It’s common practice that your Title will be truncated if it’s too long and pulled from DMOZ or Yahoo!’s directory, but lately Google’s use of Titles is making a lot of site owner’s scratch their heads. A domain name overriding a Title Tag’s contents? Titles crafted from anchor text, ALT or H3 tags? Titles coming from text used in inbound anchor link text–even if that text is nowhere on your site.

Complaints and concerns can be heard all over the web at Google’s webmaster forums, Webmaster World, and here. But not all webmasters are experiencing or even bugged by this. Some are reporting that the changes are improving click throughs.
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Over at the Webmaster World forum, Brett Tabke started a post you’ll want to read: vBulletin Issues Warning : Google reCAPTCHA System Cracked.

Here is more information. Google’s reCAPTCHA system, which is meant to protect websites, forums, and bulletin boards from spam and excessive registrations, may have been compromised. An independent researcher claims that he tested the system with automated attacks and successfully thwarted reCAPTCHA 17.5% in testing.

Most of us are familiar with CAPTCHA, an acronym for Completely Automated Public Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It deters spammers from inundating sites with junk posts. You’ve seen CAPTCHA when registering at a new site or posting comments on a blog. It’s a box with distorted words or a combination of letters and numbers that you enter to prove you’re human and not an automated program.

Google contends their system was not cracked and that the researcher tested an older version of reCAPTCHA. However, after hearing this news, many site owners are saying that, yes, they’ve noticed a big increase in spam posts.

If you use vBulletin they are suggesting switching to the Q&A Verification system until the issue is investigated further and resolved. Of course, this method is not fool proof either.

Sources Cited:

Mello, Jr., John P. “Google ReCAPTCHA Cracked.” Anti Spam, Anti Phishing and Email Security in Business – AllSpammedUp.com. 5 Jan. 2011. Web. 12 Jan. 2011.

There is no substitute for a converting landing page on page one of Google; however, I wanted to share an easy method for getting your Tweets listed in Google Reatime.

If you’re not too familiar with Google Reatime results, you’ll find a link to it in the left side menu of Google Search. Once a search is performed, a menu appears to the left. Click the “Everything” link. This reveals the different Universal Search options available, such as searching only blogs and blogs posts, images, or videos. For this article, we’re interested in the “Realtime” link (which may appears as “Updates” in your area). Realtime was created to list the “latest” information and breaking news on the web from sources like Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, FriendFeed and MySpace, but right now it’s basically a search for indexed Tweets.

But that’s a good thing. It means even if someone doesn’t use Twitter they may still find your news, link, or offers. Not all Tweets are included in Realtime, but there is an easy technique for getting yours included immediately. It doesn’t matter if your Twitter account is one minute or one year old, this works. And I’m not talking about “sponsored” Tweets I’m talking about “any” Tweet which is even better.

1. Sign up for Twitter or log in.
2. Sign up for Digg or log in.
3. Link your Twitter and Digg accounts via Digg.
4. Post a link on Digg (avoid spam).
5. Elect (via Digg) to also post it to your Twitter account.

It may take an hour or so for the initial post to appear in Realtime results, but once you’ve done this, future posts appear almost instantly. Just remember to follow the steps above. Once you have a nice Twitter following, have shown that you post quality content regularly, and have gotten some retweets and mentions, your posts should appear on their own.