Albatross - The Detective Macaulay Murders Trilogy #3 - at amazon.com and smashwords.com now.

 

**** The FBI hunt for Bo Harknett intensifies to its thrilling climax. ******

One life hangs in the balance.
One chance for survival.
Time is running out.

Will Detective Macaulay get there in time?

The pursuit of sadist Bo Harknett takes Detective Finkel Macaulay into uncomfortable territory, which shocks her to the core.

The final part of this gripping, murder-based trilogy,

"Albatross - The Detective Macaulay Murders Trilogy #3" 

has just been published at amazon.com and at smashwords.com

Now that the trilogy has been published, I feel as though I have suffered a bereavement. I did not prepare myself for this overwhelming sense of loss, this feeling like I had lost "people" I love.

As I clicked 'publish' I did not steel my heart for the loss of my beloved characters. Characters who had been in my head and heart for weeks, months, and even years before I could finally confine them to page and screen, and book.

This sense of loss has me feeling bewildered, unsure what to do with myself, what to do to fill the void left by releasing my creativity out into the world.

Writing 'Albatross' was difficult, for a variety of reasons. 

Not only is it the longest of the trilogy, it is also the most challenging story-wise, with multiple story arcs and emotions all vying for your attention simultaneously.

Near the final paragraphs of the final chapter I even found myself making excuses not to finish it, and I did all I could to avoid sitting down to write the final few words.

If I told you that there were real tears in my eyes at some of the parts of this  final book, you would be astonished. I have a feeling that this book will take off - all the time I have been writing it, the story and dialogue has come to me in dreams. It felt at times like I was being helped to write this book, it often felt as though another's presence was helping me. 

Although I had crafted an outline of the book before starting to write it, the plan changed many times, taking on a life of its own. I went to sleep each night and had dreams about what my characters would do next, and when I woke up it was with a new found eagerness to put down on page and screen what I had dreamt about. 

Perhaps it is a 'stream of consciousness' that allowed me to tap into my psyche and write this incredibly suspenseful, thrilling and emotional book, and now that the Trilogy is complete, I have enough material coming to me while I sleep to write at least a dozen more books in this series.

I have arrived, Universe, embrace me.

If you wish to preview or download a sample all of the books in the Trilogy go to smashwords.com  for iPad iPod Touch, Apple iBookstore, Sony Reader, Barnes and Noble Nook, and Kobo Books Reader. Amazon for Kindle also allow you to download a sample to your Kindle device.

To look inside this book, or to download a sample for Kindle, go to  amazon.com
Ruby Binns-Cagney is a successful self-published Author at smashwords.com and at Amazon.com for Kindle.

Google's Penguin 2.0 Update Has Arrived

(credit: national geographic)

Google Penguin 2.0 Update Background:

May 25 saw the implementation of the long-awaited Google Penguin 2.0 update.

Google started cleaning up the quality of content pulled into their search engine going back to the Panda update in 2011 which targeted low quality websites; ones with duplicate content, thin content, scraped content.

2012 heralded the blackhat spam update, Penguin, targeting those websites which were full of spammy links and redirects, and the ones where users were served pop-ups and pop-unders and redirects to porn websites and websites offering Viagra pills.

Penguin 2.0 update leads on from this, in an aggressive way, detailed below.


What Are The Main Factors?

The Google Penguin update is a fairly standard update that was aimed at reducing the webspam within the Google results. There have however been some highly documented factors that the Google Penguin update specifically targeted.

Google have publicly stated that the update was aimed at reducing web spam techniques utilized by many SEO’s, and the factors above clearly demonstrate that they have tried to attack web spam and low-quality content. 

About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice.

What can you do to improve your sites Page Rank post-Penguin if you notice your rank has dropped significantly?

>>Clean up your website. Remove old, duplicate ads, broken links, photos that are too big and load slowly.

>>Check the backlinks you have - do they help or harm your ranking? Use the Google disavow tool to remove backlinks which do not serve you in a positive way.

>>Avoid having too many ads above the fold.

>>Verify your website with Google by using an exact-match domain (for example, make sure you have an email address which matches your domain name, such as info@mydomainname.com from http://www.mydomainname.com) and get verified now.

>>Have a responsive website design: if your site takes a long time to load, revise this to make sure it loads faster. One way to do this is to use CSS to ensure that whichever device a visitor uses to view your website is an optimised experience.

>>Stop using paid links that pass PageRank - you will receive a penalty notice from Google if you continue to use paid links to make your PageRank higher.

These are just some of the Google Penguin 2.0 updates. Even if you do just one of the suggested improvements your PageRank will thank you.

Ruby Binns-Cagney is a successful self-published Author at smashwords.com and at Amazon.com for Kindle.