SEO Junkie

Via CNET comes news that Google has launched its first mashup - a map-based Web site with information about earth-friendly locations in five of the U.S.’s top travel destinations.

 According to Luanne Calvert, creative director at Google:

The site, at maps.google.com/green, features information on and video tours of spots in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York and Orlando, Fla., as well as tips for “traveling green” during the summer using Google Maps.

 She further explained:

By “green” Google means “things that are earth friendly,” That includes “restaurants that are about sustainable living” and “a car service in New York that only uses (gas-electric hybrid) Prius vehicles,”

They will certainly get more and more people to use Google Maps to get around this summer.

This tool crawls your entire site and then analyzes all your pages for duplicate content. It shows similarity percentage among all pages on your site, so you can see what pages are similar enough to trigger a flag in major search engines and consequently they can penalize your site for duplicate content.

The higher the similarity, the more likely that you will zapped by them

Below is its screenshot and I think the tool doesn’t require any how-to as it is quite simple.

Download Site Wide Duplicate Content Analyzer (2.29 MB)

If you have any comment, questions or anything else, please let me know.

P.S – This tool is NOT intended for large websites and has a lot that can be improved.

UPDATE (8/05/2006)

This tool is NOT working at the moment as the Web-based PHP script that used to compare the % of duplicate content among pages for it has been disabled by the host since it was causing a high load on the server. It won’t work till I get a dedicated server of my own to host it and update this tool. Thanks!

UPDATE (5/26/2006)

I just updated the tool and fixed “Overflow” errors and the like. I think that it can be used for small to mid-sized websites now.

If you want to tell me your suggestions or experience problems using Duplicate Content Analyzer or have found a bug, please feel free to write to sufyaaan AT gmail DOT com.

Channel 4 News posted a video of Q&A session with Larry Page & Eric Schmidt. Larry Page, one of Google’s founders answered questions from the press.

The answer - artificial intelligence - with search engines so powerful they would understand “everything in the world”. It’s the dream of Larry Page - one of Google’s founders and now a multi-billionaire.

RustyBrick also blogged about the Q&A session with the Google “heads of state”

They talk about how artificial intelligence will change the future of search. They also discuss the “do no evil” but yet Google does evil in China, which Google responded to that the US government also does the same thing, which was replied to that it wasn’t a good response. They also talk about privacy, specifically with gmail and discuss how the tradeoff of convenience and privacy must be the right balance.

Also, there is an interesting thread titled Larry Page sets out his Vision at WMW that is worth a read.

Again, Aaron Wall comes up with an excellent interview of Kim Krause Berg. Kim is a popular and well respected usability expert who is the owner of Cre8pc.com, Cre8asiteForums.com and co-founder of Cre8asite Webmaster Resources Directory.

She is also the first person who has ever offered blog usability review services.

If you are a usability junkie, then it IS a must read for you.

Today, RustyBrick wrote about a WMW thread titled Yahoo - Where to Start with Link SEO. The thread is focused on how to build links that Yahoo! would find important.

He further pointed out:

I’ll summarize some of the points, but the thread is worth a read…

Get ODP/Dmoz links
Get related directory links
Trade links with related but not competing businesses
Send out articles for other sites to syndicate (include links in them back to you)
Use Yahoo!’s Site Explorer Tool
Link bait!
Get on the good side of bloggers
KEY: Try to get the attention of local media

Now, don’t these all work at also Google & MSN? Or maybe not…

That’s very true. It is a known fact today that some of the links that works wonder in one search engine may not be as important in the eyes of the other. For example; site wide links still helps in achieving top rankings in MSN Search but Google discount them and they are useless.

I just read about Google to have released an AJAX framework to enable software developers to build AJAX-enabled applications using Java language with GWT (Google Web Toolkit).

According to them:

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don’t speak browser quirks as a second language. Writing dynamic web applications today is a tedious and error-prone process; you spend 90% of your time working around subtle incompatabilities between web browsers and platforms, and JavaScript’s lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile.

This is bound to become popular soon, as it promises to make AJAX available to the masses.

On his blog SEOBook, Aaron Wall points out that an abundance of low quality links could cause decreased importance in crawl priority as told by Matt Cutts over at ThreadWatch.

Matt also made a detailed post on his blog saying that some sites are completely removed from Google’s index due to heavy reciprocal linkage.

The sites that fit “no pages in Bigdaddy” criteria were sites where our algorithms had very low trust in the inlinks or the outlinks of that site. Examples that might cause that include excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web, or link buying/selling. The Bigdaddy update is independent of our supplemental results, so when Bigdaddy didn’t select pages from a site, that would expose more supplemental results for a site.

Aaron further explained the issue:

Knowing that having a certain percentage of shady links will kill your ability to rank in Google adds an additional opportunity cost to building shoddy links which. Things that were once “cheap” or “free” suddenly became expensive, and quality votes gained a bunch more value in the process as well.

Thus, it is extremely important that you be extremely cautious while building links to your site. Don’t engage in excessive reciprocal linking and avoid linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web.

Google has finally launched its Google Notebook service which offers their users an ability to make notes and bookmarks through any browser.

According to the IT Week news:

Google’s Notebook service, which allows web users to store and compile links to web sites, favorites, and snippets of information while browsing, went live last week as a beta.

Users will need a Google or Gmail username and password; and Firefox users will need to download version 1.5 of the browser.

Notebooks can be made private or public. Public sites will be open to search by other users, though this service is currently unavailable.

It seems to me pretty useful for the users. Plus Google will benefit from the service by learning their users preferences and bookmarks.

Aaron Wall of SEOBook.com recently interviewed Seth Godin. Seth is a well known marketing guru, bestselling author and entrepreneur who’s blog and books have helped a lot of people around the world. He also did a video interview on AuctionBytes recently.

You can read the whole interview on his blog.

ICANN has approved a new top-level domain .Tel awarding a contract to British company, Telnic.

ICANN’s board made the decision last Tuesday, said Andrew Robertson, a spokesman for the organisation but it was overshadowed by ICANN’s rejection at the same meeting of the .xxx domain name.

Telnic, which applied for the domain in October 2000, says it envisages creating a universal text and navigation system for contact information over the Internet. Mobile device users could communicate and access the services of organisations or individuals with .tel domain names.

On their website, Telnic explained how the new domain name .Tel could help people. For example, a user would type Hertz.tel on the mobile phone and be connected to a customer service rep for the local area. Pretty cool, isn’t it?