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John Chow has been penalised heavily by Google, for link-bombing. He is now far behind the first page for both “John Chow” and “Make Money Online” search terms. There’s also reports that Google will drop his PageRank from the 6 to 4, in the next PR update.

For several months now, John Chow had been aggressively pursuing a linkback campaign, where he would link to any blogger who writes a review of his blog, and links to him with the link text “Make Money Online”.

Google is at it again. They have acquired Blogger, Blogspot, Picassa, Measuremap, Analytics, YouTube, FeedBurner - the list goes on. Now, Google has acquired Panoramio, a Spanish image-sharing site. The perks seems to be that Panoramio allows users to upload images and locate the shot on Google Earth/Google Maps.

Some guys saw this acquisition coming a long time ago : Google had made Panoramio the default photo layer for Google Earth, which in turn helped Panoramio grow to over 1 million photos located on Google Earth.

Mahalo, a human-powered(!) search engine was launched by Jason Calacanis. Mahalo is the second innovative search site launched this year - the first being Powerset.

Calacanis hopes that Mahalo will beat Google, and win over the organic search results segment, which is now crowded by spam, MFAs(Made-For-AdSense) and wiki sites.

A flashback : Powerset launched with aims similar to Mahalo.

Mahalo, means “Thank You” in Hawaiian. Results are handpicked and classified into topics like as travel, music, television, movies, cars, food, health, news and sports.

The free site statistics tool, StatCounter, one of my favourites along with Google Analytics, has got a major feature upgrade. The log size has been increased by 400.

Earlier, in the free version, site stats were unlimited but, but detailed analysis of each visitor was available only for last 100 visitors.

Now, StatCounter has raised the bar to 500, according to the StatCounter blog.

More than a week after reporting about Google Analytics’ redesign, my Analytics account has finally switched over. Joy at last!

I had mentioned in that post that, if all the hype surrounding the redesign were to be true, Google Analytics would finally be a stand-out in the crowd of site statistics services.

The newly designed interface was available to users who signed up after it was unveiled. Loyal customers(that’s you and me) had to wait for some time.