What happened to Google Docs?

Hey!???

What happened to Google "Docs and Spreadsheets"? I was about to post a message, but that option has disappeared from my menu after I have logged into Google!

I hope it's just a temporary problem, but it does highlight the issue of relying on an online provider for important work - you never know when it is not available or when it is just going to disappear.

If there was a way to save your work to disk...

Beware robots noindex

I'm adding a new category to this blog - the WTF category, for blog posts about really bizarre events that occur for unexplained reasons.

The first WTF is the unintentional use of the meta robots tag with a "noindex" directive. I have no idea why this was used, but it works with all of the major search engines, and the affected pages will disappear from their index within about three months. A client called me, complaining that their site was slowly disappearing from Google, after I had worked very hard and succeeded in getting them up on page one.

They had recently converted their entire site from asp to PHP, so I looked at a lot of things that might have occurred, but the "noindex" instruction to the robots took me by completely by surprise, and it would have escaped notice if I had not been looking for something else.

Nobody will take credit (or blame?) and they claim that it was like that on the old site, but it's too much of a coincidence that the day they launched is also the last day that the site was indexed... Hence, the WTF category...

Less can be more...

I inherited a PPC Adwords campaign from a person who was not very much in tune with what PPC advertising is all about (which is a very polite way to put it). Every keyword was set up as broad match bidding at $2.50, with a daily budget cap of $50.

Needless to say, the ads stopped showing in a very short time each day because the entire budget was exhausted early on every day. And, even though they had the #1 spot, I noticed some very odd search phrases coming in from outside the USA. So, the very first thing I did was to cut the max bids down to $0.50 (or less), and the traffic to the landing page went from about 80 visitors per day to more than 240 per day, with a corresponding increase in converting sales.

Not good news for Google, since I'm sure they love this type of client - bid high so you are always #1 (even though it empties your bank account).

However, it's great news for my client, who is selling three times as many items for the same advertising cost.

I have a lot more work to do, but clearly in this case, less is more...

IE6 no longer works with PayPal...

Hmmm... If you add an item to a PayPal shopping cart in IE6, it looks normal, but if you continue shopping and add a new item to the cart, the old item is discarded so you can have only one item at a time in your shopping cart.

It works fine in IE7 and FireFox, so is this just a ploy by MSN to get everybody to "upgrade" to IE7 whether they like it or not?

Personally, I don't care because I've already switched to using FireFox simply because it is soooo much faster. But I pity the poor IE6 users who decided not to upgrade to IE7. Hmmm... Maybe it's time for them to make the switch to FireFox also...

If that's the end result, MSN's market share for browsers will drop even further, which may leave them with a lawsuit as the only way to stop their rapidly dwindling share of the market.