How’s your mirror reading? The real, original Googleism site reports of All Too Flat’s excellent mirror site of Google. And when they say mirror, they mean it. Go practice your mirror reading skills!

The site is used widely in countries where Google is banned (like China), and I can see how the chineese might find it just as easy to read as the original.

Also, if you try to search, you will have to enter the search phrase backwards. If you would try a search for N!kkes Index your would have to enter xednI sekk!N. That’s one of the great answers in the elgooG faq.

Note about Googleism

I’m sorry, about stealing the term Googleism for this category. But Googleism is such a wonderful word for what I, and many other webmasters spend to much time thinking about. How do our sites rank on Google (and other search engines)? Lately Google has been acting strangely, and since we can’t know for sure what’s going on, we guess and rant att SEO forums like SEOchat.com.

Now, get over to the Google mirror, and don’t forget to donate, they need to cover their bandwidth costs with all those chineese searches going on.

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Summer!

The weather in Stockholm is just beautiful right now, temperatures around 25°C, warm evenings, the sun doesn’t set until after 11 PM. And still I’m crazy enough to leave for Mallorca.

The rest of this summer is booked solid with work, and to ensure the rest I definitely need, we decided to rent a house somewhere around the Mediterranean.

After a few searches in France and Italy, we found the beautiful house shown on the right. it belongs to two swedes living close to Felanitx, on the east cost of Mallorca. The plane tickets where booked online, all the negotiations with Jutta and Pegen Lindqvist (yes, he has the same surename as I do) was handled over email, and a car was booked via the web.

Now that everything is settled, I have decided to leave my iBook at home and have a disconnected vacation. My crappy Ericsson mobile had a battery burnout or something the day before yesterday, so I won’t even have that as a means of communication.

I’ll rest, read that stack of books that I haven’t found time to read, play and swim with the children and spend lots of time with Lena.

Back in July. Till then.

Cheers,
Nikke

Followup in Swedish:
Hyra hus på Mallorca

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Every day there are a couple of Google and Yahoo! searches for the phrase “i hate george bush” showing up in my search engine referrals pages. It’s not very surprising that those who perform this search end up here, since both Google and (Google driven) Yahoo! places one of my t-shirt pages, titled “I still hate George Bush“, in the first position, and the same page is listed on top when searching on Yahoo! I’m somewhat flattered by the positioning, but I must admit that I have been wondering why anyone might do such a search. Could it be a possy of right wing christian fundamentalists coming after me, or the CIA?

Today, I think I found out why. The probable cause is an article by Joshua Rey, a British blogger with quite an interesting site. His excellent article is titled “Why we hate George“. His article contains this passage:

It’s no exaggeration to say that George Bush is more widely and deeply hated in Britain and the Western World than Saddam Hussein is. And that’s even though Saddam has home advantage, as it were, in that he’s a fit object for hatred by both sides. If you punch up “I hate George Bush” on your favourite search engine you’ll get a good deal more links than with “I hate Saddam Hussein”. And you’ll also notice that a lot of the Saddam links are to articles about George Bush saying “I hate…”

None of the links from Joshua’s article puts this site in a noticable position. So people must have done the search on their own, and forgetting the surrounding quotes from the article or editing them out deliberately to see what happens they have instead reached my page. At least that is what I hope has happened.

Since Joshua wrote his article Google has spidered his site, and placed it as number 2 and 4 in the two suggested searches above. But why is my I still hate George Bush page on top? There are several reasons, and here follows a few free SEO tips:

1. The page has the words in the search string in the page title (window bar)
2. The headline is tagged as h1, meaning really, really, important to Google
3. On the index page, there was a link tagged as h2, meaning really important to Google. This link has dissapeared with time, but is still present on the t-shirt index page
4. There is another link with the exact same wording in the right menu bar, wich is visible while viewing another of my t-shirt pages
5. At the bottom of every page I have 30 links to “recently added items”. Thus, a link with the exact same wording as the page title was to be found on over 400 pages when Google spidered the site
6. My page probably has a higher page rank than the other pages found

The results will change

Now that I have written and published this article, that in fact, and contrary to the t-shirt page, contains the exact phrase “I hate George Bush”, things will change. It might take a month or so, but eventually this page should pick up a position on those Google searches. Just wait and see. That’s the fun part about writing about Google search results. You know for a fact that the facts will change, and just by writing about a search phrase you are actively driving the change.

And, if you are at all interested in the t-shirt, it still might be for sale at TShirtHell.com. Just click here to find out.

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