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Do Macs get Virus's? 12th April 2012 1:38 PM
“Eerrr:
news.drweb.com/show/?i=2341&lng=enDoctor
The myth that Macs can't be hacked is just not true.”

Good job we've got Google Translator, that page was in Russian, apparently it's a Chicken pie recipe

Mac's do seem pretty bomb proof, and some common sense seems to take care of 99% of issues.

Most of the threats come from plug-ins and add-ons, like for browsers, which are usually distributed outside official app stores, says Jamz Yaneza, a threat research manager at Trend Micro.

"If its not in the Mac App or App stores, just don't download it."

The Ten Most Dangerous Mac Viruses

In this post XP world, I'm actually considering a Mac myself
Moving website to a new URL 12th April 2012 1:15 PM
“Having one big sitemap will do more harm than good on a big site, so I'd have separate ones for listings and pages”

Yup in the UK, we have sitemap_index.xml and then multitudes of site maps broken up into 50k segments, but this approach failed in the US, so like I say, prob have to put another server in
Google Search Results change? 12th April 2012 12:12 PM
“Regarding publisher mark up, do you have more information about it? That is interesting ”

Yup, here's Googles help page on it:
Google+ Pages - Webmaster Tools Help

And below you can see the results from our home page, from the rich snippets test tool. Although publisher verified, and it used to show our logo in the tool (just noticed it's stopped displaying, not sure why), but currently doesn't show the logo in the serps. Guessing it will do eventually, just a question of time

Rich Snippets Testing Tool - MLS results
Moving website to a new URL 11th April 2012 2:03 PM
“I couldn't see a SE sitemap... Do you have one?
It should help Google with knowing what to index and increasing the time a little.”

There was a technical hitch with the SE sitemap. We set it up, and it took 28 hours to run and consumed the servers resources!

We run the sitemap on our UK site daily, and it take about an hour, but the US database is huge.

Personally I'm not 100% convinced about the need for a google sitemap, as according to WMT, we are averaging 200,000 pages a day in the crawl stats. But as the traffic begins to grow, we are looking at the option of putting in another server that will hold the master database, run any cron jobs and complete the sitemap, leaving a slave database to actually run the site.

All ideas at the moment though
Exit Strategy - do you have one? 11th April 2012 1:20 PM
So you launched your business, grafted night and day, year after year and you now have a healthy viable company.

So whats next?

Do you have a master plan to build your business up and get bought out by a big fish, or do you keep running it until you retire then look at selling up? Maybe you hope one of your offspring will take over the reigns?

Does anyone have a planned exit strategy they want to share, or is it something you haven't even considered with the day to day stress of running a business?
Google Search Results change? 11th April 2012 12:21 PM
“Hi Steve,

Reviews is actually a snippet that Google looks to roll out as well.. Based on market study that online reviews does act similarly as personal recommendations.”

Cheers Wingman, yep have been using rich snippets for some time, and we have definitely had a positive reaction ever since we started showing reviews, although it does increase overhead moderating reviews and dealing with negative complaints

Interesting to see how Google is incorporating more rich snippets. It looks like hcard still isn't being used, although we are marked up for it, and still waiting for Publisher markup to start showing (ie showing business logos rather than author and G+ profile pics).
It's an interesting debate albeit quite an old blog post now, but still relevant.

Interesting point he makes that subscribers to pension schemes went down when there was a lot of choice as people got confused.

From a business point of view, in the online directory world, I looked to the market leaders when I was designing the functionality of My Local Services, and the thing that struck me, particularly with yell.com at the time (2005) was how ridiculously complex their rate card and listing options were.

So we decided to keep things as simple and basic as we could, and we still do today.

Going back to the supermarket example, at home me and the missus tried online shopping with our local supermarket, but we found we just ordered the exact same things each week (admittingly the supermarket conveniently shows a list of previous things you have bought, and you simply tick the same ones).

Now I prefer actually going to the supermarket, and trying to vary our shopping.

So maybe under the covers we are all sheep?
misrepresentation 11th April 2012 10:59 AM
Is this one of these multitude of daytime TV "have you been miss-sold PPI"

Will confess to not quite understanding what all the fuss is about with PPI, but I remember always saying no to PPI when I took a loan out, mainly because it saved about
Here's the latest batch of Google updates, which got rolled out in March.

Google Search Updates

There's a lot of techno babble, and nothing really stands out this time, but it looks like emphasis is continuing on "freshness" ie updated web content, so get your pages updated!

I've got to be honest though, it does give an insight to the average behind the scenes Googler if you look at some of the project names and descriptions...

My personal favourite:

Simplification to Images Universal codebase. [launch codename "Galactic Center"] We
Social Network Traffic Generation 10th April 2012 4:46 PM
“just need convincing that any financial outlay I may make, will fill my bank account with wads of cash”

I'm not convinced personally, do it yourself
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