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Just moved my blog to a new domain, Leefe.RatesTheWorld.com.au. I think this will work better in the long run, but is a pain in the short run.

All the things you have to do when moving sites.

You have to tell Google and Yahoo about your new site, and add sitemaps again. Then wait the month or more while their indexes update.

Not to mention that Technorati has no means for moving your blog from one domain to another. You have to add the moved blog to your Technorati Profile as a new blog, loosing your previous links and ranking.

So make sure the old url forwards to the new one for the foreseeable future, or you will loose a lot of traffic as nobody will be able to find you.

I should probably also update my Google Analytics profile for this blog.

Plus the new URL needs a new look and feel. Though I think that can wait. The old theme still looks ok, and will do till a new one can be found or produced.

Ah, the joys of moving sites. Not something you want to do everyday.

Looking up information about Australian passports the other day I noticed the following sponsored link.

The URL listed looked wrong to me. Australia doesn’t allow domains straight on the ‘.au’, only as second level domains. There is no www.AustralianPassportAdvice.au. But I wonder how many people realise this?

So, is is ethical to advertise a URL that is not the same as the one that the viewer is directed to? And is it also the responsibility of the group serving the advertisement (Google in this case) to check this?

The actual site is a ‘.com’ domain. It promises to help Australian citizens with all things related to passport registration. Just call the 1902 number and be charged $5.50 a minute. I think I’ll give it a miss.

If you make it to the bottom of the page, small print in a colour very close to the background colour, says:

“This service is not connected with, or endorsed by, The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. APA has no professional qualifications or experience related to the subject matter and we recommend that you contact DFAT for any information relating to passports.“

The official Australian Passport site can be found at: www.passports.gov.au

(Which doesn’t work if you leave off the ‘www’ or if you use the singular ‘passport’)

There have been a number of articles recently written about Google changing their Page Rank (PR) algorithm. And as a result everybody’s page rank has gone down.

Well, you can’t have everybody’s Page Rank go down. I’m pretty sure that Google RP works on a logarithmic scale. There are a lot of people with a PR of 1 and only a few with a PR of 10, with a gradient in between.

Using that model, if some people go down others must have gone up. Keeping the same ratio across the curve.

I think the big losers in the algorithm change were bloggers. It looks to me like the changes are designed to combat splogs (Spam blogs) and blogs created as link farms.

To prove my point, a couple of the sites I manage went from PR 3 to 4. I don’t think it is bad news for everyone, the sky is not going to fall in, just a reordering of rankings.

It appears that the weight of links from blogs has decreased. So, all the bloggers just need to go get more links to their blogs from ‘real’ sites.

Also see:

• Directories PR fell down? (2007.10.07)
• What could have happened that your PR dropped? (2007.0.24)
• Matt Cutts Confirms that Paid Links Killed Your PageRank (2007.10.30)
• Matt Cutts Confirms Paid Links & Google PageRank Update (2007.10.29)

Trying to look up stuff on Google for uni I found an internal link with a 404 page. If you are in Google Scholar , have searched for something and then go to the more page you will find that the Blog Search link gives you a 404 error page.

So I suppose that blogs are not considered scholarly in nature.

After spending billions of dollars on measures to catch terrorists, without any results, it is decided the public sector is not up to the job.

“The marvels of modern technology,” said the woman, shrugging at a nearby sign: Immigration-Powered by Google.

With all the data it collects, Gmail/search results/pages visited/adds displayed, Google is considered the best private sector business to screen people entering the USA. But do you want customs officers querying you about what you sent 6 months ago? Or why certain adds were displayed with your search results?

An interesting piece of fiction that asking ‘what if Google was evil?’.

• Scroogled (Cory Doctorow, Radar, September 2007)

I recently came across About Us, a web directory of domains that uses a wiki as its underlying engine. Most of the pages are created by a bot. You enter the domain name, and the bot collects information about the domain and creates a page from a standard template. It is an interesting concept, but some people are questioning the ethics of the site. (More on that in a later post.)

Since much of the site is auto generated it often requires editing to be more useful. This includes the categories a page belongs to, which are often just a list of key works. (Good thing as a wiki anyone can edit it)

So to make Australian sites easier to find I created a new category: Australian Roleplaying. I added sites I found in AboutUs, linked sites, and other sites that I know of.

The category now sits at around 60 club, convention, designer, published and shop sites. Not bad for a few days spare time.

As it happens there is a man selling Sydney Rock Oysters laced with Viagra. His idea was to produce a super aphrodisiac. Perhaps a smart marketing move, unfortunately the same can’t be said about his Internet usage.

He has been trying to promote the idea through a website. And when an email from Google arrived saying saying it was the “fastest growing internet story since 9/11” he went straight to the media.

A story in the Sydney Morning Herald details how the wool was putted over his eyes.

My favourite quote from the story is:

“Obviously, I’m not dumb, if I’d knew there was anything wrong with it at that point I’d have gone ’shit I’m not going to put that on national television on Sunday night’.”

No, he is obviously just gullible and didn’t think to check the email authenticity.

• Oyster man’s Google-gram a hoax (SMH, 6 June 2007)

Articles of interest about Google buying YouTube. The lawsuits expected. And the problems it has caused the holder of a similar domain, utube.com.

Articles:

• Google hedges against YouTube lawsuits (SMH, 16 Nov 2006)
• Policeman’s YouTube email goes to utube (SMH, 6 Nov 2006)
• Google gobbles up YouTube (SMH, 10 Oct 2006)
• Boom: Google buys YouTube for $2.2b (SMH, 11 Oct 2006)
• Google lawyers fend off the YouTube lawsuits (SMH, 6 Nov 2006)
• YouTube is ‘toast’ (SMH, 29 Sep 2006)
• Will ads in YouTube spoil the fun? (SMH, 18 Oct 2006)
• YouTube to make life even busier for Google lawyers (SMH, 24 Oct 2006)
• YouTube founders now superstars (SMH, 11 Oct 2006)
• Google mulls YouTube takeover (SMH, 7 Oct 2006)

Hormel Foods, the producer of the canned pork product Spam is trying to stop the dilution of its product name. It doesn’t mind too much that “spam” has become a colloquial term referring to junk email. What it objects to is use of the word “spam” in naming commercial products.

The EU trademark office has rejected its application. Citing the high count of sites using the junk mail meaning in Google. The second site when I checked was “spam.com“, the spiced ham fan club. So its not like it doesn’t appear at all.

I suppose the moral of this story is trademark your product name ASAP.

• Spam-maker loses bid to trademark ’spam’ (SMH, 12 Oct 2006)

Recently I have been reading up on human edited directories. How they work, are they any good and can they be used to improve your ranking in search engines?

Search engines use spiders and bots to index the web. These programs automatically check web pages and index them based on some algorhythm. Google being the well known example of a search engine.

Directories use humans to add and categorise sites. Sites are placed in a tree of categories where the human thinks they best fit. And you can find sites about a particular topic by traversing the tree to the topic you are interested in. A classic example is Yahoo, and a newer example is DMOZ.

So, do search engine spiders read directories? And do humans adding to directories use search engines to find new sites?

On the second question the answer is probably yes. Some people submit sites to directories. Others are added because editors found them by accident or from linked sites. But I’m sure that editors use search engines to look for new stuff.

Now on the first question the answer is harder. I found a discussion about this at Digital Point(1), questioning the assertions an article at SiteReference(2) makes. Digital Point’s opinion seems to be that search engines shouldn’t read all directories, but they seem to. And you should submit your site to them. Just make sure that you read the submission guidelines before submission.

Wikipedia has a description of directories(3), as well as a list of major directories(4). It is also worth looking for specialised directories on your site’s topic, for example the RPG Gateway is a directory of roleplaying sites.

Links

1. Do search engines use links from human edited directorys?
2. Internet Directory Submission, Sure Way To Link Popularity
3. Wikipedia - Human edited directories
4. Wikipedia - List of web directories