Did Google just changed its favicon?

Posted by multippt

I’ve just realized that Google changed it’s favicon from capital G to small g. For those of you who do not know what a favicon is, it is that small 16 by 16 pixels icon you sometimes see beside the address bar. I guess that’s probably one of the minor changes that I’ve ever seen happening on the Google homepage.

Nonetheless, it does appear that someone spotted it as well. Kudos to all who managed to spot the change.

I still can’t get accustomed to the new icon. Maybe I’ve been using Google for a very long time and even a small icon change makes me feel a little uncomfortable. Hopefully I could get accustomed to it sooner or later. Honestly, while the new icon looks pretty sleek, the shadow (or gradient?) behind the “g” makes it look ackward. I guess that’s because I’m using IE7 and that the icon appear to be semi-transparent. On Firefox, the icon looks great.

*Note: In order to view the new favicon, you can shortcut the caching process by simply accessing the favicon directly (i.e. google.com/favicon.ico) and refreshing it. Tada, the new Google icon!

Let’s hope Google won’t be turning lowercase anytime soon, otherwise it’ll look pretty odd.

May PageRank update review

Posted by multippt

Looks like the PageRank update is going to be great news for webmasters, since there is an overall increase in PageRank across sites, unlike the previous 3 PageRank updates that have done the opposite. This update has been carried out over several days, so you may want to check out inner pages of your site if you went PageRank hunting on the day of the update.

This update saw more increases than decreases, partly because the main penalty round occurred a week before the update began (probably the first signal that an update was iminent). The penalties involved mainly new sites selling paid links, so it does seem that Google is tightening its stance against paid links. This is not expected since after all, Google gave their official message that nofollow paid links are not allowed and subjected to penalties. The paid link business have gone a lot more quiet (but it doesn’t mean that webmasters are not giving up on paid links though).

Google may have also changed the weightage of links, now giving internal links slightly more power or perhaps all links in general. Probably great news for site owners who have been building links for a while.

May PageRank update

Posted by multippt

Looks like Google decided to update the visible PageRank on the Google toolbar between the 30th of April and the 1st of May. Well, at least it came after much speculation (on Digitalpoint anyway) of PageRank updates following a string of PageRank penalties across sites that were caught selling paid links.

Overall, most sites received an increase in PageRank, while others had the same PageRank, which is good news for most sites on the whole. Of course, it is bad news for guilty site owners who have sold paid links, since Google is being extremely vigilant (and smarter) on what links are considered paid. Penalties are also carried out during the update, but most of it a few days before the PageRank update. This is done so presumably so that you can address the issue, and request for reconsideration, and have the right PageRank in time for the incoming update.

Google webmasters and analytics update

Posted by multippt

Google has recently updated the backlink count over the past week, so you may see new backlinks registered in the Webmasters Tools page. While a Google update usually comes weeks after this happens, don’t be too happy yet, since Google is growing more and more unpredictable.

Google has also updated Google Analytics. You can now view the traffic charts by week or month rather than by day. This is useful if you want to compare traffic over a long period of time (or calculate how much traffic you have received in a particular month).

Another feature of note is benchmarking. If you are tired of Alexa’s inaccuracies when you compare rival sites, you could give a shot at Google Analytics. Benchmarking pits you against sites that have similar “size” (determined by traffic, with 3 classifications: small, medium, large) to your site. Generally, this statistics help determine if your site’s traffic is above average, or below average. It can also serve as a… benchmark, when setting new goals. Nonetheless, there are some glitches associated with this feature (that’s why it’s in beta), such as some charts being unable to show some info if your site lies to far above or below the benchmark.

A nice feature of benchmark is that you can narrow the sites you want to compare by category. This would help make it a fair comparison since most webmasters prefer comparing their sites to other sites that are similar in genre.

Though, this benchmarking service only gathers information from sites where owners have chosen to opt-in for the benchmarking service.

Note: Apparently, Google accidentally introduced a glitch in its chart. This glitch prevents users from seeing information on a certain day via the Flash chart. It can be temporarily fixed by clicking on the drop-down arrow, click on “Compare to Site”, and then click on “One Metric”.

Google April fools for 2008

Posted by multippt

Looks like April Fools went silently this year, but not without it being forgotten. Google went 14 steps further this April fools, this time with 16 April fools hoaxes, compared to the two earlier last year. Sounds like Google is pretty busy preparing for its favorite day.

1# Virgle - Google aims to built a permanent human settlement on Mars with the Virgin group. Comes complete with invitations and applications as well.

2# AdSense Blog - Looks like Google considered the literal meaning of contextual ads, going as far as to adding AdSense to your normal conversations. The link to the blog entry is here. Clicking on the supposed sign-up link takes you to a Wikipedian entry on April’s fools (wow, looks like even Google acknowledges Wikipedia). Of course, it would be really nice if Google could actually implement that.

3# Orkut - Orkut’s name was changed to “Yogurt” for the day. Well, at least they still sound similar.

4# Google Japan - Google launches the site with the mission of “organizing the world’s laughter”. (Japan exclusive)

5# gDay - Google announces (in Australia) that they have developed technology that can search for pages hours before they are created. (Australia exclusive)

6# Google Translator - A new feature to translate different dialects of Korean. (Korea exclusive)

7# Google custom time - A new feature in GMail that allows you to send E-mails to the past.

8# Google calendar - Google decided to bring “I’m feeling lucky” to Google calendar, except that clicking on that button will not bring you to the first page of the results, but rather adds a nice event that sets you up with a date with some famous/popular people.

9# Google summer of code - The license were changed to WTF Public License temporarily for the day.

10# Google wake up kit - Adds a feature to the Google calendar that does the classics of waking up people using unorthodox/extreme methods.

11# Google documents - A new easter egg was added in the file menu (called “New Airplane”). Clicking on it literally opens up a document containing instructions to fold a paper airplane, complete with the Google logo.

12# Google manpower search (China) - Uses search results powered by human labour. Of course, it would have been the best search engine all-time if that were true and feasible. (China exclusive)

13# Google book search - Adds a new section called “scratch and sniff”. Basically the idea is to click on a button and “smell” the book (by placing your nose close to the monitor).

14# Blogger - Blogger featured an announcement on Google Weblogs which is touted as the next revolution in personal publishing (or simply, blogging). This new “Blogger 3.0″ places your best content at the top, rather than the latest posts. In addition, it supposingly populates your sidebar with relevant content (technically, this is already done - it’s called ads).

15# Google Talk - Google annouces that it plans to shorten conversations (by omitting certain vowels and letters) on the 22nd of April (i.e. Earth Day). Kind of nice to think that Google brought up Earth Day on April Fools.

16# Youtube - This is the first time Youtube gets a nice April Fools addition. All links linking to featured videos point to Rick Astley’s song. In other words, anyone using Youtube on April Fool’s will get RickRolled - by Google. That’s neat. At least Google is paying attention to Internet memes. (United Kingdom [UK] and Australia Youtube sites initially affected [Google must have been following the time-zone], followed by the remainder.)

—

P.S.: Never believe anything you read on April Fools. Even newspapers lie…
P.S. #2: April Fools is yesterday, so this post ain’t an April Fools joke.

Absurd PageRank allocation in Firefox

Posted by multippt

Update: Ironically, this doesn’t show up on the Google toolbar for Firefox. Pretty odd, ain’t it? 

Looks like Google is showering a whole lot of PageRank juice on Mozilla.org. Alone in the Add-ons section of the site, over 800,000 pages have a PageRank of 8, as if the PageRank on these pages are spoofed.

Here are the following pages which have a PageRank of 8
-All extension pages
-All user profiles
-All themes
-All pages in discussions about any extensions

This is not exclusive to Firefox as well; Pages about Thunderbird, Seamonkey and Sunbird also have the mysterious PageRank 8 allocation for almost all pages viewable.

Even W3 is not able to match up with the amount of PageRank 8 pages one can find on the site. Wordpress isn’t any closer either.

PageRank Q2 2008: Silent February update & Webmasters Central

Posted by multippt

Google is sure quick in updating the new PageRanks - this time 2 months faster than expected (well, the update is just 1 month away from the previous, and the expected cycle is about 3 months). Though, the update is once again… sloppy and probably incomplete. Though, you should be able to see a change in the front page of your site. Sadly, this update also appears to be the opposite of the previous update - chances are inner pages may sometimes be stripped off their PageRank, despite being linked all over the place.

Note that the update is probably not completed, as most sites may not have a change in PageRank. Then again, Google usually dishes out everything within 24 hours. It’s still a hit-and-miss though.

Interestingly, PageRank appears to be going down yet once again this time round, with Google even hitting its OWN pages (iGoogle, anyone?). The great news, is that the new PageRanks now probably comes without a penalty in most cases (unlike that horrid update last year). The fall in PageRank for particular pages shows that Google has changed something somewhere in its algorithm. Even backlinks shown by the inaccurate “link:” command shows a change, though an unusual one since apparently the link count is reduced even further by half.

There are also some unusual PageRanks - particularly high PageRanks given to blogs which have no backlinks (or blogs with mainly exchanged links). Sites which previously have no PageRank originally appears to have their PageRank restored, such as Technorati.

Back on the Google webmasters central, it does seem that Google has got all the backlink counts a lot more less compared to the past. It’s as if Google lost a large chunk of your backlinks, particularly internal links. It’s also pretty unusual that most of the links were stated as being discovered in “February”, despite being actually shown in the Webmasters tools several months ago.

*Certain pages on this site appear to have got nuked by Google. :p