However high or low your page is in Google's rankings, more people will visit your site if the text that appears in their search results interests them. How does Google determine what text to display? What can you do to control it?

Obvious things first: The link text is taken from your page title. If...
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If parodies of copyrighted material a protected under fair use, perhaps an entire company could be a parody of another. Think Macrohard, with their operating system Doors. The icons are all doors which, when clicked, open half way and then slam shut, turn blue, and stop working till the computer is rebooted.

Think Moon Macrochaos,...
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Drop shadows can be a useful design element for adding depth and variety to your webpage designs, but tranditional techniques for adding drop shadows have required adding images to your pages, resulting in some slowing of download times. Here's a technique for creating drop shadows using CSS which does not require images, and which allows...
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Barring the discovery of anything that simply doesn't work, only editorial changes will be made to the latest draft of the Atom specification before it is submitted for review by the entire IETF. One thing that was added to the last draft that might raise a few eyebrows is the requirement for a wrapper <div>...
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You may have heard about something Google's toolbar has started doing lately that could alter the presentation of your webpages. It's called AutoLink, and it turns some text in web pages into links--for example, addresses, book ISBN numbers, etc. Many arguments, both for an against are being made regarding this feature. There are also two...
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I love Google. In the spirit of that love, I point out something about my dear friend that is bugging me, and point you, gentle reader, at a petition addressed to Google, requesting a change.

Google has recently debuted a feature in their web browser add-on toolbar called AutoLink. What it does is turn text...
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I love Google. In the spirit of that love, I point out something about my dear friend that is bugging me, and point you, gentle reader, at a petition addressed to Google, requesting a change.

Google has recently debuted a feature in their web browser add-on toolbar called AutoLink. What it does is turn text...
[read more]

I just had an entertaining daydream about a way to strike back at spammers. Of course, there are a lot of details between a daydream and effective execution. Behold the mythical Smeagol spam filter.

The idea was born when I recieved a spam message titled "Personals: do you want to meet boys?" To which my...
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Referrer spam is all those entries you see in your web server's referrer log that indicate that people are coming to your site from web pages that don't really link to you. It's left there in the hope that your referrer logs will be visible to Google and friends, and that you (and your site's...
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A TLD, or top level domain, is the last part of a domain name. For example, .com, .net, .edu, .uk, etc. So I have a question: who's the dope who thought of the ".ws" TLD? It stands for "web site". I can understand that some people might think it was a good idea: "I want...
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