Central Perk

joi, 18 august 2011

Damn Cool Pics

25 Greatest Unscripted Scenes in Films
Crazy Celebrity Hairstyles
Hot Bikini-Clad Girls Set Shower Record
Modern Life Of Papuans
29-Year-Old Becomes Britain's Youngest Grandfather
11 Things The Richest American Could Buy For The U.S
Amazing Dragon Illusion
Mont Saint-Michel Castle, France

Posted: 18 Aug 2011 07:50 PM PDT

Check out 25 Great Scenes in Film that actually were not scripted, but rather, improvised. Please keep the captions on, as the creator of the video explains the improvisation. Pretty cool stuff.

Crazy Celebrity Hairstyles

Posted: 18 Aug 2011 07:50 PM PDT

These horrible hairstyles left us scratching our heads. Why on earth would any A-list celebrity take such a crazy risk by sporting one of these over-the-top styles?

Check out this gallery of celebrities with some of the wildest hairstyles in Hollywood.

Britney Spears

Natalie Portman

Jake Gyllenhaal

Renee Zellweger

Emma Watson

Charlie Sheen

Cassie

Pink

Matt Damon

Solange Knowles

Demi Moore

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Michelle Williams

Rihanna

Selena Gomez

David Beckham

Rumer Willis

Alicia Keys

Selma Blair

Willow Smith

Keira Knightley

Hot Bikini-Clad Girls Set Shower Record

Posted: 18 Aug 2011 06:02 PM PDT

A group of bikini-wearing girls have lathered up on Bournemouth beach in a bid to help set the world record for the most people to shower together. The record was set by 152 people who braved the chilly weather to lather up and get soapy with complete strangers under a giant 18-foot shower structure.

The event was organized by Lynx to promote their new shower gel and beat the previous record set in Illinois two years ago when 145 people showered together. The marketing geniuses at Lynx were smart enough to implant a lot of sexy models into the publicity stunt so that the photos and video were very pleasing to the eye. I would not have written this story had 152 hairy, fat guys in Speedos just show up.

Anna Orford, of Guinness World Records, said: "Lynx have constructed a fantastic showering tool, and the people of Bournemouth have to be applauded for getting into the spirit of the day and taking a shower together.

"Their reward is a new Guinness World Record for the most people showering simultaneously at the same venue. Congratulations to everyone involved!"

Source: dailymail

Modern Life Of Papuans

Posted: 18 Aug 2011 04:26 PM PDT

Papuan is a cover term for the various indigenous peoples of New Guinea and neighboring islands, speakers of so-called Papuan languages. Papua New Guinea occupies the eastern part of the world's second largest island and is prey to volcanic activity, earthquakes and tidal waves. Linguistically, it is the world's most diverse country, with more than 700 native tongues.

Some 80% of Papua New Guinea's people live in rural areas with few or no facilities of modern life. Many tribes in the isolated mountainous interior have little contact with one another, let alone with the outside world, and live within a non-monetarised economy dependent on subsistence agriculture. For more.

29-Year-Old Becomes Britain's Youngest Grandfather

Posted: 18 Aug 2011 02:40 PM PDT

A dad has become Britain's youngest grand-father at the age of 29 after his daughter gave birth at 14. Shem Davies was also 14 when he became a father for the first time. Now, schoolgirl daughter Tia has had a baby girl a week before her 15th birthday.

Jobless Shem who split with Tia's mum Kelly three months after Tia was born - said he was "absolutely delighted" at the new arrival. Tiny Ava Grace is in an incubator after she was born ten weeks early. But the family said she is "doing remarkably well" at the special care baby unit where she is being cared for in South Wales.

Shem spoke of his shock when Tia told him she was pregnant by her 15-year-old boyfriend Jordan Williams. The grandad who has a nine-month-old son with new girlfriend Robyn Thomas said, "One minute Tia's a baby, the next she's pregnant. I could have yelled at her, but what's the point?" He added, "I wasn't able to cope with it and I ran away." Shem and Kelly have both been supporting Tia as she watches over Ava Grace the sixth generation of the family alive.

Both parents are still in school and plan on finishing, with Tia seeing herself as a hairdresser in the future. Amazingly, Tia and Jordan have been dating for 18 months, meaning they were around 13 when they started going out. These young parents are part of the more than 35,000 kids under 18 who get pregnant in the UK each year. However, at least half of those kids get an abortion.

11 Things The Richest American Could Buy For The U.S

Posted: 18 Aug 2011 02:18 PM PDT

The 400 richest US households' combined wealth of $1.37 trillion dollars is pretty difficult to visualize. Thankfully, faireconomy.org put together an infographic to describe just how much that money could do to help the general public.

Click to enlarge.

Source: faireconomy

Amazing Dragon Illusion

Posted: 17 Aug 2011 07:58 PM PDT

This is a terrific optical illusion! As you move around the dragon, it will appear to follow you, turn its head and nod up and down... but it's not really moving at all!

Mont Saint-Michel Castle, France

Posted: 17 Aug 2011 07:18 PM PDT

Mont Saint-Michel is a rocky tidal island in Normandy, France. It is located approximately one kilometer off the country's north coast, at the mouth of the Couesnon River near Avranches.

All the structures on the island, including the castle, are crowned by the abbey church that stands 240 feet above sea level. The rock upon which the castle and all the structures of Mont Saint Michel are built measures a height of 84 meters. It is made of pure granite and is tough enough to withstand the rigors of time. The Italian architect William de Volpiano was commissioned as the building contractor in the 11th century.

History
During the sixth up to the seventh centuries Mont Saint Michel served as a stronghold. However, this role of being the safe keeper of Romano-Breton culture ended when Franks ransacked it in 460 AD. The next major event that is reported about the place is the miraculous appearance of St. Michael, which is for the most part according to legend. This event occurred in 708 AD with St. Aubert as the witness of the event.

The English made repeated attempts to invade Mont Saint Michel. However, every attempt they made ended up in failure. All the said attacks occurred during the so famed Hundred Years' War. It was during this time in 1420 when fortifications were reinforced. However, in the many sieges, the Romansque choir collapsed.

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Robot Access & Indexation Restriction Techniques: Avoiding Conflicts

Posted: 17 Aug 2011 03:42 PM PDT

Posted by Lindsay

As you've probably learned, you can't always rely on search engine spiders to do an effective job when they visit and index your website. Left to their own devices bots can generate duplicate content, perceive important pages as junk, index content that shouldn’t serve as a user entry point, and many other issues. There are a number of tools at our disposal that allow us to make the most of bot activity on a website such as the meta robots tag, robots.txt, x-robots-tag, canonical tag and others.

Today, I’m covering robot control technique conflicts. In an effort to REALLY get their point across, webmasters will sometimes implement more than one robot control technique to keep the search engines away from a page. Unfortunately, these techniques can sometimes contradict each other: One technique hides the instruction of the other or link juice is lost.

What happens when a page is disallowed in the robots.txt file and has a noindex meta tag in place? How about a noindex tag and a canonical tag?

Quick Refresher

Before we get into the conflicts, let’s go over each of the main robot access restriction techniques as a refresher.

Meta Robots Tag

The Meta robots tag creates page-level instructions for search engine bots. The Meta robots tag should be included in the head section of the HTML document and might look like this:

<html>
<head>
<title>Article Print Page</title>
<meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOINDEX” />
</head>

Below is a table of the generally supported commands along with a description of their purpose.

Command	Description
NOINDEX	Prevents the page from being included in the index
NOFOLLOW	Prevents bots from following the links on a page
NOARCHIVE	Prevents a cached copy of the page from being available in the search results
NOSNIPPET	Prevents a description from appearing below the page link in the search results AND prevents caching of the page
NOODP	Prevents the Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org) description of the page from being displayed in the search results
NODIR	Prevents Yahoo! Directory titles and descriptions for the page from being displayed in the search results

Canonical Tag

The canonical tag is a page level meta tag that is placed in the HTML header of a webpage. It tells the search engines which URL is the canonical version of the page being displayed. Its purpose is to keep duplicate content out of the search engine index while consolidating your pages strength into one ‘canonical’ page.

The code looks like this:

X-Robots-Tag

Since 2007 Google and other search engines have supported the X-Robots-Tag as a way to inform the bots about crawling and indexing preferences in the HTTP Header used to serve the file. The X-Robots-Tag is very useful for controlling indexation of non-HTML media types such as PDF documents.

As an example, if a page is to be excluded from the search index the directive would look like this:

X-Robots-Tag: noindex

Robots.txt

Robots.txt allows for some control of search engine robot access to a site, however it does not guarantee a page won’t be crawled and indexed. It should be employed only when necessary, and no robots should be blocked from crawling an area of the site unless there are solid business and SEO reasons to do so. I almost always recommend using the Meta tag “noindex” for keeping pages out of the index instead.

Avoiding Conflicts

It is a bad idea to use any two of the following robot access control methods at once.

Meta Robots 'noindex'
Canonical Tag (when pointing to a different URL)
Robots.txt Disallow
X-Robots-Tag

In spite of your strong desire to really keep a page out of the search results, one solution is always better than two. Let's take a look at what happens when you have various combinations of robot access control techniques in place for a single URL.

Meta Robots 'noindex' & Canonical Tag

If your goal is to consolidate one URL’s link strength into another URL and you don’t have any better solutions at your disposal, go with the canonical tag alone. Do not shoot yourself in the foot by also using the meta robots ‘noindex’ tag. If you use both bot herding techniques, it is probable that the search engines won’t find your canonical tag at all. You’ll miss out on the link strength reassignment benefit of a canonical tag because the meta robots ‘noindex’ tag has ensured that he canonical tag won’t be seen! Oops.

Meta Robots 'noindex' & X-Robots-Tag 'noindex'

These tags are redundant. I can’t see any way that having both in place for the same page would directly cause damage to your SEO. If you can alter the head of a document to implement at meta robots ‘noindex’, you shouldn’t be using the x-robots-tag anyway.

Robots.txt Disallow & Meta Robots 'noindex'

This is the most common conflict I see.

The reason I love the meta robots ‘noindex’ tag is that it is effective at keeping pages out of the index, yet it can still pass value from the no-indexed page to deeper content that is linked from it. This is a win-win and no link love is lost.

The robots.txt disallow entry restricts the search engines from looking at anything on the page (including potentially valuable internal links) but does not keep the page’s URL out of the index. What is the good in that? I once wrote a post on this topic alone.

If both protocols are in place, the robots.txt ensures that the meta robots ‘noindex’ is never seen. You’ll get the effect of a robots.txt disallow entry and miss out on all the meta robots ‘noindex’ goodness.

Below I'll take you through a simple example of what happens when these two protocols are implemented together.

Here is a screenshot from the Google SERP for a page that is disallowed in the robots.txt and also has a meta robots 'noindex' in place. The fact that it is in Google's index at all is your first clue of a problem.

Source: Google SERP

Here you can see the meta robots 'noindex' page. Too bad the search engines can't see it.

Source: View source of this page

Here you can see that the entire subdomain is disallowed in the robots.txt, ensuring that useful meta robots 'noindex' tags are never seen.

Source: Robots.txt file

Assuming mail2web.com is sincere in it's desire to keep everything out of the search engines, they'd be better off using the meta robots 'noindex' exclusively.

Canonical Tag & X-Robots-Tag 'noindex'

If you can alter the <head> of a document, the x-robots-tag likely isn’t your best route for restricting access in the first place. The x-robots-tag works better if you reserve it for non-html file types like PDF and JPEG. If you have both of these in place, I’d imagine that the search engines would ignore the canonical tag and fail to reassign link value as hoped.

If you are able to add a canonical tag to a page, you shouldn’t be using an x-robots-tag.

Canonical Tag & Robots.txt Disallow

If you have a robots.txt disallow in place for a page, the canonical tag will never be seen. No link juice passed. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Sorry.

X-Robots-Tag 'noindex' & Robots.txt Disallow

Because the x-robots tag exists in the HTTP Response Header, it is possible that these two implementations could intermingle and both be seen by the search engines. However, the statements would be redundant and the robots.txt entry would ensure that no links within the page would be discovered. Once again, we have a bad idea on our hands.

---------------------------------

Bonus Points!

I searched high and low for a live example to share here. I wanted to find a PDF that was both robots.txt disallowed AND noindexed with the x-robots-tag. Sadly, I came up empty handed. I'd have dug around all night, but this post had to go live at some point! Please, I beg you, beat me at my own game.

My process was as follows:

1. Use this handy search query to identify robots.txt files that call out PDF directories or files.

2. Start up your HTTP reader. I use HTTPfox.

3. Call up the robots.txt disallowed PDF file and check the Response Header for the X-Robots-Tag noindex entry.

Good luck! Let me know when you find one!

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The concept I've been driving at here is fairly straight-forward. Don't go over-board with your robot control techniques. Choose the best method for the scenario and back away from the machine. You'll be much better off.

Happy Optimizing!

Robot Rabbits from Shutterstock

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