• Active warnings from the Pacific Tsunami Center include Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska.

People in Honolulu’s coastal areas have begun evacuating after authorities sound warning sirens.

The magnitude 8.9 earthquake was the largest ever recorded in Japan.

Its epicenter was about 231 miles from Tokyo, unleashing a 13-foot tsunami that swept boats, cars, buildings and tons of debris miles inland. Officials have reported numerous deaths and major damage.

To put it in perspective, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti was magnitude 7.0.

Having survived the Haiti earthquake, myself, one thing to keep in mind is that there will be several aftershocks afterward.

The quake in Japan was, indeed, followed by a series of aftershocks, including one of magnitude 7.4 about 30 minutes later.

A good way to answer this question is to think about the capabilities of the mobile phone’s web browser, especially in relation to the capabilities of modern desktop browsers. To simplify matters, we can break mobile phones into a few classifications:

1. Traditional mobile phones: Phones with browsers that cannot render normal desktop webpages. This includes browsers for cHTML (iMode), WML, WAP, and the like.
2. Smartphones: Phones with browsers that render normal desktop pages, at least to some extent. This category includes a diversity of devices, such Windows Phone 7, Blackberry devices, iPhones, and Android phones, and also tablets and eBook readers.

We can further break down this category by support for HTML5:
* Devices with browsers that do not support HTML5
* Devices with browsers that support HTML5

Once upon a time, mobile phones connected to the Internet using browsers with limited rendering capabilities; but this is clearly a changing situation with the fast rise of smartphones which have browsers that rival the full desktop experience. As such, it’s important to note that the distinction we are making here is based on the current situation as we see it and might change in the future.
Googlebot and Mobile Content

Google has two crawlers relevant to this topic: Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. Googlebot crawls desktop-browser type of webpages and content embedded in them and Googlebot-Mobile crawls mobile content. The questions we’re seeing more of can be summed up as follows:

Given the diversity of capabilities of mobile web browsers, what kind of content should I serve to Googlebot-Mobile?

The answer lies in the User-agent that Googlebot-Mobile supplies when crawling. There are several User-agent strings in use by Googlebot-Mobile, all of which use this format:

[Phone name(s)] (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

Resources: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/02/making-websites-mobile-friendly.html

You have always had the possibility of searching for recipes on Google. Just enter “recipe lasagne” in the search box and off you go.

Google is now making use of its left hand column links for restricting search results to one specific types of content or sites. In relevant searches, there will appear a separate link called Recipes. Click on it and you will get recipes only in the center search result column.

This in itself would not make much of a difference. But if you click on the More button below the Recipes link you will may get a list of ingredients. Tick off the ones you want or do not want. You can also restrict searches according to cook time and calories.

The main difference is that this time, it is going to affect more sites in a shorter time than normal.

The problem is that there are several sites that are making a business out of a core property of the Google algorithm. Google likes sites that provide original content of interest to readers. Traditionally spammers would put up pages with content scraped (stolen) from other sites and present it as its own.

Google is getting better and better at catching such sites by identifying duplicate content. Google rewards web pages with many links from popular and trust worthy sites. Since spammers cannot expect people to link to their copy and paste web pages, they put up a lot of sites that link to each other. Google is pretty good at finding dubious inter-linkages of this kind.

This is why some sites have specialized in getting people to write new and original content for them. This makes it less likely that the duplication alarms go off, and it is even possible to get people to link to some of these pages. Organized linking takes care of the rest.

The fact that these sites have original content, though, does not mean that it is very good or very useful. You have probably read quite a few of these pages yourself when searching the net. The articles includes a few paragraphs of relevant content, but these paragraphs do not tell you anything new. They are the kind of articles that tell you that if you want to succeed at a job interview it is wise to brush your teeth. It isn’t exactly wrong or irrelevant, but it is news to very few of us.

The problem for Google is that such pages may outrank pages of greater value — pages on web sites that provide more in depth and thought provoking content. And these are the sites Google would like to reward in its latest major algorithm tweak, and they will do so by punishing “content factories” or “content farms”, as well as the more traditional spammer and scraper sites.