Cranial Soup

Google Accounts Are Restricted to People Age 18+

2011-09-01T10:56:00.001-04:00

It seems a lot of parents are very upset about their children under age 13 having their Google accounts deleted. They seem to think that since Google didn't explicitly ask for an age at the time the account was created, that their young children could have one. It wasn't until Google Plus was launched that they learned differently.

Children are having their Google accounts deleted, Picasa photos, emails to Grandma, school work in Google Docs, and all, for violating the age restriction, when they enter their age when joining the Google Plus social networking service.

The Google Terms of Service clearly states in Section 2.3

2.3 You may not use the Services and may not accept the Terms if (a) you are not of legal age to form a binding contract with Google, or (b) you are a person barred from receiving the Services under the laws of the United States or other countries including the country in which you are resident or from which you use the Services.

While most websites have a clause in their contract barring use by those under 13 years of age (there is a law restricting that), Google has chosen to word their Terms of Service in such a way that it bars any US resident under the age of 18, because minors under 18 can not legally form a binding contract with anyone.

Let this be a warning not only for those under age 13, but for those age 13-17, as well. Google may delete your account and everything in it, if they find out that you lied about your age by agreeing to their Terms of Service. If you are under 18 and have a Google account, yes, you did lie to get it.

Always read the Terms of Service. If you don't, it could come back to bite you later.

How can you rank well on search engines, without fussing with SEO?

2010-07-02T16:07:00.002-04:00

If you want to rank well on search engines without fussing with SEO, then pretend it's 1995 and there are no search engines that will list you, because you can't afford the high fees for inclusion.

Now, how are you going to, in an ethical way, make people want to visit your site, stay awhile and explore, come back often, and share what they find with others?

Your site should work well and not be broken.

Make sure all links to pages on and off your site actually lead to where you want them to.
Make sure you don't have broken images.
Make sure the content loads correctly in all the major browsers.
Make sure your pages adhere to W3C standards and they validate.

Your site should be designed for people.

Make sure your template is pleasing to the eye and not painful to look at.
Make sure it has good navigation and is easy to discover and find the content your site has to offer. Good use of sidebar links to important stuff. Links to similar content pages on your site.
Make everything within 2-3 clicks of the main page.
Break up huge amounts of text with related images to help the eyes stay focused where they should be,
Your site should load fast. Use real thumbnails for your images and not just merely resizing with HTML.
Don't overwhelm people with ads.
Remove spam promptly.

Your site should invite people back.

Give your visitors multiple ways to be notified and access new content (RSS feeds, email subscription, follow on Twitter, a Facebook fan page.) Make sure new content reaches them wherever it's convenient to them.

Your site should encourage sharing.

Make sure you don't use frames. Every page should have its own unique URL that shows in the address bar.
Use Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Google Reader/Buzz buttons.

Your content should be unique and of high quality.

Don't copy other people's stuff, write your own.
Check your spelling and grammar.
Put thought into what you write.
If you post YouTube videos, add some unique commentary that doesn't exist anywhere else on the web.
For every sentence you quote from another source, write 3-5 of your own. So if you quote 3 sentences, you will have to write 9-15 to balance it. Don't quote in every article. Don't quote any more than what is necessary, less is much better than more.
If you are supplying information, make sure it is complete, accurate, and up to date.
Write about stuff people will care about enough to want read it. Don't write about what you had for lunch unless your a restaurant critic.
If your site is a blog, link out in every article to quality related content. Linking out to pages on other good blogs has the bonus in that it may earn you a trackback link on that page, or at the very least attract the eyes of the author of that blog who will stop by and check out who is linking to him.

Interact with your visitors and make them feel important.

Allow commenting and respond to comments as soon as humanly possible.
Give your visitors a means of contacting you privately, either by supplying an email address or a contact form.

Spread the word.

Become a highly respected member of a large community with similar content.. Put your link in your profile and signature. If people respect you, they will click the links.
Reach out to blogs by reading and participating in discussions. Never leave a "nice post" comment. Put some thought & work into your responses. You want to catch the attention of other readers and the bloggers themselves, and make them ask "Wow! Who is this guy?" so they will click your name and visit the site it links to. Always make your comments increase the value of that bloggers page.
Participate on social media sites and interact with people in a positive way. Get conversations going. Again, you want to make people ask "Who is that guy?" which will lead to them checking out who you are (your profile) and where you came from (your site).
Find an ad network that gives away free advertising. (I happen to really like Project Wonderful, personally)

If you do all of the above, quality inbound links will happen on their own and between the fact that others think high enough about you and your site to write about it and link to it, combined with having a great site, structurally, that makes it easy for spiders to find your content, you will get the ranking in the search engines that you deserve.

Above all, be patient, work hard, and don't engage in any "evil tricks". Good ranking does not happen overnight.

A question to ponder

2009-11-14T01:36:00.002-05:00

I picked this question out of a list of 140 Google interview questions and thought I'd post it along with my answer.

Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife. Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has. The village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife who can prove that her husband is unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of the village would never disobey this law. One day, the queen of the village visits and announces that at least one husband has been unfaithful. What happens?

My answer: The queen is executed.

Here is why...

Each woman, including the queen knows this truth: If all the men that they know about die, (assuming the innocence of their own husband) there will be at most only one man left in the village. They also know it is possible that all the men in the village will die, leaving no men at all for any of them.

Each woman in the village is faced with this question: Knowing that at least 98 husbands have cheated (the queen doesn't know about the king's infidelity and the women all assume the innocence of their own husbands), why would the queen announce this unless she wanted all of them to die? Would it be better for the village to kill off so many men or for the women never to tell each other about what their husbands have been doing?

In the end, they come to the conclusion that the only woman that deserves to be alone for the rest of her life is their evil queen. But if they all go and tell her who her husband, the king, has been sleeping with, she will see that they will not tell each other the truth and have instead plotted against her. And after killing the king, in retaliation, there is a strong possibility she may tell them all that their husbands have cheated.

To save their village, they decide not to tell each other and not tell the queen about the king. Instead they tell their husbands what evil plans the queen had in mind for the village. Then angered, knowing their queen is dangerous and unfit to rule, the whole village gets together and kills her. The king, knowing the entire village has just saved his life, doesn’t try to stop them and is forever grateful to the women of the village.

Do you agree with my answer?

Rank Spanked

2008-05-19T10:03:00.004-04:00

I have had a few of those freebie .tk domain names for quite awhile pointing to a few sites of mine, that back when I started those sites, the hosting of them was quite unstable.

I acquired them so that visitors would always be able to find my sites, even if the hosting and real url changed frequently. Those sites were originally hosted on free servers or in the case of one of them, a single page on my ISP's server. I couldn't afford anything better at the time and those sites weren't created to make money, so they weren't going to pay for themselves.

Much to my surprise, the single page site hosted on my ISP's server became quite popular, quite quickly, making it to the front page of digg. This was followed by people linking to it all over the place, using the .tk domain name in their links.

I have been investing a lot of time & work into that site lately, transforming it from a single page into something much better.

Last year I discovered that the freebie .tk domain name for that site had a Google PR of 4. In light of that, I actually considered purchasing that domain name so that it would behave like a real one rather than just loading my site in a frame. Search engines would actually be able to spider the content of the site and associate it with that domain name. Visitors would be able to direct link to the pages properly and they would no longer see the .tk ad frame at the top. It would become a real domain name.

But recently I have seen the page rank drop to 1 and it no longer holds the top spot for certain search terms that it once did for a very long time. The true url of the site now holds the top spot for those search terms. Google took away with one hand and gave with the other.

But now I lost the benefit in page rank of all those one way inbound links that are all over the place, and I haven't seen a rise in actual page rank on the links that Google has replaced with the true URL's. They also are a PR1.

I am assuming that all freebie .tk domain names took a hit, but did the paid ones get hit as well? Does anyone have a paid .tk domain name that is a PR4 or higher that didn't get rank spanked this time around?

Google Trends Fiction

2008-05-18T11:47:00.003-04:00

I have often wondered how popular of a site you could have if you took the list of the day's top 100 searches from Google Trends and concocted a wild crazy humorous well written story, incorporating as many of the search terms from the list as you possibly could.

Of course the story would have to make sense, and that would take a fair amount of writing skills. And it would take a fair amount of time, as well. And a site like that would be a lot of work, because you would have to do it every day.

Does anyone know if there already exists such a site? I would be more than interested in checking it out.

Drop me a link in the comments of you know of such a site. (or if you create one from this idea)