Google is planning to rename two of its popular services soon: Blogger will become Google Blogs and Picasa will become Google Photos. That's according to Mashable, which says the changes are due in the next six weeks. Google's YouTube property will not be included in the company's rebranding efforts, but other products beyond Picasa and Blogger could be. We reached out to Google for more information, but the company told Search Engine Land it would not be commenting on the report. The last time Google rebranded one of its existing and established properties (i.e., not a new or recent [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Content | Google: Blog Search | Google: Blogger | Google: Picasa

Anyone who has found that their content has been stolen (or scraped) online faces the decision of either letting it go (and using best practices that help Google rank things correctly) or dealing with the cumbersome task of filling out a DMCA  infringement notice. Those who are falsely accused of copyright violations have to deal with the equally cumbersome counter-notice process. Today, Google announced on their public policy blog that they'll be launching improved tools for both to make these processes easier and to better protect copyright online (beginning with Blogger and Web Search). T [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display | Google: AdSense | Google: Blogger | Google: Web Search | Legal: Copyright

Color me tired. I got a report of a site that reprinted one of our articles without permission. Checking it out, I discovered that miserable combination of someone making money off content they don't own, paying nothing to host that stolen content on Google's Blogger service and earning off that content through Google's AdSense ads. And reporting the infringement is oh so easy. Not. So here's the fun loving site: The most current article shown comes from Search Engine Land. It's reprinted in its entirety, without permission. There's even a credit line shoved in at the end: New [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display | Features: General | Google: AdSense | Google: Blogger

Blogspot.com cited as the No. 1 host for malware from News.com reports Google's Blogger accounts "for nearly 2 percent of all malware hosts." Sophos, an antivirus vendor, published a report showing the state of malware injections and attacks throughout the web. Specifically, hackers can set up "malicious blogs" on the Blogger service, plus they can inject dangerous web links and content into Blogger blogs. The Google web search team takes malware attacks seriously. They have reviews in webmaster tools and they label malicious web sites in web search results. So isn't it ironic that Googl [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Content | Google: Blogger | Google: Security | Legal: Security

My day started reading about how Google was reportedly censoring anti-Barack Obama blogs by shutting them down on Google-owned Blogger. I quickly did some debunking in a comment on our Sphinn site -- but still, Google probably needs to do more to ensure its Blogger spam reporting tools aren't being abused -- especially given how it says these "can't be manipulated by angry mobs." Right now, it looks like they can. NewsBusters has the best write-up of the charges I've seen, covering how a number of anti-Obama blogs received emails recently from Google saying they were unable to pub [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Content | Google: Blogger | Google: Web Search

Google Custom Search Blog Hacked? from Google Blogoscoped quickly reported what appeared to be a hack of Google's official Custom Search Blog. But what really happened was that Google marked their own blog as a spam blog and ultimately removed the blog from Blogger, allowing someone else to claim the URL. Google sent Google Blogoscoped a response detailing the issue: Whoops! We accidentally classified ourselves as spam, and our ever-perceptive Blogger settings caught us. The Custom Search Blog has since been restored, and we’re taking steps to ensure this doesn’t happen with other Goo [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Content | Google: Blogger | Google: Marketing | Google: Security

Google axes death-threat blog at The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Google finally shut down CYFSWATCH New Zealand blog after numerous complaints from governmental officials in New Zealand. The blog, hosted on Google's Blogger service, reportedly wrote a death threat against a New Zealand politician. When you access the blog at this time, it says "NONE" and that is followed with "No posts match your query." But the Google Cache still shows blog posts from the blog, at this point in time. More details at The Sydney Morning Herald. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Content | Google: Blogger | Google: Legal | Google: Outside US | Legal: Censorship

Last month, I wrote Public Spam/Splog Report over on my personal blog, begging Google to stop the "people search" spam that's been clogging my Google Blog Search feeds with junk off Google's own Blogger service. Today, I noticed Steve Rubel writing recently on the same issue. Steve gives you the screenshots of how the junk shows up on Google Blog Search. My post goes into depth on the redirection and scraping that's going on. End of story, the junk needs to step. C'mon, Google -- fix it. FYI, here's today's latest junk out of my newsreader from just today: United State [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Blog Search | Google: Blogger | Google: Critics | SEO: Spamming

Now that Blogger is officially out with a new version, I guess Google's ready to get behind the service in a big way. The screenshot above shows a new promotional "tip" I just got in my web search results. I've never seen anything like that before for Blogger nor that I can recall for any other Google products. Not like this. The tip reads: Tip: Want to share your life online with a blog? Try Blogger It seems to be triggered by any use of the word "blog" in a search. For me, all of these will make it come up: blog blogger blogs suck blog about google closing its [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Content | Google: Blogger | Google: Marketing