World Watching

Google seem incapable of not making the news of late, usually for all the wrong reasons (street view, google books etc) but as one famous hollywood type whose name i have forgotten said “all publicity is good publicity” It seems google is battling on none the less.

The lastest brainwave of the internet giant is apparently called ’shop view’ where it seems they are trialling something similar to the much hated street view, just inside shops now. Coupled with an aquaintence bemoaning how it seems google are ignoring the noindex tags on his website, this got me thinking, If you don’t invite google or any other search engine to index your site i.e submit your url to them… do they actually have a right to be indexing your site, docs and pictures that you may have on the server at all?

Read the rest of this entry »

This time it’s in Switzerland, the reason? Street view! how long is it going to take for the morons and bone heads at google who dreamed up the concept of being an internet peeping tom to get it through their caveman like skulls that people don’t like the concept of not only themselves but their homes and children being photographed and posted on the internet.

The BBC is reporting that the swiss data protection commissioner Hanspeter Thuer is asking the Swiss courts to order the immediate removal of all Swiss images from street view until a judgement is handed down on the issue.

wow, i had no idea such a simple task would become such a time consuming and frustrating job.

having downloaded and installed plugin after plugin and had all sorts of error messages appearing and at one stage crashing the blog completely.. i eventually found a meta tag plugin that actually works.

I’m sure the others may work, But i’m no computer code genius and i’m not about to try and learn php, just to verify the blog with google.

So, if your in the same boat then i strongly recommend installing this plugin from Joost de Valk , Its called Robots Meta and as easy to configure as falling off a log.. literally!

When you have installed the plugin via the Plugins tab, click on settings. The screen gives you some useful check boxes to select.. or not as you wish with some of the easiest to understand descriptions i have seen today.

At the bottom are the google, yahoo and Live verification boxes.

NOTE: only add the value from google, not the whole string (e.g D6fEdgSRMlGCt7GS4B9Yv48A7Pq+WSxLB2t7DYLfRcw= ) to the input box. That figured out the site verified with Google first time.

10/10 in my opinion. Take a look at the website of  the Robots Meta creators for more interesting solutions and tips.

Create your Google Sitemap Online – XML Sitemaps Generator

For anyone creating their own website, Knowing about this site has to be an absolute MUST.

It will automatically create google compliant xml sitemaps in just a couple of clicks, no techie knowledge needed which suits me down to the ground.

Quite simply enter your website address, wait 60 seconds and then save the resulting file. Job done. The file is then ready to be uploaded to your web server and to be submitted to google.

And its completely FREE… happy days