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By Ash Nallawalla
Microsoft Windows 7 (Win7) is the latest operating system (OS) to come out of the Redmond giant software maker. It follows the less than spectacular Windows Vista, which I installed on my family computers but not on my main PC. This release is different and truly worth the wait. The executive summary is that I use it daily on my personal PC.
Some cynics have said that Win7 is what Vista was meant to be, implying that Vista was released before it was ready. There might be an element of truth in that, but without the worldwide feedback from Vista users, Win7 might not have been much better. Microsoft has listened. I was the first to report one problem and it does not exist in the released version – that pleased me a lot.
I won’t list all the features of Win7 because you can look them up at www.windows7.com. This hands-on report is about what I liked and didn’t like.
It took nearly 84 minutes to install Win7 on a new 1 TB drive. It took an hour to reach the end of the “Expanding Windows files” phase. At the 80 minute mark I entered my key. Four minutes later, the installation was complete, but it then proceeded to fetch updates. Some Linux lovers have published extraordinarily long times for an in-place Vista-to-Win7 upgrade (e.g. 20 hours) – all I can say is that the method I mention later in this review will save you a lot of time, regardless of what OS you currently use. You will need an external drive.
During the beta test period I noted after installation that I had to dig up the original programs for the motherboard to enable the LAN, audio and optimum video. There was a further hurdle because the Asus drivers came with a hard-coded .INI file containing a string depicting the OS, e.g. “WNT_6.1P_32_MCE = Win7”.
Such a string was not present, so the program would refuse to run. This was annoying (but understandable why it is needed) because I could not connect to the Internet to look for new drivers or to activate the OS without an Internet connection.
Therefore, I had to copy those programs to the Win7 drive, edit the .INI file to add an entry for Win7 by copying one from Vista, then the necessary drivers were installed. I am pleased to report that the final version of Win7 seemed to know my motherboard and its components, and only had a minor problem with the speakers not being seen. My Skype phone was, however, seen as the only audio device. I downloaded the latest version of the Realtek audio drivers and the Win7 version of the Nvidia video drivers (for good measure) and the PC was happy.
One of the headaches of a major OS upgrade is how to migrate all the old programs and data to the PC. In my case I was upgrading from Windows XP Pro, not Windows Vista (which will allow an in-place upgrade), so I had to install Windows 7 on a clean drive and reinstall all the applications. Even if you are upgrading from Vista, I recommend a clean install because you are guaranteed that there are no orphan files wasting space.
My data is always kept on two separate physical, internal drives, so that a scrambled C drive won’t lock out access to the data. I keep just the OS and installed programs on the C drive. This makes it easier to reformat the C drive to install a new operating system, but some settings are kept on that drive by some programs, such as browser Favourites/Bookmarks. You have to remember to back them up.
I downloaded a free utility program from Microsoft known as Windows Easy Transfer (WET) and connected an external backup drive. This is handy because few people would buy a new PC just to upgrade the OS. WET lets you choose the programs and settings that you wish to move to the Windows 7 drive. This program finds files all over your computer, so I had to use the Advanced settings to deselect files from the migration list, as they lived on drives other than C, so they would still be available after I swapped the C drive.
The main joy of this OOBE was that all settings, cookies, stored passwords were migrated. For more information about a Windows XP to Windows 7 migration, see technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ee150430.aspx.
The Windows desktop is less cluttered than before, showing only the Recycle Bin at top left and, of course, any shortcut icons or files you choose to place there. As in Vista, the icons are larger than they were in XP Pro, which helps those using a touch-screen PC. At the bottom, the Quick Launch area has gone (you can get it back with a hack) and the Taskbar shows you thumbnails of multiple windows you have opened. If you hover on a thumbnail, you can preview it full-screen. You can pin your favourite programs to the Taskbar for rapid access.
The supplied Backup tool is basic but better than the XP version, as you can set a schedule for automatic backups. I use it to back up important files and a system image. It does an incremental backup only and I have chosen the Non-Stop method to silently back up to a separate internal drive. For a complete image backup I use Acronis TrueImage Home 2010.
You also get the opportunity to create a System Repair Disc in case the system image in the backup set is damaged.
So far I have installed the following applications without any issues:
I had no choice but to set a password for Windows XP Mode, the virtual environment for running old programs that won’t run under Win7. I wasn’t able to run the beta or RC version of XP Mode for some reason, but the RTM version (the one you can buy) works fine.
It didn’t surprise me to learn that this is a copy of Windows XP inside Win7, so it too has to download updates. You have to find a separate Anti Virus program for it. So far I haven’t found any of my regular programs that needs XP Mode, but it’s there if needed. The Security Center interface did not point me to Microsoft Security Essentials, its latest, free antivirus offering. No problem – I grabbed it from http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/ .
The Action Center replaces Security Center, which is now part of the former. Its presence is a small pennant icon in the System Tray at the bottom right of the screen. You can open it to see your security and computer maintenance task status, as well as adjust the UAC settings.
The UAC (user account control) feature was one of the most annoying in Vista. Win7 gives you a four-step setting, with the top one being the Vista setting. Win7 defaults to the second highest level (notify me when programs are trying to change the OS settings but not when I make changes; and dim the desktop). The next setting is identical but the desktop is not dimmed, thus you are more likely to click OK without thinking. The lowest setting is Never Notify, which is not a good idea.
Win7 has a feature known as ASLR (address space layout randomisation), which means that working data in memory is placed in random locations, so that malware doesn’t know where to find it and tamper with it. ASLR has to be enabled by the software developer, so don’t expect old programs to have this benefit.
It also features DEP (data execution prevention), which came in a basic form in Windows XP SP2 but was improved in Windows Vista. This prevents buffer overflow exploits by not allowing memory that is reserved for data to be used to execute code.
BitLocker To Go (in Win7 Ultimate) now enables you to encrypt USB flash drives. In Vista SP1 you could only encrypt hard disks, which are less likely to be lost or stolen than flash drives.
Corporate users can take advantage of DirectAccess, which does away with the need to open a VPN (virtual private network) tunnel.
Also for the corporate users in a Windows Server 2008 R2 environment, AppLocker provides finer access control over designated applications. Windows 7 Ultimate and Enterprise PCs can be managed fully with AppLocker.
Biometric fingerprint reading is now part of the OS, unlike Vista, where a third-party application was needed to enable it.
Internet Explorer (IE) 8 has several security improvements, but the one I like the most is Domain Name Highlighting, which helps avoid clicking phishing emails. A common trick is to have a long URL such as www.anz.com.some. gibberish.malware.cn. The email program might display a truncated URL showing the beginning of the URL and you might be tricked into trusting the website. IE8 in this example would highlight the real domain at the end of the URL.
There are many other security features that can’t be listed for reasons of space. We used to say that Windows XP Pro was the most secure OS from Microsoft, but now Win7 takes it to a new level.
The OS is loaded with peace-of-mind features such as the Action Center, which alerts you if there is a security or maintenance problem. Some tools are new, while others are more accessible now. The Reliability Monitor keeps a log of application failures, warnings and informational events such as installations and updates. Should there be a problem during startup of the PC, the Startup Repair Tool launches automatically.
Windows 7 works with many devices in many clever ways. One that I can relate to is Location Aware Printing. When I travelled a lot to my US company headquarters, there was always a problem remembering to change the default printer, otherwise my document would be printed 8,000 miles away. A more common situation is bringing the work laptop home and needing to connect with the home network. You don’t need to do anything – Windows 7 just finds the network.
I noted a few permission problems when working on files created on the Windows XP Pro system. Their owner (in Properties > Security) was shown as some long alphanumeric string (a Registry key). I had to make my new identity the owner of such files by giving them full control. I should say that this might not have been a problem if I had allowed WET to copy all my data files, but then the whole process could have taken many hours. Instead, I am using a registry hack that lets me give full control with a single click.
Task Manager is occasionally not as responsive as it used to be in XP. It takes its sweet time to show up. I have an occasional bout of complete unusability owing to slowness. This is somehow tied with Firefox 3.5 (and 3.0) and it comes and goes. At first a very high I/O Read count for csrss.exe was fixed by turning off the Superfetch service (thus negating one of the “benefits”). However, when the PC is unusably slow, Task Manager isn’t showing high CPU, high memory use, or high anything, which makes the problem hard to diagnose. My graphics card isn’t particularly fast, so that is a possible suspect.
Advice from others to turn off indexing wasn’t a solution. I also checked whether my SATA drives were set to IDE or AHCI – they were set to IDE, which is meant to help with speed. I improved disk performance by moving the contents of the C drive from a 1 TB disk to a 320 GB disk. Both are 7200 RPM, so it seems that having an unnecessarily large C drive isn’t a good idea. The Windows Experience Index (WEI) improved from 3.4 to 5.9 for the primary hard disk. My graphics card has a WEI of 4.8, it is the weakest link and, therefore, my overall WEI is also 4.8. Since office tasks only need a minimum WEI of 2.0 and gaming needs a score of 3.0, I don’t feel deprived by not having a higher score.
Fix: I cured the responsiveness problem by removing a couple of obscure Firefox add-ons that I wasn’t using, but they were always loaded.
At the time of writing, Windows Live Sync (a free, online service from Microsoft that lets you sync files between two or more PCs) could not recognise Windows 7 PCs whose names were previously associated with the libraries set up on Live Sync. This wastes time, as you have to set them up as new machines on the sync list.
I made a shocking discovery today. I was going to uninstall Adobe Web Suite Premium CS3 from my hard drive to move to another PC when I got this message upon clicking the Deactivate option:
I knew there was a problem with CS3 when I had installed Windows 7. Over the years I had installed CS3 on many of my PCs but I had never noticed “Deactivation”. This time I could not install and the error message told me to deactivate it on another PC. I dutifully did so, thankful that I hadn’t overwritten that drive.
Today I was about to take CS3 off this PC and move it to another that I was planning to use just for web work. The damn thing would not deactivate. I looked around the Adobe forums and there were a few people with this problem and others were just telling them to call Adobe Support (the same as the advice on the error dialog). I am usually doing these things on a weekend and I doubt if Adobe Support is available on a Sunday evening. Surely the solution must exist somewhere.
I found it: CS3 Activation Limits – a post by Bob Levine over a year ago. To my amazement I am informed that CS3 has only 20 activation/deactivation cycles!When you hit the 20th activation, you can’t deactivate it. You have to call Adobe Support and they give you five more activations. I have yet to do that.
To think of the CS3 activations I have lost over the years on dead or reformatted disks. It’s never been on more than one PC at the same time. Silly me, thinking that Adobe activation was like Microsoft Office’s, which has a sensible mechanism that works out whether you are sharing your licence or using it on your own PC. If I hadn’t been a Macromedia casualty back in 2002 and was still at Adobe, I’d have given the product manager and the anti-piracy chap my opinion of this idea. It doesn’t stop people using cracked copies and only inconveniences the legitimate owners.
I have no idea about CS4 activation/deactivation restrictions but if you have either versions, be sure to deactivate before uninstalling.
Some weeks ago I read Rand Fishkin’s post about Google capping its index and retiring a lot of old content. I didn’t think any further about that topic until I was writing my monthly column for APC Mag (April 2010). I was checking some search counts for some old news and found the numbers a bit low. So I thought I’d try some truly big news stories, taking care to choose a phrase most likely to be used only for the next 24 hours and not some recent coverage:
Then the puzzler:
I had missed the terrible tragedy by going to bed (in Australia) just five minutes before the first plane hit, but I woke to the clock radio newsreader opening with “The twin towers are no more”. It took me a few seconds to absorb this apparently bizarre news bulletin and subsequently I heard that phrase many times that day. Surely, numerous print media also used it, so I am puzzled to find just 31 instances today in Google.
Bing is not a lot better – we are used to Bing counts being a tiny fraction of Google’s for a given search term:
Yahoo:
Finally, an unambiguous phrase, not date-restricted (there are lots of these namesake buildings around the world), spelt the American way to avoid counting many of the others:
Google:
Yahoo:
Bing:
Is Google becoming more relevant or pruning the index? I tend to think it’s the latter. Is this Caffeine?
I liken SEO to the early days of medicine.
In every forum where SEOs congregate, sooner or later someone brings up one of two topics:
The discussions usually mention:
I own a very part-time business where I teach SEO and I certify some of the students as Professional SEOs. I have trained dozens of students but only two were awarded a certification. (This isn’t a pitch for that business, so there is no link to that website.)
Therefore, these discussions used to intrigue me, particularly because there is very little interest in taking up SEO training.
I began this post by likening the SEO industry to the early days of medicine. Nobody knew how the human body works, but they knew that certain actions (eating, sleeping, exercise etc) were good and others (starving, poking big holes in the torso, etc) were bad.
Then came the medicine men who found ways to cure illness. They found that eating or applying certain herbs was beneficial. It took many centuries before someone decided that this stuff needs to be written down and taught in a college to ensure repeatability and reduce the loss of innocent lives. Even today, humans haven’t fully guessed the body’s algorithms.
Are today’s SEOs comparable to witch doctors? Some can cure a ranking malady and others cannot. In these politically correct times, let’s not offend witch doctors but let’s compare SEOs with quacks. I am reminded of an old joke, modified for the SEO profession:
Q. What’s the difference between a used car salesman and an SEO?
A. The used car salesman knows when he is lying.
I’ll explain why my SEO training business is very part-time. Three years ago I left an employer after making them the then-largest SEO company in the country. (I headed that division). I can’t take credit for the large number of SEO customers – having a great sales force and a large customer base (for other products) had a lot to do with it. However, over 90% of the customers enjoyed a top-10 ranking and 94% had a top-20 ranking.
Buoyed with my own ranking success, I started an SEO training business offering a one-day SEO course and a half-day PPC course. Back then Kalena Jordan ran the only business offering SEO training, but it was online. I felt that a classroom approach also had a place in the market. Later, other companies joined the training bandwagon.
I wrote down all my acquired knowledge, partly to give myself a handy checklist for topics that I didn’t encounter very often. I regarded my course content as a short cut to learning current best practices without wasting time on outdated or ill-informed material that you will find on the web.
I invested in local print ads and AdWords. I booked a venue. There were a few nibbles but a lot of excuses – the date was not convenient. The price was too much. It sounds very technical. And so on. The course was cancelled. The remaining students were trained at their own premises.
In 2007, I went to India for a holiday and almost at the last minute a friend offered to organise a training opportunity in Pune. It was oversubscribed – a great success. Later, the training course was expanded to three days, then cut back to two days because students could not get time off.
Unfortunately, after deducting the cost of an air fare to India and charging an affordable number of Rupees, there isn’t a lot of profit left to make it an ongoing business proposition by my standards. That country is still clamouring for competent SEO training, which is a good sign, given that we in the West like to point out shoddy SEO work from some Indian SEOs. I still get 2-4 training enquiries every day from India without any advertising. I point them to my self-paced online course but very few take it up.
So, for the time being I am happy to be back in corporate, in-house SEO land. When I get an enquiry from Australia, I offer to run the course on a weekend at their premises. That’s where the interest disappears. There’s also a price war of late. I used to charge $1795 for two days but I see others offering a two-day course for less than $600. Good luck to them.
Not surprisingly, some trainers have given SEO training a bad name. What do you make of this post – SEO Certification Guide?
A friend who runs an SEO agency asked me an interesting question, “Why are you selling SEO training?” I asked him why this puzzled him. He could not understand why I would want to share my secrets. Perhaps he didn’t want the market to be flooded with competent SEOs – he didn’t say.
I told him that I was tired of retail SEO, having worked on nearly 2000 websites at that stage. It was a sausage factory, with sales pressures, etc. I liked the thought of being my own boss, travelling as I pleased, attending more than one SEO conference in a year, and so on. I said that there was an obvious shortage of experienced SEOs (I trained all but one of my SEO staff on the job).
The lack of interest in paying for SEO training suggests to me that a lot of operators think that they know all that they need to know and don’t need to pay for any formal certification. This is a simple economic decision. After all, most of us are self-taught in Microsoft Office and unless an employer is paying for it, we don’t do a course in Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Similarly, short-sighted SEO company owners are happy for their new hires to be trained on the job. I get that.
However, I don’t understand why some people are so vocal against SEO certification. Don’t we need operators to have a minimum level of competence? Is SEO destined to be a black art, only to be learnt at the expense of clients?
There is also a lot of ego at risk. I am not certified, so why would I presume to certify others? I have demonstrated expertise, so I don’t need to prove it any further and get certified myself. Similarly, the A-list SEOs are not about to apply for SEO certification anytime soon.
The SEO profession consists of in-house SEOs like me and consultants/agencies who work for clients.
A lot of the in-house SEOs I have met or observed appear to be new to the profession, which is not surprising, as very few business owners hadn’t heard of SEO five years ago. That they are hiring full-time SEOs is a great sign. This group includes expert SEOs who work on their own websites, i.e. they don’t work for others.
The second group is more visible. They include A-list SEOs who speak at every major conference and who try to engage Matt Cutts on Twitter. 
Their public visibility is usually aimed at picking up new clients and good luck to them. Most of them have excellent blogs or informative websites where they attract more subscribers and potential clients. Their SEO knowledge is undeniably excellent. They are expensive to hire.
However, the large B-list of this grouping is unknown. They include the fresh IT graduates who advertise themselves as an “SEO Expert” and use a Gmail email account. Then there are the agency owners who haven’t practised SEO personally for years but who hire fresh IT graduates and pay them peanuts. Most of the shoddy work I have seen comes from this part of the industry. They don’t invest in their staff and make them follow a checklist of tasks including mass submission to low-quality directories. By the way, shoddy SEO work can be found in all parts of the world. Don’t always blame the operator – blame their boss.
Demand for SEO work is still on the increase; therefore, the number of agencies has increased. It’s a scary thought to think that large numbers of fresh practitioners are learning on the job. I don’t think other trainers are getting much business.
The B-list also includes an unknown number of competent, unsung operators who rarely identify themselves in their forum posts, if any. Don’t for a second assume that all SEO gurus are well-known.
I believe that most people who perform SEO work can deliver ranking success for a non-competitive keyphrase, particularly one that mentions a suburb, e.g. Avondale Heights b&b. In many suburbs there won’t be more than 10 B&Bs with a website. At best there will be directory entries in the top positions but they can be beaten with an optimised, dedicated website.
However, once you need national or international ranking or have multi-national websites, the number of competent SEOs drops sharply.
To conclude, here is what I would look for in a competent SEO:
* The H1 is important but not if that’s the only change you are making to the site. Google can recognise a heading even if it is not marked up as such. The contents of the heading are very important. The Meta Description needs to contain some compelling words to encourage a click. Using it just to repeat the Title Tag might not attract a click. Therefore it has importance, but not in the sense that keywords-in-meta-description help the ranking. The clicks help ranking, if you see the difference.
So, what are your views on SEO competency training and certification??
I found that Firefox 3.5.6 was not loading Google.com in spite of trying a few times. I noticed in the bottom left of the browser (the status bar) that it was stuck at loading clients1.google.com. This was a new subdomain to me, so a quick search brought up a Google web discussion.
The initial suggestion by a Google employee to check for malware was not relevant. I had just performed a full system scan with no problems.
Another suggestion was to turn off Search Settings > Query Suggestions. I didn’t try it as I had no problem with that feature so far.
The third suggestion worked for me. At the top right of the Firefox page I changed the search provider from Google to Yahoo! and the search engine loaded as before. This doesn’t solve the problem, which is probably at clients1.google.com and not on my PC, but it is a workaround that suits me as I never use that search box in Firefox.
It’s a sad indictment of the times when the print media can’t hire competent humans to proofread the galleys but resort to spell checkers. But sometimes, the result can be funny; sometimes it is apt. From the Melbourne, Australia Herald Sun, 19 December 2009, page 43:
With my unusual Indian surname I can sympathise with a lot of Poles whose names can neither be spelt nor pronounced correctly by the rest of the world. What hope, then, is there for a newspaper spelling checker close to deadline time?
I was lazily browsing the local paper on this cloudy summer morning when this small item caught my eye. After reading it, I sensed something wasn’t right. The museum spokesman is named Drowsily Manifold? Drowsily, Vasily – maybe. Those East European names can end in ‘ly’. But Manifold? I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the middle name of some British aristocrat, but not in Poland. Never. Then I noticed “Aerobic Mac fare”. There is a sad irony there. Nothing that happened in that infamous camp deserves those words.
The online version of the Herald Sun article is barely a sentence or two in length, but its stable mate the Brisbane Courier Mail article has a more plausible name “Jaroslaw Mensfeld” and “Arbeit Macht Frei” is correct.
Following on from my previous post How to SEO for Google PlaceRank, I was delighted to read Bill Slawski’s discovery of a new patent: Machine-Readable Representation of Geographic Information, which was published two days ago. It isn’t easy to read, but head over to Bill’s post to get a human friendly rendering.
(Aside: I can’t view the USPTO images in spite of reinstalling QuickTime via Firefox 3.0, IE8, IE6 or Chrome on two machines. I only get the Q logo briefly, then a blank image. What am I doing wrong?)
We know how popular QR codes are in Japan. Will they work in the West? Bill asks the question:
One question that needs to be asked, is why would Google rely upon stickers for a system like this instead of using something like Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) information, or cell phone triangulation, or some other method that would negate the need for someone to take an actual picture?
The “picture” as I understand it is not of the venue, à la Google Goggles. I use a Telstra QR code app on my S60 work phone and my personal iPhone and aim it at the QR code. As soon as the app sees the QR code in focus, it proceeds to open the web browser and takes me to that URL. I can choose to bookmark it at that time or just view it and then close the browser. Thus there is no picture taken.
A few months ago, B&T reported that Telstra signed a deal with Pacific Magazines to use QR codes across the publisher’s range of magazines, including Marie Claire, New Idea, Famous, and Who Weekly. Over four months, the trial resulted in 20,000 scans by readers.
Over a year ago, my employers conducted a small trial in a Melbourne suburb using similar stickers on shop windows. The results were not encouraging, including the problem with one venue having plate glass that made it difficult to scan the QR code. However, time has marched on and as millions of iPhones and other smart phones are in use, there might be a future for these codes in the West (or Down Under).
Stickers do more than facilitate data transfer or help nominate Favorite Places – they extend Google branding (as if Google needs more branding) to thousands of passersby.
What type of business would do well using QR codes? Here is my pick:
Phone browser? Yes, if I see a QR code URL in a magazine, I won’t bother to scan it with my phone if it is not a mobile site. This is one of the barriers to adoption.
A desktop mouse that acts as a scanner is more likely to get me to scan QR codes for use with a desktop PC. Nine years ago the CueCat scanner was ahead of its time. It was a scanner but not a mouse and was a commercial failure, as per the Wikipedia article.
Perhaps, if a phone app can easily transfer the URL to my desktop via a sync process, I might scan QR codes more often.
Google has sent QR Code stickers to about 190,000 businesses across the US that have been tagged as a Favorite Place (they have a mobile version of their website). Favorite Places are the mobile equivalent of Place Pages (aka Google Places).
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuVSpG-ZdkU[/youtube]
Google Video explaining Favorite Places
TechCrunch has quoted Google Earth VP John Hanke, “Google will be adding these businesses incrementally. ‘They are selected based on their PlaceRank,’ says
John Hanke, VP of Google Earth, Maps, and Local. PlaceRank is like PageRank for places It tries to figure out how prominent a place is based on factors such as ‘references on the Web, reviews, photos,’ says Hanke, ‘how many people know about it, how long its been around.'”
PlaceRank isn’t new – but I believe this is the first acknowledgment of its use with Google Maps in a local search context. Bill Slawski reported it back in 2007 in this post, which is well worth reading (like the rest of his site). Here is a link to the patent that describes Place Rank (two words) and Interestingness.
Undoubtedly, Local Search SEOs will be excited by a new unit of measure (will we get another green pixel bar? – I think not). I think this is a good move, but are Americans and the West in general ready to use QR Codes?
The patent offers some clues about the ranking algorithm.
[0047] In an embodiment, this ranking, which can be referred to as place rank, is computed based on the weighted contributions of various non-cartographic meta attributes about a geospatial entity. Rather than directly measuring a characteristic of a physical place, such as its population, these attributes reflect traits of abstractions or representations associated with the geospatial entity. Examples include an attribute of a description of an entity (for instance, the amount of detail in the description of an entity or the number of times a description has been viewed), an attribute of a definition of an entity (e.g. the context or downloads of a definition of an entity, or attributes about the creation of an entity in a public forum), an indicator of the popularity of a geospatial entity (such as the number of views, downloads, or clicks on the entity or a placemark associated with the entity or an attribute based on a ranking or score assigned to an entity), or the relationship of an entity to its context, such as the category to which an entity belongs. Attributes that fit into each of these categories are described in greater detail below:
Here is my summation of the ranking detail in the patent:
So, there are numerous factors in this algorithm that might seem too complicated for an individual SEO to influence, which basically suggests that gaming PlaceRank will be very difficult. 🙂
Thanks to a post by Tom Crandall in Smallbiz Central, I was alerted to yet another addition to Google Maps Place Pages. For certain listings that have a rating and review at Judy’s Book, a new field entitled Reputation Trend is shown, with a value of “Reputation Trend” (I presume this will eventually show an actual number), which links to the same business on judysbook.com.
Being do-follows, Judy’s Book might be thrilled by these links, although I don’t believe that they count for PR.
In my studies of IYP rankings, judysbook.com has never rated anywhere for organic SEO. However, they seem to have a band of loyal users who help to create user-generated content by way of reviews and ratings. This is the only site I know of that uses a reputation trend chart to plot the average rating over time.
Other Yellow Pages sites (particularly ones not chosen to power Google Place Pages) should appreciate how this differentiator has allowed Judy’s Book to get a piece of the traffic pie.
Deepak Ramanathan of Google Australia has blogged “Australia is going Google … along with millions of businesses around the world” in the official Google Australia blog.
It’s a rosy picture – companies such as Konica Minolta, Rentokil Initial, De Bortoli etc have switched to Google Apps for their company operations. They no longer
have to deal with the hassles of managing email servers or rolling out software updates, and their employees now enjoy the convenience of shared documents and calendars, Gmail and more.
Gmail had outages in February, March, May and September this year according to this SMH article or this Computerworld article. Last year there were some more outages including one lasting 15 hours.
I have been in situations when my company’s network or email was down for several hours, so I know how unproductive it can be with several thousand employees unable to use their PCs. Multiply that across millions of SMEs and educational institutions and not only do you have a lot of frustration but a lot of unemployed sysadmins.
On paper, the use of SAAS (software as a service) looks attractive to bean counters, but did the soon-to-be-redundant IT staff have a say in the decision?
How are Australian companies dealing with the implication of moving personal data offshore (National Privacy Principle #9)? I am an early adopter in many ways but I am not ready for the cloud yet. How about you?
I fired up Firefox 3.5.3 this morning and was greeted by a strange popup that said that two of the Microsoft add-ons had been blocked:
This was unusual, so I searched for other reports and was led to a TechRepublic .com blog post by Chad Perrin:
For details please see the above link and Mozilla’s list of blocked add-ons.