Internet Marketing Venturer

Last September I’ve conducted a ‘Does Google indexes content of div tags hidden by display:none ?‘ experiment which resolved to ‘Google indexes content of div tags hidden by display:none‘.

This time the experiment will test the speed of indexing as the rumors are it’s compromised. Apparently as of beginning of April, a new Google algorithm update is in place. Amongst other things it is speculated that the page indexing speed will be significantly reduced.

The experiment will also measure if the rankings will drop for any reason during a certain period of time.

This test will include a nonsense keyword nargosylian, and a broader existing keyphrase for which I should get a ranking for in first hundred results: “extra experiment“.

This blog post will be submitted to a couple of major Social Bookmarking websites as it is usually done when you want your pages to rank quickly.

The results will be posted as soon as the Google Alerts hit my mailbox. Follow up on rankings will be posted periodically as well.

UPDATE: The phrase nargosylian appeared some 15 minutes after writing this post as well as “extra experiment” phrase. So much for that! We’ll see if it holds during the next month or so.

UPDATE 04/13/08: Both phrases nargosylian and “extra experiment” are no longer in Google SERPs, and it seems that I’ve hit the sandbox for these terms. Will update shortly upon getting back to SERPs.

UPDATE 04/16/08: Both phrases are back in SERPs. “extra experiment” is back at #1 for exact phrase, but it used to be #1 for broad phrase search, too. Now it doesn’t show up in first 100 results, only the newly indexed page of an old blog post pinged by this one appears at #27.

UPDATE 04/22/08: “extra experiment” phrase is back at #1 for broad search. Maybe due to repeating it here more than I normally would, but I think that what we’re seeing here is a normal Google results ranking cycle. My conclusion is that the Google indexing speed is fast as it was, although there might be some other indexing/ranking algorithms or filters in motion when a more competitive search terms are involved. Those are however hard to test.

Technorati Tags: google, extra, experiment, nargosylian, april, update

Couple of days ago I’ve came to a conclusion that I definitely need some sort of intranet, a way to track all of my projects and share project specs with my future employees.

One way to do it was to set up a protected wiki.

The other way is so much better: Google sites.

Not only that you can write pages in an easy way as you would in wiki pages, but you can easily integrate all google documents that you use: spreadsheets, presentations, graphs and so on. There are ready made templates that are basically good to show you all the various possibilities, but the best thing is easy sharing of documents, and document access, as well as read/write setting for each individual user.

I was able to create project specs pages and progress statistics for one of my bigger project just in this afternoon, in a couple of hours. The interface ‘feels like home’, and there’s nothing to stop you in using Google Sites right away. So I warmly recommend it!

Technorati Tags: google sites, intranet, sharing

I own a Macbook Pro, and unlike it’s pre-descendants it has some wake from sleep issues described and resolved here (thank you Windley for a fix!). The thing is, if you happen to be in a situation where you need to force your Mac to shutdown, like I had to because of the wake from sleep problem, there is another problem waiting for you after reboot.

I use MAMP for my websites development locally. When I forced my Mac to a shutdown, both Apache and MYSQL servers were started. When I rebooted and turned on my MAMP interface it appeared that they were started as indicated by a green light, but in fact they weren’t. I tried to stop MAMP with Stop Servers button, but nothing happened. I tried to kill the apache server from the Terminal with:
/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/apachectl stop
but ‘httpd (pid 55500?) not running’ returned, meaning that in fact Apache was not running. OK, so I thought I’ll start it with:
/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/apachectl start
and I’ve gotten an error again:

Permission denied: make_sock: could not bind to address [::]:80
no listening sockets available, shutting down
Unable to open logs

Wow, that sucks! I really hate when my system messes up in the middle of my work day, and just when I thought I will spend an hour or so messing with this problem, the simple solution appeared:

All I needed to do is to click on a ‘Preferences’ button in the MAMP interface, and then click OK. The servers rebooted and started normally.

Technorati Tags: mac, os x, mamp, apache, mysql, servers, shutdown