Actually, it is infinitely more important that you stop wasting MY time with blog comment spam like this:

“Dave…
Interesting topic… I’m working in this industry myself and I don’t agree about this in 100%, but I added your page to my bookmarks and hope to see more interesting articles in the future… “

 Are you working in “this industry”? Really? Well you won’t be for long unless you learn to stop spamming the SAME BLOG with the SAME LAME COMMENT dozens of times a day. Perhaps leaving a comment of some value along with a link to your SEO Services Page would be a better idea if a link is what you’re looking for. By the way, in case no one bothered to tell you the news: WORD PRESS BLOG COMMENT LINKS HAVE A rel=’nofollow’ TAG IN THEM!.

Or maybe this is the result of multiple morons:

…buying blog comment spam software. In that case, I’m glad you did it because you deserve to be ripped off. Now come on over to First Page Fitness so we can repair the damage whenever you get booted from Google’s index. That’s how we make a living, you know.

 PS: I wish to invite my blog readers to return the favor. Their email address is above.

I have recently taken on a challenging in-house project with the 800-pound guerilla of Yoga / Pilates Instruction Videos. One of the challenges has been to untangle a web of redirects used for the purpose of infomercial websites and internal landing pages. Another challenge is to figure out what type of server each of these hundreds of websites reside on.

I find myself using a certain tool dozens of times each day to help me obtain the above information. This tool is called the Check Server Headers Tool - HTTP Status Codes Checker and is provided for free by SEOConsultants.com.

The First Page Fitness Blog is about helping the do-it-yourselfers out there who might not have a budget for outsourcing SEO. We are dedicated to helping the health and fitness community in this regard, even if it means sending you to another SEO firm’s website.

By the way, even if you only have one site and know all of the sever header info by heart, this is a valuable tool for competitive intelligence.

Either the latest Google Search Engine Algorithm Patent to come out of Mountain View, California is a hoax, or a really, really bad idea. For Google’s sake, let’s hope they’re trying to pull one over on us.

RE:
System and Method for Supporting Editorial Opinion in the Ranking of Search Results
Accepted on August 22, 2006 - Filed on December 13, 2000
United States Patent # 7,096,214
Assignee: Google, Inc. (Mountain View, CA)

Ever get the feeling that Google applies for bogus patents sometimes just to throw us off? I mean really, going back to using human editors or relying heavily on directory listings for search results? That’s not a step forward; it’s a step backward.

The Patent Application on Using Directories:
“…favored and non-favored sources may be automatically determined. To accomplish this, exemplary queries in the query theme may be classified into a set of topics (e.g., an online topic hierarchy, such as Yahoo!…) Web hosts that appear in the URLs associated with the best matching topics to the query theme may be taken to be favored sources. For example, if the query theme is “sites that help in finding accommodation,” then web hosts listed under the ODP category /Recreation/Travel/Lodging can be taken as favored sources.”

The Patent Application on Using Humans:
“This identification of favored sources and non-favored sources may be performed manually by the editors…”

Then it goes on to say how the server would check to see whether the editorial opinion was “favored” or “non-favored” for the site, and would either take off points or provide more points towards that site in the SERPS for the query:

“For each web page in the result set that is associated with one of the web sites in the set of affected web sites, the server may determine an updated score using an editorial opinion parameter for that web site. An editorial opinion parameter for a favored source may, for example, cause the score of the associated web page to be upgraded by a percentage of its previous score or by an absolute value. Similarly, for non-favored sources, the applicable editorial opinion parameter may cause the score of the associated web page to be downgraded…”

Getting Banned Because an ODP Editor Doesn’t Like You:
The Google patent application says, “In extreme cases, the applicable editorial opinion parameter may cause the web page to be moved to the top… or removed from the list completely”.

Maybe we should coin a new term for DMOZ (ODP) Editors: The Google Gestapo.

In response to someone who posted about this on another blog:
“This technology would be most easily applied, I think, in the Personalized Search feature.”

BUT, it kind of defeats the purpose doesn’t it? I mean, if I want MY results personalized for MY tastes, allowing some person I don’t even know (whether directly by choosing an editorial opinion parameter, or indirectly by choosing whether or not to include the site in a directory) would be personalizing MY results to someone else’s tastes.

So which is it folks? A hoax by Google, or a really bad idea? Or maybe it’s just an old, discarded idea (originally filed in 2000) that finally made it through the bureaucracy of the United States Patent Office.

This is fun and educational… enjoy.

It is also a fantastic marketing technique by the folks over at Adsense Secrets , and a good example of something called Link Bait, as evidenced by the fact that I am linking to them.

http://www.google.com/translate_t

The Google tool above is made for the purpose of translating web pages. However, it has one other very useful and interesting purpose if you are willing to think creatively: Finding out if your competitors are cloaking Google.

Cloaking is when different pages are shown to different users. Sometimes there are legitimate reasons for this, such as geo-targeting. Often, however, “black hat” SEOs and webmasters will use cloaking to trick Google and other search engines. For instance, they might show the search engine a well-written, unbiased page about pharmaceutical drug research, while showing the end-user (you and me) a page full of “buy viagra” spam.

How does the Google Translate tool help you discover if a competitor is cloaking Google?
The best way to see the version of a page as Google sees it is to view the “cached” version of the page. There should be a link to the cached version in directly under the search result for that page. However, savvy webmasters can block Google from caching the page using a “noarchive” meta tag. Whenever I see a page in the search result WITHOUT a cache link below it, my Spam-Sensors immediately go up and I suspect that the page is being cloaked. This is where the Google Translate Tool comes in handy:

Go to http://www.google.com/translate_t
Where it says translate a web page, type in the web page that you want to view. German-to-English is fine. This will show you the page as if you were viewing it from a Google IP address. In other words, it hides you behind one of Google’s computers.

This is also known as a “proxy” search. People sell programs that allow you to “surf the web anonymously” for thousands of dollars. Really, this is all they are giving you and you can get it at the link above for free. There are many other proxy servers out there not affiliated with Google. Just do a search for “free proxy search”.

NOTE: You may see that the text reads strange. This is just a translation issue that you can ignore.

What else is this tool good for besides translating and catching cloakers?
The reason I went in search of something like this was because one of my clients’ sites requires cookies and I wanted to show the IT and marketing people that Google can’t view their Shop pages for that reason. So I had them go to the Google Translation Tool and enter the shop using Google’s IP address. This proved that Google was unable to view their shop because it took their spider (googlebot) to the “You don’t have cookies enabled” page after they clicked the shop link.

Yet, when they entered the shop without using the tool, everything seemed to work fine. They were blocking Google from viewing their site by asking the GoogleBot to accept a cookie. Obviously, they did not want to block the largest search engine in the world from crawling and indexing their pages, so we made some changes and now Google results are climbing steadily.

You may not ever have a need for this, but the fact that it allows you to search the web while hiding behind one of Google’s computers is pretty darn interesting.