Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

Checking to see if some new products we added to the site were indexed yet, I came across another "oversight" on Google. A while back, it was reported that Google hadn't excluded www.google.com/products after the switch from froogle to Google Product Search, but today I found results which have been updated and are excluded by robots.txt but still in their index. As you can see in the image below, print.google.com/products, which mirrors the GPS results, still shows in the SERPs, meaning those of us listed in Google Product Search are getting credit for some links from Google.com, but also that they have Search Results showing in Search Results again, which is something they told us they don't want anyone else to do. Not only are there a few URL's listed, there are 219,000 URL's listed. Also, it appears to be updated recently since new products we've added in the past several days are showing up. Yet, when I check the robots.txt file, /products? is disall...

We started a new blog. It received the first links yesterday, right after the first article was published. Less than 2 hours later, the first scraper had hit it and posted our original content on a spammy site. Impressive.

A .gov.cn with parasite hosting? And it is ranking for our name? Huh? Actually, this isn't even that complicated to be considered parasite... or is it? I really don't get why this is here , but it was in the SERPs for the ToolBarn name and seems to be an open proxy via CGI. Why do people leave these things lying around? Are they that clueless?

We recently got SpamAssassin set up with a ruleset that seems to be working fairly well. Not only has this made my inbox much nicer to look at, but it has also created a new game in our office. We now have the "Spam Olympics". What is that you ask? Well, each piece of spam is given a score by the SpamAssassin judging bots. We just watch those scores, looking for the top marks from the algo. Initially, we were looking at 30 somethings as being good, but it quickly moved into the 40 range, and we had a few break 60 over the weekend. Not exactly the most productive game, but at least it makes the SPAM worth double checking for false positives. I wonder how many other offices partake in the "Spam Olympics"...

Look out, Patrick Gavin and crew. Google is on to you. As you can see, my gmail has already alerted me that anyone buying links through text-link-ads will obviously be needing to file a re-inclusion request, so they included the link for convenience. That's awfully swell of them. I guess I'll quit marketing and start filing re-inclusion requests now. They're on to this little game of yours. Matt Cutts finally figured out your scheme. Yeah... right. And next you'll tell me MSN's results are totally SPAM-less. At least Google has a good enough sense of humor to make me laugh today.

Last week, I was at SES in San Jose. Each year, Google hosts a little event that they call the Google Dance at their Mountain View headquarters. While I was waiting to get on the bus, I was given a white hat with the letters SEO on the front. It was a nifty gift from some friends at appliedseo.com , so I donned it. Later in the evening, I saw Matt Cutts getting ready to grab some grub in the cafeteria. He walked over to talk to us, and it didn't take him long to notice the hat, and even less time to realize it was hidden text (white on white). He posed for a picture in the hat, but now I'm left wondering. Since I've been caught with my SPAM (hidden text) at the GooglePlex, do I need to file a reinclusion request so I can return next year? If so, should I do it in video format like Matt's latest blog entries? Someone please give me some advice here. :-D

So I've taken part in a debate over if CSS navigation systems cause an SEO penalty and all the internal pages to fall out of grace with Google. I personally don't think this is the case, so I've started working on one for ToolBarn.com. I can see how the usability for some will be great, for others it'll be used the same as always, and some people will keep on using search. However, it's neat looking and our competitors don't currently use it, so it'll differentiate us from them. So what's the reason people are saying it's a penalty? Simple. There are div's that are hidden. Well, the version I'm building doesn't use many divs. Most of it is just unordered lists with different classes applied depending on the depth. I'm interested to see how it ends up looking and working. My biggest obstacle right now is our webstats and our live help buttons. They both run JavaScripts that have to complete before the JavaScript for the nav system will...