Stephen's Thoughts » Google

Google Car on the N3

Stephen Downey — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 07:54:14 +0000

On the way into work today I saw the google street car, used to record images for Google Street maps.

Google Car on the N3 in Dublin

Why is VrtIreland.com being penalised by Google?

Stephen Downey — Tue, 20 May 2008 14:37:48 +0000

I launched my VRT Ireland website last month and up until the start of this month I was getting great support with an average of 100 unique visitors a day. this may not sound like a lot but when your average visitors suddenly plummets to between 9 and 15 it was a lot. I have noticed that if you search for “Vrt Ireland” in Google it will not longer lists my website. Up until now it was always in the top 5 results for this search and it was teh most popular search term used to find the site.

You can see in the Image below from StatCounter.com the dramatic effect this has had to the site.

I have looked at the Google Guidelines to see if I can see why the site has been penalised but the only thing that I found were hidden links in the wordpress theme that I have been using. I have removed any link that I found embedded in the theme but the site is still being penalised.

As you can see from the stats above, the site was first removed from Google a few days from the 30th of April until the 5th of May. Matt Cutts site recommends that you fill in the “Request reconsideration” form to get Google to relist your site. I filled in the request reconsideration form at this point and it was back in the first page of results again but a few days later it was removed again. When filling out the form I explained the situation and even asking for feedback as to why the site is being penalised so I can rectify the situation if there is something I am doing wrong but I have not received any feedback from them at all.

I would really appreciate any feedback or pointers to getting my site back up the Google ranking.

Sold out to Google

Stephen Downey — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 18:02:33 +0000

I have decided to add Google Adsense to my site. I had a lot of hesitation in doing it but after adding the ads to the page banner it doesn’t look too bad. It was actually pretty much pretty pain free to do. I just applied to Google last week and once the verification email came through, it was just a matter of logging into the Adsense site and choosing the type of ad I wanted. This is the best place to start:

The code is then generated and it’s a copy and paste job to place it in the relevant page on the site. I did look at the Adsense plugin from Acme Technologies but as I just wanted to add it to my banner at the moment I didn’t see the need for it yet. If I decide to go down the line of embedding ads into posts then I might look at using it.

Has anyone recommendations on other Adsense plugins that are worth looking at?

Google RSS Reader

Stephen Downey — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 13:25:59 +0000

Thank you Tom for pointing me to the new release of Google RSS Reader. Up until now, I have been using a pretty old desktop reader called Abilon. I have always found it pretty good so I never looked for an online alternative.

I just imported my opml file from Abilon into Google, so I am going to give their RSS reader ago for a while. On first impressions, it looks pretty good and could be a strong contender.

Google Release AJAXSLT

Stephen Downey — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 08:11:55 +0000

Google have just released AJAXSLT.

…an implementation of XSL-T in JavaScript, intended for use in fat web pages, which are nowadays referred to as AJAX applications.

I'm looking forward to playing around with this. I have being doing a lot of work with XSLT lately so it will be interesting to see how Google have married this with AJAX.