This is a comment on an article in Wired Magazine by Megan Gray on 2 October 2023.
If I had searched for “Nikolia-brand kidswear”, I get ads for Nikolia clothing by several advertisers, as it ought to be.
Update
Wired has removed the article.
This is a comment on an article in Wired Magazine by Megan Gray on 2 October 2023.
If I had searched for “Nikolia-brand kidswear”, I get ads for Nikolia clothing by several advertisers, as it ought to be.
Wired has removed the article.
Australia has six- and ten-digit local numbers that begin with 13 and 1300 respectively. The 13 xx xx numbers connect you to a local number in your city so it is a local call. The 1300 xxx xxx number is similar but is usually a single destination for the price of a local call. A problem arises with mobile browsers and link validation of such pages, by a crawler tool of your choice, or Google Search Console.
WGN-TV, a Chicago TV station did a story on the Jewish Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) and mistakenly used an inappropriate image – the yellow star that Jews had to wear in German ghettoes. A bunch of my friends started discussing what might have gone wrong.
A persona is a fictitious person that has certain defined attributes. In product marketing, we create personas for major groups of users who will use the product. For example, a word processor’s set of personas might include a high school student, a university student, a generic office worker, a specialist author, a manager, and so on.
In the world of black-hat SEO or spamming, a persona is usually a very shallow person, with no thought given to its creation. Beyond a rather implausible Western name and Gmail address, there is no sophistication, perhaps because the only purpose of that persona is to send once-off spam. Since you can create billions of fake Gmail/Yahoo/Rediffmail accounts without any worry, you can create a new one for each email if you wish. Continue reading
Recently, I wrote about Google demoting JC Penney for getting links from dubious places. Now it has demoted Overstock.com for getting links from very prestigious websites – .edu to be precise.
Amir Efrati writes in The Wall Street Journal:
Google Inc. is penalizing Overstock.com Inc. in its search results after the retailer ran afoul of Google policies that prohibit companies from artificially boosting their ranking in the Internet giant’s search engine.
and Continue reading
The New York Times has published a well-informed account of how a major US retailer was using alleged paid links from dubious websites. Entitled The Dirty Little Secrets of Search, writer David Segal outlines the process of searching for household items and then is surprised that:
in the last several months, one name turned up, with uncanny regularity, in the No. 1 spot for each and every term:
J. C. Penney.
The company bested millions of sites — and not just in searches for dresses, bedding and area rugs. For months, it was consistently at or near the top in searches for “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter sets,” “furniture” and dozens of other words and phrases, from the blandly generic (“tablecloths”) to the strangely specific (“grommet top curtains”).
I prefer to get the maximum number of results in a Google Search, namely, 100 results. For the past few days I noticed that I was getting only 10 results even after I went to the Search Settings (Preferences) and changed the number from 10 to 100. My preference was not sticking.
Why was this happening? The likely cause is that the Google Instant feature generates a lot of data traffic (more so for Google than you) as you type the search term, so Google nobbled it. This is not so likely when you realise that Google could have simply taken away the option to see more than 100 results. Anyway, the solution was easy.
Continue reading