1 hour from the Google SERP?

I just made a little post on the al-gore-rithm. After realizing I wasn’t the first to come up with that pun I wanted to do a google search to see how unoriginal I really was. And the I saw my own post right there in the SERP – a mere hour after I posted the thing.

This is about the fastest I’ve seen anything go into the SERP – and one must wonder what injection needle this blog has to Google’s servers? I use Google Sitemaps (with this plugin)and have also submitted this blog to my own Google Reader. Are these fast tracks to the SERP?

Update:

Matt Cutts has already described this: Minty Fresh Indexing – where index entry times are reported as low as 18 minutes :-)

Update 2:

Rosenstand reports in the comments on ‘Time to Index’ as low as 3 minutes. And I’ve now documented a recent post with a TTI of 6 minutes :-)

Screenshot documentation

WordPress cheat sheet

If you’ve been tampering just a little with WordPress and also consider doing so in the future WPcandy has created a handy little cheat sheet with the most common WordPress:

  • Basic Template Files
  • PHP Snippets for the Header
  • PHP Snippets for the Templates
  • And Extra Stuff for WordPress

Well, go look: The WordPress Help Sheet – …and yes, I know they call it help sheet….

Politikere på nettet – en sørgelig historie

Valget er skudt i gang og landet over vrider vores kommende folketingskandidater deres politikerhjerner for at finde ud af hvordan de kommer i medierne, får synliggjort deres standpunker og kommer i dialog med deres vælgere. Det er naturligt og forståelig – og langt hen ad vejen en sørgelig historie.

Alt for mange håbefulde og ivrige politikere flakser forvirret rundt i cyberspace; det er lidt som at se svundne tiders forsøg på at indtage luftrummet – meget opfindsomt, men ikke særligt effektivt…

Politikeren på nettet

Jeg faldt over et par artikler i dagens aviser. De handler om venstrekandidaten Bent Soelberg – Folketingskandidaten, der kun er tilstede på nettet (jp) og Den første virtuelle kandidat (Berlingske).

Berlingske sælger sin artikel på denne måde:

Ingen plakater. Ingen taletid. Intet budget. Bent Soelberg er folketingskandidaten, der bruger internettet som det skal bruges.

… og når jeg nu er meget interesseret i online markedsføring, ville jeg da gerne have lidt inspiration. Desværre havde de to ovennævnte aviser ikke fantasti/evner/forståelse nok for internettet til rent faktisk at give læseren et par links til folketingskandidaten, der kun var til stede på nettet. Godt så, det skal da ikke hindre mig i at lære noget nyt om politisk kampagne på nettet – og så tilmed af en Ph.d. fra CBS. Google it is: Bent Soelberg. Resultat: 0, zip, nada – ingen politisk tilstedeværelse her. Ingen blog, ingen hjemmeside, ikke engang en uskyldig lille adwords-annonce. Skræmmende – hvor mange mennesker har mon læst disse artikler og efterfølgende ønsket at vide mere om Bent, artiklerne hjælper jo ikke, og uden bare lidt synlighed i søgemaskinen er der nok mange, der har måttet gå forgæves.

Men det skal da ikke stoppe mig, og min jagt på Bent Soelberg, folketingskandidaten, der efter sigende er til stede på nettet fortsætter. Det var først yderligere Googlesøgning på Bent Soelberg Venstre, der gav et link til Comon, der havde et link til Soelbergs side på Myspace. Endelig – nu skulle jeg lære det – online kampagne a la web 3.0. Men nej, det var ikke her de vises sten lå – til gengæld kan jeg rapportere at Bent har 5 venner – heriblandt vores statsminister (der også har en myspace side, der er sit helt eget indlæg værd). Dog fandt jeg et ikke hyperlinket link til Bents webside på venstres domæne – wohoo? …nej, ikke endnu. Denne side er også stort set tom – og jeg må vente lidt endnu på at finde ud af hvordan man ‘bruger internettet, som det virkelig skal bruges’.

Der er også mange politikere, der bruger nettet rigtig godt – en af dem er Villy Søvndal, som jeg tror jeg vil skrive om en af dagene.

Hvem synes du gør det godt på nettet?

Clamp-down on Cloaking – the Google scattergun

…and so the story goes that one day Cloaking-system.com came forth and boldly announced that they would violate Google´s almost canonical Webmaster’s Guidelines and more precisely the section about cloaking:

Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index. Some examples of cloaking include: * Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users. * Serving different content to search engines than to users.

Here’s how Cloaking System describe their method: (from IP-delivery @ Cloaking System)

IP-delivery is the type of cloaking we use at Cloaking System. IP-delivery means that content is delivered, based on different IP-addresses. IP-delivery based on country IP’s is used by Google. When you type in www.google.com in your browsers address bar, you are automatically shown Google’s page in your own language… At Cloaking System we use IP-delivery a bit differently. We take the IP-addresses from the search engines and search robots and show them the content of one page, and show a different content to the visitors – your visitors. They are shown the page on your website that you want them to see.

The observant reader will notice that Google’s guidelines and Cloaking System´s method have some discrepancies. Now, openly admitting to corrupting Google’s search results can be compared to entering a the arena for a bullfight. Brave Cloaker Happy Cloaker Somehow, these two images remind me of each other… So… expectedly, Google blocks Cloaking System from their index – but our heroes are not duped at all. Like true heroes, they stand fast on their right of way, defending their points of views. On SEO Ninjas some of the central people from Cloaking System have a say: Google Promotes Cloaking. Impressive! True bravery. They are almost on par with Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy. Now, putting ourselves in the place of the bull/Google, what course of action can be taken do when their first attempt to still the rebels has failed? But of course – find customers who have bought services from Cloaking System – and if unsuccesfull – find out where the rebels work and kick them out of the index too. And so ReFocus, the white hat-chapter of Cloaking System, was also booted out of Google’s index. That’ll teach them… Maybe someday we will see ReFocus back in Googles index – but until then they’ll have to follow the wise word of the Bible: “And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloak forbid not to take thy coat also.” (Luke 6:29) And so it seems this time round, the bull won… Sad Cloaker

Embiggen and cromulent

Jared Spool spotted that Flickr uses Simpsons lingo in their slide show feature and points readers in the direction of Wikipedias Culturally significant words and phrases from The Simpsons, where more Simpsons lingo is defined, explained and mainstreamed.
I’ll try not to embiggen the significance of this development – but popular culture is forming the language of tomorrow. The number of movie catchphrases entering our daily use of language is surely loooong.
But some cool ones stand out of course 100 Movie Quotes.
…still I’m surprised that Beam me up, Scotty isn’t in the top 100.

Doping Testing 2.0

Simple problem:
Danish Anti Doping Committees have trouble locating their athletes.

Complex Solution:
Online location registration applications.
As many athletes (most currently professional road cyclists) seem to have immense problems in explaining their whereabouts, using the internet could solve their problem. It may be as simple as a login at WADA giving the athlete a few basic input options:

Dear Doping Controllant,
In the next

I’ll be training in

If you need me, I can be found at this address:

Kind regards

… but drawing on existing social services such as Jaiku, Twitter, FaceBook, Plazes, or some sort of integration with GoogleMaps etc, etc could prove to be even more effective and easy to use. Surely not many of todays top athletes stay outside the reach of some form of online communication for extended periods of time.

What do you think?

Update:
It is already here: UK Sport Welcomes WADA’s Athlete Friendly Whereabouts Procedures.
…Will the Danish Anti Doping programme follow up on that? See current practice: Retningslinier om whereabouts (in danish).

Forfatteren og internettet

Jeg faldt over forfatteren Klaus Kjøllers website – det ser ud til at manden har bedrevet en form for blogging siden 1999. I begyndelsen mest henvisninger til anmeldelser, men senerehen også i større omfang kommentarer til samfund, litteratur og egne udgivelser. Der er rigtig meget spændende indhold på sitet, men det bærer også i høj grad præg af at være hjemmelavet. Ikke et ondt ord om hjemmelavede websites, men grænserne for kvaliteten og udessendet af hjemmelavede websites har flyttet sig en hel del. Kunne ikke lade være med at klikke lidt rundt på Klaus Kjøllers website og faldt over dette citat:

Derfor har jeg prioriteret det funktionelle og enkle, på bekostning af det smarte. Muligvis skyldes det også i høj grad at jeg ønsker selv at være i stand til at udforme og revidere netstedet fra top til bund. Og da jeg ikke gider læse manualer, bruger jeg det jeg kan lave i mit tekstbehandlingsprogram.
(Hvad kan en forfatter bruge et netsted til?)

..og den holdning er helt fin med mig, men der er jo altså sket en del med internettet siden 1999. Så kære Klaus, vil du ikke nok overveje at få en blog? Det kræver sikkert lidt flytten rundt med dine gamle tekster, men du har jo tydeligvis en temmelig god forståelse for hvordan man bruger nettet. Jeg ville gætte på at der er en venlig sjæl, der vil hjælpe dig med projektet (ellers stiller jeg gerne op for et afmålt kvantum whiskey :-) )

Faktisk slår det mig at det ikke behøver at være så stor en omvæltning at skifte til en blog, da Word 2007 jo ifølge den gode Don Tørnings eksperimenter jo fungerer formidabelt.