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relax seo labs - freakish Experimentation
"Web 2.0 was kinda like the 'Flower Power' generation, full of ideas and hope. Now it seems we have a better understanding of the path ahead, and things begin to move."
RELAX SEO Services is an engineering group that just happens to produce applications that are useful in the field of search engine optimization. Our current Project Load includes research and development in the following areas:
xml - transformation and Web Services.
Microformatting Applications and Services
RSS, ROR and OPML Applications and Services.
The Semantic Web - Ontology's and inference
RDF - machine representation
Triples - Graphs | Testing and Analysis
We take these core Technologies and mix em up in the mashup lab and in many cases discover that our SEO clients really benefit from our deliverables.
While much of what we do remains exclusively for our Clients use, we do publish our research in the Web 2.0 SEO MindMap periodically. Also you will find some of our released deliverables in the SEO Central tools section. We are committed to producing SemWeb compliant solutions. We are also commited to your 'right to relevancy'.
RELAX SEO Services | the best 'Blue Hat' SEO practices.
 As a paying Google Apps customer, the lack of communication during recent outages left a bad taste in my mouth. Im pleased to report that I just received an email from Google with details of many improvements coming our way. These are much needed and welcomed.
 Improvements Coming!Were committed to making Google Apps Premier Edition a service on which your organization can depend. During the first half of August, we didnt do this as well as we should have. We had three outages - on August 6, August 11, and August 15. The August 11 outage was experienced by nearly all Google Apps Premier users while the August 6 and 15 outages were minor and affected a very small number of Google Apps Premier users. As is typical of things associated with Google, these outages were the subject of much public commentary. Through this note, we want to assure you that system reliability is a top priority at Google. When outages occur, Google engineers around the world are immediately mobilized to resolve the issue. We made mistakes in August, and were sorry. While were passionate about excellence, we cant promise you a future thats completely free of system interruptions. Instead, we promise you rapid resolution of any production problem; and more importantly, we promise you focused discipline on preventing recurrence of the same problem. Given the production incidents that occurred in August, well be extending the full SLA credit to all Google Apps Premier customers for the month of August, which represents a 15-day extension of your service. SLA credits will be applied to the new service term for accounts with a renewal order pending. This credit will be applied to your account automatically so theres no action needed on your part. Weve also heard your guidance around the need for better communication when outages occur. Here are three things that were doing to make things better: 1. Were building a dashboard to provide you with system status information. This dashboard, which we aim to make available in a few months, will enable us to share the following information during an outage: a. A description of the problem, with emphasis on user impact. Our belief is during the course of an outage, we should be singularly focused on solving the problem. Solving production problems involves an investigative process thats iterative. Until the problem is solved, we dont have accurate information around root cause, much less corrective action, that will be particularly useful to you. Given this practical reality, we believe that informing you that a problem exists and assuring you that were working on resolving it is the useful thing to do.
b. A continuously updated estimated time-to-resolution. Many of you have told us that its important to let you know when the problem will be solved. Once again, the answer is not always immediately known. In this case, well provide regular updates to you as we progress through the troubleshooting process. 2. In cases where your business requires more detailed information, well provide a formal incident report within 48 hours of problem resolution. This incident report will contain the following information: a. business description of the problem, with emphasis on user impact;
b. technical description of the problem, with emphasis on root cause;
c. actions taken to solve the problem;
d. actions taken or to be taken to prevent recurrence of the problem; and
e. time line of the outage. 3. In cases where your business requires an in-depth dialogue about the outage, well support your internal communication process through participation in post-mortem calls with you and your management team. Once again, thanks for you continued support and understanding. Sincerely,
The Google Apps Team Comments
Tag: Google, Apps
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Various reports have been witnessed at Webmaster World, stating that Google might have disabled or removed AdSense advertisements from Google Cache.
Here are a few excerpts from the thread at Webmaster World: We used to all complain about AdSense displaying off topic ads when your page was displayed in the Google cache. That's no longer a problem because it appears all ads in the content network are now disabled when you display pages with AdSense via Google cache links. Now the fact that cached pages used to display off topic ads was silly because Google knew where the pages came from so there was no rhyme or reason that AdSense would go off topic whatsoever unless there was an internal disconnect between Google Search and AdSense. This made no sense anyway because Google claims both Googlebot and AdSense Mediabot share the same cache of the pages, so it never made sense because both the webmasters and Google were losing money from this ridiculous situation. Now, the pages with AdSense display nothing whatsoever so it's a complete loss for all involved. No PSA, no off target ads, just a big blank spot making us all look stupid. There is one caveat to this in that I've seen a couple of premium publisher sites still displaying AdSense ads in the cache, but none of the 30+ publisher sites I tested for regular AdSense ads showed anything at all in Google cache. Personally, I'd prefer the ads enabled when cached pages are viewed and the same ads properly displayed that would be seen on the same page when in context of the website, so everyone involved could make some money, but that's no longer an option. What's the reason for this current change? Could it be a simple technical malfunction? Is it possible that AdSense in cache was disabled so that the cache pages are truly "fair use" and Google isn't monetizing them? Could it be a -url=http://www.webmasterworld.com/goog/3730801.htm-sign of the times-/url- and with some belt tightening that Google doesn't want to share revenue when the visitors are on their site? Are they trying to get 100% of the PPC revenue when the visitor clicks BACK out of the cache? No clue, purely tossing ideas around. I'm not sure of the reason, but it's a huge change without as much as a peep about it from anyone anywhere! It may be related to allowed sites feature. If it is enabled ad will only display on selected domain and it will not display on other places. No, if you use the Allowed Sites feature, ads will still display on sites that are not allowed to show them according to your settings, but impressions and clicks won't be credited to your account. Oh and ads are showing just fine on Google cache pages (though a little off-topic), so I suppose it makes sense there hasn't been a peep about it from anyone anywhere. Can't think of a reason why they're not showing for you though. Did you provide the other people on IM with a direct link to the Google cache, or did they go there on their own? The ads are NOT showing in the cache of one of my sites and the 'allowed sites' feature is and has been turned off for several days. The cache does show my Google CSE search but it's missing the little Google logo that usually appears inside the box. I've allowed site turned on and ads are not displayed on page copied to .edu and other domain using cache or w/o cache. So I will go with Bill about bug. Lately adsense got few bugs and I'm guessing more site maintenance You looked at your sites in Google cache right? I checked some other people's sites I know today and I'm seeing the javascript is running because those sites are set to collapse the area when the ads don't display, and the full space is made for the ads, it's just blank. On my competitors website, GG ads do not show on thier homepage, but they do show on deep link pages. My site has no archive tag on all pages. Comments
Tag: Google, AdSense, Webmaster World
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 It seems that Google is not wholly obsessed with algorithm changes and ranking updates; they conduct minor experiments too - on a daily basis.
On the Official Google Blog, Engineer Ben Gomes explains that some of Google's search experiments can be very subtle and they can run up to 200 experiments on Google sites all over the world at any given time. "Experimentation is a very powerful tool, and we use it very widely to test potential changes to search. At any given time, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments on Google sites all over the world... experimental changes so small that you can barely tell the difference after staring at the page." Gomes says. Most of the time, experiments with smaller changes are almost never noticed. For example, can you tell the difference between the two search results pages below?
Ok, times up... did you pick it? For those that didn't, the white space around the first search result has increased. Google thinks this makes the first result in picture 2 slightly more visually prominent. Would you agree? This is just one example of many experiments to make our searching experience easier and more enjoyable, if you want to check out some more click here. My question is however, are these small experiments actually valuable? Google seems to think so - "We test almost everything, even things that you would think are so small that we could not possibly care (nor could they possibly matter). In fact, small changes do matter, and we do care." Comments
Tag: Google, Search, SEO
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Implementing these search engine optimization tips should show an improvement in your website's ranking.
Don't turn away additional visitors to your website by believing Google is everything.
How to get ahead of the competition, rank better in Google and make your website visitors lives easier.
blackbearnh writes "It may make you feel very, very old, but the Macintosh will be turning 25 in January. As we approach this momentous anniversary, O'Reilly News had a talk with Andy Hertzfeld, one of the original Macintosh designers, about the long and storied history of the Mac. Hertzfeld, who tells the story of the Mac in his book A Revolution in the Valley, shares his thoughts about how the Mac has aged over time, how life might have been different if Steve Jobs had stayed on at Apple, and the differences between working for Apple, and for Google (his current employer.)" Read on below for a bit of what Hertzfeld had to say.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Martin writes "Mozilla Labs have released a prototype version of the Firefox add-on Ubiquity. It is basically Launchy (the application launcher) for Firefox with the difference that Ubiquity makes use of web APIs and the Firefox browser. The official website contains examples, a command list, information about creating your own commands and of course the Ubiquity extension that is compatible with Firefox 3.x. Ubiquity can pull and send data to various services like Twitter, display, find and embed Google Maps, perform searches, write emails, add entries to the calendar, digg stories and more."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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