It should be no surprise that this update is already getting tweaked. Whenever Google releases an update of this magnitude, it is only logical to deduce that changes must be made to make sure that the results are 100% accurate.

While no specific details were given, in an interview with Wired, Amit Singhal, a Google employee, said that the company was testing results in a new way. He said that the company was doing things like asking non Google employees to rank the new results versus the old results and telling them which one was better.

When asked about the sites that were wrongly punished along with the content farms, Amit had this to say,

“We deeply care about the people who are generating high-quality content sites, which are the key to a healthy web ecosystem,” Singhal said. “However, we don’t manually change anything along these lines.”

“Therefore any time a good site gets a lower ranking or falsely gets caught by our algorithm — and that does happen once in a while even though all of our testing shows this change was very accurate — we make a note of it and go back the next day to work harder to bring it closer to 100 percent.”

“That’s exactly what we are going to do, and our engineers are working as we speak building a new layer on top of this algorithm to make it even more accurate than it is,”

If you feel like your site was incorrectly labeled as a content farm, be sure to post a report in the Google Webmaster Help Forum. Google really does want to make sure that it has accurate information in its organic search engine results. Apparently they are actually listening to the feedback they are getting from webmasters.

Was your site negatively affected by this recent change? Did you get labeled a content farm even though your site was not a content farm? Did you make any changes to how you create content for your site? We would love to hear from you. Leave your reactions in the comment section listed below.

Resource: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/google-spam-side-effects/

Plaxo started in 2002 as a way for its users to keep up with all of their contacts on the Internet and across a wide variety of platforms. Over the years the company attempted to get into social media with its Plaxo Pulse service. On Wednesday, Plaxo unveiled a product called Plaxo’s Personal Assistant Service. This service plans to help you automate the task of  updating the data that you have stored in Plaxo. This way you make sure that your information stays updated at all times.

The way this service works is that Plaxo Personal Assistant compares the  information in your plaxo address book with the information that is available in public records. If the service sees a discrepancy, it alerts you and offers you suggestions to change it. According to Plaxo CEO, Justin Miller, this occurs withoutsharing any personal or private information.

Currently, ZoomInfo is plaxo’s partner for providing the data that Plaxo Personal Assistant searches. Mr. Miller says that Plaxo is in talks with other data providers as well.

In addition to Plaxo Personal Assistant, the company has lots of  other useful applications. The basic service (which is free) allows its users to keep all of their contacts in one place. One of the features of the basic plan is a de duper tool. The de duper tool identifies and removes duplicate entries for you.
This helps you save time. Plaxo also has mobile applications that allow you to access your online address book from your mobile device.

What do you think about Plaxo’s recent decision? Do you think it was a good idea for them to abandon the social media project? Do you think they are being smart by sticking with what they have been good at? Leave your comments below. We would love to hear from you.

Google is always making changes to its algorithm. It has to if it wants to make sure its users get the best search experience. After all, that is what Google is known for. That is what Google does best. It brings users relevant information depending on what they type into the search bar. So naturally Google would constantly be updating its algorithm to provide its users with the most relevant results. However, this almost always affects some webmasters negatively. In this most recent update, Google was targeting sites that had no original content or content that it considered to be low in quality. When this update was made, it affected article directories and content farms. According to Google, this change in algorithm impacted 11.8% of its queries.

This change didn’t only affect small sites. Ezinearticles.com, one of the largest, if not the largest, article directory on the web reported that it lost 35% of its traffic after this update took place. The recent changes Google made to the algorithm caused ezinearticles.com to make some major changes to how they accept articles.

So what does this mean to you? Well if you relied heavily on article marketing to drive traffic to your website, you may have to look into additional methods. You may want to consider adding video to the mix of things you do to get traffic to your website. It is very easy to create a video based on your article. You should also consider doing a podcast. You can just strip the audio from the video you made. You may also have to do more guest blog posts to get traffic to your website. You will have to stop spinning articles and submitting them to multiple article directories. You will have to actually submit a unique article to each article directory you submit to. It may also be wise to pick only a few article directories to focus your attention on so that your efforts aren’t diluted. One thing is for certain. Article marketing as we once knew it is changing. Gone are the days when you could just hit a button (provided you had the right software) and submit an article to hundreds of sites and have hundreds of one way links within seconds. You are going to have to work to get that traffic now.

Resources:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html

http://blog.ezinearticles.com/2011/02/search-engine-algorithm-changes.html
Image Credit:

Image: Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

If you have ever been stuck in traffic, you will appreciate this latest release by Google. Google has just released a feature in Google maps that will help you avoid traffic.

Unlike the traffic reports on the radio, you can find out about traffic jams before you get stuck in them. You can do this either by using the Navigation App for the Android or from inside Google Maps. According to Google’s Marissa Mayer, drivers have already saved a ton of fuel and a total of two years per day.

When you use Google Maps just type in your two addresses like you did before. Make sure the Earth icon is highlighted. You will want to click the box next to traffic to see what the current traffic situation is. There is a color coded system that tells you how much traffic there is on a given highway, allowing you to plan another route to your destination.

So what does this mean for your small business?  Hopefully your business will experience increased productivity.
You will not have to worry about missing a meeting with an important client because of traffic.

Share this news with your employees and contractors so they can have fewer tardies due to traffic woes. This can be helpful when you have visitors coming in from out of town. You can alert them to traffic issues while they are at the airport. You can provide them with alternate routes to get to your office, which will save them time and make you look like a hero.

If you run a service business, this can help you help your clients be on time to their appointments. Tell all your clients about this new feature so they can avoid traffic jams that may occur between their home or office and you. You will be able to serve more clients because your schedule will not be held up because of people being late.

How are you going to use this new feature? We would love to hear your thoughts.

Leave a comment in the comment section.

Resources: http://www.webpronews.com/google-marissa-mayer-mobile-sxsw-2011-03

http://www.webpronews.com/google-aims-to-help-you-avoid-traffic-2011-03

Image Credit: graur razvan ionut / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The Lovely Faces duo featured 250,000 profiles of men and women whose pictures were gotten from Facebook without permission. They didn’t display random pictures on their site, even though they collected the pictures randomly. They had and still have a goal in mind. Below is an excerpt from their web site with an unusual title: face to facebook.

Through special custom software we collected data from more than 1,000,000 Facebook users. What we collected is their “public data” – some of their personal data (name, country, Facebook groups they subscribe to) plus their main profile picture and a few friend relationships.

We built a database with all this data, then began to analyze the pictures that showed smiling faces. The vast majority of pictures were both amateurish and somehow almost involuntarily or unconsciously alluring. And they are almost always “smiling”. Below is a video to go with it.

Their target was to sieve out smiling faces that will be used on their site. Of course, it is a dating site and the images should convey a message that suggests willingness to date, and what better way is there to do that than to smile at somebody. To understand their criteria for selecting the 250,000 faces they finally uploaded on their site, read the comment below.

“In ‘The Love Delusion’ essay, Dan Jones cites Martie Haselton’s research, which indicates that men typically overestimate the sexual interest conveyed by a woman’s smile or laughter. When men see someone of the opposite sex smile at them they tend to think “she must be interested.” By the way, women simply see a smile. [Dan Jones "The Love Delusion", March 31 2007, New Scientist].they said”.

Having said that, I’d say the summary of all this is that social network site still has a lot of security issues to settle. Facebook has been exploited and people’s identity stolen. So be careful not to upload sensitive and private information on social sites.

In concluding, we know the motive of Lovely-Faces, we know Facebook is vulnerable, but what we do not know is how Mark Zuckerberg will react to this development which is a violation of Facebook’s terms, considering the fact that he used similar process to scrap faces of women to create FaceMash. Does he have any moral right to contest this violation in form whatsoever? I’d appreciate a great deal if you can leave a comment.

The standing record was set during the FIFA world cup in South Africa last year with 3,283 tweet in one second. The astonishing thing about Sunday’s record breaking event is that the old World Cup record was broken six times in the over the course of the game.

According to an official blog, the surprise winner of the Super Bowl is Usher. His sudden appearance during the Black Eyed Peas’ halftime show performance created the second largest peak in Tweets during the game. Plus, the continued talk about him made him the most talked about person during the Super Bowl. The Peas were next on the list of most-discussed people, followed by Slash, Eminem, and Christina Aguilera. Aaron Rodgers, the most mentioned player, was sixth.

Although the Sunday Super Bowl saw an “all-time sporting record” set, it still didn’t surpass the most Tweets in a single second record. The most Tweets in a single second still belong to a one-second period that occurred directly after the most recent New Year’s Eve celebration in Japan. It was confirmed just four seconds into 2011 when Japanese users clocked up a super-sociable 6,939 tweets per second, smashing the previous record – also held by Japan.

Twitter’s success in Japan might have something to do with the fact that 140 characters of Japanese script goes that much further. The relative anonymity the service offers could also be giving it a boost amongst Japan’s famously private web users a Blog report said.

The Twitter official Blog also stated that the most talked about commercials and brands during the game were Doritos, whose “Pug Attack” commercial was a popular favourite, making it this year’s champion. Audi and Pepsi took a close second and third, followed by Chevy, Coca-Cola and Groupon that have come under heavy criticism because of their television ad air during the game.

Are we expecting to see another sporting tweet record soon and what lessons are we to learn from the fact that in a single second, 4,064 birds landed on the same destination? Please, be kind enough to tell us what you think about this post.

The new pages redesign was first seen by users sometime in December of 2010 and the launch was considered an accident but after a few weeks, it has finally hit the computer screen of anxious Facebook pages admin, and fortunately, it is not an accident this time.

The most profound changes made is seen in the layout. The layout of Facebook pages has been completely overhauled. They now have almost the same look as the Facebook profile. The left-hand “Information” box has been removed, so also, is the menu on the left hand side for editing pages and has been replaced with a navigation menu, which means goodbye to the old tab menu.

Furthermore, page admins now have the ability to log into Facebook Pages through a “Login as Page” feature, and a section that features the page admin is located on the right hand side of the layout. The most exciting part of the changes made is the ability of page admins to post comment now and add info about their pages.

Facebook pages also displays photos at the top now just as it is in Facebook profile. Some other added features now make Facebook pages resemble normal user, for example, admins have the ability to interact with the rest of Facebook as a page. There is also a section that show admins how many of their friends have “liked” that particular page and admins can actually log on and start commenting and/liking things on Facebook pages.

“We strongly believe you should have consistent experiences when possible,” Facebook’s Rohit Dhawan said. Dhawan is the lead product manager for Facebook Pages and had explained earlier that the company had always wanted to redesign Facebook Pages ever since it launched the profile redesign.

However, it is worthy of note that Facebook pages can’t do everything a normal user can, for example, they cannot post on a user’s wall or write comments except the user’s privacy setting is enabled for “everybody”.

Facebook page admins have until March 10 to switch over to the new design before Facebook automatically updates every page to the new design; giving them ample time to have a preview of what their page will look like.

It is true that Bing has enjoyed an outstanding growth in their market share value in the last couple of months.. Bing’s market share rose from 10.60 percent in December to 12.81 percent in January, according to Experian Hitwise. Hitwise released the new stats few days back; Bing’s market share was seen to have increased by a significant amount between December and January.

It is also true that Google, who is undisputedly the industry leader when it comes to search engine and which tend to at least hold steady or increase its supremacy, suffered a minor market share drop from 69.67 percent to 67.95 percent on a month-over-month basis.

Looking at the stats from Wall Street these past months, it will be logical to believe Hitwise’s report. Because better service means more patronage, which in turn can affect how experts in Wall Street will advise their clients. However, search engine algorithms are not built by financial experts; they are built by programmer who put in much time into thinking innovative ways to serve users better.

Hitwise’s conclusion on the matter was based entirely on number of clicks on displayed search results. Bing users click search engine results 81.54 percent of the time, compared to 65.58 percent for Google users. But, to be honest, this criterion is not sufficient enough to draw a conclusion. I’d expect such conclusions to be made after proper analysis of the situation. Am I on Google’s side here, no, I am only saying we should be fair on both parties.

If you also put into consideration that fact that 68 percent of all searches made on the web are directed at Google compared to 27.4 percent that Bing handles, one would have a second thought before agreeing with Hitwise. Google handles almost three times what Bing deals with; therefore, going by this, it will be out of place to judge them on a scale of “amount of clicks” on search results displayed.

Furthermore, if Google’s accusation against Bing of using at least a small percentage of their search engine results is true, then, the claim become even harder to accept. Google had accused Bing of cheating and stealing its results.

Is Bing actually more accurate than Google from your experience of using both or do you think Hitwise was right in its conclusion? Please, leave a comment.