Is your site ready for Google's new Penguin Update?

Google is soon to release a new update for their search engine which will affect the rankings of a massive number of websites, known as Penguin 2.0.

Anyone following Google’s Panda and Penguin updates may realise this is actually the 4^th Penguin update, but as it is such a large impact update it is officially being refered to as Penguin 2.0 internally at Google. This new update is set to shake up search results, with many webmasters and SEOs into panic in order to make sure their website doesn’t tank once the update is applied. The last penguin update in April 2012 shook up search results and affected a number of black hat SEO sites.

Luckily, here at Thomas Cole we’re prepared for the update, making sure our own SEO techniques are under Google’s radar, but if you are worried that your site is going to drop in the rankings then we'll be posting a list of things that you can do to be Penguin ready before the big update,to moderate your backlinks and ensure that your site won't be flagged up by Google.

Look out for Penguin 2.0 being rolled out in the next few weeks. Remember, if your website’s rankings do drop after the update you can always give us a call!

Google vs. Bing: Which Is more likely to Infect your PC?

Creating a Search Engine that cancels out all malicious results is near-impossible, but which search engine is currently doing a better job of keeping our machines squeaky clean? 
Independent German testing lab AV-Test recently undertook an 18 month project to determine which search engines gave out malicious links in their top results.
Google and Bing were both tested in the study, in addition to Russian operator Yandex and Blekko, a search engine which claims to provide better search results than Google, excluding content farms and other sites. Across the 40 million different sites that were tested across the 4 engines, 5000 potentially harmful links were found. Whilst this may seem like a very small amount at first, once you consider the fact that Google alone has 2-3 billion search queries per day it’s a different story.

• 10,912,207 Google results tested, with 272 malware results (0.0025%, or around 1 in 40000)
• 10,958,884 Bing results tested, with 1,285 malware results  (0.0117% or around 1 in 8525)
• 13,690,659 Yandex results tested, with 3,330 malware results (0.0243% or around 1 in 4111)
• 3,007,975 Blekko results tested, with 203 malware results (0.0067% or around 1 in 14817)

Google is clearly the Winner here, with Blekko not far behind, however indexing less results that other search engines is bound to reduce the number of malicious sites. Bing however produces nearly 5 times the amount of malicious results and Yandex even worse with more than double the malicious results than Bing.

Granted, all of these companies work hard to keep malicious results from appearing, a whole lot more are blocked than the amount that actually squeeze through. However, the report also shows that most of the malicious sites allowed through by Bing are done so through crude SEO techniques, making their own small blog network and spamming them with backlinks for the malicious sites.

You can see the full report in PDF form here.

Facebook Home Software to take over Android as we know it?

Facebook recently announced a new piece of software for android users to be released on april 12th, known as “Facebook Home”. Home will be a “wrapper” for the Android OS and make Facebook features the primary use of the phone. 

Facebook Notifications, messages and images will appear on the phone’s main screen instead of having to use the dedicated Facebook app. Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg’s angle was that Home will put people at the centre of the mobile experience, as opposed to apps. Home will act as your loader for all other apps, to access them simply click the button with your face on it at the bottom of the screen.

The Android Lockscreen and Homescreen will be replaced with a “coverfeed”, which is a version of your News feed that uses the entire phone display, this will include ads however, as of course Facebook uses ads to make their money. It will also bundle all your messaging together into one feature called “chatheads” with Instant Messaging, Facebook Chat and SMS rolled into one, and you can keep track of your conversations by clicking that person’s face on the app.

It’s a unique concept to say the least and it’ll be interesting to see how well it is received in the coming weeks. Facebook Home will be available for free in the Google Play Store from 12th April. It will also come Pre-Loaded on HTC's next phone, the HTC First.

Record Breaking Petaflop Supercomputer Shut Down

The US Supercomputer known as “Roadrunner” has recently been switched off by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
This Machine was a record setter back in 2008, the first to perform at “Petaflop Pace”, or in other words 1000 trillion calculations per second. Over the years Roadrunner was used in nuclear weapons research, as well as to model distant parts of the universe and virus structures. Whilst it remains to be one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, it has now been replaced by an even faster machine.
Gary Grider, from the Los Alamos National Laboratory high performance computing division said the following: "Roadrunner got everyone thinking in new ways about how to build and use a supercomputer, specialised processors are being included in new ways on new systems and being used in novel ways. Our demonstration with Roadrunner caused everyone to pay attention.''
Roadrunner consisted of 12000 modified versions of the same processor
 used in Sony’s PlayStation 3 console and over 50 miles of fibre optic cable. It was shut down on 31 March and is being dismantled this month after a few experiments are carried out with its OS.

Full Game created in Microsoft Excel

An accountant in Canada has created a full RPG game within Microsoft Excel through the use of spreadsheets and Macros.

Cary Walkin, a Chartered Accountant and a MBA Candidate at the Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Canada created the game in his spare time, known as Arena (or “Arena.Xlsm”)

It features a fully-fledged battle system in which the player fights a multitude of enemies such as bunnies and garden snakes, represented by regular text characters available in excel. Mr Walkin claims it took him around four months to complete the game’s creation, which features over 2000 enemies and 8 boss fights. The game is compatible with the 2007, 2010 and 2013 versions of Excel, however it will not work with the Mac versions of the program.

If you’d like to download Arena for yourself for free then visit Cary Walkin’s Blog