Getting iCloud calendar to sync with HP Touchpad

So you want to display your iCloud calendar from your iOS device on your HP Touchpad (webos).

Well there is an easy way.

In the calendar on your Mac - right click on the calendar and share the calendar / make it public, and copy the url.

Paste the url into this website;

https://icaltogcal.com

Then click continue, and copy the new share url.

Add this to your google calendar;

https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/178357?hl=en - How to add the calendar to google


Sign in to your Google Apps account in a web browser and open your GoogleCalendar.

In the left sidebar under Other Calendars, click the Add menu. Then choose one of the following:

Add by URL: Adds a team or company calendar someone created. Enter the calendar's address (ends in .ics).

Now it should process the url and add the calendar. It takes a few hours to start syncing, so it will be blank for a while, but after a few hours (I left it for 24 hours) it will start syncing.

Then on the Touchpad add your Google account to the calendar, and voila the calendar will appear on your Touchpad. 

Done.

Why did interflora get kicked off Google search rankings?

Here is a good question and answer from SXSW 2013 regarding why Interflora got kicked off the Google search ranking in advance of mothers day;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm7nVHslGyw

Question from David de Niese: UK there was a case regarding Interflora http://www.interflora.co.uk, where Google kicked Interflora off the search index, Interflora were probably responsible for that in some way as well, no doubt. But ultimately Matt was responsible for every mother in the UK not getting flowers for mothers day this year. What it does proof is that the algorithms that you use have a large material impact on every company in the world. How long do you think the work that you guys do will remain unregulated? 

Answer from Matt Cutts from Google: How long do I think the work we do will remain unregulated? That's an interesting question; I'm just a web spam guy, I'm not a lawyer, so let me prefix it with that. I've actually had the enjoyment of talking to regulators on both sides of the Atlantic, right, for FTC and EC. And so far that's gone relatively well. From our perspectives we try to make sure we run the search engine, we run google, just like you guys would run the search engine, like you would run Google if you were in charge. And so we have pretty clear guidelines like don't cloak, don't do sneaky javascript redirects, don't make doorways, don't buy links that pass page rank cos those violate FTC guidelines and the UK fair-trade guidelines and all that stuff. 

We force that on both small and large companies. But you don't always here about it because when we take action on large companies, we're not as more likely to talk about that as we don't always talk about it when we take action against a small company. So last week for example we and earlier this week we took action on 98,000 sites, that were all part of a link network. We don't feel the need to call those sites out, right. And we're probably not going to say this site did badly, this site didn't do badly.

But I'm actually kind of heartened that when people like the FTC come in, and look through 9 million documents then about how Google works, you know there was a great article by Tim Woo who was at the FTC and said the regulators were doing their job, they looked at what was going on, and apparently didn't find anything worth pursuing. For working at Google for 13 years I think we try to do a pretty principle job. So you know whether it's a big or small company, whether it's a site that sells flowers, or whether it's a mom or pop, we try an enforce our guidelines consistently. 

SXSW Google and Bing how to improve your search rankings

Good Q&A with Google and Bing regarding how to improve your search rankings. All about SEO/Search Engine Optimisation. Interesting points that came up;

• Facebook has a robots.txt file which blocks all web-crawling of their site. And Google mentioned that they have been blocked by Google. Whereas Bing has a partnership with Facebook. Could that be a big concern for Google. Especially in light of;
• Facebook Graph search - does that worry Google or Bing, they didn't really answer that one very directly, they just made some comments about them waiting and seeing and it could be interesting. Whereas I think it could spell quite a problem for Google...
• They re-iterated before contacting them in order to understand a problem on your site in terms of site ranking then you should make sure you are fully utilising the web master tools as they will reveal a lot of the problems / issues and how to fix them.
• Interesting discussion around when a site has gained a poor reputation, or you've taken over a domain with a poor reputation, you can request a "re-inclusion" request (after you've rebuilt the site and distanced yourself from the site before) - this will effectively wipe the slate clean and get you re-listed on Google.
• Interesting discussion about content behind a login - what's in front and behind the login or paywall should be the same, outside should be a subset. If you offer a completely different experience internally then this is known as "cloaking" and is frowned upon. The guy from Bing also explained you should do a spreadsheet of all the links/content on your site and place a value on all those links, and you need to flip it round and see how you can get a subset of your most valuable content outside the login, in order to help attract users in to the site.
• Note you can setup local listings options for your site, to reflect for a business, where the local region(s) for that business is.
• If you are having problems with content not getting crawled or appearing in search, use the "fetch as googlebot" and "fetch as bingbot" tools to see what the crawlers are seeing.
• Utilising schema.org to mark up your website is a good idea, as it helps the search engines understand your sites content and index it appropriately (and display it appropriately) it doesn't get you higher on the search rankings though.
• They repeatedly talked about how you can perform better on search when you are in a domain dominated by larger players - and that is to pick a niche keyword(s) and build a reputation around that, and then expand from there. Also the suggested phrases at the bottom of search can help you decide what keyword phrases to focus on.