mp4 video H264
Playtime: 5 min 45 seconds
For some reason when I was editing we ended up with a much smaller image than before, but as I have more videos coming uploading and publishing as it is. The sound is a little poppy as well as I boosted it maybe too much.
mp4 video H264
Playtime: 3 min 04 seconds
Unlike many people in the SEO, Tech or Marketing community, I don’t write posts just for linkbait & traffic, and when I make up my mind about whether I want to continue being involved in a community, that decision is final.
Blogger (Google) and Amazon it seems have collaborated and introduced a way for people using Blogger to monetize their blogs using Amazon.
I wonder if Google is making some money as a 2-tier affilaite referring so many affiliates to Amazon
I think Google have got their priorities wrong with Real Time search, though I haven’t seen this on other “ego search” terms. I checked with Danny Sullivan and Michael Arrington to start with.
Living as an expat, you don’t always have the benefit of exposure to a complete marketing ecosystem, thus when you hear of a marketer who seems to be “doing things” for the first time, with a huge following, it can shake you up a little.
Lots of reports are out today about how effectively Dell is using social media marketing and especially Twitter to generate revenue, $6.5M in sales are the headlines, I wonder what that translates to in margins.
I am still working on some stuff with dynamic tracking links, but if you are using WordPress for PPC you might also need to think about dynamic content.
I know there are a number of WordPress Themes and plugins that claim they are intended for use with PPC, but they are not going to solve dynamic keyword insertion, and that could have a massive effect on conversion rates & quality score.
It is no huge secret that I have had this WordPress blog hacked twice this year but some consolation is that I am not alone.
Alex recently launched a DVD course on WordPress security that is available for FREE + shipping
Stop – I know what you are thinking – FREE + Shipping these days normally comes with lots of strings attached, forced continuity often hidden etc. Whilst Alex does cross-sell a few related products, the main offer is genuinely free.
Twitter deciding to nofollow links 2 years ago really annoyed me.
When they decided to close all loopholes in creating an active link within the bio area, it prevented me linking to my disclosure policy – that annoyed me as well, especially with all the terrible attempts of providing adequate disclosure within paid tweets that are currently being used/proposed.
There was a huge outcry from the SEO community.
Google have introduced a DNS service
If you use it, they will know everything you do online. I am sure some people won’t mind.
A lot of the money made by major ISPs is for the anonymous data they provide to various services that aggregate that data.
I know I can optimize lots of things on my site, and some of the work my server admin does and plans to do in the future have already reduced the time it takes Google to cache my content by 50%+
Read more on Google Friend Connect Adds 8 Seconds To Page Load Time…
With Google now providing convenient anchor links as sitelinks within search results for long structured documents I thought it would be prudent to examine current solutions for WordPress and see which of them is most likely to help you obtain anchor links.
Read more on Anchor Sitelinks – WordPress Table Of Contents (Part 1)…
It is good that Twitter is doing something to protect their users, but this is like putting on a condom the morning after.
Update: It has now been 98 hours since Twitter blocked my site
Why?
If you asked Howie Schwartz what are the key skills that make his business a success, at least one of the answers would be “outsourcing” and another would be automation with effective tools.
Whilst he employs 80 people, he also has a team of 200+ website creation, content development, link building and social media specialists to call upon (native English speakers).
If you can avoid doing all the work yourself, either with automation or outsourcing it is more scalable.
Just over a week ago, Todd Hogan the founder of Keyword Titan approached me to see if I would be interested in taking a look at their new Keyword research automation tools.
Trust me, I have spent thousands on various keyword research tools in the past, some of them even still get updated by the authors despite changes in the way data can be pulled from the search engines, many of the services are still in business and even booming, and in many ways I am quite happy with what I already have available.
That being said, time is one of my most valuable commodities (though I tend to not use the resource to it's full potential)
Another problem is grouping
It is fairly easy to group keywords if you are generating them from various root keywords.
{specialty} {profession} {location}
Annulment Attorney in Los Angeles
It is far harder, or at least more time consuming on researched keyword lists.
I was already starting to prepare a monetization list to offer as an opt-in bonus, as a companion to Howie's 36 Niche report. I knew he was covering keyword research in his training, along with monetization, but I wanted to help accelerate the success of anyone taking part in his competition, and continuing that into the future.
If you help people achieve results, good things happen.
Photo credit: S@TS
It can make quite a striking difference with Feedburner if you have a few followers there.
But even this doesn't really account for the shifting sands in online attention.
The latter half of this post was originally published Mar 21, 2008 @ 20:38
Since then Twitter has for many people emerged as the primary way they read RSS feeds, combined with various forms of lifestreaming.
The first time I see tweets and blog posts often is also on services such as Blogcatalog's dashboard or even Mybloglog (though that can sometimes lag a little on updates these days)
From what I have heard you will be able to listen in without signing up to the VIP list, but then you won't receive a reminder just before the broadcast starts, and you won't be eligible for any of the prizes.
Prizes? Yeah Rich is giving away a boatload of prizes, worth subjectively tens of thousands of dollars including private consultation (which I don't think he really offers these days)
Rich Schefren Live - 12pm EST (midday) Thursday 18th June 2009 - scheduled to last 4 hours, though knowing Rich he might keep it running longer if there are people online.
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The links are visible, nothing is hidden, but all the same it is effectively a paid linking scheme.
Here is what they said in an email sent to customers
Our New "Link-To-Us" Program We're also launching a new "Link-To-Us" program today. In essence, customers who post new links or change their old Mosso links on their websites to our new http://www.rackspacecloud.com site will receive special goodies. The more sites you post a link on, the more great stuff you will get. How cool is that? Please check out all the links here: http://www.rackspacecloud.com/links Thanks so much for being a part of the Rackspace family, and please keep the feedback coming so that we can continue to build the most complete and easy-to-use cloud platform on the web.The sad thing is this would all be unnecessary if you just made some minor changes to your affiliate program.
Seems simple enough, except two things are going to prevent this from effectively promoting the sponsoring brand over time — 1) disclosures read like warning signs; 2) Google is downgrading any blog or site that actively publishes paid content.Sarah Lacey's recent piece was fluff as well Google has no stated problem with paid or sponsored reviews - with Google it has always been about machine readable disclosure of paid links i.e. use some way to block the links from counting such as rel="nofollow", javascript, block with redirect + robots.txt etc I stated that Brian's article was a fluff piece, because it is very easy to research, but here are a few choice articles.
This isn't your typical scenario - 503 errors are frequently sent when a server becomes overloaded, or there are some backend problems.
A search of the Google Webmaster Help forums doesn't bring up a huge amount of cases, and mostly it is enquiring about what someone should do when they want to do some maintenance on a live server, probably for a short time.
In my case I didn't plan to be in "Maintenance Mode" for an extended period.
Here is the complete timeline:
I know the new additions to Gmail are just tweaks, and mainly created in Google "20% time" but these little problems cause me no end of frustration.
I have to read my spam folder daily, because it gets sometimes 200 spam email messages, and within that may be as many as 5% false positives.
These are emails I want to receive, which I have signed up to receive, I have confirmed a subscription with a full "double opt-in" process, and are from senders I previously had no problems receiving email from.
Some examples are occasional emails from list owners
On Google's new favicon
I was honestly wondering when someone would come up with a service like Share-A-Post, because it is one of those "no brainer" ideas that I have thought of doing, but never got around to.
When to a huge amount of disbelief I blocked some of my high ranking paid reviews with robots.txt, and hinted that syndication would be a perfect loophole in Google's penalties, no one fully understood what I meant - many SEO experts thought I was bonkers.
This is what I meant - widespread syndication with editorial control
What follows is an example of the Google search results being devastated by techniques taught by Alex Goad in his Players With Money membership site.
In the run up to the initial launch, and some time afterwards, I was ranking extremely well, with only the primary domain ranking better.
Now things are a little different…
That is an exact match search - the SERPs are a little noisy without quotes, with many sporting references regarding players and money, so in this case I thought an exact match is a better demonstration.
Relative search positions for a broad match are the same, though the
I have actually suffered from Chondromalacia Patella or "Runners Knee" for 25 years, and at one time even ran a niche website / blog on knee pain that took me a few hours to put together, and pulled in a few dollars a day.
Google today have launched Google Health that is supposedly for US use, but I was able to log straight in, and add the ailment I suffer from. I am not worried about the privacy aspects.
The information provided is pretty basic as you would probably expect in a country famous for medical lawsuits.
One useful aspect of Google Health
Today is RSS Awareness Day, and as a solid 40% of my RSS subscribers use Google Reader, I thought I would take this opportunity to reach out to the Google Reader team.
I am someone who loves using RSS, but at the same time as a business owner I find RSS is not living up to its current billing.
Whilst I haven't mentioned RSS day before on this blog, I have known about Daniel's plans for a month, and I might have been the first one to suggest using a dedicated site to promote RSS Day. This avoids what might be looked on as purely an attempt at linkbait.
As we are having a bit of an affiliate marketing news week, I thought it would be good to mention that SpeedPPC v3.0 has just been announced, and for the next week it will be available at $100 discount.
Last July SpeedPPC launched to huge critical acclaim and they even created this cool demonstration video of how it works.
With all the previous discussion of paid reviews and my unwillingness to raise the white flag or bend over, this post is going to come as a bit of a shock.
I am lowering the red flag
Carry on reading to find out why this isn't the same as raising a white flag, and is far from surrendering to Google on paid reviews.
It has been close to a year since I first starting delving into the intricacies of various forms of blog search, and 10 months since I returned to the subject. My post yesterday on the Microsoft Yahoo deal was the ideal opportunity to see how things might have changed over the last 10 months, as it is a topic being heavily discussed on 100s of blogs.
It crops up occasionally that people want to leave a comment with a reference to a Google webpage or a Google search result.
Unfortunately on a daily basis my server is hit with comment spam with links pointing to Google redirects, or Google subdomains.
Here are some examples:-
Due to all the spam, Google.com ends up on my domain blacklist, and a single URL occurrence will still allow it to be visible within my standard settings for comment moderation, as long there is no other specific penalties imposed by Spam Karma.
Multiple occurrences will end up buried amongst the spam, which is not something
Yes it is time for another controversial SEO post, sit back and enjoy.
Every single time I write a post mentioning PageRank, I get comments about PageRank not being important for ranking.
These comments very rarely differentiate between toolbar PageRank and the PageRank of whatever kind Google stores on their servers and upgrades on an extremely frequent basis for every page. I know from first hand experience that the toolbar PageRank has very little to do with rankings, and is manually manipulated based on Google's commercial goals.
The Ranking Factors article at SEOmoz in many ways skirts around
Lets face it, I have social profiles all over the web and I am or have been an active participant in tons of conversations on blogs and forums.
3 years ago Google introduced rel="nofollow", very similar to rel="me" , rel="friend" and other XFN and FOAF standards. Today Google are championing their new API with the slogan "URLs Are People Too"
3 years ago that was true, now URLs on many (most) places where people congregate on the web are no longer "people" because in a supposed attempt to combat comment spam, Google encouraged major sites to use rel="nofollow" making the
I know a segment of my readers are sick to death with anything to do with Google PageRank updates, and I haven't even bothered mentioning the most recent update up until now… there wasn't really anything newsworthy in it.
I just spotted a story on Sphinn that will likely get deleted because it is all in Russian - the Google Directory has apparently been updated from DMOZ data from 08/01/2008 (European date notation)
That wouldn't be significant other than Google lists pagerank alongside the listings in their version of DMOZ
I have highlighted a few sites that as far as
Lots of talk today about Google changing the terms of their referral units for Google Adsense. Good coverage by both Darren and Jeremy.
Lets take a little look at why they might have done this.
I would like to congratulate the Techcrunch team for finally coming to the realization that linking to sponsors within posts, without using nofollow on the links might be in violation of Google's Webmaster guidelines.
This was previously written about by Ted Murphy of Izea, and vehemently defended by Techcrunch, so it is surprising that they have made a significant change in their stance without also making a public statement about it.
I also wrote about this situation in a previous article on paid links and the PageRank update (round 5).
Here is their previous links to sponsors post from
As I had hoped, ( http://community.izea.com/blog/2007/12/an-invitation-t.html ) Ted Murphy had a chance to chat with Google's Matt Cutts at Pubcon
It seems Google want all links within content that "wouldn't exist without payment" to use nofollow, but seems to be focusing on services like PayPerPost, and not other forms of links which wouldn't exist without compensation.
If you read the Google blog or the coverage on Search Engine Land, you might be rejoicing that supplemental results are no more
It has been described as lipstick on a pig and others have just offered tips on site indexing.
Before this change, one of the tools still available to SEO practitioners to give an indication of the depth of site indexing was to add /* to the end on a site: search query.
Thus you would use
site:andybeard.eu/ - this would return the total pages supposedly indexed site:andybeard.eu/* - this would return the
I have had a chance to deal with the odd email over the last 2 weeks whilst moving house, but I knew I should respond to this paid links post by Matt Cutts as soon as I was able to do so with some level of detail.
So far the best estimate for having a landline for internet access provided by the Polish national carrier is 10 months, so I am using a GSM solution which in my remote part of Poland seems to clock in slightly faster than what I would expect from UMTS so might be giving me
I think this is one possibly for the water cooler on Sphinn, because I find it comical in a sad kind of way.
Ted Murphy rightly questions Google quite openly to explain why PPP bloggers are being punished for not using nofollow on links, yet many prominent bloggers post quite blatant pagerank passing links to their advertisers every chance they get.
Not only do they mention their advertisers in "Thanks To Our Advertisers" posts, but they also name drop them every chance they get as a form of disclosure.
As an example, almost every time PayPerPost was discussed, either Text Link Ads
Since the first real information came out about Izea's (PayPerPost) new SocialSpark service, that is in testing but will formerly launch in January my excitement has been a little tempered.
As I wrote in my initial preview of SocialSpark, there will be new metrics for gauging the authority and influence of a blog, to help determine advertising spend, not only based upon traffic and demographics, but also on past performance with CPM and CPC data also being made available.
With SocialSpark, any required links will be nofollow, though there is an option for editorial links without a nofollow.
All the negotiation about
Well I thought Google really hated me, but here is some real proof that the Google Toolbar isn't exactly telling the truth.
I personally have never seen sitelinks on a PR5 before, let alone a PR4, but then it isn't something I monitor extensively.
Congratulations to Maki from Doshdosh on also gaining some coveted sitelinks (and also PR6)
An example of a PR6 domain that still doesn't have sitelinks is Sphinn itself
Sphinn based upon MSN Live.com newly reactivated Linkdomain commnd has three times as many links as I do. +linkdomain:sphinn.com compared to +linkdomain:andybeard.eu
Graywolf thinks sitelinks are ephemeral so I
This isn't a typical "how To" article, because currently this feature doesn't exist, but it could with just a little 20% time at Google.
Whilst you can download an OPML file to import into other feed readers, or to upload to the web in another location, you can't currently access it directly.
Whilst many tech sites are lauding the new blogroll for Google Reader users, it isn't really very useful, and is without doubt extremely ugly compared to many widgets that use OPML, such as SpringWidgets, or even a work-around previously available.
Whilst I am upset about what Google says about my blog with their displayed Toolbar PageRank, and am even considering liquidating my site on Google Toolbar Buttons because of their poor technical support and response to feedback, this is totally unrelated.
You might think there is some element of bias, but what I just discovered is highly disturbing, and the thought of a family member seeing the same, maybe a child when they clicked a button on the "do no evil" toolbar, is just too great a risk.
Over the last year I have given a fair amount of coverage to PayPerPost, who now house the service along with other endeavours under the name Izea.
There are multiple reasons why I have supported PayPerPost and similar programs so strongly, and yet at the same time have never reviewed a link buying / selling service.
I have mentioned link buying and selling in passing, and also a couple of Wordpress plugins, but those plugins generally allow you to sell links which have a nofollow.
My emphasis both in editorial about services and in the few reviews I have myself written is to encourage the writing of quality content with editorial links. Compensation in whatever form should be based upon the time involved, expertise, and possibly the size and influence of the audience, and not based upon any SEO benefit to a site or service being reviewed.
Someone a few minutes ago sent me a legitimate enquiry via my contact form, a 100% text based message.
I do try to be responsive to enquiries that I can deal with quickly, so I emailed them straight back, and received the following delivery failure.
Delivered-To: myemailaddressatgoogle@gmail.com Received: by 10.65.176.15 with SMTP id d15cs319332qbp; Sat, 3 Nov 2007 08:39:24 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.65.230.9 with SMTP id h9mr8975879qbr.1194104362967; Sat, 03 Nov 2007 08:39:22 -0700 (PDT) Return-Path: Received: by 10.65.230.9 with SMTP id h9mr16558173qbr; Sat
Google just walks into reputation management and trademark problems one after the other, and today is no exception.
Not too long ago it was their attempt to force people to give up domains legally registered using the acronym "g.m.a.i.l" or gmail, which Google uses for their email service.
The Polish Poets are still in business, and apparently Google also lost in other countries.
So today news is breaking about Google's new "Open Social" platform for social media web developers. The big problem is that Google don't own the trademark, or even a lot of the concept behind it, and they certainly don't own their own SERPs (search engine results pages)
Courtney stopped by to let me know about what appears to be a real PageRank update that is in progress, if there can ever be a real update again.
Many of the blogs highlighted in the update just a couple of days ago seem to have reverted to their previous position.
Now for anyone who might be thinking otherwise, there are still some obvious penalties on place for a few sites, but it is less obvious for the more vocal networks.
Some sites and networks still have a penalty, as do some sites.
Some of those penalties seem to be a carry over
For a company such as Google with a stock price based extensively on anticipated growth and public sentiment, it doesn't take a huge swing in goodwill to have a dramatic effect on valuation. Google has just slapped their biggest fans.
After the very controversial hit many sites took just 2 weeks ago for various degrees of selling PageRank or linking to clients, you might have thought Google would take a breather, but Google it seems hadn't even started its crackdown.
A number of sites have been hit yet again, including this one, but there is also a new element that has
Obviously despite some negative commentary, Google still is the fairest of them all, though not all results necessarily make sense.
Vanessa Fox came across something interesting in her vanity search today, and I thought I would add to the mystery and mystique of… the Google SERPs.
I noticed that within my own not quite so vanity searches ;) call it an ego search, that a recent post by Tinu about the paid links problems was ranking highly (#7).
That isn't overly strange, until you look a little deeper in the SERP, and discover a second listing for exactly the same article
Google Reader now reports feed usage, and it is being suggested by a prominent Google engineer that you should look at aggregated numbers. Danny has gone into what many of the numbers mean, but he is missing out on some vital clues that are extremely revealing.
First up, for those counting stats such as Darren Rowse, Robert Scoble and Techcrunch here are my numbers.
Google Reader is currently showing 3 different feeds that are all providing the same content, which you might think would be better served as a single number as appears in Feedburner. Hopefully that will never
Danny Sullivan has managed to get some feedback from someone at Google confirming there are visible PageRank penalties being applied, as much as a -2 on what is displayed on the Google Toolbar.
This is my follow on from my post yesterday:- Dancing With The Gevil - Defamed By Google?
Fair enough, for those people who have been caught selling links primarily for boosting search engine results.
The funny thing is I have seen so many blogs today that are selling Text Links who have not received a penalty, yet lots of sites that write high quality paid reviews penalized. I am
A number of my readers have noticed that Google have been making some minor adjustments to the displayed PageRank on a few sites, and Josh quite rightly pointed out that the displayed PageRank on this domain has for some reason been reduced.
Whatever change Google have made in the data held about my site, it doesn't seem to have prevented any of my content ranking, and unfortunately it is impossible to say what data they are working on to begin with. They could well be using a dataset from 1 year ago in their experimentation with some new algorithms, or just
Blogcatalog Members today are collectively blogging about abuse.
I thought of blogging about all kinds of abuse that affect real people day in, day out, but decided that ultimately that doesn't fit in with my audience, or really add any authority to the words I would be writing.
As it happens, today part of a 2 hour interview with me was published in the Guardian (Digg Story you know you want to). I honestly didn't expect any more words in print from the article, because it was so wide ranging, and such
I have been spending a fairl amount of time recently pulling email I want to read from the spam folder, even emails sent to me from my own contact form.
Today while pulling an email from the spam folder I was greeted with this message.
This appears to be something newly implemented as Forrester Research were recently talking about problems with filtering.
There are also seems to be lots of talk about an offline version of Gmail coming soon, but so far nothing substantial in the rumour mill.
I have just received notification that OpenAds 2.4 has been release. This is a full public version, not a beta (does that make it Web 3.0 ? )
Primary new features include:-
OpenAds is a complete tracking solution and advertising rotation system, and best of all it is free.
It allows you to manage your advertising from one central location, avoid banner blindness and serve different
Blocking adverts could actually cost you money, or damage the web as we know it is today.
I honestly laughed when I saw the new "Open Social Web" Bill of Rights launched yesterday, not because it isn't to some extent a useful idea, but because of one specific term…
Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others
10 months ago I fired off a heated debate about RSS sharing, and how Google with it's easy to share feeds could be killing the future of RSS. Now I say I fired it off, but honestly it would have been a storm in a teacup without Robert Scoble taking part with one of his most
This could have been a paid review through ReviewMe, it was ordered a few days ago and I just haven't had time to write something that warrants being paid for it, but I decided to write something for free. If any of the Google Spam Team are reading this article, it was not paid for in any way and your bots can't tell the difference because keyword analysis would pick up the specific words suggesting that there is some kind of disclosure for paid links.
My paid reviews are not cheap, but they are often worth it - people are paying me
I have spent the morning watching a number of contrasting videos which in some ways suggest that Google may have jumped the shark, and I don't fully agree with any of them. The Seth Godin Video is interesting, because he was telling Google what to do 18 months ago.
In this video Seth Godin is insightful, and explains to a bunch of Googlers all about Purple Cows and Flipping the Funnel on its side and embracing buzz marketing.
The concepts are sage advice, however there is one major pitfall.
If the perfect way to market a product is to flip
I don't think so but…
We have seen how blog discussions can have both a massive positive and negative influence on large company share value, especially with Apple.
I have written about this a few times in the past, first of all questioning Google's definition of paid links and more recently with my post on linking payola. OK I have probably mentioned this a few more times than that, but those articles cover the core points quite nicely.
When Ebay purchase a site like StumbleUpon and eventually includes a footer link, and possibly some contextual links to product pages that are search engine followable, are they paid links also?
They only paid… what… $75M for 1.5M blogs (and growing) located on subdomains
I frequently use Google to search for results on my own site, so you would expect that when using Google Personalized Search, pages on my own domain would rank higher for very obvious specific search results.
You would be wrong…
Read more on Google Personalized Results – Ego Search Conundrum…
I like to keep a fairly professional and level head when I am discussing various issues on this blog but unfortunately I have just listened to the pre-recording that Shoemoney did with Rand Fiskin about full disclosure when blogging, and quite honestly whilst I empathise with some of the points both made, I think in many ways both are missing at least a few vital points.
Read more on Blogging Full Disclosure Debacle – Grow Some Brass Ones…
I am a long way behind on memes, in some cases a good 3 or 4 weeks, but I have the ones I am interested in bookmarked, and I will come back to them when I have time.
I thought I would mix things up with a few interesting videos I have been watching
First of all a short video from SMX Seattle on various things regarding duplicate content and paid links. I am not sure if there is anything new, but it certainly emphasises how you should handle syndication of your content with links back to the original.
Read more on Video Roundup | SMX Seattle | Duplicate Content | Jason Calacanis…
Rumours have been surfacing for the last few days that Google might be buying FeedBurner for around $100M.
Listed below you will find 7 reasons Google and Feedburner are a perfect match, and 7 equally compelling reasons we should be concerned.
Read more on 7+7 Reasons Why Google Buying FeedBurner is a Match Made in Heaven & Hell…
It is a rare occurrence when Google create a product, or new feature to an existing product that isn’t very good, but now they have created… Google Crap(s)
I haven’t played around with the new Google Personalized Recommendations on Google Toolbar before today, so I thought the results would be interesting.
Read more on Google Crap(s) vs StumbleUpon – Personalized Recommendations…
The moment I heard about the new Robots-Nocontent class that can be added to content, alarm bells started ringing in my ears. Whilst this can be used in a legitimate manner, it is also possible for webmasters to heavily abuse it.
Read more on Robots-Nocontent | How To Spot Abuse By Sneaky Webmasters…
Eric Enge Interviews Adam Lasnik about paid links, duplicate content and crufty pages (lots of code, little content)
I am sorry to say not a lot, it reinforces Google’s position not to really say a lot, though apparently there is no real penalty for duplicate content, and not to worry about how pagerank flows in your site.
Read more on Do Google Hate Paid Links, Duplicate Content and Cruft?…
For quite some time, Technorati has allowed you to find out how many other blogs have linked through to a particular post, they even provide live widgets.
Technorati will also allow you to search a particular blog regarding a keyword and pull up related content.
There are 2 extremely useful features that Technorati has missing, that are vital for quality search results.
I am going to cover this first, because this is a brand new feature introduced sometime yesterday, and I am probably one of the first to notice it, and happen to have convenient screenshots taken just 23 hours apart.
In my last post on Google Blog Search, I used the following screenshot, grabbed just before I published my post.
Now if you look at the result at the bottom of the screenshot, you will see my own listing, which had a fair amount of longevity.
Publishing the post displaced my old blogsearch content from the listings, maybe permanently if Google decides that that listing is more relevant, or maybe until it is no longer given an extra benefit due to freshness.
I only have one listing, and it is my most current or the one with most authority – the balance seems to normally tip around the 4 or 5 day mark.
Here is a new listing for the same search taken 14 hours ago, just 23 hours after my followup post on Google Blogsearch was made.
You will notice there is now an extended results link. That signifies that my site has additional information about this topic.
For a casual searcher things like that are not significant, but for someone like myself who uses Blogsearch as a serious tool to find relevant content, it is extremely useful.
The fact that Google also knows about that additional content on my site, just hours after publishing is also extremely significant, because that can also have a significant blogsearch weighting factor. If someone has mentioned Blogsearch multiple times, they might have more authority on the subject
That additional authority on a particular subject doesn’t seem to have any weighting on Technorati… at all. Technorati authority seems to mainly based on total number of links, and not based on authority of a particular subject.
As an example, Technorati doesn’t think I am much of an authority on [tag]dofollow[/tag] or [tag]tagging[/tag] – it is only recently I have moved up from having “a little authority” to having “some authority”, no matter what the subject.
Also of note is that Dougal Campbell isn’t looked on as an authority on plugins for Wordpress, and his recent post that I linked through to from my Ultimate Guide to DoFollow Plugins isn’t listed in a search for Dofollow as an authority.
Yes I know that Wordpress developers were removed from the Top100 because they dominated the Top10, but that shouldn’t mean they have no authority.
If you want Wordpress news “straight from the horses mouth”, don’t use Technorati, as an example a search for Wordpress 2.2 news with a lot of authority will not bring up recent developments, which I know Dougal has posted about, and so has Matt.
Back to Google Blog Search…
All things being equal (which they never seem to be), I should always outrank Techcrunch or Problogger when discussing something like Blogsearch, but there are other factors, as you can see by the fact that Alister’s blogsearch post on Problogger.net is still outranking my post with an almost identical title (though it does have more words in it)
Did you notice I am outranking the Bruce Clay blog? – The Lisa posted linking through to Alister on Problogger within a few minutes of my post – I am not sure who was actually first to post.
Alister’s article on Darren’s site so far has had 64 references, compared to the 2 references I had from Matt at Globally Local and Dan at The Wrong Advices.
Another thing I noticed for the first time is that Google also have introduced supplemental results for the references. The Lisa was linked by Danny Sullivan in his roundup. If you look at the references you can see one listing, plus supplemental results.
Now for anything to do with RSS, I don’t want to read supplemental results. The feed I am using at the bottom of this page would be useless if it contained supplemental results.
The number of items found on Google are not affected by duplicates, so it is a real number. Technorati’s numbers tend to be inflated by the duplicates.
I would like a listing that includes the additional references that were part of the extended results, so if a site has 10 documents that are looked on as being or suitable authority, all of them will be shown.
If I am trying to mix RSS content, I want the “real deal” and not just the most recent item.
It is a shame so many of the people linking through to Alister’s guest post are attributing it to Darren.
Now the even more worrying thing I have seen from all the people linking through to Alister’s post is that many want to increase the size of their blogroll, and I am sure 95% of them have no clue about linking structures or the fact that blogroll links also appear on all their duplicate content pages.
That is why I originally took the time to write a post in response to Alisters, because in all things there has to be a balance.
The majority of bloggers don’t research what they write, or don’t research using a blog search engine that brings up results based on the authority of the content, and not the historical authority of the blogger.
Read more on Exclusive: Google Blog Search Extended Results | Supplemental Results…
Canonicalization is a serious problem for webmasters, just read this latest entry by Matt Cutts or this great post from John Andrews. However telling webmasters that they should fix these issues isn't enough, webmasters & bloggers need solutions.
A couple of months ago Alister Cameron posted a simple solution to .htaccess such that you didn't need to use a plugin to convert URLs using www to URLs without.
At the time I suggested a couple of improvements, and also mentioned I would post about it here on my blog, hopefully to help
Performancing metrics has risen like a phoenix from the ashes, but is it a devil in disguise that it not just looking to steal the shirt off your back, but your undies as well?
How many blogs link to Technorati on every post they publish? Many blogs also use followable links to social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, and social news sites such as Digg on every single page of their site? Google in their recently disclosed patent are saying that it could be a negative indication of quality.
Read more on Destroy Your Blog Rankings Linking To Digg or Technorati?…
For a long time my blogs have performed amazingly well with Google Blog Search. I always appear in the relevant results quickly, and the results I obtain have some reasonable longevity, even when I am not the original source of a story.
Read more on In Depth: Google BlogSearch | Ranking Blog Documents Patent…
Just added a new toolbar button to my toolbar buttons site for Twitter addicts.
There has been so much talk about Freebase.com, but Twitter.com seriously should have some kind of health warning – so many people are becoming addicted.
Google might well have goofed again with Gmail domain registrations. I live in Poland so this is quite comical for me, and thus the comical headline. The Polish court system isn't quite as well organised as the US, but decisions are often made faster and a lot cheaper. What that means to Google is that they can't throw a fit and expect a small group of poets to concede defeat, and that their size as a company might not give them any advantage (unless they know someone who can influence decisions).
I am not a lawyer, and the following is for
Google Reader is one of the easiest to use RSS Readers currently available. The code is fairly light, thus allowing you to skim read 100s of RSS articles quickly. One of its many failings however, which I have pointed out previously was the lack of reporting subscriber counts to Feedburner.
Read more on Google Reader News and When Will Google Create a Social Network?…
There has been some talk today about Lijit, a service intended to be a better way to search for information. I was pointed in the direction of it by a post by Matthew Chen of Megite, which in turn led me to another blog I subscribe to but hadn’t looked at yet, A VC, who discussed a Lijit search for Venture Capital blogs that is now appearing on the VC Feedburner Network coordinated by Brad Feld who also discusses it.
This is all based upon a partnership between Lijit and Feedburner. I hadn’t seen anything on the Feedburner blog about this partnership but as I am interested in Google CSE and Feedburner, I thought I would take a look.
Read more on Lijit Alpha? – Google Custom Search Engine Is Not Currently Suitable For Site Search…
This is a deadly serious question, and I am not even going to answer this one in my RSS feed, you will have to click through to get the answer.
Has Danny Sullivan committed the cardinal sin?
Yes I know how to use Read more on What Do Google, SearchEngineLand and Technorati WTF Have in Common?…
Lots of controversy over V7N and their new contextual links program.
I use Google for a lot of searching every day, I am sure more than 95% of casual users. I am not talking about checking ranking, as things like that can be automated with Google’s APis and various tools. When I need to find information, I use Google Search.
I have seen Google suggest other related terms to try such as this, which appears at the bottom of a page when I search for “insurance”.
The Google Related terms normally look something like this:-
For all those webmasters (like me) wondering why Toolbar Pagerank doesn’t seem to have propagated correctly, or is universally missing, I thought this screeenshot would offer you some comfort.
Sometimes I feel like Oliver Twist.
Read more on Google PageRank – At Least Problems are Universal…
I watched this video last night… slept on it, and listened to it again today.
This video was originally posted on the Google Adsense blog, and the presenter is Laura from Adsense Support.
Now I should point out that Google have been very clear in their wording with all the recent correspondence relating to Adsense changes, which in some ways makes this even more extraordinary.
The interesting bit in regard to financial declarations starts 1min:30 from the start.
It should be noted that this wasn't recorded live, as you can see from the out-takes at the end, is in response to
The news today seems to be that Wikipedia have added nofollow to external links.
I have seen a lot of sites mention that all the search engines respect nofollow. Actually they don’t. Anlaysis has shown that Yahoo certainly follow and index pages despite the nofollow tag.
You might well have read on Jensense about the changes in the contextual advertising policy that confirmed my understanding of the policy that I wrote about 2 days ago.
As I stated in the comments in that post, I also contacted Google directly but I asked multiple questions. I had to use the email route not having a direct line to decision makers at Google, but Google have been fairly prompt in replying to my questions.
Read more on Adsense Guidelines – Contextual Ads – Adsense Backgrounds…
It is nice to finally see one of the mainstream blogs pointing out that it is hard to track readership numbers from Google Reader. Techcrunch have been looking at a report from Hitwise
Jennifer Slegg has a great analysis of the new changes to the Google Adsense Policy. First of all the announcement of the adsense change, and then some analysis.
It seems using other adverts that look similar is out, and Jennifer goes into detail how that can affect split testing, or having adverts from different sources in different parts of your site.
Read more on Chitika Contextual Adverts With Adsense Now Allowed?…
Wikiseek seems to be the hottest news of the day but honestly it is just a poor mashup of the Wikipedia database, a poor quality search engine, and some PPC adverts. Whilst Wikiseek has launched in a huge fanfare, and admittedly is still in beta, my personal opinion is that Wikipedia are taking the wrong direction.
I have been visiting lots of Blogger blogs this week, thus I was a little shocked when this popped up while visiting one of my reader’s blogs. (btw Divya’s Blog is a really good read)
Google know who you are, Matt Cutts proves that time after time
Like good webmasters, you might be inclined to register your sites with Google Webmaster Central.
Why do I have to include this (ok that one is fake) junk in my Adsense adverts.
Matt Cutts has mentioned there is a pagerank export in progress.
Pagerank reflected on your toolbar has no effect of your search engine traffic, as the pagerank used by the various data centers is different to that used for your Google Toolbar. Toolbar OageRank is just historical data, often up to 3 months out of date.
For a few days I have noticed a small hiccup in my SERPs on Google, especially relating to my theories on how Google treat tags.
It seems it was Google just juggling numbers, because not only were terms such as “Wordpress Training” not showing my tag page near the top, but also terms such as “Wordpress Trademark” had disappeared completely.
Paul who lives and runs his business in Denmark noticed something strange in the SERPs yesterday on Google.dk.
Apparently Google have been adding some kind of click through data to the search engine results.
I previously wrote about this subject in my post “How to move your blog or start a new one“, but I didn’t go into it with as much details as Rand Fishkin dies in this post. Rand goes into the technical aspects of moving a domain in great depth.
You would think that having been nominated by The American Dialect Society as the “word of the year”, official dictionary definitions would be prevalent on the internet.
So I decided to put Google to the test… oops.
MyBlogLog is a service I enjoy using, and which provides me with a significant amount of quality readers.
But it is becoming devalued
Recently Andy Beal decided to issue a free Zune MP3 player to a member of his MyBlogLog community. I actually thought this was a good idea to encourage people to use the service, as Andy has a high readership. Thus I did link through to him in my post “MyBlogLog – Antisocial Behaviour?”.
The Google Reader Team have announced the availability of readership stats. You mean you can actually see how many readers you have using Google Reader? Nope, don’t be silly – what we get to see is how much time we are spending reading other people’s feeds. I am highly disappointed.
It is five years, almost to the day that Yahoo started charging $299 per year for a listing in their directory as this article on Pandia clearly illustrates.
The main benefit of being in the Yahoo directory isn’t traffic, it is pagerank / trustrank. Who actually uses the Yahoo directory for anything other than listing their own sites?
It is many years since I went to Yahoo to lookup an entry for anything other than a competitor in a niche.
One of the most rewarding things about blogging, at least for me, is when you see people taking action based on something you have suggested.
There are actually 2 distinct stages in taking action
I use Google Alerts to track a lot of my article syndication, and sometimes it comes up with some absolute diamonds of ways content can be presented to an international audience.
Whilst working on an elevator speech suitable for non-technical potential seed investors, I was chucking loads of word combinations around and came up with two very unique definitions that describe what I am trying to achieve with my startup projects (I am looking for a CTO partner).
Further to the situation with the Wordpress trademark that has caused such a public outcry, I have just read over on Cristian Mezei’s Seopedia that Google is Banning users From Adsense for using their trademark.
In the comments discussing my objections to the current implementation of Google Reader on Robert Scobles blog, something very interesting cropped up.
Robert was vehemently questioning the morals of people in a blogging network.
An RSS feed which you subscribe to is your personal subscription to a service, just like email.
A private subscription service for text, audio and video content, even involving a paid subscription fee has been possible for more than a year, based upon RSS.
Michael Arrinton has made quite an outburst regarding DisclosurePolicy.org, but I think he might be slightly blinkered in his analysis.
A disclosure policy is a much better option for a site that features affiliate links, or is Michael looking to encourage commission stealing?
Read more on Techcrunch and Disclosure Policy (picking straws)…
Google have just launched the Google Co-op Custom Search service.
The initial feedback I have seen from many bloggers is “more of the same”.
Google Co-op is not the same as Google Adsense for Search in many ways, and the new service can be used / abused in ways that Adsense for Search could not. Read more on Exploiting Google Co-op CSE…
Salmon Protocol Endpoints & Canonicalization
This blog post mainly comprises of a message I just sent to the Salmon Protocol mailing list, but I have expanded on it a little.
Salmon Protocol is actually one of the most exciting things that will be used by Google Buzz & theoretically could dramatically make huge changes to the way communication flows around all kinds of web content, whether comments on blog posts, votes & likes on Youtube videos, maybe blog posts themselves, video replies etc.
Read more on Salmon Protocol Endpoints & Canonicalization…