You Can Fake Your Google +1 Counts With Redirects

Enrico Altavilla discovered a bug with how Google+ shows +1s for a page, which has already been patched by Google. It is pretty amazing and reminds me of how webmasters faked their PageRank back in 2005.

In short, by using a simple redirect on the page, a page was able to pretend it was another page and use the +1s from the page they are redirecting to as the their own +1s.

So when a site had a weird JavaScript redirect to YouTube, it thought the site was indeed YouTube and that page inherited the +1s YouTube had.

Again, this no longer works but I figured I share the story so if it happens again, a different way, we have something to look back at.

Google's Matt Cutts: Content Clarity Over Technical Content

There is an excellent video from Google's Matt Cutts on the question Should I focus on clarity or jargon when writing content?

The short answer is focus on clarity over jargon.

Matt explains that in most cases, having content that most people understand is way more important that having all the scientific and technical jargon about the topic you are covering. If you can't explain the topic to a novice, then the reader likely won't be able to understand your content.

Best case, start off explaining it in simple terms and get more technical as you go. But if you had to pick, it seems Matt is saying content clarity is more important over detailed technical and scientific content, in most cases.

Here is the video: