I was looking for a list of blog publishing platforms and thought Google Sets, a little-known Google labs experiment that takes a list of items as input and outputs a larger set of items of the same kind, might be useful.
I gave it WordPress, pivot, geeklog and greymatter as input and got a pretty comprehensive list of blog publishing platforms.
Google did a pretty good job with that, quite impressive.
The Scotland Yard has shutdown over 1000 sites that claimed to sell designers goods for cheap prices.
The sites main source for suckers… hmm, I mean, traffic was Google searches for terms like “discount ugg boots” (look what happened to the SERP – it has around trizillion DMCA complaints).
The site owners seems to get ranked for those kind of terms for organic traffic using some very shady link building techniques (links to Yahoo’s linkdomain results, here’s Google link results) to make sales.
Most of the links are from Chinese websites, which is quite dubious for a site in English that managed to rank very successfully in google.co.uk for highly-competitive terms.
The links themselves are also very suspicious. I mean, look at it:
All of those invisible links (they’re inside a marquee container with 1px height) are stuffed above the opening <HTML> tag of the document. Can it be more obvious?
Most of the links seems to come from sites that were hacked (some Chinese government sites, too), probably in an automated manner that put those links into every HTML file it could find.
What does it take for Google to notice something is wrong? if it didn’t notice such obvious spammy link building techniques that was done using hacking, I think the SEO world is giving Google too much credit.
I found CSSJanus couple days ago, an online tool that attempts to change CSS from left-to-right to right-to-left, by changing properties like text-align, float and direction from “left” to “right”, “ltr” to “rtl” (and vice-versa), dealing with CSS properties that has “something: top left bottom right” (like margin: 10px 5px 1px 3px), and also some less obvious properties that effects text/layout direction/alignment.
It does quite a good job – converting LTR to RTL is 90% done (and completely done in some cases) after using it, there are some changes that must be made manually sometimes – but starting off with this is a great start who saves most of the job.
CSSJanus was written by Lindsey Simon (who works at Google) in Python. More information can be read at the Google Opensource Blog and the code can be obtained at Google Code.
A video showing the developer, explaining about it and showing it in action: