Google Hacked?
by Taylor Flatt on January 31st, 2009 at 11:26 am EDT - 1,557 views
Saturday, all searches on Google resulted in errors saying the site may contain harmful material and that you should pick another website. Webmasters, including ourselves, were going crazy when we noticed this glitch. However, Google has since fixed the “glitch” and is going to be releasing an official statement soon.
There was a fault. We don’t know the nature of it yet. Everything has been solved. We are still making initial enquiries
a Google spokesperson told BBC News. These kinds of “faults” are something that Google isn’t really well known for which has surprised us all. Although they have fixed it, everyone is wanting to know, What happened? Let us hope something worse doesn’t happen if they were truly hacked or if it was just a simple mistake.
Update: Google attributes the fault to human error. The error occured for about 40 minutes when Google accidently flagged all sites as dangerous. Marissa Mayer, VP of search products and user experience had this to say, “What happened” Very simply, human error. We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again”.
Source: BBC
Image courtesy of BBC
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0 CommentsIs Google Preferred Site Worth It?
by Chris Burns on January 19th, 2009 at 3:45 pm EDT - 615 views
So I wanted to write a bit about my personal experience with the new Google preferred site option. This is a feature that Google is beta testing with certain account members.
What the feature allows you to do is to tell Google which sites you find as authority sites. Google with then give these sites priority rankings with any related search terms to your preferred sites. This sounds like a great idea when you first hear of it, but upon further thought and use you start to wonder… what is it good for?
There are two ways to tell Google that a site is one of your preferred sites. You can enter the sites into a list as one option. Also, when you are logged into your account and browsing natural results in Google you will see an up arrow and a down arrow next to each search result listing. You can simply click the up arrow to add the website to your preferred list or down arrow to remove it. Not only can you bump your preferred site to the top of relevant searches, but you can even leave a comment about the site which will be displayed with future searches it comes up under.
This is very cool and interesting at first glance. I tested the system as you can see in the included screen shots. The keyword “florida mortgage company” when NOT logged into my Google account shows the regular natural search terms and my sample website is no where to be found in the top 10. Now when I log into my Google account and do a search for the same keyword I will ALWAYS find my preferred site ranked #1.