Dave asked me to do a quick review of Google Related. Basically it’s a little bar that sits on the bottom of your browser providing you with related information. It’s quite handy, you can download it here.

For example, say I visit www.theolddeanery.co.uk then here is what kind of information I get:

Map

If you rollover this image on Google Related a useful Google Map pops out so you can see where the business is located.

Reviews

If you rollover this tab it pops out with a few reviews and you can click through to find more reviews from other sites.

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Google has recently released Real Name Verification for Google +. At the moment it is only open to celebrities, but they plan on rolling it out to everyone according to the announcement by Wen-Ai Yu on the Google Plus Updates Channel on YouTube (see video embedded below):

If you watch the video and then have a think about what this may mean. First of all, one of the biggest problems on Twitter, is they really do have a problem with spammers – a high percentage of followers appear to be spam accounts. With Google requiring everyone to be verified they will actually reduce spam a lot. On a more sinister note though, there is something creepy about having your social profile verified, but maybe we’ll get less trolls and flaming…

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Well as if it wasn’t hard enough to get your site onto the first page of the Google search rankings, things have just taken a whole new twist, the online search engine giants opting to increase the amount of space that a sites ‘sitelinks’ take up on the page.

With former sitelinks only filling a small area of the page up in the form of smaller text links, an alteration to the way in which Google want to present the links has now left websites that are looking to achieve first page rankings with a whole new obstacle.

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In less than 2 weeks, Becky & I will be heading to San Francisco for SES where I will be speaking in a few sessions. I’m really looking forward to going back to SES San Francisco this year and it promises to be a great show.

The sessions that I’m speaking on are :

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Google announced their new Page Speed Service today, I won’t deny it, I was quite excited (sad I know). So I rushed over and started reading about it, they linked to a comparison test, awesome, as you can imagine nearly everyone in the room decided to run the comparison of how much they could speed up their website.

Unfortunately it seemed every single SEO in the World must have had the same idea, the site was showing a 23 minute wait!!! (In fact, later on they added a message to apologise for the long waits because of the Page Speed Service launch)

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Johnson Press, the group that owns The Scotsman have been reported to have announced that they have appointed former BBC new media head Ashley Highfield as their new chief executive.

Highfield is a recognised name within the media world due to his role as a vice president of Microsoft, most notable being his responsibility for UK customer and online business for Microsoft’s largest content portal, MSN.

Mr Highfield will be assuming his role with the newspaper group once current chief executive John Fry stands down from his role on 31^st October and with his experience as a director of new media and technology for the BBC, the partnership seems destined for success.

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I have always liked to be able to have quick access to a number of features that are available to me through my Google toolbar and being a Mozilla Firefox user the ease of adding in the Google tool bar has made that possible but after caving into the numerous requests to update my browser.

The decision to update the Firefox browser to Firefox 5 seemed to have removed my Google toolbar from existence, something that I knew I would have to look deeper into, after all, nobody likes too much change do they?

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A while ago I started seeing some very odd links appearing, ones that looked far too natural, it appeared as though the majority of them had the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin, developed by Joost de Valk, with the “Track outbound clicks & downloads” selected.

So I started to wonder if some how these sites had been hacked using a vulnerability somewhere in the plugin. I had a look through the code until I got to the function in charge of tagging the outbound links, although I could read the PHP code, I don’t really have much knowledge about XSS and SQL injection and stuff like that, so I asked James to have a look (the guy that likes to break things).

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