Dropbox and the Killer Penguin
Posted On: 2013-05-17
For me today and tomorrow is the lull before the storm. The next two days are going to be a little less frenetic than things usually are around here so I've got to use this time to get a whole bunch of things done before things really start to go crazy on Friday and continue on like that for the next week.
So how's the next week shaping up for you? Are things looking like they'll stay relatively calm so you can keep on working at a steady pace? Or are you like me ... frantically trying to prepare for a crazy time ahead or maybe catching up from some unexpected event that took you away from your work for a couple of days?
I certainly hope that you're in that calm space where you can just keep on working at a steady pace. I probably won't be back in that space for at least 10 days but I'm looking forward to it and the thought of being on the other side of that crazy time and being able to sit back with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine and know that I'm over it is keeping me going.
I'm sure I've talked about Dropbox before because it really is a most invaluable tool for webmasters but if you're not using it then you're really missing a very useful tool. Even now as I'm writing this I'm getting continual alerts popping up at the bottom of the screen to tell me that more files have been added to the Dropbox folder that my partner and I share.
Steve's working from the home office today and he's been prepping a whole bunch of files for a new client's website and now they're done he's transferring them via Dropbox to me so that I can start putting the site together. It's faster than trying to send them over via email and it's quicker than uploading them and then downloading them again via FTP ... and it's free.
You can even have different folders in your Dropbox account and allow others to access individual folders so if you have some stuff you want a coder to work on and other stuff you want your graphic designer to work on you can give them access to you assign them each a folder ... give them access to that folder ... and upload the files they need to those individual folders.
Killer Penguins
Hey ... there are Killer Whales so maybe at some time in the past there were Killer Penguins too and if there weren't any then things are about to change.
There's a new Matt Cutts video out and in that video he talks about what releases Google has planned for the summer. We've been expecting a new version of Penguin to appear for the last few weeks and there's been quite a bit of talk about it. This version of Penguin was supposed to be a departure from previous versions because this time it was to appear as part of the general algorithm rather than a stand-alone piece of code.
There have even been some people ... including a rather vocal guru here in Australia ... who have claimed to have seen the effects of the new Penguin update. However, in the video Matt Cutts says that it won't be released for another couple of weeks.
There is something else that he says in the video about this particular version of Penguin that should be of great interest to some here in the porn industry. In fact he singles out the porn industry ... and what some people in the industry do to achieve good rankings ... for special mention.
Now we know that Penguin was all about tracking down unnatural links but the new version ... from what Matt Cutts says ... has been given a dose of steroids so that it can now detect the sort of interlinking and cross-linking schemes that some of the quiet achievers in this industry use to make huge sales.
If you haven't heard about these systems ... they're nothing like the crappy link networks that so many people in mainstream have used and continue to use ... then image a huge network of small optimised sites spread across multiple IP addresses and different hosts that are all owned by the same person. They all interlink with each other and pass page rank and if you can imagine that then you will begin to get an idea of what some of these guys have built over the years.
These networks give their owners the power to dominate the search results for just about every adult-related search term. But now, if the latest version of Penguin is as good as Matt Cutts says it is those networks may be about to lose their power to rank well.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the Killer Penguin comes over the horizon.