George Pearce - iamPearce

It looks as though GMail is to become Google’s next shot at Facebook, according to an post I read on mashable. Its interestingly timed with Facebook releasing that they are going to integrate email into their very popular social networking platform.

Now I think this will create an interesting battle; because Google are (one of) the leading webmail providers and Facebook (the) leading Social Networking site. They are now about to cross into eachothers territory, using their own existing mammoth userbases as a boost.

It’ll be interesting to see who comes out on top of this one; as Google FriendFeed and the other various ones didn’t work out so great.

So did Google Wave just fail?

I mean, it was supposed to be redefining email and all that fun buggery, but to be honest, I’ve not yet see anyone offer Google Wave as a means of contacting them – maybe this was one of the projects that Google would rather forget?

There was a huge buzz as it launched, as I remember, but since then it seems to have gone down like a lead balloon, I joined, with one contact, failed to see the point and never used it again.

I’m curious as to whether there is.. *anyone* that uses wave routinely for a means of contact? Or did it just die?

I’ve been doing a bit of reading around; and there are some sites that suggest that Google does indeed give some weight to nofollow links, or even full weight.

I found a post which suggested Google indexed his site from a number of nofollow links that he placed, suggesting that their followed, but is weight given?

I’m going to experiment slightly with a post on a product comparison website I made for playing around with; competing against a post on the same subject on my own site, to see if it’s possible for the site with nofollow links to rank at all, or highly, in Google.

I don’t know how accurate the test will be, because I’m actively working on the ranking of the rest of the site; which might.. cross over a little, but I’m hoping it’ll be a half decent test and it’ll come out with something I can write about.

I’ll use Google webmasters tools to measure the rankings, comparing this post on my blog (Sennheiser MX 260) with this post on the comparison (Sennheiser MX 260). There is a nofollow tag attached to the latter link.

As part of a recent job I’ve been doing, I’ve been tracking down a certain kind of links, for SEO purposes. While I’ve been doing it I’ve learned a huge amount about SEO, and how it all works – and I’m tempted to follow it to the point that I can offer my own SEO work.

I’m considering trying out all the learning I’m doing in making this site rank as highly as possible for something competitive, lets say.. George. And using that as a selling point for why my work is awesome.

I don’t know how do-able that is, I’ll be competing against Asda George, which is just *huge*, but even being around there somewhere would be a MASSIVE achievement to me.

I’ve actually recently lost my ranking for “George Pearce” too, so building that back up would be the first step – I’m going to try it out anyway, but whether I decide to start offering SEO is another question, there are SO many people doing that and I don’t want to become one of them- it’s a massively bloated market.

I don’t mean to imply that just because I’ve learned something I’m better than anyone else, but I think with a suitable number of hours put into this, I could make some serious headway rankings wise – and use my own site as a running experiment to see how it goes.

Google Chrome – Google Book Search. A summary of what Google Chrome will be – looks pretty sweet to me. Looking forward to trying it out ;D

I’m not the first to notice this, nor will I be the last. However, notice it I did.

Google changed their favicon recently, to a tiny little g, while previously it was an uppercase G. Not that bigger change, and on most websites, it wouldn’t even have been noticed. This is Google, though.

I’m not sure if I like the new one, although I’m sure I’ll get used to it, if they keep it how it is.

I just grabbed a copy of WordPress 2.6 bleeding, and in doing so, caught up on all the new stuff that’s there, and all the little things that have been fixed. Unsurprisingly, WordPress have added another cool feature into the mix, post revisions, which (as far as I know) nobody expected. It’s given WordPress a bit of a wiki editing style approach, and while it’s not going to effect me on GPearce very much (I don’t edit my posts much), websites with lots of contributors should appreciate it

Another cool thing that’s been added is the support for Google Gears. I’m not 100% clued up on how it works, but another link got added to my taskbar (see the pic – click it), something about saving my css and stuff on my pc. Neat idea, I’ma give it a try, and see what it’s like

Ok, well I can’t say I’m perfect. But I’m doing a damn site better than a lot of other bloggers I have seen, at least some of my pages get top rankings in Google
So, I decided to write a sort of tutorial in order to help the not-doing-so-well or brand new bloggers along the way a little bit

So, you want to get your site or pages up there in Google? But there are so many results How are you going to do it?

First step is research. Decide what the keywords are for the page or site you want up there, and Google them. See what you are up against. I don’t reccomend taking on huge sites, like BBC or CnET, but look for keywords with slight less results. Now, take your page, and place those keywords (in a relevant way) into the text. For instance, if you are talking about computers, referencing a certain component might help.

Next up, you need backlinks. This is how Google chooses your position in otherwise tied results, backlinks and PR. So, you need backlinks.
As I’ve said before on the forums that I frequent, one of the best ways (in my opinion) to get backlinks is to use Google BlogSearch, found at blogsearch.google.com

All you have to do is search for your keywords, find blogs about them, and post comments, with a nice link back to your site, and suddently, Google will value your page more. It’s not instant, but after a few days or a week, your rankings will go up.

To track this, and not spend forever searching for your keywords, you should use the Google Webmaster Tools. It is the best, without a doubt. It’s at www.google.com/webmasters/tools , and once you’ve verified your site, you have access to a huge number of resources.

Well, that’s most of what I can think of, for the moment, I’m sure there is more, but that’s what worked for me

It appears that Yahoo will be rejecting the bid by Microsoft for it’s takeover, according to an article here.

The Journal source said the company would be unwilling to consider an offer below $40 per share, which would represent a $12 billion increase over Microsoft’s original $44.6 billion bid. It is unclear if Microsoft would be willing to increase its bid by such a significant amount.

This should put an end to many speculations on what would happen if the bid was successful, although I’m sure there will still be people out there, determined that Microsoft will raise it’s bid. Honestly, I don’t think they will, and MS should get off of their own backsides and work on Live, because with some simplifying, they could challange the great G.

If the bid had been accepted, Microsoft would have gone into debt for the first time in it’s existance, despite it’s massive backups of money. Microsoft’s shares have also dropped 13% since the announcement of the bid, and Yahoo’s have increased 51% in value.

If the bid was accepted, I’m sure the whole thing would be heavily scrutinized, as Google said:

“Microsoft’s hostile bid for Yahoo raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It’s about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.”

That was the chief legal officer of Google

What will become of this? It’s become pretty messy, I guess everyone gets to wait and see if Microsoft push their prices up, to buy shares that will probably deflate when the purchase is complete :/

As most people know, Microsoft recently made a move to purchase Yahoo, saying that the general public needed an alternative to Google before it got too late, and I’m inclined to agree. Google does have total dominance at the moment, and some healthy competition wouldn’t be all bad

However, some people have been saying that if this merger goes ahead, it will form a ‘Google Killer’ , that is to say that it will be the downfall of Google. This I seriously doubt, because while it will leech some of the revenue from Google, the products they offer beat the other search engines by far, and most importantly, they are fastest. Google search takes fractions of a second, the homepage isn’t littered with crap like Yahoo, and it doesn’t try to go over-web2.0 on you, like live search does. Everything is simple, and fast, and that’s what makes it dominant.

There is also the thought that if Microsoft and Yahoo merger, there could be a serious loss in income as teething problems are resolved, advertisers might choose to jump ship to Google, and what would happen if Microsoft decides to force Yahoo Mail and YIM into Hotmail and MSN? There would be chaos, and amidst it, the Google would take yet more market share, which is exactly the thing that Microsoft have set out to take off of them.

If Yahoo accept the takeover offer, then the merger will have to be done very carefully, or chaos will ensue, I think.