I forgot about posting about the modernism in Barcelona, a path that I did in the scooter very fast, since it was the last day. I visited some of the famous modernist places from this famous architects :

• Antoni Gaudí
• Domènech i Montaner
• Josep Puig i Cadafalch

Here you can watch some videos of ”La Pedrera”, built between 1906 and 1912 :

• The terrace of the warriors
• The entrance of the house

I was about to write an article about Jakob Nielsen’s last column Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous (Dec. 17).

But as I’m on holidays and I’m quite lazy I will just write about the Barcelona trip, about the bad idea of renting a 125 cc scooter, and about the Termal Spa I’m planing to go while I write this notes:

Other remarkable activities:

• CH€ exposition. (See also photos about Guevara expo)
• The “Fotoperiodisme a Catalunya (1976-2000)” exhibition was an initiative of Josep Maria Huertas Claveria
  Watch the video / Watch Korda explaining how he took the famous Guevara picture that became a cliche and a simbol of all the revolution
• Visited my friend and teacher Elisa
• Freezed out in a scooter going from Barcelona center to Argentona
• I would like to remark that Cooltra motos gives a really bad helmet. Forget about going in the highway if you rent on COOLTRA.
• Jazz Jam sessions at JAZZSI Club Barcelona: Jam session one and two. Sorry about the sound quality (It’s just a mobile phone)

By the way got this infamous alert on Flickr:

Hey martin2movil! About your photos…
You’ve run into one of the limits of a free account. Your free account will only display the most recent 200 photos you’ve uploaded. All of your photos beyond 200 will remain hidden from view until you either delete newer photos, or upgrade to a Pro account.

Yeah, freedom has it’s limits ;)

Read first: Curiosities about Google Ranking PR (Part I)

Like I promised in the last entry I will describe how some people manages to trick the PageRank (PR) so Google thinks they have relevant using obscure wemastering techniques.
For that reason pay attention, and get solid references, before giving a SEO work to someone that promises fast positioning techniques. There is no SEO magic guys. That’s the truth.

At this stage, concretely at 30’s, when I hear fast duct-tape solutions they always make me thing how they do it and what technics they use. And today I had the oportunity to discover this page, that violates sistematically the webmaster guidelines, and that’s why I’m making a report out of it in this entry.
This is a link that a friend sent me to see the details of what they are doing:
http://www.reiki-arolo-tifar-angeles.dpymes.com

Reiki (only TXT) 7 KB
Reiki (complete HTML) 35 KB

This are the type of non-accepted content and formattings on a web Page:

Hidden text or links
Misleading or repeated words
Page does not match Google’s description
Cloaked page
Deceptive redirects
Doorway pages
Duplicate site or pages
I’ve marked the ones I think should be applicable to the URL example.
Well now let’s analize some points in this page:

1. Look at the weight of text only compared with HTML.
   The visible text only weights 7 Kb so it’s the 20 % of all the HTML content. First clue. What is all the rest ?
   There is something rare in this page ?
2. Now let’s look the META headers:
   <meta name=”abstract” content=”Reiki, Arolo tifar, Angeles atlantis, Cirugía energética. Reiki Arolo tifar ángeles. Maestría Esenios, Didgeridoo, Voz, Armónicos, Cuencos, Cábala, Reiki, Arolo tifar, angeles atlantis”>
   <meta http-equiv=”DC.description” content=”Reiki, Arolo tifar, Angeles atlantis, Cirugía energética. Reiki Arolo tifar ángeles. Maestría Esenios, Didgeridoo, Voz, Armónicos, Cuencos, Cábala, Reiki, Arolo tifar, angeles atlantis”>
   This is just two of them: Don’t you see that they abuse a little bit with the keywords ?
   They are smart though becase they even used different names for the META attributes. Maybe Google didn’t detected all this mess because it has indexed this page and it even gave it more trust than their competition.
3. Following this head analisys we have another rare keyword that is didgeridoo. What’s that ?
   Didgeridoo is a musical instrument, but guess what, it’s also the name of people doing the same kind of business: http://www.didgeridoo.es
   With this they won’t get higher PR but they will get listed even when you search the keywords of the competence ! They in fact researched and used the same keywords of their competence. But they reinforced them repeating the keywords making them appear lot’s of time hidden in the HTML (Hence the size of 35KB)
4. The name of the subdomain:
   www.reiki-arolo-tifar-angeles.dpymes.com
   Look the way they empower the keywords adding them in the same domain name, getting one more step on the SERP ladder.
   This is not penalizaded and it’s totally legal.
5. Hidden text, used to repeat keywords, just after the body tag. Enclosed in Google best digesting headers H1, H2, H3 and all the rest:
   <h1><b>reiki arolo tifar angeles</b></h1>, reiki, arolo tifar, angeles, reiki arolo tifar, reiki angeles, arolo tifar angeles
6. To finish this rant that is getting too large let’s try a search:
   http://www.google.es/search?hl=es&q=reiki+arolo
   Google SERP screenshot just in case changes.Look how the url www.reiki-arolo-tifar-angeles.dpymes.com appears first than others, including others that have better and real content. Also they had their webpages before in this city. The afore mentioned points move the balance to get the position in the SERP listing up.

This is just a small research about the techniques that you can see in this webpage. This in made in different scales by many other sites, others with a less agressive approach, but anyways using obscure webmaster techniques. This is something that Google doesn’t likes, and anybody searching for relevant content likes, and that’s why they’ve starting requesting people to report sites like this.

Google created a ranking system based on reputation. They have a ranking formula called PageRank :

PR(A) = (1 − d) + d(PR(T1) / C(T1) + … + PR(Tn) / C(Tn)

Where PR(A) is the PageRank of page A;
PR(Ti) is the PageRank of the Ti pages that link to A;
C(Ti) is tehe number of outgoing links of the page Ti; d is a variable factor that is between 0 and 1. (Source: Wikipedia)

With this formula and your query Google calculates in what position you are listed in the SERPs. The PageRank is a very wise algorithm and that is one of the main reasons that make Google the most consulted Search engine globally. This ranking can be also tricked, as many people knows, but this is something I ‘ll leave for another entry.

There are different reputation systems in internet. To give another interesting example the reputation on Wikipedia it’s beggining to be measured depending on how much time the changes that the users made to a document last. It’s intuitive right ?
If your change is not solid then someone will come over and change it again.

Another very different thing is the when the ranking is based on popularity as in digg. What we were discussing is about the concept of reputation, something that can be extended and be applied to many other things.
Reputation is a social phenomenon and thus can be used to measure trust for user feedback and Karma. That’s what the forums, digg and other sites are already aware off.

In next entry I will post something about tricking page Rank and how some people is obscuring the Search Engine Results page to bring more people to their sites. This is something that Google may penalize removing your site from their index for some time.

Tomorrow at 6 AM, after the Christmas dinner at Son Net I’m heading to the airport, hoping I’m not going to miss the plane.
(Sorry, I’m not going to dinner)

I’ll be a week in Barcelona in a friends house. If anyone is up for some fun and some afternoon cocktails I’ll be around the famous Ramblas almost every afternoon.

SOME UPDATES:
Waldo Verdejo interview (only Spanish till I find some extra time)
I finally catched the tall guy and made him some questions. He was nice enough to answer all my questions and to make a 10 minutes video. I recommend downloading the Mpeg 4 version of the video because the flash video version is really crappy.