If you mouse over the comic over at XKCD website, you get this comment:
‘Fucking ineffable’ sounds like someone remembering how to do self-censorship halfway through a phrase
 | Tumblelogs have two key features that help users create an enormous backlog of posts in a very short time – “notes” and “reblog”. Through the latter button, users can simple click and reblog content found on another user’s site. This is one of the things that has made Tumblr such a hit among the masses, it is also one of the reasons that it is not in Google’s good graces. Search engines like Google use two key factors when creating rankings for searched sites: content and backlinks. Since Tumblr makes it so easy to copy content found on other blogs, it takes a lot more effort of on the part of a Tumblelogger to achieve a high ranking in results … because reblogging can easily become a duplicate content nightmare. |
A follow up on my post about Tumblr’s SEO problems. See also Sochable: “Tumblr’s Biggest Strength is its Biggest Weakness to Google” by J.D. Rucker, August 22, 2010.
| As part of its mission to make the world’s books searchable and discoverable, Google has digitized over five hundred ancient Greek and Latin books. We present them here downloadable as zip files of images and plain text, and as links to Google Books web pages where you can read them online in full or download PDFs. This collection was selected by Prof. Greg Crane and Alison Babeu of Tufts University, and compiled by Will Brockman and Jon Orwant of Google. |
Read more about it over at Inside Google Books: “Google releases 500 scans of Ancient Greek and Latin texts for research” by Will Brockman, Software Engineer, June 25, 2010
| Yeah, Tumblr is definitely a disaster for SEO. I have had massive problems with pages not being indexed on Google. The URL structure is worthless and post titles are virtually non-existent. If you want a blog that ranks well on Google you would do yourself a favor by not using Tumblr. |
To be fair, it worth reading Topherchris post on the subject of search engine optimization and Tumblr (he works for Tumblr).
I became aware of the problem with this post. It was reblogged as is by a Wordpress blog (Innovation is Dead). If you try a Google search for “Beastness Jaclin”, the Wordpress blog comes up first. My Tumblr post doesn’t even come up (it uses tags, it’s making use of descriptive URLs and, of course, in my settings, I’ve allowed search engines to index my blog).
I’m aware, as Topherchris puts it, that it may be “related to how one’s template is designed and content is constructed”. But it’s a pain nonetheless. I should be able to get good search result for all of my post without having to tinker with my CSS template. After all, simplicity is what made us choose Tumblr in the first place. I wrote to Tumblr support about this. All I got was this:
“We can’t control what Google and other search engines choose to index and show. For further assistance you could try contacting Google or another search engine directly.” (april 22sd, 2010)
Notice they didn’t point me to a source of information, didn’t mention tags or meta-data and didn’t say a word about the template I’m using. Hell, I would have been interested in buying a template that as a good SEO system.
So for the past two months, I’ve been playing with export/import tools : I’d like to move everything from this Tumblr account to a self-hosted Wordpress blog. Granted, Tumblr is easy to use and, for me, it’s a great archiving tool for my personal needs. But as I understand it, I can’t do anything serious on it unless I start doing heavy research on how to modify my template. Which I won’t have to do on a Wordpress blog (I’ve been using this SEO plugin for years and it works great).
I know this post won’t show up on Google, so I’ll publish it on another Wordpress blog I own.
| But there were obstacles. Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological. |
Or how Ludwig Wittgenstein helped to improve Google.
First spotted via Kottke.
“However, if you look at Google Wave as a mishmash of Web 2.0 technology, you’re missing the point. Google Wave is a communication device all its own. It allows you to communicate online as if you’re in the same room, and it makes your communication with large groups of people more powerful and useful. If you really want to conceptualize Google Wave, you’re going to have to use it. Here’s how.” Follow the link to learn more.
“So many people wanted to verify early reports of the singer’s death that the computers running Google’s news section interpreted the “Michael Jackson” requests as an automated attack for about half an hour.”
✖ Via The Press Association: “Massive web surge as Jackson dies”“Even Google News felt the pressure. A Google spokesperson confirmed: “Some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson.” This difficulty occurred between 10.40pm and 11.15pm UK time. During this period Google News did not go down, but users searching for Michael Jackson related information were asked to verify they were indeed a human and not a computer attempting to launch a spam attack.”
✖ Via The Telegraph: “How did Michael Jackson’s death affect the internet’s performance?” by Emma Barnett, June 26, 2009“Google, on the other hand, began receiving so many searches for news about Jackson that it caused the search engine to believe it was under attack. The site went into self-protection mode, throwing up CAPTCHAs and malware alerts to users trying to find news. A Google spokesperson described the incident as “volcanic” compared to other major news events, confirming that there was a service slowdown for some time.”
✖Via Ars Technica: “Internet groans under weight of Michael Jackson traffic” by Jacqui Cheng, June 26, 2009 (thanks Infoneer).… Then basically it happened that a computer programmed by some humans temporarily identified human activity as virus attacks.
