Youtube and CNN had teamed up in the past for presidential debates but there were problems with the format. The problem was that CNN producers hand-picked many of the questions for the debate and were criticized widely for their choices.

Some of the choices were silly questions posed to Hillary Clinton or a talking snowman named Billiam on Youtube asking questions which took away from the gravity and credibility of the format. This time around things will be a bit different but could be just as interesting.

Through the Fox Youtube channel, people will be able to vote up questions that they want to be asked during the debate. This democratic and social process may be more palatable to not only the candidates who had done their fair share of complaining but the audience in general, since this an audience participation format without the interference (presumably) from the staff at Fox News.

So, if you want to produce a video question that has the potential to go viral if shown during the debates, now is the time to start planning.

According to Google, however, this update is not an algorithm change. Caffeine is able to find, index and rank newsworthy pages plus other new pages more quickly than before. Non-competitive pages that a person had to wait weeks to show up in the rankings before are now fast-tracked through the system at a much faster pace.

The Mountain View, CA search giant says that this architectural change is basically in the crawling and handling of data. There is not as much “page chewing” as before as the new “decision engine” (sorry Bing) has decided on fast digestion of data and delivery of results.

Google Caffeine will not only be a wakeup call to website owners but to the other search engines (you know who you are) that are struggling to deliver results in a timely manner.

According to the Official Google Blog, “This incident highlights just how publicly accessible open, non-password-protected WiFi networks are today. Earlier this year, we encrypted Gmail for all our users, and next week we will start offering an encrypted version of Google Search. For other services users can check that pages are encrypted by looking to see whether the URL begins with “https”, rather than just “http”; browsers will generally show a lock icon when the connection is secure.”

Google has been encrypting all sorts of data for a while now, including Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Talk to name a few. This privacy and security breach in Ireland was due to a little snippet of code that a programmer put in back in 2006, when Street View was first being tested.

At least now there is a solution and the world’s largest search engine is moving quickly not only to correct this problem but to offer a more private experience in search in general.

But, websites can also have security breaches and this can be aided by the info on your PC. Storing cookies, history, IP addresses, logons and passwords in your email software and FTP software can also open a door for these breaches.

So, as an experiment I decided to use Internet Explorer’s InPrivate Browsing feature. It can be found under the Safety tab on the toolbar. But, when I started using this feature I noticed something. That something is that Google would like to access your location.

In fact, sometimes during private browsing, which doesn’t store cookies, history, logons and passwords, a message will pop up on the Google Toolbar that states, “Google would like to access your location. The Google Toolbar will periodically use the network to keep your location up to date.” Of course on the toolbar you can allow or disallow the Google toolbar to have your IP address.

According to Google, “When My Location is active, Toolbar will automatically send local network information (including, but not limited to, visible WiFi access points) to Google Location Services in order to determine your location. This information is not tied to your Google Account, and you can disable the My Location feature at any time by clicking the My Location icon.”

The benefits of letting Google and other websites know your location are several. First, Google Maps can serve up businesses in your area and second, location specific ads can also be served up. Localize results are also a benefit of knowing the IP location.

As for other websites knowing your location, they can track statistics used to enhance their websites and your experience on their site. The downside is that not all websites are friendly and can use your geo location, cookies, history, stored logons and passwords against you.

You’ll have to decide for yourself whether or not private browsing is for you. For me, I bounce back and forth between the two and let my best judgment decide whether I would like to keep my info private or not on a website by website basis.

This is why Google Click-to-Call service is now being employed across the Adwords network for mobile devices. A person in a certain location can do a Google search and business ads will pop up in the usual Adwords spaces.

The person with the mobile phone simply has to click and their phone will dial into that business. Pretty slick, huh? The advertiser will pay the same for the call as they will for clicks on the ads from people on PC’s and laptops.

The advantage to this type of advertising is that people on cell phones, roaming around their communities or traveling to different communities can find restaurants, hotels, hardware stores, and you name it quickly and easily on the move.

Google piloted this Click-to-Call program back in 2006 in the Maps section. Recently the search giant has also rolled out Goog-411 where people can call toll free for information locally about businesses in their location.

The Google Click to Call program gives local advertisers one more method in which to reach out to potential customers who are roaming in their community right now.

If you are familiar with the duplicate content penalty in regard to unrelated websites, this www versus non-www issue is a duplicate content penalty within the same website. So, how do you tell if this is happening to your website?

The first indication is usually that a website is fully indexed by the search engines but is buried in the rankings and fails to be unburied within a reasonable amount of time. If you have a website that has been around long enough to escape the Google Sandbox, but still languishes at the depths of the rankings wormhole, then it is worth checking to see if your website may have this problem.

The easiest way to check is to go to Google and type in site:www.yoursite.com and check the number of results listed. Next, type in site:yoursite.com (and of course substitute the name of your actual site for “yoursite”) and see if the number of results match.

If the number of results do not match, you site most likely has this www issue going on. If the results match, you may or may not have the www issue as well. Conventional SEO wisdom has stated that if the numbers match, then you do not have the www problem. But, through my own experience, I have tested a number of sites and found that some will have the number of results match, but the pages in the results are not identical, and thus the www issue is present.

So, if you do have the www issue, how do you fix this problem? Typically, you can fix this issue through the htaccess file, which works most of the time. The simplest fix is a 301 redirect from yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com and that may work fine for you. This simple fix, however, does not work in all cases.

Another fix to use in the htaccess file is to use a mod rewrite that interacts with your webhost’s server.

Here are three versions that I’ve used with success of different occasions.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.yourdomain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301]

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(.*)\.yourdomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Experiment to see which one will work for you. If you page won’t load after using one of these, simply remove the htaccess file and try another one. If none of these works, and interferes with the functioning of your website, remove the new htaccess file and reinstall the old one if you were using one.

Some people have gone to the extreme of moving their website to a new domain name and doing a site wide 301 redirect from one domain to the next. This should be done only as a last resort. If this is the route you choose, then put a moratorium on changes for several weeks while making this transition.

The best case scenario is moving one identical website that the search engines have already indexed to a new domain, do the 301 redirects and give the search engines a couple of weeks to fully index this identical website sitting upon the new domain name.

If you make changes during this time, it may affect your search engine results and Page Rank. If you do everything right, however, your site still may suffer in the rankings so patience will be needed.

These are the basics of the Google www versus non-www issue. Whether you are working with your own sites or client sites, this is one issue that will need to be checked especially for sites that are fully indexed but not ranking well.

The U. S. Attorney General’s office has issued the subpoena s as part of an investigation involving the Child Online Protection Act (COPA). Google’s main objections have to do with resources required to fulfill the subpoena, privacy issues of searchers and compromising proprietary technology that will be mandatory if the subpoena is to be honored.

This brings to mind whether the U. S. Attorney General’s office presumes the responsibility for filtering adult material from children lie with the search engines or whether the responsibility lay with the parents and guardians (who can also install software to do such filtering)? Or both? The question of the necessity of protecting children is a given and one would have a hard time finding a person who would argue the opposite position.

The bigger questions are the ones of responsibility. Who is responsible are what are the consequences in acting in an irresponsible manner? Google may be balking at these implications along with their previously mentioned objections.

It will be interesting to see how this one plays out as this issue will not be going away any time soon. For the full text, see Google Subpoena

On a separate note, it appears that the Big Daddy update at Google / AOL has also not taken place yet, though there are some indications that the AOL SERP’s have been bouncing around lately, so this may just be a minor update. Also, Matt Cutts from Google has mentioned that his company is testing out a new datacenter, which is actually the Big Daddy update (Big Daddy is not an algorithm change but a foundational change).

The Big Daddy datacenter is supposed to address canonicalization of URL’s and 302 redirects, which have caused numerous headaches to webmasters over the years.

Good luck on high rankings.

Some critics have pointed out that the duplicate content penalty is merely a myth and that a search engine such as Google wouldn’t have the horse power or inclination to check every page in its index against every other page for duplications.

However, if you try out a free service like CopyScape.com you’ll certainly see that the technology exists to scan for duplicate content within the Google index. Also, if you’ve followed the search engines for the past several years you’ll know that the search engines have employed penalties for mirrored sites and redirects (outside of the 301 redirects), which in my mind shows that the inclination to penalize duplicate content pages is there.

What is more convincing to me, however is my own personal experience resurrecting several customer web pages from search engine rankings oblivion over the past year. Simply by changing the text on a single web page that I knew was duplicated elsewhere would be enough to see dramatic results within days. These web pages I knew to be duplicated elsewhere either from my own searches or from the customer.

Earlier I stated that this duplicate content penalty applies only in some circumstances. The circumstances I am referring to are two web pages that are nearly identical textually. What I do know is that, for instance, my own homepage for my website has been pilfered by someone else (see CopyScape) but because there is other text on this pilfered page besides the entirety of my homepage it doesn’t seem to affect my rankings. So, it seems that a certain percentage (that I haven’t come up with yet) of duplicate to non-duplicate text is the threshold for the penalty.

Anyway, my conclusion is that a duplicate content penalty does apply for identical or nearly identical pages. However, its anyone’s guess as to what the threshold percentage is for duplicate versus non-duplicate text in order to avoid a duplicate content penalty between web pages.