Happy Holidays 2009 Google Doodles

This week Google celebrated Sesame Street’s 40th Anniversary with a custom Google Logos. Sesame Street premiered on November 10, 1969 and both of the creators of Sesame Street were born in November. Big Bird’s Golden yellow logo with his legs as the L, Cookie Monster Cookie flavored logo with his eyes as the O’s, Bert and Ernie’s heads as Google’s O’s, Oscar the Grouch, Elmo as the L, Count Von Count and the whole Sesame Street Ensemble.

Does ‘Sesame Street’ still have legs? I would say so. Last week was Halloween and I ran into these guys:

Bert and Ernie - Off The Hooka

Happy Birthday Sesame Street!

Big Bird - Sesame Street 40th Anniversary - Google Logo

Google is honoring Sesame Street with a custom Google Logo.   Sesame Street and Big Bird both premiered on November 10, 1969.  I don’t know why Google has this logo posted this logo today, November  4th.  Sesame Street creators; Joan Ganz Cooney (born November 30, 1929) Lloyd N. Morrisett (born November 2, 1929), were both born in November, just not on the 4th.

It’s a rare day when you can honestly say Google messed up. Today is that day. If you click through on a SERP today and get; “Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer!“, don’t worry about it. All results are getting this Malware warning.

There is no word about this issue on the official Google blog yet so stay tuned. I will update this post with more info.

This issue seems to be resolved and Google admits its human.  #Googlemayharm

Google just updated last week. For most web sites nothing special happened but for others Google took away some of their precious page rank on their web site or blogs. I am not talking about one or two point page rank reductions, this Google Update took (and the last one as well) took away 3 points or more. And in some cases a few sites lost all their Page Rank.

Some of the harder hit web sites were Renkoo, Del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia where I saw some users that are in my network loose all their Pageranks. Renkoo lost two points on its main page (dropping from a PR7 to a PR5) and most of the users I know lost at least one point on their blogs. The worst was on Delicio.us where a CEO’s linking blog went from a page rank five to zero, this reduction also happened to a few other people on other networks as well. The best for me was one of my local competitors lost out as well, dropping from a PR 7 to a PR 4, on his main web page.

What happened? Google made things tougher in most cases (except Renkoo who did it to themselves). Having a web site or a social network without a strong sense of what SEO is all about is like saying I want to have zero defensible competitive edge. Having an Strong sense of SEO could have preserved Renkoo’s former Page Rank at seven or improved it upwards. For a few bloggers the reductions came because they (like Renkoo) were asleep at the wheel.

Maintaining a strong position in Google (and thus your defensible competitive edge) requires constant work, vigilance, and a keen eye for detail. Think of working on your web page like just like doing work on a race car, sometimes you have to go into the pit for either gas or tires. A lot of people’s web sites just ran out of gas while on the track. So just like racing, make sure you stay on track, don’t fall asleep at the wheel and keep a good SEO guy on your team.

After having his site taken off Google for the term, “The Greatest Living American” for being Google bombed to the number one spot. Stephen Colbert is back with a vengeance. The Cobertnation is now winning for the term “The Greatest Living American” both with and without quotes. I guess Google’s work around for Google Bombing isn’t working again.

The Greatest Living American SERPS 09252007

Update 10.01.07 Looks like this was very short lived. Google updated the day after I posted this blog. I also fixed the typos. Sorry to all who were offended over two typos.

“The Greatest Living American”

Here is a short list of useful Advanced Search options for Google:

cache:www .example.com Google’s cache of example.com
link:www .example.com List of websites that link to example.com
related:www.example.com List web pages similar to www.example.com
info:www.example.com Show information that Google has about www.example.com
site:www.example.com List all web pages hosted at www.example.com
allintitle:query Restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the title.
intitle:query Restrict the results to documents containing that word in the title.
allinurl:query Restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the URL.
inurl:query Restrict the results to documents containing that word in the URL.
apple * sauce the words apple and sauce separated by exactly one word
Nokia phone $100…300 Search within a range of numbers for a Nokia phone between $100…300
safesearch: sex education Search for sex education material without returning adult sites

At least thats what Google not says. Google removed the link to the white house page of GW Bush recently as the number one hit for the search “Miserable Failure” They have also undone a few other Google bombs such as the one that was making the site for the movie “Super Size Me” win for the term “McDonald’s” This looks like a crack down on Google bombing in general.

Also the White House has changed the URL for the target link from:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html

The old link redirects here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/

I used to think that the people at Google have a sense of humor. This change seems to have a human hand to it. It was good while it lasted. However they still keep the term “leave” results as Disney.com Most porno sites link their “Leave” button on their splash page to Disney.com. So it looks like they don’t have this feature fully fleshed out just yet.

In case you don’t know what all this Google bombing stuff is about, I have it explained here