Sunday Chatter – 9/13

Are You Banned from Google?

This is perhaps the worst news any webmaster can receive — their website has been blacklisted from Google. Maybe you’re pulling off some blackhat SEO techniques, or automatic content generation. Either way, the search engines find out and if you’re caught, good luck getting back on. John Chow was banned for years and couldn’t even rank within the first 10 pages for his own name. Now he’s back on after making peace with Google and shares some tips on what you can do if you’ve been given the boot. It’s not all bad news, because there’s still hope!

Upgrading to Snow Leopard

The latest Mac OS X operating system recently came out and after not being able to locate a copy locally (all stores were sold out), I had to order it from the Apple website. At $35 for the upgrade, it’s definitely a must if you’re a Mac user. My upgrade was painless, fast and smooth of any sort of bumps. Don’t get me started on upgrading from Windows 98 to XP and XP to Vista — both of those events made me want to hit something. If you’re thinking about upgrading to Snow Leopard, consider this list of things to do first. They involve clearing out all the clutter from your system, so you won’t be transferring over duplicate files and other junk you don’t really need. After all, Snow Leopard is faster than its predecessor and it’s best to take advantage of it.

How Google Reads News

Google has revealed how it reads and ranks news results in its index, which also include video and images, not just text. They have released a 15 minute video which goes into great detail on what they look for, which is very valuable to publishers, especially if their site is already in the news index.

You can read more about it here, or watch the video below.

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