Inspired by Carlos Andrade‘s own tool, I’ve just coded a couple of scripts to take an OPML file and show an ordered table of Technorati ranks. Naturally, I used it for my own Planet site, Planet Atheism.

Here it is: Technorati Ranks for Planet Atheism members

The implementation was ridiculously simple (and there’s a lot of room for improvement), but, other than Carlos’ tool, I didn’t find any scripts or utilities to do this. And, yes, I searched. Therefore I may release the code soon, as the 2nd project on software.dehumanizer.com, since this can be a fun “toy”.

[EDIT: added each blog's Google PageRank to the table. Why not? ]

From the mini-site linked in the post below:

The browser’s address bar is never used. For instance, to go to Playboy’s site, you don’t type “www.playboy.com”; instead, in the “search field” in your start page (probably MSN search), you type “Playboy”. You do that every time you go there.

Some time ago, I read some article which mentioned, among other things, that the top (non-sex) search terms in search engines were stuff like “yahoo” or “ebay”. At the time, it came as a surprise, because I had never really thought about it.

It’s one thing to search for “auctions” and get Ebay as a result. It’s quite another thing to actually search for the name of the site, and click on the first result, instead of simply typing “www.ebay.com”. And to think that most people do it… it was a bit of a shock.

I never had much use for browser “home pages”, or “start pages”; usually, the first thing I do in a new computer is to change it to a blank page (except for my home PC, which I point to Wikipedia’s Special:RandomPage – learning is good. ). But, apparently, most people do use them, and never change them in their lives.

Now, what are the default search pages in the 2 most popular browsers? For IE, it’s MSN Search; for Firefox it’s Google.

See why Google invests so much in Firefox, both in terms of money, and of actually hiring developers to work full-time on it? Firefox makes a lot of money to Google (after all, there be ads in the search results)… and to the Mozilla Foundation, as well.

Nothing wrong with it, of course. But it’s interesting to think of these things.

According to BlogSEO, it’s happening now.

You can use the Future PageRank tool to check a site’s PR on each of Google’s servers.

Apparently, none of my sites change in PR. The newer ones, however, didn’t have a visible PR yet, and have one now. Mostly 4s, with one 3. Not too bad. The Tlog is still my highest rated one, with a PR of 5.

I actually don’t blame Google for this. It was either accept the government censorship, or not do business in China at all. And would the Chinese gain anything by that? It’s not as if what they already have there is uncensored…

Some people on Slashdot said that Google should have taken a stand and not be in China at all, that the Chinese would become more aware of the censorship because the world’s no. 1 search engine wasn’t available. The thing is, Google is not number one in China. Its market share, there, is quite low – about 25%, from what I’ve read. It simply wouldn’t have worked.

And no censorship is perfect. It’s still possible that Google will make it possible for some Chinese to become more aware of the truth about their regime, and of what the rest of the world is like.

I saw the following in a Slashdot post, and couldn’t resist posting it here:

http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen+square (“International” Google)
http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen+square (Google China)

See for yourselves…

It’s Google News!

In related news, sub-zero temperatures in Hades have been reported.

You’ve probably heard of a couple of such attacks, recently. But have you heard the latest one? They apparently want Google to disclose search data. Google is refusing.

The most worrying thing is that MSN and Yahoo! have already complied. Still feel comfortable using them?

Of course, the government doesn’t say it’s attacking privacy. It says it’s doing it “for the children”. In another blog of mine, I have written an article called People and they stated goals. It’s about how, by saying you’re doing something (whatever it is) for some noble cause, it apparently excuses anything you do, and demonizes anyone who criticizes you. That’s what’s happening here:

Jack Samad, senior vice president for the National Coalition for Protection of Children and Families, a Cincinnati, Ohio-based advocacy group, said search engines should be willing to help the Bush administration defend the law.

Samad said: “Young people are experiencing broken lives after being exposed to adult images and behaviours on the Internet. I’m disappointed Google did not want to exercise its good corporate branding to secure the protection of youth. I think [complying with the subpoena] would substantiate the basis of Copa if they get a free exchange of information on youthful use of the internet.”

But in which way would getting “millions of search records” help in that? That’s what they don’t say. And where does it end? Anyone can abuse a child at home, so why not install government cameras in every room of every single home?

I sometimes think you could get away with killing children by saying you were doing it “to protect the children”…

Google has just released a new extension for Firefox, Blogger Web Comments, which shows a small (configurable) popup showing blog articles (which they get from Google Blog Search) that mention the page you’re currently viewing.

I’ve only been using it for 3 minutes or so, so I still haven’t thought about the implications of, basically, for each page you browse to, getting a list of blog articles talking about it. I think it could actually change the browsing habits of a lot of people. A reasonable way to put it might be: “what if every single page in the world had easily accessible comments – and not controlled by the page’s owner?”

It could become annoying, though – I’ll have to wait and see. It can be hidden or temporarily disabled, of course. Or uninstalled, naturally – this isn’t Internet Explorer.

(seen on ProBlogger)

Seen on ProBlogger: Google now has an “Add to Google” (Homepage or Reader, that is) button, and a page for generating HTML to add a button with your feed.

Note that, as of now, their HTML is slightly invalid, as they forgot to close the <img> tag with a / before the >. That’ll make it fail on XHTML validators. Until they fix their code, you should do it yourself.

(this shows, by the way, the importance of validating your site whenever you add something to it – even if it comes from a “big” source such as Google)

This is how it looks, by the way:

All right, I couldn’t resist it. Even though I said I’d wait a week or two, after Darren Rowse said it was working fine, I tried it.

Very impressive, so far – and a lot of options to explore there.

I suggest you try it, even if you’re satisfied with the stats you already have – there’s nothing to lose, after all… (are you paranoid because of Google knowing too much? Trust me, they already do, they don’t really need this. )

In their relentless quest for world domination, Google has done it again. Here’s Google Base, a place to post content.

What kind of content? For a start, no HTML. Apparently, most posts so far are ads to sell stuff, much like the ads section of a newspaper. Content only lasts 31 days there, so you won’t be able to create the equivalent of a splog. (hard to do, anyway, without HTML links…)

To test it, I created a “People Profile” of myself, since, of course, I’m a celebrity.

No, I haven’t let all the news about Google Analytics pass me by. I’ll eventually try it, in fact.

But everyone is saying that it’s too slow, timing out often, and stuff like that. This seems to be happening a lot to new Google products, these days – remember the Google Reader? It works now, but in the first days…

Besides, I quite like AWStats. Maybe I’ll try Analytics in a week or two – they should have ironed out the problems by then.

Looks like a big coincidence, doesn’t it? After I mentioned my drastic drop in hits from Google in my gaming blog, Darren from ProBlogger makes a brilliant post called “What to do when your Google traffic disappears.

Go there. Read it. Now. But come back here, afterwards.

One of the points Darren makes is very important – in an already successful blog or site, such a drop in Google search rankings (whether caused by the Google Sandbox or something else) can mean a drop in your earnings of 2/3 or more! What if your blog has been slowly but surely growing, and you’re starting to see some money, which causes you to see the “light at the end of the tunnel”… and suddenly, earnings drop down to a trickle, almost nobody comes from Google… it’s enough to make many people quit blogging, or at least hoping to one day make a living from it.

But, as Darren says, all of this – again, whether it’s the Sandbox or not – is temporary. It may take a couple of months, but you’ll get back to good positions in Google, eventually. Meanwhile, keep blogging, keep improving your blog, and get ready for the big comeback, when suddenly you’re flooded with hits. And clicks.

Remember a post of mine, less than 2 weeks ago, where I mentioned how this blog was in the Sandbox (and so almost nobody came here from Google, and those that did, came because they searched for stuff the blog is not about, like a misspelling of Sudoku), but my “Games of my Life” blog wasn’t, and actually got great Google results?

Well, in the last couple of days, I’ve noticed in the logs that the number of hits from Google searches almost stopped rising.

So, I went to Google, and googled for the same search terms… and nothing. The blog’s articles are nowhere to be seen in the first page of results.

I’m all for stopping splogs (spam blogs), but I think the Google guys (or their algorithms) are being overzealous. I mean, that blog is 100% original content, and hasn’t suddenly got an avalanche of links from other sites (which is always suspicious).

Oh well… I guess I’ll just have to weather it. It’ll pass, eventually.

As you should know , this particular blog has been around for 2 months, and it gets a lot of hits per day. However, very few (relatively speaking) come from search engines. And the ones that do come…

… well, let’s say that the top 5 searches are related to Sudoku. Which I only mentioned once, in a post about a version for Series 60 phones. And the top search string is actually a misspell, coming from a user comment.

In other words: virtually no one arrives here because he or she searched for something that this blog is about. Not technology, not games, not software, not blogging tips. No, people come here because they misspell “sudoku” in Google.

Yet, the blog is relatively well linked, having earned a PageRank of 5, and having almost 50 blogs linking to it, according to Technorati.

Weird, isn’t it?

Now, consider a different blog of mine, The Games of my Life. It’s on the same domain, on the same server, using the same software, and even a variant of the same theme. It was promoted in mostly the same way. Less than 15 blogs link to it, and, since it was created after the latest PageRank update, it still shows a PR of 0.

It’s only 2 weeks old – today, in fact.

Yet, if you google for some terms the blog is about, or which are the subject of particular posts…

• “target renegade”: it’s the 13th result (appears in the 1st page of results)
• “natuk”: 7th result (1st page)
• “lords of midnight”: 17th result (1st page)
• “fahrenheit / indigo prophecy”: 9th result (1st page)
• “the hobbit spectrum”: 5th result (1st page)
• “tennis critters”: 7th result (1st page)

and, even better,

• “80s games”: 9th result (1st page)
• “90s games”: 2nd result (1st page) (!)
• “zx spectrum chaos”: 3rd result (1st page)
• “zx spectrum penetrator”: 1st result (1st page) (!!)

Impressive, isn’t it? Especially for a 2 week-old blog.

And, needless to say, people are arriving there from search engines.

What makes those two blogs so different in this respect? Almost surely this: the Google Sandbox. One is in it, the other isn’t.

Either that, or someone at Google loves games.

From ProBlogger, a way to make it so that Chitika eMiniMalls ads (in non-contextual mode) use (optionally) the search terms that brought someone from a search engine to that particular page.

In other words: let’s say someone searches for “cheese dip”, and one of the results is a page in your blog or site. The user clicks on that link, and, as you should know, those terms appear in the referrer page, in your server logs – which log analysers can then use to give you the “top search terms”.

With this method, the Chitika ad will also use those terms (remember, in non-contextual mode you already have to give it a list of product and/or product types), giving it a large change of having an ad about cheese dip (in this case) – even if your blog isn’t really about cheese dip (though that particular page probably mentioned it somewhere). The idea here is that someone who searched for cheese dip is most likely to be interested in an ad about cheese dip – more so than in whatever the blog is really about.

I’m not using it in any of my sites right now, as it’s yet doubtful whether that makes the ads “contextual” (which means that they can’t be used together with AdSense), but it’s certainly an interesting idea.

Yesterday’s Google PageRank update was the main SEO-related happening, of course, but there was another: they also updated backlinks.

Backlinks are what you get when you go to Google and search for “link:address” (e.g. “link:www.thetlog.net“). It was a bit annoying that MSN Search and Yahoo Search showed many backlinks to my (less than 3-months old) blogs, but Google didn’t. Until yesterday.

That update also made Silktide SiteScores go up a bit, which is always nice.

Again, my gaming blog seems to be too new to be affected: it still has a PR of 0, and 0 backlinks. Oh well, that’ll change 3 months from now…

Again, I have to be completely unoriginal and credit Darren for the information.

Google is, at this very moment, updating the visible PageRank (PR). You can see the update almost in real time by using the Future PageRank Tool – it shows the PR for a particular URL in several of Google’s servers. A few hours ago, the PR for this site had only been updated in 2 servers; right now it’s been updated in 6 of them.

A little explanation: Google updates the PR continuously. However, the visible PR is updated only every 3 months or so. That means there’s not any jump in hits from Google when they change this site’s PR from 0 to 5 (it was 0 because it’s less than 3 months old). They do it this way because, otherwise, SEO people would spend all the time changing little things and checking how they influenced PR.

PR, by the way, is determined by how many sites link to yours, but also by how high those sites’ own PR is. So, a link from a top site (without the “rel=nofollow”) is very, very desirable.

As I said, this blog now has a PR of 5. My philosophical blog and my personal blog will both have a PR of 4. My forum is PR 3. And, unfortunately, my gaming blog will remain as PR 0, apparently… it’s too new. Oh well…

In Matt Cutts (who works at Google)’s blog, I’ve just read an article: What’s an update? (saw it mentioned in ProBlogger) which leads me to think that the complete lack of backlinks to this very site in Google may not be related to the Sandbox at all (though, looking at the few search words that bring people here, I still think I’m in it).

Instead, apparently, Google only updates the backlinks it shows (not their database, but just what is visible to the public) every 3 months or so. This site isn’t 2 months old yet.

The likely result of this is that, in little more than one month from now, I will probably have backlinks from hundreds of places (I hope ), but there won’t be a jump in how I actually rank in Google searches, because Google is already using that information, it just isn’t showing it.

What will affect those ranks is, probably:

• more and more people linking to this blog, or to particular articles in it;
• the site becoming “older” – apparently, it helps; and
• getting out of the Sandbox, assuming this site is in it.

Amazing article about the Google Sandbox. Saw it mentioned in ProBlogger. I guess you learn something new every day…

Excerpt:
What is the Google Sandbox?

The Google Sandbox is an alleged filter placed on new websites. The result is a site does not receive good rankings for its most important keywords and keyword phrases. Even with good content, abundant incoming links and strong Google PageRank, a site is still adversely affected by the Sandbox effect. The Sandbox acts as a de facto probation for sites, possibly to discourage spam sites from rising quickly, getting banned, and repeating the process.

Yes, this very site is currently in the Sandbox. It’s still less than a month and a half old, so I guess it’s normal. That explains why I get so few hits from Google searches, even though the site is very well indexed (and regularly crawled) by it.

Supposedly, when a site gets out of the Sandbox, it starts getting a deluge of hits from Google. I can’t wait.