Screw your competitors. Google will help you.

October 24, 2007 at 10:57 pm · Filed under Online Marketing

As Google ponders how to apply relevance where relevance is now for sale and barter, they have stepped up and fired their first salvo: Dinging the Page Rank of link farms and sites which promote heavy cross-linking activity.

Situationally, they’re in a can of worms here. For their strategy to be effective, they’d really need to check sites by hand to decide if they should be put on their demotion list. On the flip side, if they do nothing at all, the burgeoning text link ad business will run amok, adding false positives to Google’s view of all things meta.

What to do, Google… what to do. Clearly this is the safe route, and one that is hard to challenge at face value: Kick the link farms in the stomach. But, many sites of a different caliber have reported negative repercussions (read the SEOmoz article below). Forbes? The Washington Post? I had heard rumors that there were a good number of highly respected sites that have stealth pages (that users never see) where they sell text links for top dollar. Maybe it is true.

Regardless, Google policing in this manner when looked at from a slightly different perspective is unsettling. Want to get a leg up on your competition? Buy them a nice present. Hook them up with involvement in some highly visible link farms. Get them some text link ads from a really visible source, too. Google will help you screw them over.

Read more on TechCrunch:
Google Declares Jihad On Blog Link Farms

SEOmoz is also providing commentary and the effect on more mainstream web sites:
Google Toolbar PageRank Losses For Hundreds of Websites

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Twine beta invite

October 19, 2007 at 12:36 pm · Filed under Web 2.0, Beta, Social Networking

InviteShare, my new go-to source for beta invites doesn’t have a line on anything for Twine. If anyone out there has an invite to the beta they’d be willing to share, I’d love to be able to check it out.

What’s is it? Twine, the product of Radar Networks, is one of the more promising semantic search engine efforts to date. Yes, the phrase “Google killer” is being used. Venture Beat did a great write-up on Twine yesterday if you want to learn more about it. The post on VentureBeat does a great job explaining not only Twine, but the concept of semantic search. There is also a more concise post about Twine on TechCrunch.

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Microsoft’s Analytics Offering (Gatineau) Goes Beta

August 31, 2007 at 2:43 pm · Filed under Web Applications, Analytics, Beta

Joshua Allen blogged on the MIX07 web site this morning about Gatineau, Microsoft’s web analytics offering, going beta. Microsoft is touting its ability to apply its own demographic information to your web traffic data. From Josh’s post:

In addition to all of the standard analytics features, Gatineau can correlate your web traffic data with our massive database of demographic information. This allows you to slice your logs based on gender, age and other characteristics of your visitors. The service is free.

Read the whole post on the Visit Mix web site, or go directly to the Gatineau beta sign up.

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Operation Gain Google Respect: What is with my PageRank?

August 19, 2007 at 10:07 pm · Filed under Content, Analytics, Online Marketing

I blogged awhile back about Google being less than excited about my blog. Since then, I’ve gotten some great advice, done some observation, and will continue to utilize my blog as an open mic as I hope to regain some respect in Google’s eyes. First things first-what’s with my incredibly disappearing PageRank?Maybe I’m overreacting to my loss of PageRank. To refresh everyone’s memories, I’ve lost my page rank for every page on my blog except my homepage, which, has the horrific rank of 2. It’s better than being blacklisted, but I’m certainly not on Google’s list of cool places to hang out. But, let me reiterate-although I’m in PageRank purgatory, I still receive the strong bulk of my traffic from Google. It’s not a lot of traffic, but the search traffic that I am receiving is highly relevant.For those of you that are new around the search engine landscape, here’s a bit on Page Rank straight from Google:

PageRank ExplainedPageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

Sounds like PageRank is the juice—I’ve gotta have it to drive relevant traffic to my blog, right? From everything I’ve read (including claims that PageRank is actually almost completely irrelevant) I’d say, yes, PageRank is still absolutely important, maybe it is just harder to determine what my PageRank is at this exact moment.Let’s back up. How does one arrive at knowing what PageRank is assigned to any given page on a web site? Like many online marketers out there, I use the Goolge Toolbar (or a Firefox or IE extension) which pings Google HQ and reports back the PageRank of the page that is currently being viewed in the browser. This is where I’m getting the abysmal PageRanks for this blog. It’s straight from Google. I’m screwed, right? Maybe not. The quote below is allegedly straight from a Google Rep.

“The PageRank that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is forentertainment purposes only. Due to repeated attempts by hackers toaccess this data, Google updates the PageRank data very infrequentlybecause is it not secure. On average, the PR that is displayed in theGoogle Toolbar is several months old. If the toolbar is showing a PR ofzero, this is because the user is visiting a new URL that hasn’t beenupdated in the last update. The PR that is displayed by the GoogleToolbar is not the same PR that is used to rank the webpage results sothere is no need to be concerned if your PR is displayed as zero. If asite is showing up in the search results, it doesn’t not have a real PRof zero, the Toolbar is just out of date”

Too broadly paraphrase the Google Rep: don’t necessarily trust the PageRank indicator in your browser. Which, in my scenario, does feel right. Google has likely raised its eyebrows at me for moving the blog from a hosted Blogger to a hosted Wordpress blog—not because I went away from a Google product (although it did cross my mind), but because I made slight changes site-wide (including utilizing a completely different presentation template, changing the permalink structure, and moving pages—301′d or not… and I get a B- in that department, but that’s another story).For now, I’m going to move my PageRank concerns off the critical list. It would seem the PageRank tools are likely reporting well out-of-date data, so how much credence can I give it in the short-term anyway?The good news: Google reports that I’m indexed well. I am coming up in the search results. So, I’ll take that as a nod that things are OK for now. If things go south insofar as incoming traffic from Google, I’ll definitely reignite my concerns. There are, however, other things that come into play that can help my blog get more respect from Google. I’ll continue to blog about about this subject under the “Operation Gain Google Respect” heading and tag.

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Boy is Google upset with me

August 11, 2007 at 11:42 pm · Filed under Content, Online Marketing

It’s my site, not so much me. Maybe it was never happy with it.

What would make me concerned? Well, first, I do have a reasonable level of SEO knowledge. It’s not my role directly, but it is a service that is highly relative to what I do. So, admittedly, I’m not a practitioner guru by any stretch of the imagination, but I certainly don’t think I’ve done anything remotely harmful. So, back to the question—what would make me concerned?

1. The Google PageRank for my blog’s homepage is 2
   Google PageRank is on a scale of 0 to 10 (there is also a “not yet indexed”). If Google knows you exist, and you aren’t being penalized for any reason, you should have a PageRank of 3.
2. None of my pages beyond my homepage have any PageRank assigned to them whatsoever
3. Google’s Advanced Search indicates I have one inbound link
   The importance of relevant inbound links to Google is undeniable. Luckily, several web sites and blogs have picked up on posts and linked to them. However, Google is only crediting me with one when I use their advanced search and check (when I just search for smcandrew.com I come up with more than 200 in-bound links).

A little more backstory on my blog

I initially hosted a blog, on this domain, using Blogger’s hosted blog solution. My Blogger site did have more pages with PageRank, across the blog I had PageRanks of 4 or 3. I was looking for something that provided more flexibility and switched to a WordPress solution. When moving to WordPress, I did my best to make the transition smooth, and, if anything, improve my search affinity:

• I did 301 redirects for the new locations of all moved content since Blogger and WordPress’ directory and page naming schema are different
• I utilized WordPress plug-ins to populate my Meta tags (I honestly do not know how Blogger was populating them)
• I modified my page titles to focus on content (as opposed to the name of my blog)
• I incorporated a Google Sitemap, and a WordPress plug-in which updates and resubmits it automatically

I want to be in Google’s good graces. My site isn’t heavily trafficked, but of the traffic I do get, more than half is from Google.

So what did happen? Maybe it was the move from Blogger and the slight modifications I made in tags and page titling (though I’d hoped that since everything was 301′d Google would look at the ‘updated’ site and content as a good thing). Maybe it is something about how the HTML is outputted between Blogger and WordPress. I’m not exactly sure. I get SEO feedback and gain knowledge on what has upset the Google Gods, I’ll post it here on this blog.

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