This morning the times announced that they had started to roll out their online Paywall! Now disaster for one of the biggest sites in the UK has been struck, and they have vanished from the Google SERPS! Even when you run a search on Google for the “Times Online” you get the sub domain pages, in fact the www.timesonline.co.uk domain does not appear any where in Google.
Check out this screen shot from Google:
It would appear however that the site has not been “automatically” removed from Google and in fact has been MANUALLY deleted from the SERPS! The site has no meta tags that instruct google to “noindex” and the pages are still accessible at the moment. Which in effect means that the Paywall hasn’t been rolled out yet. Suggesting that after the announcement, Google offices would have then found the Times Site and manually taken it out of the SERPS.
Whether or not this was a collaboration between Google and the Times leader Murdoch is unknown. Interestingly as mentioned you can still access all of the sub domains but cannot access the main website. There could be yet more changes to come, but at the moment, the main Times site looks as though it is a faint memory!
Welcome one and all to even more weekly stats. in my series of weekly updates from the Blazing Minds blog where I list blog posts I’ve enjoyed reading as well as some of the stats for the week, such as the top 5 referring websites that have graciously sent me some traffic over the week.
So your using Google, MSN or Bing to search the net! But what about giving these guys a run for their money and trying out a new type of website search engine, one that takes Real Time search results and brings them to you as quick as a flash!
Well now you can with a new search engine called LeapFish not only can you search the internet with this new multimedia search engine but you can also customize the site from the homepage with the option of logging via connecting your FaceBook account.
I connected my FaceBook account to LeapFish.com to give it good checking out!
So after connecting my account I tried the two search options the first the default search and searched for “Blazing Minds”, when the results come up you can then cycle through Google, Yahoo and Bing to see the results from each of the engines. You also get the options to choose from Videos, Images, News, Blogs and Shopping, brilliant and the results are so quick and informative.
Next I tried the Real Time search, this time I tried a search for a word of the top of my head, “Batman” great I was delivered a list of News Results, Wikipedia, Web results, video, twitter, blogs and even digg posts, outstanding.
So using LeapFish is great and much more than other browsers, you can customize the way the homepage is shown with widgets, changing colours, you can even add LeapFish to your search list in FireFox!
But what I really like about this search engine is the way that everything comes up on one page and it’s also very quick, so if you are looking for an alternative to Google, Yahoo, Bing or other engines then give it a go, I’m glad I did
LeapFish is conducting private demos prior to the highly anticipated launch, if interested please email demo@leapfish.com
I was going through my bookmarks recently on FireFox and noticed some handy sites that I would like to share with all my readers, you may already know about some of these already, but, for those that haven’t seen these sites then they are certainly worth checking out and may even help with your future endeavours with your websites SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
Firstly a great little website, but not to take to seriously is PageRank Prediction the title says it all really, it’s a simple pagerank checker, just enter your website address and the site will try to give you your pagerank on the next Google PageRank update, I’ve found it to be around 80% accurate though, so give it a whirl!
Next is the first in the “Graders” websites, the Website Grader measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.
The second “Grader” is one which is quite fun and is the Twitter Grader, will give you a grade out of 100, show followers, following, Summary of the Twitter, history and tweet cloud, all good fun and useful tool to see what a new follow is really doing!
Finally a website tool for those of you trying to improve your websites keywords, the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, is a must, just type in the keywords that you would like to improve on and Google will search through it’s database and try to give you a good selection of keywords that may help improve your keyword on your post or website, I do find this very useful for some posts and it has improved my posts in the past, it may even help you with Google Adsense, but it is trial and error, so give it a go.
Now I don’t personally keep checking my Google PageRank, it’s one thing that I only occasionally check to see how it’s doing, but I checked it today and it seems that my Google PageRank has gone up!
Ok, so it’s only gone up by one from 2 to 3 but that’s some good news, right?
So hopefully what I’m doing, I’m doing right, by blogging about interesting things and not having the over abundance of out going dofollow links from my site Google has let me have a little piece of the pie, so hopefully here’s to a nice little update on the Google PageRank updates
Now I have been using EntreCard for a long time now and I must be one of the few “Droppers” that actually visits a site, stays for a while and even leaves a comment if the posts interest me, but the problem is those “Droppers” that speed drop!
The trouble with speed droppers is that they land on your site hit drop and then bugger off! Which is not really good for your blogs bounce rate, ok, I may be sending this right over people heads right now, so I would recommend reading the Wiki about Bounce Rate to find out what it is, but to cut a story short, bounce rate is the amount of time a visitor stays on your blog before moving onto another site etc.
Now I can quite honestly say it’s been a while since I used my Google Earth on my PC and I was quite intrigued by version 5 boasting it’s ocean views and having the option to turn back time and check out locations from present day to some years back!
So I’ve given it a bash and wow Google Earth 5 will allow you to fly, or should that be swim!, around the ocean checking out more than you could on previous version of Google Earth.
As with the other version of Google Earth it is a free download so it won’t cost you a penny, unless you want the pro version which will set you back $400 about £280, but the free version is good enough.
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