Googler JohnMu has said that blocking access to your website from whole geographic regions is cloaking and against Google guidelines.

Report and full story: SEORoundtable: Google says blocking countries outside of US is against policies via SEO Theory: Dear Google this ain't cloaking

Another we-make-them-up-as-we-go rule from Google? I know of know such written guideline from Google. I don't see how this is any different from Google automatically geoforwarding UK users to Google UK or German users to Google DE. Not only is this FUD it is BS. It is most definitely NOT cloaking.

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/0702...rc=netflash-rss

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=13571&

Sorry, I'll believe this when I see it, because I hear this about every 3 years - that Flash is now indexable by search engines and it never really comes about.

Still unanswered: IF links in Flash are indexable do they pass link juice? Will Flash pages really rank well when compared to HTML pages?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7484782.stm

Hi

I do a lot of work with the oscommerce shop engine and have had a lot of success with the search engines (from hereon referred to as Google ).

the urls I use look like www.mysite.com/mygreat-product-p-37.html

And has worked very well over the years.

Over the past few weeks webmaster tools has been popping up hundreds of warnings related to duplicate titles/descriptions.

e.g.
www.mysite.com/mygreat-product-p-37.html?sort=2a&page=1

It is a ligitimate sorting option for the standard url, this url however is now causing duplicate warnings and I suppose I can see why.

So one option I could take is ..

if( $visitor == 'googlebot' )
301 redirect it back to the url without the querystring.

My concerns are ..

1) Googlebot will consistently see links on my site that I consistently insist should be 301 redirected.

2) I will start getting the "too many redirects" warnings

What do you think? is there a better way?

Thanks guys

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7482991.stm

I just stumbled upon (w/o the social site) these pages. Take a close look and tell me if you notice a pattern (okay, this sounds like it's one of those jokes where you look at a picture and then you hear a loud scream and see a monster or something, but I promise it is not!)

http://www.geo.mtu.edu/~rblanken/Pics/New%...%20n%20bull.JPG
http://www.geo.mtu.edu/~rblanken/Pics/New%...er%20dancer.JPG

Seriously, though, does anybody have any evidence or hint why links from .edu domains could be given more weight than links from any other tld *with the same amount of link authority*?

I'm not trying to be a nay-sayer (exp?), but has anyone ever had any hint that it might actually have something to do with the .edu or .gov domain and is not solely related to the fact that such sites usually have a lot more links pointing to them than sites with other tld's?

I guess this wouldnt really be an actionable insight, because why a site gives u a lot of link juice doesnt really matter so if you can get .edu's and .gov's it's great (though some people might exaggerate thinking they need them extremely bad, because they heard it's the latest trick)...but I'm really wondering if maybe this is just an urban SEO legend?

So out of curiosity: Is there any evidence that a link from a .gov or a .edu domain with a (real) pagerank of 5 is more beneficial for rankings than a link from a .com or .co.uk with a (real) pagerank of 5?

of course it might "make sense", but then again a lot of other things make sense, too, but then the search engineers test it and try to see if it makes the results more relevant and it doesnt and thus isn't used in the algorithm despite making sense (e.g. if Peter Norvig's statement about clickstream data is true for example..but then maybe it's not hehe).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7481241.stm

John Battlelle calls the search wars over. Google Wins. Monopoly, soon if not already
.

http://battellemedia.com/archives/004518.php

I think he's right. It's over, everybody trying to do search can go home now.

Here is a nice list of the top 10 internet retail sites.

http://www.internetretailer.com/dailyNews.asp?id=26943

OK, 4 problems now, cannot edit title!

More problems and questions, which other forums have failed to answer sufficiently:

1. Drupal issue: http://drupal.org/node/273575

Basically I want to change the date format in the ed_classified module, but cannot see how to do it.

2. Wordpress theme: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/184781?replies=2

Header is centred, but cannot for the life of me get the content centred.

3. Drupal on shared host > security question - https://www.clook.info/forum/showthread.php?t=7180

Moved a Drupal site to shared hosting in the UK (was in the USA on my cheap VDS) and to get files writeable, had to change it to 777. Is this cool?

4. No asked this one anywhere else yet - Wordpress - looking at 404's - lots of stuff like //\"\'+uri+\'/\" coming up. I recall something similar happening on my Drupal site, and Chris checked it out and said that it was due to people trying to inject stuff. Is this happening again? Is there a way to make Wordpress 2.5 more secure, or is it secure enough?

I hope you don't mind me asking all these questions here!

Cheers

Jon.

I have a problem. I am trying to show a verticle banner to the right of my page, and have managed to get it positioned in all browsers OK, but have just noticed that the links stop working in FF (ok in IE).

The page looks like this:
http://www.motleyhealth.com/test.html

The CSS is like this:


Full CSS: http://www.motleyhealth.com/andreas00.css

It seems to have something to do with the position:absolute, as when removing this the links are active again.
I have tried other ways to positioning it, using floats etc, but cannot get it in the right place in both FF and IE (the links also work fine when using floats).

So, what am I doing wrong? Open the test page in both FF and IE and you'll see what I mean.

Cheers

Jon.

I'm looking into blogging from my cellphone:

Right now my blog is on Wordpress.com. Wordpress only has a web interface for mobile blogging. I tested it yesterday and it seems okay for simple text-only posts. No photos and no links, although you may be able to laboriously type in XHTML code for links but that seems a bother.

Blogger: lets you post by email. I have not tried it but it seems like it would be a great way to post. Attach a photo (good feature for smartphones with camera) and it becomes part of your post, the Subject line becomes your post title and the body of the email becomes the content of your post. I think some other blogging hosts use this posting method too.

Blogger also lest some cell phone users post by SMS text messages. I don't really see the point of this but kids might like it.

Typepad: has downloadable blogging client software. They may have other methods to mobile blog but I don't know of them.

I can see how mobile blogging, especially with a cellphone camera could be great for a home town blog or local portal to post about things closer to real-time.

So does anyone mobile blog? If so how do you do it and how do you like it?

Things are looking grim over at Yahoo, as executives bail, Yahoo gives up on their own search ad system and steams around like a rudderless ship in search of a reef.

But Danny Sullivan does what Yahoo's (un)leadership fails to do: tell the world about Yahoo's strengths and that things are not that bad.

It looks like Google Android, the free smart phone OS being prepped by Google will have soon have free, open source competition as Nokia buys the remaining stake in Symbian and intends to make it open source.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7470772.stm