Beyond clear-cut blackhat webspam, the second-biggest category of spam that Google deals with is hacked sites. The most common reaction we hear from webmasters is “The problem is with the Googl...
I haven’t given an update on my 30 day challenges in, like, forever. So here goes:- In 2011, I paused my 30 day challenges to do a “six month challenge”: training to run a marathon....
Updated: Okay, there’s a new plan. My wife is having surgery to put a screw in her foot, and the operation is two days before my panel. I really can’t leave her to come to SXSW. We’...
A couple months ago, I wrote this about SOPA: SOPA galvanized the tech community, from start-ups to venture capitalists to the largest web companies. SOPA was an unexpected shock and a wake-up call. ...
I’ve been reading a lot of the coverage of the Search plus Your World launch and I wanted to share my story and then clarify something.I love to stay up until early in the morning playing Werewolf. I...
Larry Lessig has a new book called Republic, Lost which discusses the corrupting influence of money on politics. I would highly recommend the book, because it gets to the heart of why things so many ...
A lot of the time, I dispel misconceptions by leaving comments on blogs. That works great, except for the rare occasion when someone pretends to be me and leaves a rude, fake, or otherwise untrue blo...
When I did my blog post about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) last week, things looked quite grim. The fight isn’t over, but there’s been a lot of great developments in the last few day...
(This is post is my personal opinion.)Normally I don’t like to ask people for help, but I could really use your assistance. If you’ve ever watched one of my webmaster videos, or if I̵...
For my next 30 day challenge, I’ll be growing a mustache to raise awareness and money for men’s health issues, and specifically prostate cancer research. Men of search and SEO, please joi...
For Halloween this year I asked people on Google+ what I should be for Halloween, and someone suggested going as the blackhat stick man from xkcd. You know, this guy:That sounded like a good challeng...
I made a Portal turret for my Halloween pumpkin! I was trying to think of things to carve: vampire Android? R2-D2? Zoidberg? Then I thought: I could do a character from Portal 2! I was going to carve...
Okay, I’m starting up a new 30 day challenge: I’m going to eat vegan for the next 30 days. That means no meat, dairy, or eggs. I’m curious to see how it will go.
Even though this year is nowhere near finished, a lot of people at Google are already thinking about things to launch next year. So I wanted to put the question out: what cool things would you like t...
I’ve been out of town (hiking in Yosemite and traveling to the East Coast) for two out of the last three weeks, so things are a bit crazy. Besides the usual email overload, there’s a proj...
For the next week or so, I’m going to be hiking in the back country of Yosemite. That’s assuming that my legs hold up: after finishing the San Francisco Marathon at the end of July, my kn...
This submission round is now closed–thanks!Sometime soon I’m planning to record some new webmaster videos. I created a Google Moderator page where you can post video suggestions and vote ...
It’s summertime, so I’m looking for a bunch of fun books to read. I just ordered two books by John Scalzi (Fuzzy Nation and The God Engines), two books by Dean Karnazes because I’m ...
Each year I try to settle on a small set of big goals for the year. Last year my big goal was to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. This year, I settled on 2-3 goals I wanted to achieve:1. Go skydiving. I was wi...
I answered an interesting rel=canonical question over email today and thought I’d blog about it. If you’re not familiar with rel=canonical read these pages first. Then watch this video ab...
This week brings the Google I/O conference. That page has a QR code that lets you install the official Google I/O Android app for the conference.The conference has a ton of great talks scheduled. You...
I’m always a fan of Googlers doing more communication and more videos, so when some fellow search quality folks made a video about working at Google, I said I’d be happy to post it:You ca...
Steven Levy just wrote a new book about Google called In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. It succeeds the most on the “how Google thinks” part–if you want t...
I wanted to mention that Google’s search quality team is hiring. We work on everything from synonyms and spell correction to core ranking, UI changes, evaluation, and yes–even webspam. Th...
If you have a lot of urls that you don’t want in Google anymore, you can make the pages return a 404 and wait for Googlebot to recrawl/reindex the pages. This is often the best way. You can als...
It’s been a while since I reported on any 30 day challenges, so it’s time for an update.30 days of Being ThankfulI knew that January, February, and March would be crazy, including a bunch...
I’m going to be traveling for the next few weeks. I’ll be at three different conferences:February 28th – March 4th: TED. I’ll be attending, plus doing a short (three-minute) a...
Google just launched two-factor authentication, and I believe everyone with a Google account should enable it.Two-factor authentication (also known as 2-step verification) relies on something you kno...
I sometimes hear people say “Remember when Google launched and the results were so good? Google didn’t have any spam back then. Man, I wish we could go back to those days.” I know w...
If you want to post some JPEG pictures but you’re worried that they might have metadata like location embedded in them, here’s how to strip that data out.First, install exiftool using thi...
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