Google announced today some changes to their Google+ badges. They are now adding more flexibility in the badge to help it fit better in your site’s design.
They are depreciating the size attribute, and introducing width and height. You may now select from two heights and select a variable width (between 100 and 1024 pixels). Similar to Facebook, you can now select either a light or a dark color scheme. See my screenshot below.
I’m compiling a report for one of my clients and I was trying to show them how their traffic was affected by Panda and I couldn’t find a quick list of the dates that Google released all of the Panda updates. To make my life easier (and maybe yours), I’ve compiled the below Google Panda update list which shows the dates when people started seeing changes in their rankings. I will try to update this list after every Panda update as a quick resource.
Google Panda Update Dates:
I don’t think I’ve ever come across a URL this bad in my entire life: http://www.freshconservative.com/Fresh_Conservative/Fresh_Conservative/Fresh_Conservative.html (paste the URL, I refuse to give them a link). To quote my friend Brian, this is definitely “SEO TO THE MAX!”. Nonetheless, their homepage ranks #1 for “Fresh Conservative”.
Upset boyfriends and girlfriends are nothing new. There are plenty of stories of girlfriends getting back at their ex-boyfriends for mistreatment and visa versa. But in the age where Google ranks supreme, you do not want to mess with a girl who knows how to manipulate Google.
One guy learned this the hard way.
Apparently, a disturbed ex-girlfriend took her ex-boyfriend’s professional taken picture and polluted it all over Google Images for a search on his name. You can see the Google Image search spam yourself by clicking here or in the screen shot below:
There has to be dozens of the same image, all with little notes from the girl written all over them. I won’t name the individual or the notes but it is a bit interesting to see upset ex-couples use Google Images as payback.
I suspect the images will be dropping out of Google shortly simply because it seems like the image sources have been removed from the servers they were hosted on.
As per the complaint thread started by the boy’s mother at Google Webmaster Help, the mother was extremely upset about this. She said:
My minor son’s ex-girlfriend took a copyrighted picture of him (we own copyright) and uploaded it more than 60 times to a website. On each image she wrote slanderous, defamatory and pornographic captions. The webmaster of the site states he removed the images 6 weeks ago, but Google Search still shows all the images. My son is so stressed out and embarrassed and we’ve done everything we can to get images off of Google including URL removal tool, a letter to Google Legal with all the URLs because of copyright infringement, and nothing has worked!
You see, she knew to have the source site remove the images but Google still has them in their index. The issue is that although the images appear to be gone, the URLs they are sourced via are actually returning a 200 status code, which to Google means they are still there. They need to return a page not found status code, and they do not.
Lesson? Before you upset your girlfriend or boyfriend, make sure they do not know how Google works. Oh, and never mess with an SEO.
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
Article courtesy of SERoundTable