and could confidently handle any subject she was familiar with.

Scottie proved herself unbeatable. As days pass by, she might open up new doors in the field of online marketing.

Scottie’s sites www.rightclickwebs.com ,
www.successful-sites.com

Do visitors from google images convert? very interesting thread discussion in webmasterworld.com,

There is an interesting thread in webmasterworld.com which discusses whether visitors from google images convert, In my point of view it all depends on the site we run, If the site is basically built around images and art it is best to feature in google image search,

this is an interesting posting from the same thread,

My site was basically built around a large photo gallery, so image search
is important to me, and generates a big share of my traffic.
But like a lot
of image galleries, the visitor may not be actually looking to buy anything.
Sometimes they are actually looking for images, prints, posters, etc, none of
which I sell.
But I do have ads on the site and a modest number of visitors
click the ads on any given image page.
What has worked well for me is
providing links to pages about stuff some percentage of visitors coming in
through image searches might be interested in, and putting ads on those pages
that they are more likely to click.
As a side note, because my images get
“borrowed” at a fairly high rate, I decided to label most of them with my url.
Those “borrowed” images appear to generate a pretty decent level of fairly
targeted traffic. Basically I turned the images themselves into ads for my site.
That might be harder to do with an image that comes from a product
description page, but it might be worth giving some thought as to how to make it
work in that situation.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/32479.htm

Hacking mania continues – another PHPBB forum hacked by notorious hackers

An other PHPBB forum was hacked recently by notorious hackers, these hackers are everywhere they hack everything,
we saw the following message ,

Haha Hack Hack Hack Hacklendin Arkadaş Kaderin Böyley miş?

ThE By DeİsGeN HaCKeD_VaTaNİsT

DEfaCe TiM => HaCKeD_SeRvO CyBerNıghtmare VaTaNİsT

ßu SiTe HaCKeD_VaTaNİsT TaRaFıNDaN HacKLeNMiSDiR!!!

HaCKeD_VaTaNİsT

when we visited this forum

netscalped.com/phpbb%202.11/phpBB2/index.php?sid=652df0aa9ac66fe48ec761b8689a2e52