After the new Google Plus update it seems that some SEO's favorite related keywords tool is gone... I had just finished a wonder wheel scraper so i went and got the url that wonder wheel used to be at. When i run a search I get this error message:

"The search option you have selected is currently unavailable"

So i guess its good that it says its currently unavailable because that implies that it may be back soon... some people were thinking that they had just left it off the UI accidentally, but the exact same thing happened around the last "Instant" update where you had to turn it off to see the option

I recently did a post on the lisamoon SQL injection attack and one of the cool things about it was that google detected the attack, showed where it was living on the domain and processed the reconsideration request very promptly

When you enter into Google Webmaster Tools and they have detected a malicious script or exploit on your domain they will show you a red alert warning you of the infection

After you have gone and and cleaned everything up and hopefully closed any of the SQL injection holes their malicious hacker crawler found then you can tell Google to stop showing that giant red warning when people are going to pages that were infected
The alert seems to be generated automatically so im pretty sure it reruns the automated scan that detected the problem in the first place. But based on the response time Im gonna say there is no human verification of the removal of the malicious code.

Some things to note while you working on getting it clean if that the big red warnings that try to send users away are created at a url or folder level so by renaming files you can make the warning go away even before Googles security bot has checked for infection again

The easiest way to do the renaming would probably be using the .htaccess file and rewriting the url to a new name and adding a canonical tag to the page

Making sure your pages are returning proper http codes is important to your SEO efforts... (especially with redirects) but another problem that can use up your crawl quota with googlebot is an infinite space problem... these pages can be driven from a database but are often soft 404s or pages that dont exist but still return a 200 code

You should make sure your pages are returning proper 404's alot of webmasters choose to add some little joke to break the users frustration of missing a page but while digging around in google's help docs i came across a little script they wrote to include pages urls who may be the correct version of the wrong url

Just drop this code on your 404 page and be sure to change the domain name to match your own

<script type="text/javascript">
  var GOOG_FIXURL_LANG = 'en';
  var GOOG_FIXURL_SITE = 'http://www.cartercole.com';
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
  src="http://linkhelp.clients.google.com/tbproxy/lh/wm/fixurl.js">
</script>

and another cool trick i just though of would be to add something like this to the page aswell

<script type="text/javascript">
  _gaq.push(["_trackEvent", "SEO", "404 Error", document.location]);
</script>

then you can see any 4040 errors that your getting and figure out what you need to redirect to so any link love the url may have doesn't get lost

PS:

"Google Bombs" are when a number of sites all link to a certain site with exact anchor text (like carter) to cause the search giant to move a page onto a SERP where it would usually never show. Some of the bigger ones was choosing "im feeling lucky" for "French military victories" would show "did you mean French military defeats" but now anti-abortion e-protesters have caused abortion to show under murder SERP using SEO to make a statement about their political views. It will be interesting to see if Google takes any action to move it out of that position. When George Bush was Google bombed for "miserable failure" they removed the bomb so it may make a political statement based on what they do (or dont do)

Google Murder

Do you know of any other bombs that still exist?
Id love your help to get me to rank on the first page for "carter" that president is killing me with his domain authority. to help me drop a link for me on something you control
Isnt SEO funny? Ill let yall know when im ranking for "carter"

Heres how you could do the alt HTML for a java applet

ok so heres the news:

News for google wave

New Zealand Herald

Google Killing 'Wave' Over Lack of Interest? - 4 hours ago By SCOTT MORRISON SAN FRANCISCO—Google Inc. said Wednesday it is pulling the plug on its "Google Wave" collaborative messaging service due to a lack of user ... Wall Street Journal - 219 related articles » Eric Schmidt on the demise of Google Wave? - CNET - 49 related articles » Google drops Google Wave - Computerworld? - NSBNEWS.net

I believe this video is a good point for why it had a rough start... first they released their 90 min video to try and explain the very powerful yet complicated idea and it was just too big for people to understand implications of what they were saying. I was begging, pleading trying to find someone that hookup on the invites, remember they decided to release it like gmail where it was once again the ability to see an exclusive preview into the genius. Like the idea to rewrite the internet with todays knowledge they had reinvented email, and fixed our problems, we could update photo galleries with multiple people on our blog in real time with edits going straight to the web, Rosie the translator bot which promised that globalization would continue even faster was missing in the release. i mean now chrome auto translates for me but then where is the inline translator so i can leave my comments in broken french or whatever? yes you could argue i should just use their API and write it but theres only so much open source code you can write (j/k i dont write that much open source code but im making the effort to release more and be open with my cool new ideas) but im rambling a little with this stream of consciousness post so lets hit a couple more points

so it can make collaboration on a document a breeze and provide a reviewable history with branches for all versions. but its like three things but all I remember is how complicated it was... i mean its its a protocol its open it can practically do magic. Here are starts at some of my work on wave, i was trying to create an othello like game... it was a game that changed over time greatly and was also based on a board like chess so i thought it would be neat to be able to replay the games. alas i gave up after trying to get the styles to behave correctly and understand how to control state in the wave
and here is another example of one of few times i ever used wave... pretty dull convo so dont think theres any harm in sharing. It was cool to see real-time typing but all the bubbles and changes all got all caught up. i really think theres a specific type of job wave is good for and isnt really this realtime typing as they first pitched it. people only are writing all over something at the same time if its a get well soon card. all the other time we are reviewing the edits and trying to make our own so them pushing it as going realtime was wrong idea (in my opinion well this whole article is I guess) its history makes seeing and reviewing these edits easy its power isnt in realtime
its flow was too bad... now for collaborative document editing I think its a think of beauty and I even recommend it if people are all trying to work on website copy I mean the uses that are listed in this original video are incredible...
i never thought that key by key would be so fast over the wire... but i still feel it was sluggish... not because of network but the speed of JavaScript rendering and rebuilding the DOM tree... with chrome its all gotten much faster but when it was all first starting and there was a free for all on public waves you saw the scalability fail... there was just too much in the documents and they had to lock them down. the version im playing with now is much more polished and looks like they got UI designer in there just a little too late. but there were other things... it needed adoption by a large community of developers for it to grow, the potential for games is so cool because it saves the entire history, so things like chess are very cool... but It was trivial to cheat and I could just tear open the javascript and find the answers to the puzzles saved in the state info.

So will we ever pick it back up in the future i have no idea... i really think it was cool but the technology just isnt there yet for doing the type of realtime stuff they were first demonstrating. I really think its an awesome product and its sad that its adoption was so slow they had to kill it. Id love to hear your options, add them below or bother me on twitter in @cartercole

So im working on v3.0 of SEO Site Tools... its going to totally rock... rebuilt from the ground up it now takes advantage of the new abilities of HTML5... things like SQL Db from HTML5 spec to provide result caching and historical data on almost every metric. Tons of useful SEO metrics can be pulled out of Google Analytics data but its often hard to get it without using an external server to proxy the information or having to give your password... but with oAuth Authentication to your your copy of SEO Site Tools gets a secure token to your Google Analytics Data can easy be revoked and all processing and data storage happens right on your computer. But enough promoting here is one of the new data sources im introducing... RSS can bring many return visitors if a blog is regularly publishing so how many subscribers do they actually have? well ive hooked into the unpublished Google Reader API to create my own public API. Now SEO Site Tools or your mashup can use subscriber stats as another data source so the data you see here
can now be used anywhere... its up to you the API now spit out all the info... it returns JSON(P) but i think i may also add XML support later... for xml include output=xml and there is the optional callback= parameter to do JSONP

All code is on original post

]]>
thats going to call the function soMZcb(obj) with the following object as its first parameter
theres a TON of data they return but some of the coolest stuff are chart api urls to show you all the subscriber usage stats as well as total subscribers and when they read

if you have any question feel free to ask me id be happy to help... look for all this new data in SEO Site Tools v3.0 its on its way with even more speed and features than ever!

Its been reported like crazy everywhere else... (178,000 times in last 24 hrs) but what is it? Basically they made their index completely fluid where they can scale and insert at any time to their hearts content... you should read the official post on some of their little factoids... like  

In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. 

crazy stuff... and this is the prediction i made... that new layout would drop abound time of caffeine. i think i was close i think its something like 2 months and unless im told otherwise its been my understanding its been being tested and rolled out more and more this whole time (matt cutts said it didnt have anything to do with "may day" update )

so if you have any questions or anything to add please bother me below...

So now they have a much better UI in WMT that shows you all kinds of cool things and how your ranking in the all important SERP... i really like the improvement and the detailed CTR has given me an idea... some opt in anonymous gathering of SERP position info... there hasn't been much data lately that can show what average CTR for each position... by allowing SEO Site Tools users to allow cleaned position and CTR information to be sent back to my server i can compute an updated and true CTR for the average SERP. now im off to get married next week but as soon as i get back i see some code to do something along those lines...

so if you haven't see it yet you can scurry over to my SEO and Webmaster link dump and check out your new query data for yourself... im going to try to start posting more often even if its just these small little updates but ill get some nice meaty ones in there too stay tuned and thats for reading...

UPDATE:

Looks like the caffeine and layout updates have been pushed!

Original Post

ive talked about the new Google layout before and shown how with some cookies you can try it for yourself too :) that was last November and I theorized that the Caffeine update would be released with this new design. the suspected data center are listed below:

• 209.85.225.103
• 74.125.95.132
• 66.102.7.18
• 64.233.163.19
• 74.125.19.106
• 66.102.7.104

but i have still seen no news the update has gone out... then yesterday i jump onto Google and what do i find?
I was one of the users tested with the new layout without hacking my way onto the test. the design has changed some since I last saw it, there is now a city drop-down under the search box and a wonder wheel link with a few more options. I click around some but it was cool to be part of the actual test... from other tests ive heard they run the samples are taken from fractions of a percent of their traffic so it was cool to get on one of the test naturally... thats all for now ill post as soon as I know anything else about the update or new layout going live

Update II

we've added even more features to enhance SERPs read about the update with things like personal search status and Insights for search integrated into Webmaster Tools and SERPs of the major 3 search engines

Update

Well thats funny... @merrillg pointed out this is the data from the anchor text tab in the links section... makes sense its there considering it is anchor text but it shows in the keywords feed and not the keywords section which is where i got confused... I was wrong about it not being published anywhere else but this data is still pretty important... I cant believe I didn't notice that tab before... I guess I was distracted by the link data... sorry :(

Original

The keyword data that Google Webmaster Tools shows you is only part of the data that exists for your site... its up to 200 internal keywords, this comes from your pages and you can manipulate it based on the keywords you use in your content. But thats not whole story, what about that all important anchor text? Now of course you could go look at Open Site Explorer but wouldn't it be great to see what Google sees as your anchor text? I found the other keywords, the external keyword data hiding in a little known feed in webmaster tools... now aside from this guy who sounds a little like a consparicy nut and a short mention in the feed documentation nobody is talking about this data... Unfortunately i couldn't get pass through authentication so you have to put in your password but thanks to my new extension SEO Site Tools for Google Chrome you can navigate this data all from the safety of your favorite browser :)

heres how easy it is to get the data... open the tool from the Page Terms / Tools section

put in your login and it will present you a list of sites associated with that email addresses Google Webmaster Tools... choose one and you will see something like this
it will show you up to 100 external keywords... but what is this data that is published nowhere else any why is it so valuable? well lets take a look at bit of the list from my blog...

carter cole
carter cole developer
http blog cartercole com 2009 10 awesome syntax
16.52 del icio us easily embed tweets in
syntax
this feed is from my technology blog
embedding your google profile social icons
my technology blog
http blog cartercole com 2009
some code for asp and php

you know how sometimes when you do a search and look at Google's cache and see that "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page" thats what this keyword data is... its the external keywords Google has associated with your site... when I searched for some of the unique ones like "this feed is from my technology blog"
my site was the first result... i append that text with a link back to my site at the end of my rss feed so if someone republishes my content i can get credit for creating it... so the scrapers are sending that anchor text back to my site and whats even more interesting is that some of these keywords are from links that are no-followed so it might be that those links while not passing juice are passing something possibly even more valuable... their anchor text

the tool is still super beta and has some errors so please send me feedback to the email provided in the tool with any ideas/thoughts you may have about this very interesting data feed thats hiding in the webmaster tools data feed

again you need SEO Site Tools to get to this data and aside from doing some HTTP Gets yourself i know of no other tool that shows users this data

Update

i found some screen shots of the old tool on SearchEngineLand before it was removed

UPDATE:

now a Slashdot article has picked up this hate for IE and is asking how developers should handle people using Internet Explorer. the first comment

You could just let IE6 "try its best". And use a big red notice bar at the top with a link explaining it.

pretty much says it all wining a score of 5 very insightful...

Original:

There has been tons of news about the Zero-Day IE Flaw and then German government urged users to drop Microsoft's Internet Explorer with France later joining call against IE and now an email i received an email from Google Apps today that they will no longer be supporting as of March 1, 2010. Ive known about ie6nomore.com that distributes the code below... i think this is a big hit against Microsoft who has been getting flack from the industry for the browsers poor performance and numerous security issues

(note this message will display for all browsers so you can see the message)

so apparently the NO MORE IE6 movement is starting to pick up some followers... chrome is also gaining market share from IE and Firefox as the browser wars continue to wage on. i reproduced the email Google sent me below in case you want to read it. If you want to bother users who are still using the old browser too you can use the code here

Email from Google:

recently i did a post about a forum spamming attack that I analyzed and included some exports from my Google analytics data...to create this report I used a HTTPhelper i created that wraps the WinHTTP object in ASP that makes it really easy to make external requests and pull data from the Google Data API. Its easy to pull different segments and data if you use the data feed query explorer to create the request url (the second test.url in the code below) then just parse the xml and output as desired... unfortunately i haven't found a good asp oauth (recommend one to @cartercole)

the code is here but i also have included it below in this post...

this post contains code see it here

its easy to pull data from the other APIs but its sometimes hard to find the correct service string tp pass so heres my cheat sheet. im all for helping / suggestions so please leve your comments they are always appreciated (and so are links)

Google API	Service name
Google Analytics Data APIs	analytics
Google Apps Provisioning APIs	apps
Google Base Data API	gbase
Google Sites Data API	jotspot
Blogger Data API	blogger
Book Search Data API	print
Calendar Data API	cl
Google Code Search Data API	codesearch
Contacts Data API	cp
Documents List Data API	writely
Finance Data API	finance
Gmail Atom feed	mail
Health Data API	health weaver
Maps Data APIs	local
Picasa Web Albums Data API	lh2
Sidewiki Data API	annotateweb
Spreadsheets Data API	wise
Webmaster Tools API	sitemaps
YouTube Data API	youtube

and here is my HTTPhelper class... it does some cool stuff like build post data from a dictionary object and has all the stuff to do Authentication and setting headers for the request (much easier for me because i forget the methods and have to look them up) so if its helpfull for you please feel free to use it :) woohoo open source!


thanks for reading and i hope this helps you do more with the data APIs and get to your data more easily...

looks like Google finally has their realtime search running kinda like bings twitter search but better... and "Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our new partners that we're announcing today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago" (from Google blog post)

i tried some of the searches and didn't see anything new.

i got it working!

for this query: search for [realtime search] on experimental Google. @mattcutts re-tweeted a link to this page that seems to use realtime search more. this is the way cool video that shows it working (and its got cool music) ill be posting more here as i find out more so check back soon

UPDATE:

The dashboard below is great but if your trying to do some on-page analysis you need a good SEO Toolbar like my newly released SEO Site Tools to help you with your work... and if you interested in your external anchor text you should defiantly run on over are read about the keyword data I found in Webmaster Tools that is published nowhere else...

i find myself constantly wanting to have one place as a jumping point for me to review all my website stuff and the way chrome does bookmarks makes it where clicking to this post is actually faster(at least for me). but i figure this is one place to start from then i don't have to go looking through all the bookmarks. ill add more items here as i find more tools that i find useful for SEOs and Webmasters


SEO Site Tools is my Google Chrome Extension with over 21,000 users 
im sure you would love it too... try it today

Google seems like they have a new flavor of search that they are testing (im assuming they are doing some A/B test for some percentage of users) and seeing how people like the new version. to see it for yourself go to google.com and paste this javascript into the address bar and refresh...

here is what you should see...
im just speculating but Google has just finished testing the new caffeine version of search so this may go along it. here is what the search feature looks like
aside from a cleaner, revamped logo there are little icons for the different types of search... images,video and news but also the ability to only search blogs or forums.
 the javascript code above saves a cookie so if you want to turn off this new version of search all you have to do is kill the PERF cookie for google.com and it will click back to normal... so thats the new layout they are testing ill be updating this article as i know more :)

so i was reading the google analytics blog as i often do and they have this awesome new tool for visualizing your websites analytics data and keywords so lets get into what these way cool tools do (the tool is here but read the article cuz i spent some time on it)

first at the bottom you get a timeline so you can see the volume of traffic your site has been receiving and colorize this ribbon timeline by bounce rate. its cool to be able to see how your content starts being read more or single view articles turn it more red
this is also cool because you can view what pages drive the most traffic and how the bounce rate changes from page to page (if your colorblind thats cool too they got a button to fix the contrast for yall)
you can see a little better here in this shot how the bounce rate changes from page to page and how some pages are much more popular then others. heres the little video that they put out to demonstrate the tool.



then they have this cool keyword visualization tool that shows keywords and how they relate to each other and a few different options to color by. i like either time spent on site or bounce rate to see what words seem to keep peoples interest longer or drive them away faster
you can see how some keywords are red and threw more bounces and then my linkbait for embedding your Google profile social icons and the Google profile badge have green text showing that they had visitors staying for a much longer period (this graph is colored by time on page) and again the cool demo video the juice guys put out



here is the link to the tool i hope you find it useful and liked the article... don't forget to re-tweet about it and let others know!

edit: ok so bing already kinda has a twitter search that it plans to improve on but like Google tweets still aren't on main results page but Yahoo (who props to them i like their new stuff) plans to change that announcing that they will be showing tweets in results soon this will hopefully help yahoo gain some ground back as they are struggling keeping their part of the search pie. Google social search experiment is the closest thing google has for social media search so far



the title says it all i was reading my daily rss and this clicked across...
Official Google Blog: RT @google: Tweets and updates and search, oh my!

so Google is going to be joining the twitter bandwagon. but wheres the link? Bing looks like they are ahead of the game already with their Bing Twitter Search it has a small tag cloud but little more im sure google will do it better with longer history but i wonder if we will see ReTweet tools built into searches with the ability to pass oAuth to Twitter and tweet from inside our searches. if it was an unobtrusive menue id think it was great. what are your thoughts?

I subscribe to the Google Webmaster Blog and i saw this click by in my reader this morning and i wanted to do a quick blurb about these new features in google webmaster tools as well as the other webmaster tools that are out there and what they can be used for so lets get into it...

Google Webmaster Tools

ok so google has some really great stuff in their tools but lets real quick talk about the features they added today. First they added the ability to Fetch as GoogleBot so you can see how your page looks to the crawler.

heres how it pulled blog.cartercole.com

This is how Googlebot fetched the page.
URL: http://blog.cartercole.com/
Date: Tue Oct 13 07:46:33 PDT 2009
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Expires: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:14:43 GMT
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:14:43 GMT
Cache-Control: public, max-age=0, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate
Last-Modified: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:08:25 GMT
ETag: "02afcfab-2808-4275-8274-6da1b3584a07"
Content-Encoding: gzip
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-XSS-Protection: 0
Content-Length: 17486
Server: GFE/2.0

-cut for length -

you will also now be notified when your page has been infected which basically looks up your pages automatically with Googles safe browsing API

manual lookup: http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://blog.cartercole.com

here are some other options / tools you get...

• changing GoogleBot crawl speed
• the major keywords google found for your site
• manage sitelinks for your site (if you get them)
• a list of links to your site (not complete)
• much more id defiantly check it out

and the API docs for google webmaster tools

Yahoo Site Explorer

ok generally yahoo site explorer will give you the best link list of any other free tool i know and you can get this cool badge



to display the links to your pages and thats about all it does right now
also yahoo site explorer API docs

Bing Webmaster Center

ok bings back up so ill finsih my post about them asap

oops looks like the Bing Webmaster Center is having some trouble... They are back up now but if you care this is what they were showing for a couple days...
yall should get on that this guy has already mentioned it

please leave comments with questions / comments / concerns id love to hear from you

This post is still evolving and it will be the complete list of Google Easter eggs. Ive added the new searhc hacks as well as some other some will remain unlisted because they dont work anymore

Man this page is getting long... they are really having fun with the code lately. their newest easter egg is if you search for "world cup" on google you see a slightly different Gooooooogle :) it took me a sec to catch it but see for yourself below (no clue how long it will stay up)


there have been many updates to this page over time so scroll, scroll, scroll and see all the cool stuff hidden in their code. some things are no longer live but ive saved copies to my server so you can still get the enjoyment of seeing them

UPDATE:

Ok this is like one of the best its the pacman game on the logo. apparently this game took up over

4.82 million hours

read about it

Play Pacman

April Fools!

and SERPS are returning strange time results...

Happy New Year! Another easter egg was published where when you click "im feeling lucky" with no query you saw a countdown until today when you see this cool happy new year animation

ive immortalized the page... 2009 New Years Egg

Click here to see a video of the countdown...


Edit:
there wasn't much meat to the post so i thought id add some more easter eggs i was able to round up. programmers will leave little tricks or games hidden in the code. eventually through word of mouth these secret codes get released and become part of public knowledge. Google as a bunch of hidden secrets here are just a few...

Here are a bunch of different flavors of Google search

• Hacker Search
• Klingon Search
• Pirate Search
• Bork Search
• Elmer Search

Some neat things for the calculator to tell you

• Number of horns on a unicorn
• Once in a blue moon
• The answer to life, the universe, and everything

Search for ascii art (ascii google logo)

Search for Anagram (returns nag a ram)

Search for recursion (returns recursion again)

Search "Do a barrel roll" (spins the screen)

Search for "tilt" (has a tilted ui)

Translating the word table from spanish to english

Google Special Searches (like the one for uncle sam)

Teddy Bears in Picasa
In Picasa: Just Press Ctrl + Shift + Y to see them appear!

Google Earth Flight Simulator:

To enter the flight simulator mode, press Ctrl + Alt + A ( + Option + A on the Mac).

here are the Google Earth Flight Simulator Shortcuts you will probably need them

so i subscribe to @mattcutts because im a nerd and i just saw his video here about how to get the reader easter egg but its in a video so i thought id steal some thunder and make the post as text so here it is. while on reader the code is

up up down down left right left right b a

i made an animated gif if you dont get it (feel free to steal it)
it then makes this way cool changes like hearts for your like buttons and then does cool animations when you click them its kinda geeky fun. you also get the bonus of a reader ninja to watch over your rss items which will all read to contain 30 items a homage to the original contra cheat

if you unlike it breaks your heart
but if you do like it you get bunches of love :)
and a cool ninja


Edit II:
happy Halloween!
We have a new easter egg hidden in Google now for Halloween its at the bottom of the robots.txt hook here at

Bottom of Google's robots.txt (it was changed back this is a mirror) you can also see the big G's robots.txt change log

Disallow: /voice/media/
Disallow: /voice/shared/
Disallow: /app/updates

User-agent: Kids
Disallow: /tricks
Allow: /treats

Sitemap: http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/profiles-sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.google.com/hostednews/sitemap_index.xml
Sitemap: http://www.google.com/ventures/sitemap_ventures.xml

Edit III: its my birthday dec 18!

i logged into my google profile page and found this egg myself
so be sure to check your page on your b-day... they are allot smoother when you see them i just animated some screenshots

if anybody knows any other google easter eggs id love to add them to this list