I can’t believe people still use AOL. How is this company still in business?

How to Cancel AOL…

You will notice that some simple addition is required in order to submit comments. Hopefully, this will cut down on the dozens of spam comments we get each day.

Would you like to try the plug-in yourself? Get it here…

The folks over at Google have decided they want cake today, so they are having a birthday party for the Big G:

But last year it was on the 7th. Why 20 days late? According to Google, they opened their doors in September of 1998. Apparently, nobody bothered to record the exact date in September. So any day this month could have been Google’s birthday. It all depended on when the folks at Googleplex wanted to have cake.

Happy BirthMonth Google!

UPDATE:
The new location of Bush’s bio is now showing up #1 for these terms. There was about a two-day lag for Google to figure out that the page had moved, but it seems - even without using a 301 or 302 redirect - that the Big G was able to figure out what was going on.

George W. Bush’s Bio page no longer shows up as the first listing on Google when searching for the terms “failure” or “miserable failure”. This has long been used as an example of the power of link anchor text. But the Bush administration has finally managed to escape this publicity nightmare.

HOW THEY DID IT:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html
Now redirects (not a “real” redirect because it returns a 200 OK status code) to:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/
(which actually shows the file located here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/index.html)

Where a proper 301 or 302 redirect may have carried over the rankings to the new page, their method does not. So, by redirecting the page they have stripped it clean off the listings.

In this case, they obviously didn’t want their rankings to continue, so a “properly” implemented redirect was probably avoided on purpose. This is a good lesson, however: If you want to move a page to another URL and keep your high rankings, be sure the http header info returns the proper redirect code. More about that here: http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp .

By the way, presumably this move is only temporary. After all, once he is no longer our President, someone else will have the new URL. Will George W. go back to his old URL, or will they move it to a new page? We’ll see in a couple of years…

First of all, I don’t really think Google has a new results page. I think some spyware in the form of a cookie was causing the page displayed in my browser for Google search results to be altered. 

So it is Saturday evening and I haven’t been online since early Friday. I check email, go to MySpace and a couple other sites, then try a google search for snowboarding. Much to my surpise, a very ugly SERP:

Is Google testing a new result page? Is it a bug? Do I have a virus? Has someone hijacked Google? Hmmm…

 So I delete my cookies (always the first step when something like this happens) and do another search, this time for cookies. Lo and behold, we’re back to the old results page layout:

Yes, I did check and my first search was also showing the classic Google page again. I have sent an email to Google, but do not expect a quick reply. In the meantime, this post at the Search Engine Roundtable can help explain the phenomenon. I had read the SE Roundtable thread previously, but it mentioned looking out for SERPS that do not have a link to cached pages for any of the results. As you can see in the first screenshot, this was not the case.