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How good is googlebot?

I was going for a walk here in OHIO and found a shop with words “This shop is powered by Google search”, Its a real estate company which occupies top spot in Google’s rankings. It now brings us to the question why should someone display such a banner in front of their shop? Is it advertisement for Google ? or Is it a fashion? I think its more to do with  gratitude.

There are too many companies in the web world which rely solely on Google search and Google adsense programs.Many websites might fall if Google decides to take them for a ride(I know they won’t 🙂 ). “Every possible site exists in Google search database” and you can reframe the sentence “A site exists only if it is in Google search”, that is how much Google has control over the search engine market.

Its not the control and market dominance which fascinates me, rather its the perfection or finesse with which it accomplishes the task.Over the last few years I have been involved with Googlebot (my favorite word is the google serpent) in many ways.It has taken nearly 2-3 years for me to understand the efficiency and presence of googlebot.Its fast,it crawls every thing and it punishes harshly whenever junk is thrown at it.

Sometime back when the SEO comapnies started out spreading their wings everybody was wondering whether SEO’s will rule the roost.But Googlebot proved them wrong pretty soon, any tactic to get a better rank had improvements in the short term but the cost? Many sites were blocked/punished, they were simply thrown to last pages of search results.

So how good and how receptive is googlebot ? I did a little research on one of my site(or rather a mistake), I tried to pass some keywords which will give me a better ad revenues, though the keywords were not totally off topic for my site but they were itly for content not present in my site. Within a few days my site’s search visitors reduced, and to my astonishment(shock) site appeared exactly in 41/42 nd position for the same keyword which I had first five places in search rankings earlier.

So is it the -40 filter? I guess so and it responded pretty quickly for my liking.It responded pretty fast to my keyword seeding / keyword spawning and the punishment was harsh as well, I lost nearly 80% of my site visitors thanks to the fourth page result. If Google had banned my site or applied -5000 filter or something my site would have become extinct in a day.

Once I removed the keywords it took my site to regain the top spot within  a week or two. I should feel pretty lucky to have regained my spot in search rankings.And the search ranking was regained mainly by referrals, which makes us to have a look at reffering sites.

Some people call it Authority sites, if a Site say Hindu.com refers my site for certain Indian news articles my site’s ranking will increase, thats because Hindu.com is the top authority site for Indian news. In my case the sites fighting for my keyword also were mine and since they were referring to my first site, it didn take long for me to get back to top spot.But a year back similar misadventure led to closure of my news site, by now I know how to work with googlebot, Dont try to be over smart with googlebot, If your site is really worth it will get a good rank else you will be punished.

I will update more filters and the Google sandbox in a few days. Signup for receiving articles from  this site.

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Services.exe using up all your memory ? and windows hangs after launch?

I believe many would have faced this problem when launching windows. Whenever your system reboots due to power failure / Application error / Windows Error, the system becomes extremely slow. This problem mostly occurs when you are running Windows 2000/XP/VISTA. Developers using heavy Java (JVM) applications like WSAD , Sun One Studio face this problem.

This problem can be any one of the following :

1. Services.exe eating up your memory (50-70% of RAM).
2. Hard drive problems.
3. Memory Hardware Problems.
4. Virtual Memory problems

Here Im going to tell you how to fix the first Problem.

Whenever Windows recognises any failure either software/Hardware it makes a entry in the system log. And when you start your machine again this system log entry will be checked and Windows will try to search for a possible solution / or try to analyse the causes of failure.How to check this..

Click ctrl + alt + del – Open your task manager and click processes. And see how much memory the process services.exe is using, If it exceeds say 10%, you can be sure you are having the diagnostic problem.In the below picture the services.exe is running normally.

Task Manager showing services.exe

Now to the solution .. Go to Control Panel, click Administrative tools. In Administrative tools select Event Viewer, there will three event logs on left side namely Application,Security and System. Select each one of them separately and right click. In the menu click Clear All Events. When Prompt asks for saving log click No. Do the same thing for the three categories.
Clear All events to fix services.exe problem
Basically you have cleared all your system logs.So once you restart your Windows your servies should show only 1-5% usage. And most probably your problem should be solved.

If you still face any more problems. You can drop me a mail or check my other posts…

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TCS might delay promotions based on Revenue projections..

TATA Consultancy Services (TCS)is gearing up to face tough times. Last week TCS reported that two of its Top 10 Clients (in US) delayed their plans to expand, or to be precise havent gone ahead with previously planned Development work.This will definitely affect TCS’s Q4 numbers and in turn TCS might cut costs by delaying promotions of the Entry level developers.

The reduced salary structure may be norm for another quarter as well.

There is already rumors in Blogs and among TCS employees that the usual 4 year wait of promotions of ITA’s might become longer by one year (Five years).This could be very bad news for people expecting this ITA promotion this year.This promotion delay occurred once during previous IT recession and even now many of the affected feel bad about late promotions.

There is already worry among employees after the earlier salary reduction.But the TCS employees working in overseas deputations were not affected by the salary cuts.

TCS also has changed its focus towards developing and upcoming markets like Russia and Latin American countries, this week TCS news Release said that they are targetting 2$ by 2010-12 in these regions.TCS is also planning to start operations in Russia and Egypt.They have 50-60 million dollars, in reserves for spending on expansion in these key markets.