Now you can send money through Gmail

Today at Google IO, Google’s developer conference, they announced the ability to send money through gmail, free!

Quote from the Google Wallet Page at http://www.google.com/wallet/send-money/ “Google Wallet is now integrated into Gmail. This means you can securely send money to friends and family in the U.S. – without leaving your Gmail inbox.”

This feature will be rolling out to Gmail users ages 18+ in the U.S. over the next few months. Look for the $ icon in your attachment options. You can also get earlier access if your friends have the feature and send money to you.

It’s free to send money from your Google Wallet Balance or directly from your bank account. You can also pay with your credit and debit cards for a low fee of 2.9% per transaction (minimum $0.30). Receiving money is always free.

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Google Takes action on link networks according to Matt Cutts

In a recent video, Matt Cutts spoke about Google’s efforts to target black hat spam and link networks.

Quote “We’re also looking at some ways to go upstream to deny the value to link spammers–some people who spam links in various ways. We’ve got some nice ideas on trying to make sure that that becomes less effective and so we expect that that will roll out over the next few months as well.

And in fact, we’re working on a completely different system that does more sophisticated link analysis. We’re still in the early days for that, but it’s pretty exciting. We’ve got some data now that we’re ready to start munging and see how good it looks and we’ll see whether that bears fruit or not.”

Today in a series of tweets, he confirmed that Google took action on a number of link sellers and link networks. There is some speculation in the comments at SearchEngineLand about some of the networks that got penalized.

In addition to mattcutts.com/blog/what-to-e… it’s safe to assume webspam will continue to tackle link networks that violate our guidelines as well.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 15, 2013

In fact, we took action on several thousand linksellers in a paid-link-that-passes-PageRank network earlier today.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 15, 2013

I don’t think any legitimate SEO is going to risk his reputation or losing a client on spam techniques.

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Brown Stew Beef with Potatoes and Carrots

Brown Stew Beef with Carrots, Potatoes before I add the water

Brown Stew Beef with Carrots, Potatoes

Ingredients

• 5 whole carrots – peeled and chopped
• 3 whole potatoes, peeled and cut in chunks
• a whole small onion
• salt and pepper
• browning/casreep or burnt brown sugar
• about a pound of beef chunks or beef stew
• about 2 tablespoons of cooking oil or olive oil

Directions

1. Pressure the beef in a pressure cooking for 20 to 30 minutes or until the beef is tender
2. In a saucepan put two tablespoons of oil and saute onions for 2 to 3 minutes
3. Add the carrots, potatoes, browning and constantly stir and let cook for about 5 minutes.
4. Now add the beef, cover and let cook on medium heat for 10 minutes.
5. After 10 minutes add a cup of water and salt and pepper, stir and cover.
6. Check every 5 minutes to see if the potatoes are cooked.
7. Once the potatoes are cooked, your done!

Total cooking time about 45 minutes to an hour.

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Mother’s Day Meal – Buttermilk Oven Fried Chicken with Mac & Cheese, String Beans and Roasted Red Potatoes and Carrots

This year for Mother’s Day my wife and I tried a new spin on fried chicken.

Ingredients for Marinade

• 2 cups of Low fat buttermilk – (We chose low-fat because we are both on diets)
• Half of an onion, chopped
• 4 cloves of garlic, crushed
• 4-5 sprigs of thyme
• 1 fresh lemon
• Breadcrumbs or crushed Cornflakes
• Parmesan Cheese
• Chicken – of course! – This recipe did about a whole cut-up chicken

Directions for Chicken

Combine the buttermilk, crushed garlic, thyme, entire squeezed lemon, chopped onion and chicken into a large bowl and let marinate for 3 to 5 hours in the refrigerator.

After the chicken has finished marinating. Combine the Parmesan cheese and Breadcrumbs/Cornflakes into a separate bowl. Generously coat the chicken in the Parmasean mixture and put into a baking pan with a mesh. The mesh is to ensure that the chicken doesn’t touch the bottom of the baking pan. I coated the mesh with Pam Cooking Spray. Bake for 45 to 60 minutes or until chicken is well cooked.

Ingredients for Mac and Cheese

• 1/2 pound elbow macaroni
• 3 tablespoons butter
• 3 tablespoons flour
• 1 tablespoon powdered mustard
• 3 cups milk
• 1/2 cup yellow onion, finely diced
• 1 bay leaf
• 1/2 teaspoon paprika
• 1 large egg
• 12 ounces sharp cheddar, shredded or grated
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• Fresh black pepper

Topping:

• 3 tablespoons butter
• 1 cup bread crumbs
• Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Directions for Macaroni and Cheese

Bring a large pot of water to a boil, include a pinch of salt. Once its boiling add the macaroni elbows

While the elbows are cooking, in a separate pot, melt the butter. Whisk in the flour and mustard and keep stirring for about 5 minutes, make sure it doesn’t settle or burn. When there are no more lumps, stir in the milk, onion, bay leaf, and paprika. Simmer for ten minutes and remove the bay leaf.

Add the egg. Stir in 3/4 of the cheese, add a small pinch of salt and pepper. Keep stirring as you don’t want any lumps.
By now your macaroni should be finished. Drain the macaroni of all the water in a colander.
Pour the drained macaroni into the mix and pour into a 2-quart casserole dish. Top with remaining cheese.

Melt the butter in a saute pan and toss the bread crumbs to coat. Top the macaroni with the bread crumbs. Bake for 30 minutes. Remove from oven and cool for five to ten minutes then it’s ready to serve

Roasted Veggies and Stringbeans

Combine all veggies into a baking pan, coat in olive oil and add a tablespoon of oregano. Use your hand and mix all the ingredients together and bake for 45 minutes to an hour.

Saute the string beans into a saucepan with olive oil. You can add some salt and pepper for flavor

You don’t have to go to Culinary School to cook like a chef.

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Google Drops Instant Previews

Last week Google dropped their instant previews in the Search Engine Results Pages because of low usage. These previews allowed you to see a screenshot of the site before you clicked through and the text you search for would be highlighted. It wasn’t a full clear screenshot because you would still need to click-through to read the actual text on the page. It has now been replaced with a new drop down with 3 options

• Cached
• Similar
• Share

Cached shows you the last cached version of the page, Similar does a related search for the urls and Share only shows when you are logged in to Google Plus and offers to share the url on your Google Plus page.

I did a search for my name “Oral Seymour” also noticed that the Similar link didn’t show on my Twitter, Myspace or Quora results.

Here is the quote from Jessica from Google in response to a question in the Google Product forums

Hi Searchey,

As we’ve streamlined the results page, we’ve had to remove certain features, such as Instant Previews.
Instant previews saw very low usage by our users, and we’ve decided to focus on streamlining the page to benefit more users.

Thanks!

Jess

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Google Warns of Exact Match Domain Algorithm Change

As you can see from screenshot, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team announced a major algorithm change designed to reduce the rankings of low quality exact match domain sites.

Cutts also tweeted, “New exact-match domain (EMD) algo affects 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree. Unrelated to Panda/Penguin.”

While I’m not surprised at the announcement, I’m surprised that it took this long, they have been hinting about this for some time now and its been a noticeable and tempting SEO tactic.

This may not have been noticeable to regular users but every now and again, I would search for a competitive organic term and the usual set of suspects would be in the top 10, Wikipedia ect. Then you’ll see a site, with the exact match domain, a few articles and a few links ranking in the top 10, other than the exact match domain, the site had no other business being there.

I sometimes worked this into a clients SEO strategy  buy purchasing exact match domains for mid difficulty terms, sometimes it was successful, sometimes not, but it didn’t take a lot of resources so it was always worth trying. It will be interesting to see if this tactic still works going forward.

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