Here in this beautiful country of Canada we have so much to be thankful for.
So to all our readers may we wish you joyful celebrations of a Merry Christmas, a Happy Hanukkah, a cheery Kwanzaa or a fun-filled Festivus. All best wishes to you and your family and may the New Year be the best ever for you.
The Google Search Process has such a powerful effect on the financial well being of many online business owners that they listen with almost paranoid concern for any rumours about the Google search algorithm that might damage their livelihood. The possible penalty that Google might apply to web pages that were substantially similar, or in other words had duplicate content, is one of the more worrying recent concerns that many have had.
Thankfully Google is more proactively working with the vast majority of website owners who operate their websites with the best of intentions. A recent post by Adam Lasnik in the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog attempts to set their fears at rest. The title is, “Deftly dealing with duplicate content“. An early statement in this entry is the following:
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Most of the time when we see this, it’s unintentional or at least not malicious in origin.
The balance of the detailed post gives sensible advice on the implications of duplicate content when this is done in good faith, usually as a service to visitors. The bottom line is that there is no penalty but that duplicate content may create some slight problems. However these are no greater than exist in reality if there are two sources for the same body of knowledge. This post can be highly recommended for the serious webmaster.
Tags: Google
That’s the grim almost tombstone like pronouncement made by Rich Skrenta, DMOZ-founder, although no longer associated with it. He wrote a post entitled ‘DMOZ had 9 lives. Used up yet?‘ He catalogues the lives:
aka Open Directory Project
aka Netscape Open Directory
aka directory.mozilla.org
aka NewHoo
aka GnuHoo
It seems that operational problems at AOL, which now owns DMOZ, coupled with pressures from AOL’s unhappy parent, Time-Warner, mean that DMOZ is now on life-support.
It’s sad since so many editors have given freely and mightily of their time, each to make their own little corner as good as they could. However in total DMOZ was seen by many others as a monolithic organization that unfairly decided which websites should be recognized and which ignored. Now it seems to be slowly fading into obscurity. An apt quotation might be what T.S. Eliot wrote in The Hollow Men: “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.”
Tip of the hat: Peter Da Vanzo
Tags: DMOZ
Thanks to my friend, Kim Krause Berg, I now have a dilemma. It’s all linked to the Blog Tag Tree. It sounds so innocent. Write about 5 things that folks don’t know about you and tag five other people. In some ways it’s like multi-level marketing. You run out of people to keep the process going eventually. Of course it’s all done for link-love and Google may like it so what’s to lose.
Here are my five items and I’m not sure anyone else would know all five.
.. and who to tag. Here are five people whose blogs I always read with a great deal of interest. I don’t think they’ve been tagged so far. So over to you, Joe Dolson, Michael Motherwell, Mike Grehan, Mitch Joel and Sass Peress.
Anyone who has used the Search function of the US Patent Office knows what a wealth of information is to be found there. So much that it’s almost indigestible.
Now Google announces that it is offering a new service, Google Patent Search, in beta of course. Their Advanced Patent Search gives you some flexibility in selecting which patents should appear in your search.
Patent experts such as William Slawski, writing in a post on this in Search Engine Land, comment that the Beta label is well justified in this case since there are some bugs that need to be corrected. He points out that the results are only an undefined fraction of what is fully available, which is true. However if you are going to eat an elephant and know that it should be done ‘slice by slice’, then it’s handy to be able to say just how you want your slices carved up.
If this topic is of interest to you, then check out the Cre8asite Forums discussion on this. There are some useful suggestions there.
Tags: Patent Search, Google
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