Has Google Italy been Got At?
What an interesting question. I mean, would it be possible for someone working within Google Italy to manipulate the Googleplex’s search engine systems to the extent that the ranking of certain sites could be manipulated?
As I understand it, Google’s systems are based on cold and complex algorithms. Although these sophisticated formulae perhaps could not be tweaked, one who knows how the algorithims do their stuff could, I suppose, pass information on to certain parties. Certain parties could then use this information to make their sites more Google friendly. What a naughty thought.
Why am I on about this? Good question. Actually, it’s because I was speaking to someone involved in the running of a major Italian website, and this site’s page ranking in Google had fallen. The fall was such that this person intimated that someone somewhere was possibly exerting influence on someone in Google Italy.
Could this really be the case? Well, this is Italy…. And Italians are ‘furbo‘. This post, of course, is pure speculation.
Oops! Slight Technical Hitch - Permalinks
Oh dear. I tried to be clever and implement an SEO optimization - and as a result anyone who found a search engine result leading to my site and clicked on said link would have found a nasty 404 - page not found message.
Luckily I caught on to the problem quite quickly, and I believe I have resolved it, thanks to this post, and thanks to the plugin that you can find here.
Now I can play with things like permalinks and not have to worry too much about nasty collateral effects!
Thanks to Google, I found the solution quickly. Phew!
Oh the joys of being an amateur webmaster.
Please accept my apologies if my tinkering caused problems.
When an advert isn’t. Or is it?
During one of my English language classes today we started discussing one of the projects that my students had worked on as part of their marketing master. This project happened to involve creating a marketing and communications plan for a holiday resort (tourist village/villaggio turistico) in Italy. During our discussion I mentioned Booking.com, one of the foremost on-line hotel booking sites in the world. In an attempt to justify stating that all hotels should be listed on Booking.com, I typed ‘hotels, Italy’ into Google and, lo and behold, the first sponsored ad was for Booking.com. However, one of my students noticed that Booking.com did not appear in the normal search results. Effectively she intimated that she would be more likely to click on a normal search result, than on one of the sponsored keyword generated ads. Indeed, had Booking.com appeared at the top of the normal results she would have visited the site most probably.
Very interesting I thought, how ‘normal’ Google’ results were not perceived by this person as being adverts, even though, in my opinion, they function in much the same way. I wonder how many others think in the same way, and do not perceive search engine results as being advertising. Quite a few, I imagine, and this may indicate that SEO is potentially more effective than keyword advertising.
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