SEO Agency India, SEO Services Agency India : SEO Agency

Introducing AdWords Comparison Ads

2009-11-04T01:32:00.000-08:00

Today we're excited to begin testing a new feature of AdWords called AdWords Comparison Ads, which lets users compare multiple, relevant offers more easily. Comparison Ads is part of our continuing effort to make ads more relevant and useful to our users and to help you, our advertisers, reach the people who are most interested in your products and services.

AdWords uses a host of targeting and relevancy signals to determine the best ads for each query. However, sometimes a user's query doesn't provide enough information for us to confidently predict what they want. Take, for example, users who search for "mortgage." Do they want a new home loan or a refinance? Do they want a fixed rate or an adjustable rate loan? Comparison Ads improves the ad experience on Google.com by letting users specify exactly what they are looking for and helping them quickly compare relevant offers side by side.

With Comparison Ads, you can also target your offers at a more granular level, leading to more valuable, qualified leads. To see how it works, let's use our mortgage example. Users searching for "mortgage" on Google.com may see a promotion from Comparison Ads prompting them to select the type of loan they are looking for and to compare various rates.

(click to view full size image)

If they click the promotion, users are taken to a page with more detailed sponsored results. They can choose directly from the offers listed on that page, or they can further refine their search by providing additional information like income and home value. By giving users the ability to refine their search on a number of relevant attributes, we are able to show more targeted ads and provide you with more valuable leads.

Once users find an offer that matches their specific needs, they can either call you directly or request a quote. If a user requests a quote, Google automatically anonymizes the user's phone number and sends you a unique code that you can use to contact the user. You only pay if a user calls the phone number on your offer or fills out a form to request a quote.

(click to view full size image)

While Comparison Ads is still an early-stage feature, we've focused on a number of ways to enhance the user experience:

Speed -- Comparison Ads shows targeted offers in less than a second. There are no long forms for users to fill out - Users see specific offers immediately and only need to fill in additional information if they wish to further refine their results.
Transparency -- Comparison Ads only shows real products. There are no teaser rates, or bait and switch offers. Comparison Ads also standardizes the information presented to users, making it easy for them to sort and compare offers on a side by side basis.
Privacy -- Comparison Ads won't send advertisers any user information, including anonymized phone numbers, unless the user explicitly requests more information about an advertiser's offer.

At this time, Comparison Ads will only show to a small number of users in select U.S. states and is only available to a limited number of advertisers in the mortgage/refinance space. Over time, we'll increase the number of users who see Comparison Ads offers as well as the number of advertisers able to participate.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

Thursday, October 29, 2009 at 12:08 PM

Web Analytics Success Measurement For Government Websites

2009-10-14T05:02:00.000-07:00

Web Analytics Success Measurement For Government Websites

If you know what the desirable outcomes are from your website, it is not hard to measure performance of the website for you and your customers.

Measuring top line success of ecommerce websites is not very complicated, all the sweet revenue based outcomes are there (at the least).

Measuring non-profit websites is a bit complicated, but not really all that hard because we can, with a small amount of love, figure out outcomes to focus on (donations, # of sign-ups for the protest in DC, # of petitions signed, volunteer applications, etc).

Measuring government websites is a bit more complicated, if for no other reason than that it takes a pinch of effort with a dash of imagination to figure out what one is solving for. What are the desirable outcomes one can focus on to measure success?

The above question came to mind from a kind note I got from Ines Jans who is a part of the team that is responsible for www.belgium.be

Ines and team were just starting to think about analytics (because the love their customers!) and asked for some thoughts.

My first question to Ines was, (surprise!):

Q: Tell me a bit more about what your site does, like what are the real goals (or give me some ideas about it) and what challenges you face, what do you expect people to get out of it?

[Best Practice: Always, always, always start any measurement conversation with the above inquiry. The answer will be key to insights, and without it you'll simply be a glorified Reporting Squirrel.]

The answer, which might fit most government websites was:

A: The goal of our site is to be a portal to all the official information there is about Belgium and make information easy to find. Visitors should be able to figure out which Ministry is responsible for what tasks.

[Best Practice: Don't be surprised in your Analysis Ninja quest if you get answers that just start the conversation, rather then give you a prescription for what you need. Squirrels will despair here, but Ninjas will take clues from what they hear and visit the site and come up with a set of important measurable outcomes.]

Based on the answer above and some time spent on the English language site as well as those in other languages (Google Translate!), I came up with the following five questions I could ask data to measure success.

~ Are Visitors able to find the information they are looking for?

~ Are the Visitors satisfied with their experience?

~ What is the most popular content on the site? What area can we prioritize higher than it currently is?

~ How long does it take for someone to find key information they want?

~ Does the right information actually exist on the website? What major things might we be missing on our website?

Let’s take each of these questions one at a time and figure out the best way to answer each using a true Web Analytics 2.0 strategy.

Q1. Are Visitors able to find the information they are looking for?

Given the singular purpose in life of this government website is to be the one stop shop for all the information one could possibly need, it should be pretty obvious that the very first, and magical, thing we would measure is if Visitors to the site are able to find what they might be looking for.

So would you use a web analytics tool?

Here’s the first surprise: No!

There are certainly tertiary ways in which you can answer this question using Omniture’s Site Catalyst or Google Analytics or other wonderful web analytics tools.

But the best way to answer this question?

Ask the Visitors!

Using a simple survey that pop-up on-exit (when Visitors leave the website) you can ask your customers to tell you if they were able to complete their task. No interpretation required.

4Q from iPerceptions, available in 18 languages, is a free on-exit survey you can use. If you don’t want to use a external survey build your own, ask four questions, analyze the data for:

“Were you able to complete the purpose of your visit today?“

The answer to this question becomes the #1 Key Performance Indicator (KPI). You are going to watch it like a hawk, you’ll post it on all your bulletin boards, you’ll set up custom alerts to ensure that your team gets a small electric shock every time this number drops below 65%!

The overall number is good enough, but the data that will be awesomely actionable will be, if you use 4Q: Primary Purpose by Task Completion Rate. . .

You see the second question in 4Q is “Which of the following best describes the primary purpose of your visit?” and a standard report in 4Q will paint the above picture.

Now you not only know if people find what they are looking for, but you also know which tasks are hard to complain.

You need to fix “Complain about the French” : ) because the Visitors are already upset and only 5% are able to complete their task, resulting in them becoming even more mad!

Remember: You don’t need to show the survey to everyone who comes to your site. You can sample just a small percent of your Visitors. You only need 300 responses in a month to get a statistically significant sample of data, and 1,200 if you want to do segmented analysis.

Q2. Are the Visitors satisfied with their experience?

HiPPO’s (the “highest paid person’s opinion”) in the organization, even in the government will love to have a more direct (than task completion rate) answer to the question: Are our Visitors happy with our website?

That’s were it is prudent to measure Customer Satisfaction.

4Q and other surveys of course measure that quite easily: Based on today’s visit, how would you rate your site experience overall?

Measure it. Trend it. Report it. Correlate the trend over time with changes you have made to the site and identify insights (any causal connection between site improvements / campaigns and customer satisfaction?).

An alternative, or additional, way to measure satisfaction is to count and analyze the Contact Us submissions. . . .

Start with the number of submissions. Trend over time.

Drill down into the type of complaints and do atleast rudimentary sentiment analysis (i.e. read & categorize) of actual messages to gauge customer satisfaction.

Remember: When you do surveys you don’t have to torture your Visitors with billions of questions! In researching this post I went to US government sites and I got a ugly 34 question on one single page looooong survey. 34 questions! Most were irrelevant. I would have answered a few, but this showed a fundamental disrespect for your customers. In the end your Visitors are upset and you suffer from a lack of data.

Only ask what you can action.

Q3. What is the most popular content on the site? What area can we prioritize higher than it currently is?

It is not unusual for content sites to produce content. It is even less unusual for them to produce content that they think potential visitors to the site might want.

What is rare is the analysis of what visitors to the site are actually consuming on the site.

Here’s a simple analysis I had learned from Tim Hart (who was with the J. Paul Getty Trust): Measure the distribution of content in each section of your website and the percentage of Visits to each section.

On the y-axis is each of the sections on the belgium.be website. In blue is the amount of content in each section. In red are the percentage of visits where that content was consumed.

Is it not awesome! Insights galore!!

If this were their data, and it is not, it would be pretty obvious that there is huge interest in content about Housing and Economy tiny fraction of the site’s content is about Housing and Economy.

The balance for Family is a lot less lop sided.

While the government might love Justice, Mobility and Health (and boy do they love Environment!), Visitors to the site are a lot less interested in those pieces of content.

Action? You know what people want, how about giving them more of that content?

When it comes time to prioritize the next set of web pages or videos or podcasts, how about giving higher priority to those big red lines?

Sweet right?

You can also do segmented version of this analysis, see what Visitors to English, Dutch, French and German sites prefer. Or within Family what group of content do people like. Etc etc.

Two more ideas to get into your Visitor’s head. . . .

Measure Downloads:

There are a ton of downloads (pdf’s mostly) on the belgium.be website. Forms, applications, useful guides (like how to marry a belgian or how to prepare for your first job) etc.

It is a trivial cost, analytically, to track these downloads using your web analytics tool. Do it. Measure what your Visitors are most interested in.

Yes, yes, yes I see my technical squirrel friends raising their hands and saying you can only track that someone clicked on the download link and not that the download was successful. I know.

For our analysis here just intent is fine.

In fact unless a vast majority of your Visitors are connecting using dial up it is safe to assume the download of small files went through. I know that does not make the squirrels happy. I am sorry. You keep squirreling while we make decisions about how to improve the site.

Outbound Link Tracking:

Another thing you’ll notice about the website (see why it helps to surf a site you are supposed to analyze?) is that there are a ton of links on the site that point to other government websites.

Track ‘em!

Of course the above is not their data :), it’s just an illustration of how absolutely easy it is to track this data.

From the report it is very easy to then figure out what links your Visitors click, which is a great, positive, indicator of the fact that they found what they wanted and also what they were interested in.

Remember: It is not very hard to do any of the above three types of analysis. All you need to get into your customer’s head is move away from “Top Pages Viewed” and “Page Views Per Visitors” and think a bit more creatively.

Q4. How long does it take for someone to find key information they want?

There are some pieces of content that are so darn important that they are heavily linked (say latest news in case of belgium.be) right from the home page, or that you really do want people to find them asap (in the Health section for example the pdf about how to deal with H1N1 virus in belgium).

For these important pieces of content measure Average Time To This Page.

That’s almost three minutes from the time that someone entered the website to the time they found this page (say the one about swine flu).

On average people give a page two and half seconds before they click/leave. Consider how long three minutes is, and how many people might have given up in the process of finding this key information.

Unfortunately not too many tools, Google Analytics and other Paid Solutions included, provide this as a standard metric. I use ClickTracks and that this delightful metric as a standard offering.

I wish others would have it.

Remember: You can use this data to ensure that your best information is found by Visitors to your site quickly. Fix your top / left / right / bottom / whatever navigation you have on the site. Consider creating a prominent “box” on the top right where you “merchandize” these important links. More things like that.

Q5. Does the right information actually exist on the website? What major things might we be missing on our website?

I have consistently advocated my love for internal site search analysis. It is simply da bomb!

Like many other sites belgium.be has a internal site search engine. Typically Visitors who have a harder time with normal navigation (or limited data on a page) will make liberal use of this site search box.

Why not use that data?

Again, this is not their data :).

I recommend looking at the top typed search terms by the Visitor but then also looking at the metric: % Search Exits.

That’s the bounce rate of your search results page. I.E. People come to belgium.be, search for the term hippo and the search results are so bad that 33.33% of the people exit from that page! They don’t even bother to do anything. Just bail. Bounce. Kaput!

Now you know both 1. what information they were looking for, 2. what search results stink and 3. likely because you don’t have the right or enough content about that keyword on your site.

Fix it!

I have one more idea to understand if you are missing information that your Visitors want on your government website.

Use Page Level surveys.

There are free page level surveys available or you can build your own (like the one above from a software vendor’s website).

These can be an excellent way to understand what content is missing from your website. You can of course also use the open text voice of customer (VOC) from surveys like 4Q, look for Visits with Task Completion = No.

Remember: These surveys don’t collect any personally identifiable information (PII) information, and that goes for your web analytics tools as well. Many government sites are extra concerned about privacy, as they should be. Do Please familiarize yourself with the privacy policies of the vendor.

Note: What was not tracked or emphasized. . .

Visits.

Unique Visitors.

Page Views.

Time on Site.

And so many more mundane and perhaps more “famous” web metrics.

I am sure most government or normal websites jump to that first. And why not, they are all staring you in the face when you crack open any analytics tool.

The problem is that these aggregate metrics barely contain any insight. If you focus on them, you’ll be left holding a empty bucket / cry a lot / get fired / not get your government pension / dread meetings with your boss.

I hope the above ideas inspire you to do more, go beyond the obvious and less than useful.

One last quick example. . .

You can use the same strategy for other sites. Though remember the job the site is trying to do and the desired outcomes will decide which key performance indicators you end up using.

For example for www.recovery.gov in addition to some of the metrics above I would probably also measure Visitor Loyalty and Recency. That’s because the government wants the data provided to be so sticky, and it is updated frequently, that it wants you to come and check it again and again.

In this case perhaps more than downloads I would also measure # of customized graphs created. When I measure content consumed (#3 above) I’ll probably focus on understanding which departments get looked at more on the site (are they the ones most spending money?).

You can also bet I am going to be totally on top of reporting how many complaints we have received on the site for Fraud, Waste & Abuse! Getting a ton of those would be a key performance indicator! : )

Makes sense?

Don’t despair just because you have a government site. Ignore the obvious. Focus on the site’s jobs. Identify key outcomes. Do productive analysis.

Help test some next-generation infrastructure Monday, August 10, 2009 at 4:14 PM

2009-10-06T23:43:00.000-07:00

Help test some next-generation infrastructure

Monday, August 10, 2009 at 4:14 PM

Webmaster Level: All

To build a great web search engine, you need to:

Crawl a large chunk of the web.
Index the resulting pages and compute how reputable those pages are.
Rank and return the most relevant pages for users' queries as quickly as possible.

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we're opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

Some parts of this system aren't completely finished yet, so we'd welcome feedback on any issues you see. We invite you to visit the web developer preview of Google's new infrastructure at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and try searches there.

Right now, we only want feedback on the differences between Google's current search results and our new system. We're also interested in higher-level feedback ("These types of sites seem to rank better or worse in the new system") in addition to "This specific site should or shouldn't rank for this query." Engineers will be reading the feedback, but we won't have the cycles to send replies.

Here's how to give us feedback: Do a search at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and look on the search results page for a link at the bottom of the page that says "Dissatisfied? Help us improve." Click on that link, type your feedback in the text box and then include the wordcaffeine somewhere in the text box. Thanks in advance for your feedback!

Update on August 11, 2009: [ If you have language or country specific feedback on our new system's search results, we're happy to hear from you. It's a little more difficult to obtain these results from the sandbox URL, though, because you'll need manually alter the query parameters.

You can change these two values appropriately:
hl = language
gl = country code

Examples:
German language in Germany: &hl=de&gl=de
http://www2.sandbox.google.com/search?hl=de&gl=de&q=alle+meine+entchen

Spanish language in Mexico: &hl=es&gl=mx
http://www2.sandbox.google.com/search?hl=es&gl=mx&q=de+colores

Uncrawled URL's in search Results

2009-10-06T22:57:00.000-07:00

Google Analytics - Some more about Analytics.....

2009-10-05T22:54:00.000-07:00

Confused about Web Analytics?

How about Web Metrics?

Have you been successfully scared?

Rhetorical questions. Don’t answer. :)

Let’s do this one step at a time, first let’s demystify web metrics. We’ll do web analytics another time.

The hardest thing you’ll do in your life as a Web Gal / Guy / Marketer / Analyst / Researcher / Jack is identify what constitutes success for you when it comes to measuring Outcomes for your website.

Step two will be to identify the Critical Few metrics to measure those successful company, and hopefully customer, outcomes.

So what makes a great Web Metric? And what are the factors you need to keep in mind to ensure that your valiant efforts to measure business success in this first life will be successful? :)

This post is inspired from my segment of the WAA’s well received webinar on the newly defined Web Metrics Standards last month.

The intelligent Ms. Angie Brown and the fabulous Mr. Jason Burby spoke about the tough work that went into creating the new standards. I spoke about Web Metrics Demystified .

In this post you’ll learn how to find diamonds in the rough, how to know that a metric you have identified for your Management Dashboard is actually a good one, and you’ll learn the process you can, and should use, to keep your web analytics metrics relevant.

Enjoy…..

Four Attributes of Great Metrics:

Metrics are a dime a dozen. Especially on the web. There are books and blogs full of ‘em.

How do you know which one is your must have darling?

In my humble experience here are four attributes that all great, nay magnificent, metrics possess…

1. Uncomplex

Great metrics almost always are uncomplex.

Because we did not make much headway with recommended metrics foisted on us, our response has been to create complex metrics. Six things each with its own unique multiplier / variable predicting the position of the sun when visitors click on your site.

Here is the thing to think about: Decisions in companies are not made by one person. If you want action then the democracy needs to understand performance, the democracy need to make decisions.

Not you. Certainly not your consultant. Or best friend.

If you are the only person who understands the metric, the Key Performance Indicator, then you have just guaranteed that your company, big or small, will not take action. Because you know the metric, but not the business.

Don’t sexify, uncomplexify. Solve for the masses making decisions. It is not as easy as you think, try.

2. Relevant

Is the metric you have chosen relevant to your business?

Since we have so many metrics we pick our favorites and then stick with them. The problem is that each business is unique, even businesses that seem like they might be in the same business.

In Web Analytics: An hour A Day I use the example of Best Buy and Circuit City. You might think that they should / would / could measure their website with similar Web Metrics. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The only thing they have in common is the fact that they sell large screen TV’s on their website. Everything else is different. Their business models, their priorities, how each tends to use the web in its multi-channel portfolio.

The metrics you would use for each company to measure success would be different.

It is ok to seek inspiration from your friends and competitors. In the end truly stress test that the metrics you identify are relevant when it comes to measuring the success objectives that are unique to you and your website.

Remember what works for Jason might not work for Shane. And those two are close! :)

3. Timely

A few years back I was interviewing at one of the biggest companies on the web. They had just closed their quarter, it had been tremendously profitable. I asked them what the reasons were for that great success. The rest of this is absolutely positively 100% true.

Them: “We have just kicked off the query against our data warehouse, it typically returns the results in three months.”

Me: Stunned silence.

Granted they were a big business. But still.

I learned a very important lesson on that day. Be on time or die.

That big company’s stock price is a fraction of its price at that time. While not all of it is related to their ability to measure, you can imagine how hard it is to be successful in your business (on the web for Pete’s sake!) if it takes you three months to know what worked three months ago.

Great metrics can be provided in a timely fashion so that your business decision makers can….. make timely decisions.

I am not a big fan of real-time (see this post: Is Real-Time Really Relevant? ). But between real time and three months there is a sweet spot. Find out what your sweet spot is and then ensure your data can be collected, analyzed, and metrics provided with insights in that sweet spot.

Even the greatest metric in the world is useless if takes nine days to get (with insights!) when your world changes every three days (key word bids, affiliate bonuses, email promotions, web page updates, whatever).

Be timely.

Sacrifice complexity and perfection for timeliness.

4. “Instantly Useful”

I absolutely love this one. Smooch, smooch, kiss, kiss.

I credit my early experience with ClickTracks for that love. Dr. Stephen Turner andJohn Marshall had eliminated all the non value added stuff from the application so that no matter where I went, what report I opened, it was instantly useful.

It was a combination of the fact that there were fewer metrics but also the fact that they were presented in a way that made it easy to understand performance and get the first blush of insights.

Instantly useful is when you understand quickly what the metric is, and you can find the first blush of insights as soon as you look at it.

Here is a great example, the What’s Changed report in ClickTracks:

Anyone can tell you what your keywords were this month, or last month. The ClickTracks reports shows you “what you should care about”, keywords that rose in their importance this month and which ones reduced in importance.

All the complexity is “hidden”, there is no crap, just stuff you should care about. In front of you.

Now does that not simply kick butt? [Click on the image above for a higher resolution version.]

It will take some nice analysis and time to understand all the nuances and unlock the mysteries and deep stuff (just like say for example with your wife / girl friend, less so with your husband / boy friend!).

But the first blush is there. As soon as you look at it.

[I think Google Analytics V2 also does this well through use of layout and color and summaries or things like Compare to Site Average, Compare to Past etc etc. But I admit I am greedy. Every time I look at a report, current or new, I ask for more instant usefulness! Phil and the team humors me by making stuff even better.]

In a data democracy metrics have to meet the bar of being instantly useful. And not just that, think of your boss, her boss, his boss. How little they know. If send them a metric and it is not instantly useful then it will be instantly ignored.

You want instantly useful, no explanations required, because that will give you the opening you need to show your “deep stuff”, explain the nuance, highlight your analysis!

Smooch, smooch? :)

Example of a “Great Web Metric”:

Let me give you a very simple example that I think will crystallize the methodology above.

I think Bounce Rate is a “great metric”. Here is how it passes the required four attributes test:

Uncomplex? Single Page View Visits. Easy to understand, explain and propagate. Enough said. :)

Relevant? It identifies where you are wasting marketing/sales dollars and which pages stink when it comes to delivering on the “scent”. Those two things apply to most web businesses. Bam!

Timely? Bounce rate is now standard in pretty much every web analytics tool, and available in every report. Every day. Nice!

Instantly Useful? You can just look at it and know what needs attention, what needs to stop. You see 25 – 30% for your site and instantly you know things are fine. You look at a page with 50% bounce rate and you know it needs attention. You see a campaign / keyword with 70% bounce rate and you know there is a fire.

Set aside half hour today or tomorrow or at the end of the week and apply the four attributes test to your own important web metrics. What do you see?

Three Important Final Lessons:

Here are three lessons that are directly from the front lines (sourced from painful battle scars!)…..

1. Perfection is…. the enemy of good enough.

Data quality on the web is not perfect, things change too fast, everyone wants a piece of data yesterday, your competitors are strong. Don’t spend time getting things perfect when it comes to your metrics.

If you have 90% confidence in the data (how it is collected, processed, and presented) then make a decision. Don’t wait for perfection.

Too many times we spend too much time being distracted by missing tags and the hoopla around deleted cookies and more. Follow best practices, then move on. Go for precision and not accuracy.

As Mr. Stuart Gold says: An educated mistake is better than no action at all.

2. Critical few baby, critical few!

I owe Steve Bennett the CEO of Intuit all the credit for this important lesson.

Steve is fond of pushing everyone to identify their “critical few”. Priorities. Goals. Metrics.

My interpretation of Critical Few: When the proverbial crap hits the fan what is most important.

That statement has a phenomenal clarifying power.

If your business was on the line how would you know things are going well or badly? Cutting through all the clutter of data, what are the metrics that are your Critical Few?

Almost all of us have too many things we measure, too many things that distract us, take away our precious time / attention.

You probably have at most three Critical Few metrics that define your existence. Do you know what they are?

If you have 12 then you have too many.

3. Metrics life cycle process is your friend!

Metrics no matter how great have to stand the test of time. And business changes. Repeatedly.

I recommend this simple Metrics Lifecycle Process…..

The idea is quite simple really: Use the four attributes test to identify your critical few metrics, go measure them, then analyze the data you collect, take action. Here’s the fork on the road. If you can’t action anything then perhaps it is the wrong metric for your business. Eliminate it. If you can take action figure out how you can improve it further.

Execute the Metrics Life cycle Process in a timely manner, I recommend atleast once a quarter.

Some metrics will stay, those are your best friends, others will outlast their value, give them a warm hug and say bye bye.

There. Web Metrics Demystified!

Not that hard, right? Just a dash of thought, a drop of common sense and a pinch of passion.

Know Google Analytics

2009-09-11T02:05:00.000-07:00

Hope you people likeed my last post...

Some more information about Google Analytics...

Google Analytics is absolutely free to use and there are many benefits that come with installing it on your site. We've listed the top five things you can do as soon as you start tracking your site with Analytics:

AdWords advertisers can make Analytics available right in their AdWords account as a separate tab through a simple linking process. Advertisers can review extra data for their online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals), and pick out their highest performing ads.
You can also use Analytics to track other Google products including AdSense, Blogger, and Google Sites.
See which pages drive the most pageviews on your site from the Top Content report. This report can answer questions you have about your most or least effective pages - for example, a high bounce rate indicates a landing page that should be redesigned or tailored to the specific ad which links to it.

Which groups of visitors became customers or did something else important to the success of your business? You can get key insights for these questions by setting up goals.

Grant other people in your company or organization access so that they are restricted to viewing reports in a profile or given full access to help manage your entire account as an administrator.

There are over 80 reports with customizable, drag-and-drop interfaces. You can also create your own reports with Custom Reporting, create the segments you want to see with Advanced Segmentation, or view multi-dimensional views of your data with Motion Charts.

Google Analytics 2009 Updates

2009-08-31T21:47:00.000-07:00

Google Analytics Update
Google Analytics team is constantly working to release new features and fix known issues to give you a better experience. This page is frequently updated for your information and benefit. You can also check out the official Google Analytics Blog for up-to-the-minute news about Analytics (in English or French only).

Browse through a catalog of our biggest updates below:
April 2009
Google Analytics Data Export API
One of the most widely anticipated features, the Google Analytics Data Export API, is now publicly available to all Analytics users. With the Data Export API, developers can integrate Analytics into their existing products and create standalone applications that they sell, or make customized dashboards and gadgets to suit their unique reporting needs.To get started, you can read all the documentation at Google Code, sign up for announcements and feature updates through theGoogle Analytics API Notify email group, or become a part of the Google Analytics developer community to share ideas and get feedback from other developers.

Google Analytics and AdSense integration
Now anyone who uses Analytics and AdSense can link their accounts together to take advantage of integrated reports within Analytics. Below are descriptions of the reports you'll find in the 'AdSense' subsection of the Content reports after you link the two accounts together:

The Top AdSense Content report allows you to see more details about specific pages on your site and analyze ad performance. For instance, if you find that some of your pages generate a high number of pageviews but aren't monetizing as well as other pages, you can focus your optimization efforts on improving these pages.The Top AdSense Referrers report can help you see how different incoming traffic sources contribute to your revenue.Last, the AdSense Trending report lets you analyze how your site generates revenue during different times of the day and different days of the week.

Don't have your accounts linked together? Learn how by reading this Help Center article.March 2009
Cost data settings changes
You now have the option of changing your cost data settings from within your standalone Google Analytics account (not from the Google Analytics link within your AdWords account). To learn how to access and edit your cost data settings, please read this Help Center article.

Motion Charts
Motion Charts now has zoom capability, an option to control bubble opacity, a list to select for data points, and a bar chart view. We're also happy to introduce Motion Charts in in 12 additional languages: Swedish Danish Germany Spanish French Italian Norwegian Finnish Indonesian Nederlands Portuguese (Brazil) Portuguese (Portugal)

You can access Motion Charts by clicking on the 'Visualize' button in some reports (like the Keywords report).

Google Analytics IQ
Take an online course to learn all about Google Analytics, with topics ranging from simple set-up instructions to more sophisticated web analytics techniques. The course is offered free of charge, but for $50 you can take the Google Analytics Individual Qualification test to prove that you are an expert.

Getting Started Guide
This is another great resource to learn more about Google Analytics. It's a basic tutorial with report overviews and how-tos, so if you're not a beginner you may want to check out the resources section at the end of the guide.

New TV ads metrics and hourly tracking
Check out the new hourly breakdown of your TV Campaigns metrics alongside your website metrics. In addition, we've included two new TV campaign metrics, Viewed Entire Ad and % Initial Audience Retained, so you can see how viewer engagement relates to your website activity.

February 2009
A new Advanced Segment just for iPhones makes it easier to track how your iPhone visitors interact with your site. Simply click on the pulldown menu for 'Advanced Segments' and select 'Visits from iPhones.' A quick tip when comparing this segment against the 'All Visits' segment: If the percentage of total visits to your site from iPhones is small, you may want to de-select the 'All Visits' segment since it will be difficult to visualize the two sets of numbers on the same graph.

January 2009
Since we've received a lot of feedback from users who say that they don't want to have bounce rates be affected by custom visitor segments, we've now stopped counting calls to the _setVar method as an interaction hit. Interaction hits will now only include pageviews, events, transactions and experiments (such as with Google Website Optimizer). There are two areas where this could affect your data:

Higher bounce rates in your reportsSingle-page visits that had previously been hidden due to the _ setVar call will now appear. For example, let's say that you've used the _setVar method to segment member vs. non-member site visitors. Previously, if a visitor came to your site and triggered the _setVar call, but viewed only one page, this would not be counted as a bounce. With this change the user defined call will not send an interaction hit and overall bounce rates will increase as this single page visit will properly be counted as a bounce.

More accurate time on page metricsTime on page metrics are normally counted by the difference in time stamps which are set by interaction hits. Prior to this change, using _setVar would cause Google Analytics to calculate the time on page metric between the time of the pageview hit and the interaction hit of the user defined variable. Now, as user-defined hits are no longer counted as an interaction hit, time on page metrics should more accurately reflect the time between one pageview and the next.

Hope You People Like

2009-08-31T21:31:00.000-07:00

Hope You People Like
http://www.epikone.com/services/
http://www.roirevolution.com/index.htm
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/

New social gadgets and features for iGoogle

2009-08-31T21:13:00.001-07:00

Starting this week, we're beginning to roll out new gadgets leveraging Opensocial to all iGoogle users in the U.S. With the new social gadgets, users will be able to share content, play games and collaborate with friends right on their iGoogle page. A few examples of the new social gadgets include:

Content Sharing - NPR enables users to browse through latest headlines across a variety of categories and share the stories that interest them with friends. With theFlixster gadget, users can rate and review movies or browse what films their friends have reviewed or found interesting. Users can now also view their friend's favorites comics stories or post comments with the GoComics gadget.

Games & Fun - The Scrabble and Chess gadgets enable users to play two of their favorite games with their friends or the public at large. Users can also see which of their friends has the biggest brain or immerse themselves in a New York Times Crossword where they can complete a given week's puzzle with the help of their friends.

Communication/tools - Users can share multiple lists with friends with the social To-do gadget. It's easy to add and remove items, mark items done, change priorities and edit item descriptions with friends or family. The Social Photos gadget enables users to upload and share their albums from Flickr and Picasa, as well as browse their friend's albums or top Photos.

For a full list of highlighted social gadgets, see www.google.com/igsocial
As part of the launch, we are also introducing two new features on iGoogle called a "Friends group" and "Updates." A "Friends group" is a list of friends users can create based on a subset of users' Google Contacts to be able to interact and share social gadgets with. "Updates" allows users to see what their friends are up to by sharing gadgets, photos, ratings and more from the social gadgets on their iGoogle page. The new social features are completely optional and can be disabled on any social gadget if users do not want to take advantage of the new features. In addition, not all gadgets on iGoogle are social-enabled and those which are will be marked with a special icon.

iGoogle's mission is to quickly connect users to the information that is most useful and important to them in an easy-to-use and customizable format. This is just the beginning and we will continue to offer our users more choices that enable them to create a powerful and personalized homepage. For developers and content owners, social gadgets allow more possibilities for building rich and compelling gadgets. In addition, not only can developers take advantage of iGoogle's growing audience of users to promote their gadgets and drive additional awareness and traffic back to their websites, but they can also earn revenue from their gadgets on iGoogle by placing ads in the canvas view mode of their gadgets.

For more information, please read our blog post on the announcement: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/i-scream-you-scream-we-all-scream-for.html. You can also find out how the new features work by watching this video available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4AXFZWZ6nI

About iGoogle
iGoogle, Google's personalized homepage, lets users customize their internet experience, choosing the content they're interested in seeing. Users can access weather forecasts, movie times, play games, or read the latest news, all directly from their homepage. For more, please visit: www.google.com/ig

WebmasterWorld and PubCon Conference Press Releases:

2009-08-17T07:32:00.000-07:00

July 17, 2009:	PubCon Opens Registration For Las Vegas Conference, November 10 - 13, 2009,(text, pdf, doc)
April 22, 2009:	Registration Opens For PubCon London, July 4, 2009,(text, pdf, doc)
February 12, 2009:	PubCon South Announces Extensive Conference Session Line-Up, Austin, Texas, 11-13 March 2009,(text, pdf, doc)
February 2, 2009:	Google's Matt Cutts To Give Keynote Speech at PubCon South, Austin, 11-13 March 2009 ,(text, pdf, doc)
January 25, 2009:	Keynote Speech by Guy Kawasaki at PubCon South, Austin, Texas, 11-13 March 2009,(text, pdf, doc)
January 24, 2009:	PubCon South Renaissance Arboretum Conference Hotel Special Rate, Austin, Texas, 11-13 March 2009,(text, pdf, doc)
October 10th, 2008:	PubCon Announces An Extensive Program Of Sessions At Its Las Vegas Conference, November 11-14, 2008,(text, pdf, doc)
September 25, 2008:	Satya Nadella, Corporate Vice President of the Search and Advertising Platform Group at Microsoft, to Give Keynote Speech at PubCon, Las Vegas, 2008,(text, pdf, doc)
September 11, 2008:	George Wright of "Will it Blend" to Give Keynote at PubCon, Las Vegas, 2008,(text, pdf, doc)
August 13, 2008:	Microsoft Live Search Signs on as Gold Sponsor at PubCon, Las Vegas 2008,(text, pdf, doc)
March 11, 2008:	PubCon Announces Conference Dates of November 11-14, 2008, Las Vegas Convention Center,(text, pdf, doc)
November 14, 2007:	WebmasterWorld's PubCon Announces Google To Hold Special Event with Google Engineers, Las Vegas, 2007,(text, pdf, doc)
October 31, 2007:	Richard Rosenblatt of Demand Media To Give Keynote Speech at WebmasterWorld's PubCon, Las Vegas, 2007,(text, pdf, doc)
October 22, 2007:	Matt Cutts of Google to Give Keynote Speech at WebmasterWorld's PubCon, Las Vegas, 2007,(text, pdf, doc)
October 18, 2007:	Demand Media Signs On As Gold Sponsor At PubCon Las Vegas, December 2007,(text, pdf, doc)
October 9, 2007:	WebmasterWorld's PubCon Announces Domain Name Auction, Presented By Moniker, at Las Vegas, December 2007,(text, pdf,doc)
September 12, 2007:	WebmasterWorld's PubCon Opens Registration For Las Vegas Conference, December 4-7, 2007 ,(text, pdf, doc)
June 7, 2007:	WebmasterWorld Inc. and SEO Class Announce Partnership to Produce Premium Internet Marketing Training Program,(text, pdf,doc)
April 17, 2007:	WebmasterWorld's PubCon Returns to Las Vegas With Craig Newmark of craigslist as a Keynote Speaker,(text, pdf, doc)
November 1, 2006:	Google Announces A Special Event At WebmasterWorld's PubCon, Las Vegas, 2006,(text, pdf, doc)
October 19, 2006:	WebmasterWorld's PubCon Announces Details Of Its Biggest Ever Conference For Las Vegas 2006,(text, pdf, doc)
October 19, 2006:	WebmasterWorld's PubCon Features over 100 Industry Experts At Its Biggest Ever Search Engine & Internet Marketing Conference In Las Vegas 2006,(text, pdf, doc)
September 13, 2006:	Danny Sullivan To Give Keynote Speech At PubCon, Las Vegas, 2006,(text, pdf, doc)
August 2nd, 2006:	John Battelle to Give Keynote Speech at PubCon in Las Vegas,(text, pdf, doc)
July 26th, 2006:	WebmasterWorld's 'PubCon,' Las Vegas, Announces a Morning Keynote Speech by Jon S. von Tetzchner, Opera Software's CEO,(text, pdf, doc, MP3)
July 10th, 2006:	WebmasterWorld's Search & Internet Marketing Conference, PubCon, Features a Keynote Speech by Guy Kawasaki in Las Vegas, 14th to 17th November - 2006 ,(text, pdf, doc)
May 31st, 2006:	Malcolm Gladwell and WebmasterWorld Raise $3,000 for Katrina Relief Fund,(text, pdf, doc)
April 13th, 2006:	WebmasterWorld's PubCon Las Vegas Conference Dates Announced for November 14 – 17, Las Vegas Convention Center, USA,(text, pdf, doc)
March 21st, 2006:	SuperBloggers of Search: Cutts, Scoble & Zawodny in Blogging Roundtable at WebmasterWorld PubCon Search & Internet Marketing Conference, Boston, 2006,(text, pdf, doc)
March 22nd, 2006:	WebmasterWorld's PubCon, Boston, Brings Together the Industry's Leading Vendors With Conference Attendees, April 18-20th 2006,(text, pdf, doc)
March 16th, 2006:	WebmasterWorld's PubCon, Search Engine & Internet Marketing Conference Includes Sessions for All Interests, April 18-20th 2006,(text, pdf, doc)
February 3rd, 2006:	Malcolm Gladwell Opens WebmasterWorld's PubCon, April 18-20th 2006, Boston, USA,(text, pdf, doc)
December 14, 2005:	PubCon Hosted by WebmasterWorld, Announced for April 18-20th 2006 Hynes Convention Center, Boston, USA,(text, pdf, doc)
November 30, 2005:	WebmasterWorld moves into new offices in the prestigious River Place Pointe Corporate Park in Austin, Texas,(text, pdf, doc)
November 9, 2005:	WebmasterWorld Announces Two Super Sessions at PubCon in Las Vegas,(text, pdf, doc)
November 7, 2005:	David Karandish Joins WebmasterWorld PubCon in Las Vegas,(text, pdf, doc)
November 3, 2005:	WebmasterWorld's PubCon, Las Vegas, Brings Together the Industry's Leading Vendors With Conference Attendees,(text, pdf, doc)
November 2, 2005:	WebmasterWorld's PubCon Search Engine & Internet Marketing Conference Includes Wide Ranging Sessions.,(text, pdf, doc)
November 1, 2005:	Special Google Luncheon Session at WebmasterWorld's PubCon, Search & Internet Marketing Conference, Las Vegas, 2005.,(text, pdf, doc)
October 26, 2005:	Pubcon, being held in Las Vegas, November 15-17, 2005, features a keynote speech by Robert X. Cringely.,(text, pdf, doc)
October 19, 2005:	One of Google's Senior Engineers, Matt Cutts, Features in a Coffee Talk Special at WebmasterWorld's Search & Internet Marketing Conference, Las Vegas, 2005 ,(text, pdf, doc)
October 12, 2005:	Major Yahoo! Publisher Network Session, Las Vegas. ,(text, pdf, doc)
September 22, 2005:	WebmasterWorld's London Internet Marketing meeting, Pubconference, has attracted sponsors including 888.com, Buy.at, ClickTracks, Miva, & PositionTech,(text, pdf, doc)
August 30, 2005:	WebmasterWorld's Internet Marketing Event Comes to the UK September 30th, 2005,text, pdf, doc)
August 23, 2005:	Las Vegas PubCon Hosted by WebmasterWorld, November 15-17th, 2005",text, pdf, doc)

Conference Press Passes

There are a limited number of press passes available for the conference.
Press passes will be issued to members of the working media who intend to cover the conference. A press pass entitles you to entrance to all conference sessions, all meals and refreshments provided, access to the press room and admission to the conference social events. If you would like to see if you qualify as a member of the press, please drop us a note at presspr at webmasterworld.com.

Press Contacts:

 Conference Coordinator:     Brett Tabke     CEO, WebmasterWorld Inc.     512-231-8107     brett at webmasterworld.com        Conference Press:     Neil Marshall     WebmasterWorld Inc.     UK Tel: (+44) 118 988 0288      engine at webmasterworld.com.     Director of Strategic Marketing Sponsorship and Exhibition:     Joseph Morin     WebmasterWorld Inc.     512-497-6856     joe at webmasterworld.com    
    WebmasterWorld Inc.  3801 N. Capital of Tx. Hwy e240-181  Austin, TX. USA 78746  http://www.webmasterworld.com

2009 Online Marketing International Confrences

2009-08-17T07:30:00.000-07:00

Event PubCon Las Vegas 2009

Where Las Vegas Convention Center in fabulous Las Vegas Nevada

Format Six Track Educational Conference with Exposition Hall

Topics Search, Web 2.0, Net Marketing, SEO/SEM, Affiliates, Domainers,
Video, Multimedia : aka: Webmastery.

Levels PubCon is scaled mainly from midlevel to hyper to advanced experience
levels (heavy content).
we start where other conferences finish.

Blurb The affordable leading edge conference.
"I send one or two people to every major conference; but, I send my entire team to PubCon". - Gillian Muessig SEOmoz

Registration for Las Vegas will open July 14, 2009

Upcoming Events:
PubCon Vegas - - November 10 - 13, 2009 Las Vegas Convention Center
PubCon Spring 2010 - March 10 - 12, 2010 Dallas Texas (tentative)

Google Affiliate Network Payments to be Through Google Adsense Accounts

2009-08-17T07:29:00.001-07:00

Google Affiliate Network publisher payments will soon be made through Google AdSense accounts. AdSense will offer you a wider range of payment options, improved ways to manage payment information, and consolidated payments from Google (if you're working with other Google products).

You must link to an approved AdSense account in order to receive payments for earnings. Starting on August 13, 2009, if you're the primary user of your publisher account, you'll see an account notification asking you to create a Google AdSense account or link to an existing Google AdSense account. (If you aren't the primary user, you won't see the account notification.)

You must link your accounts before midnight (Eastern Standard Time) on September 21st, 2009 to receive payments through Google AdSense for July and August 2009 earnings (depending on relevant advertiser payment terms). Please create or link an AdSense account as soon as possible to avoid delays in your Google Affiliate Network payments.

Earnings prior to July 2009 will be made through the existing Google Affiliate Network payment system.

Detailed instructions will be sent to you via email on August 13, 2009 to assist in the account linking and creation process.

Sincerely,

Google Affiliate Network Publisher Support Team

http://view.emailcomm-google.com/?j=fe811d75736c027a70&m=fef511747d6702&ls=fdeb10737d6d00797c177172&l=fe9816717663047870&s=fe37157375620c79741471&jb=ffcf14&ju=fe4113787c610d7a7d1d

Yahoo 'escape clauses' for deal

2009-08-17T07:27:00.001-07:00

Yahoo will be able to quit its internet search deal with Microsoft if it fails to meet certain market share and revenue targets.

Yahoo can abandon the deal if Microsoft does not produce advertising revenue per search within a certain - undisclosed - percentage of Google's.

It can also walk away if the share of search queries falls below a certain percentage of the market.

Fresh details of the deal emerged in a regulatory filing late on Tuesday.

Microsoft will pay Yahoo $50m a year for the first three years of the deal to cover unforeseen transition costs.

Yahoo can keep 88% of the net revenues from advertisements placed on its pages for five years and between 83% and 93% of the revenue for the remaining five years.

Microsoft will hire about 400 workers from Yahoo.

Yahoo has been struggling to make profits in recent years. Last year, it rebuffed several takeover bids from Microsoft in an attempt to go it alone.

The deal, announced last month, is designed to help the two companies take on Google, its chief rival, which has a market share of about 65%.

Under the deal, Microsoft's Bing search engine will power the Yahoo website and Yahoo will in turn become the advertising sales team for Microsoft's online offering.

Google Bugs May Contribute to Lower AdSense Income

2009-06-22T04:46:00.000-07:00

When we're all facing a huge downturn in the economy you would expect that Google would get all of their properties communicating properly to make sure they're maximizing every dollar possible both for themselves and their publishers.

Sadly, that doesn't appear to be the case.

I just tested a handful of my own properties and some of other people's in both Google Translate and Google Cache to see what kind of ads are being displayed, and mostly it was a shocking and abysmal failure.

Most sites I ran through the Google Translator either went completely off target or displayed ads about translator services. Some did display the proper ads but it didn't matter because they were being displayed to me in ENGLISH, not in the translated language that I requested, which was either FRENCH or SPANISH.

What good are ads in English when I'm at the console (or some foreign kiosk) asking for the page to be shown in another language, wouldn't it be prudent to assume I wanted to see the ad content in the same language?

This wouldn't be such an issue except I run a site of worldwide interest and get hundreds, sometimes thousands, of translation requests per day and if the ads don't work there's little value of letting them use the translator.

FAIL.

Next, I went back to check and see if pages in Google cache, which have had problems for many years getting the AdSense ads correct, were still having a problem. Some of the sites displayed appropriate ads but others were still displaying off the wall ads totally unrelated to the site.

FAIL.

So there you have it, lots of lost revenue opportunity just laying around waiting for Google to fix some very basic bugs that would possibly generate revenue for everyone and give us a needed boost in this downturn economy.

The Google Translator also inserted some Google text where my ad banner rotator lives so they just flat out nuked my banner ad system which is additional money lost.

FAIL

What say you Google, any plans to fix these simple issues that impede our earnings when our pages are at the mercy of your own services such as translate and cache?

There's money being left on the table, MY MONEY, and I don't like it.

Fix it please.

Translate YOUR site, view YOUR site in cache, what do you see?

Are your ads being shown on target or worthless gibberish?

Let's find out how wide spread this problem is, if it's beyond my limited testing.

Google Squared Goes Live In Google Labs

2009-06-14T07:25:00.000-07:00

Google Squared

In a nutshell

Google Squared is a search tool that helps you quickly build a collection of facts from the Web for any topic you specify.

Facts about your topic are organized as a table of items and attributes (we call them "Squares" for fun).
Customize these Squares to see just the items and attributes you're interested in.
See the websites that served as sources for the information in your Square.
Save and share Squares with others.

For example, say you're curious about which roller coasters are the fastest, tallest, and longest in the world. Until now, you would have had to comb through dozens of webpages to compile the information you're looking for. With Google Squared, all you have to do is type [ roller coasters ] into the search box at http://www.google.com/squared and click Square it to see an automatically generated table of roller coasters and their attributes.

Google Squared is still in an experimental phase at this point, so you might encounter some hiccups while using it.

Customize rows and columns in your Square

It's easy to customize Squares to your information needs, in case Google Squared didn't display the exact items and attributes you have in mind. Here's how:

If a particular item listed on the left doesn't belong in your Square, click the x next to the item name to delete it. For example, "Six Flags" wouldn't really belong in a Square about roller coasters.
Common attributes for items in your Square are listed as columns. Like out-of-place items, delete the attributes that you don't care about.
Want to expand your initial Square? Use the add rows and add columns search boxes to see suggestions for other items and attributes that you can add to your Square. You can also add specific attributes and items that you have in mind.
Once you click Add, the Square will automatically create the new row or column with the label you entered and fetch information for it. If you find that Google Squared is misinterpreting the label you entered, try entering a more specific label to get the information you want.
Instead of adding items one by one, use the search box and the Add to this Square button at the top of the page to append new search results, e.g. [ Disneyland roller coasters ], to the bottom of your existing Square.

Google Squared can learn from edits and corrections you make to your Square to gradually improve its quality for all users. So although your Square most likely won't be perfect from the get-go, it's worth it to take the time to clean and correct it.

Double-check the information in your Square

It's always a good idea to double-check information you find on the Web. Google Squared scours the Web to determine the best attribute values for each item in the Square. But different websites may give different values for a particular attribute (such as price points) or, in some cases, show conflicting information. It's also possible that Google Squared found various ways to interpret your attribute label.

Move your mouse over a cell to see the web source (in green) for the value that's displayed. Click the cell to see other possible values for the attribute and item in question. You can use the number of sources listed for a particular value to judge whether the value is trustworthy. To see the specific websites that cited that value, click the all x sources link.

If you think an alternative value listed is more accurate, simply select that value. The Square will automatically update to display your chosen value instead.

Last but not least, if you're not satisfied with the values shown, click Search for more values to see regular Google search results for the item and the attribute in question. Alternatively, you can click the text of the cell to type in a new value directly.

See an example

Save and share your Squares

Do you know other roller coaster fanatics? Save your edited Square and share it with your friends.

Squares can be saved if you're signed into your Google Account while using Google Squared. Simply click Save on the upper-right corner of the page. (Don't have a Google Account? Learn more) The next time you return to Google Squared, click the Saved Squares menu to retrieve your Square. To delete a saved Square, click the x that appears when you move your mouse over the Square's name in the menu.

To share your Square, copy the URL in the address bar for the Square you've created and send it to your friends. If the Square has been saved to your Google Account, your friend will see a copy of your customized Square. (In fact, anyone who accesses that specific URL will see your Square, so exercise caution when you're sharing the URL.) Otherwise, people will see the default Square created by Google Squared, without any customizations.

Google Squared is a new way of organizing information on the Web to make it more useful and structured. We'd love to hear your thoughts on how we can improve the tool. Send us your feedback and questions at labs+squared@google.com

Google Webmater Tool New Look and Feel

2009-06-14T07:21:00.000-07:00

Hi All, Google launch New look and Feel of Google Webmaster Tool with better UI with existing features. I hope you all like this.

Google Is Top Tracker of Surfers in Study

2009-06-09T11:11:00.000-07:00

When asked about online privacy, most people say they want more information about how they are being tracked and more control over how their personal information is used. Those consumer expectations are rarely in line with the data collection practices of Internet companies, which often collect information about their users not only on their own sites, but also when those users visit other sites across the Web.

Those are some of the central findings of a new privacy study conducted by a group of graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, which was released late Monday. The students at the School of Information — Joshua Gomez, Travis Pinnick and Ashkan Soltani — studied consumer expectations by looking at sources like complaints filed with the Federal Trade Commission and data collected by the state of California and a privacy group. They analyzed company practices using Ghostery, a browser plug-in that detects cookies, Web beacons and other types of trackers that allow third parties to gather information about Web site visitors, often without their knowledge.

Google showed up as the most conspicuous tracker on third-party sites. Google Analytics, a free product that allows online publishers to gather statistics about visitors to their sites, was used on 81 of the top 100 sites. Cookies from the advertising company DoubleClick, which is owned by Google, were present on 70 of those sites. When combining trackers from those two services, Google had a presence on 92 of the top 100 sites. Others weren’t far behind. Cookies from Atlas, Microsoft’s DoubleClick rival, appeared on 60 sites, and trackers from two other analytics companies, Quantcast and Omniture, showed up on 54 sites.

The findings roughly line up with those in other studies of third-party tracking on the Web. Researchers from AT&T Labs and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, for instance, looked at a much larger sample of 1,200 popular Web sites and found Google trackers on 61 percent of them. Omniture’s tracker was on 34 percent and Microsoft’s on 24 percent.

What is striking in the Berkeley students’ report is that in a sample of nearly 400,000 Web domains, Google’s presence remained high, at 88 percent, while those of other companies declined sharply. The second most frequent tracker in that sample was from an analytics company called StatCounter, which appeared on only 7 percent of domains. Assuming the data is accurate, it is a testimony to the widespread popularity of Google’s services like Analytics, DoubleClick and AdSense, the company’s contextual advertising network, which is used by a large percentage of Web sites small and large.

“I don’t know that anyone has identified the scope and depth of the coverage that Google has across the Web in terms of tracking,” Mr. Soltani said. “Our data shows that even if you are not going to Google, if you are browsing the Web they are collecting data about you.”

The implications of the study, however, are not exactly clear. “We are not claiming that Google aggregates information from each of these trackers into a central database, though it does possess the capability to do so,” the researchers wrote.

But Google disputes even that. For instance, it said that the cookies used by its analytics service are different on each Web site, so they do not allow the company to track a user from site to site. “It doesn’t enable any cross-site tracking,” said Mike Yang, managing counsel at Google. Mr. Yang also said Google’s contracts with customers do not allow it to merge data from various services like DoubleClick and AdSense, or to link that data to personal information that Google collects when users sign up for its other services.

What’s more, the data from the Berkeley study, which reports the presence of trackers by domain, can overstate the amount of tracking that is taking place. Many large domains like MySpace can include multiple sites with thousands of pages, if not tens or hundreds of thousands of pages. The presence of a tracker on one site or page doesn’t mean users are tracked across the entire domain.

Still, the numbers are eye-catching. And as important as the numbers themselves is what the study says about the disconnect between how Americans conceive of privacy, company practices and the government’s approach to regulation of those practices, said Chris Hoofnagle, director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology’s information privacy programs, who helped advise the students.

“Consumers were complaining to the F.T.C. about a lack of control over personal information,” Mr. Hoofnagle said. “That is very different from how the F.T.C. has framed the issue,” he said, noting that under the Bush administration, the agency frowned on privacy practices only if they caused harm to consumers.

Mr. Hoofnagle added: “We have a new F.T.C. now. They may scrap the ‘harm’ approach and look at some other method for balancing rights and responsibilities.”

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/google-is-top-tracker-of-surfers-in-study/?hp

SEO and SEM Terms

2009-05-26T08:45:00.000-07:00

Conventional SEO / SEM TERMS

1) Search Engine Marketing (SEM) � Pay Per Click Marketing
2) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) � Designing a site in a fashion to rank high
3) Algorithm � Formula used by the Search Engines to rank sites.
4) Keyword � What people type in the search box.
5) Domain Name - How most people find your site.
6) Domain Registration � Where people buy domain names
7) Webhosting � The place to 'put' your website
8) ICANN � Authority that controls the Domain name registration process.
9) Google Sitemaps � an XML / RSS feed to Google.
10) Statistics � Tracking Visitors and how they came in and left your site
11) Blog � Easy to update web pages
12) RSS / XML � Really Simple Syndication
13) Directory � Listing of sites that is human edited.
14) Google � Search Engine / Portal
15) Yahoo � Search Engine / Portal
16) MSN � Search Engine / Portal
17) Tier 2 Search Engines � Smaller Search Engines
18) DMOZ � Open Directory Project
19) Yahoo Directory � Directory Run by Yahoo
20) Link / Backlink Popularity � How many sites and what kinds of sites are linking to you.
21) Anchor Text � What is the 'keyword' they are linking to you with.
22) Title Tag � Part of the website that shows up in Search Engines as the 'anchor text' to your site.
23) Text Link � A non complicated link that does not use images.
24) Image Link � A non readable search engine link
25) Flash � A programming language not fully readable by the search engines
26) Redirects � A method of moving visitors from one URL to another
27) URL - uniform resource locater or Internet Address
28) IP � Internet Protocol (normally a number)
29) Keyword Density � How many times a keyword is on a webpage
30) H Tags � Used to define the start of a topic on a page.
31)CSS � Cascade Style Sheets (used to create look and feel of websites)
32) Code 301 � Permanent Redirect
33) Code 302 � Temporary Redirect (Can get your site delisted)
34) Code 404 � Page not found
35) SearchGuild.Com � SEO forum
36) ROI � Return on Investment (Not really an SEO term, but very necessary to say the least.)
37) Pages Indexed � How many pages the search engines see of a website
38) Spider � Search Engine Robot that goes out and checks websites to find new content.
39) Robots.txt � File that tells the Robots where they are not allowed to go.
40) SERP(S) � Search Engine Results Pages
41) Pagerank � Patented Method (of many) on how Google ranks Websites.
42) Trustrank � Patented Method (of many) on how Google ranks Websites.
43) URL variables - '?','&' and '%' and other non standard outputs in the URL.
44) Adsense � Google Ad program for webmasters
45) Adwords � Google bid program for webmasters
46) Overture (Yahoo Search Marketing) Yahoo bid program for webmasters
47)Yahoo Publisher � Yahoo Ad program for webmasters
48)Static Page � Page output is just normal html
48)Dynamic Page � Generally the website is Database Driven
49)Database � a method of storing data into tables
50)MySQL � Opensource Database
51)MSSQL � Microsoft Standard Database
52) Trackback � Method used to notify another blog that you wrote in your blog about them
53) Ping (Blogging) � Method used to notify Blog Search Engines that you updated your site.
54) Submission � Outdated process of getting indexed, rarely produces rankings.
55) Alt Tag � Image Tag description.
56) local search � Search Engine search for local businesses.
57) Google Guidelines � Google's very incomplete guidelines on how to build a website to rank.
58) Blog Search � Google new RSS search engine.
59) Video Search � Searches Video Content.
60) Google / Yahoo / MSN news � News Search Engine.
61) PHP, ASP, Cold Fusion � Web Languages (Server Side)
62) HTML, Javascript � Web Language (Client Side)

Controversial Terms:

1)Google Bomb � Using massive text links to increase rankings
2)Sandbox Theory � Auto penalizing of new sites in Google
3)Google Bowling - Using Massive text links to penalize competitors.
4)Banned � Not showing up in the index
5)Penalty - Google, Yahoo or MSN inspired punishment in the Rankings.
6)Scrapers � Sites that steal content from others simply to get higher in search engines.
7)Spamdexing � Filling the SERPS with garbage results.
8)Google Dance � Differing Data Centers reporting differing SERPS.
9)BlackHat � Using unapproved methods of gaining higher SERPS.
10)Whitehat � Using approved methods of gaining higher SERPS
11)Link Farm � A page that has no purpose other than to link out.
12)Cloaking � Serving differing content to the Search Engines than to normal visitors.
13)Comment Spam � posting in someone's blog for the purpose of attracting traffic to your site (via search engines)
14) Reciprocal links � linking 2 sites together, both ways.
15) Code Swapping � changing content when good rankings are made.
16) nofollow tag � tag added to tell search engines not to follow link.
17) Doorway pages � Pages designed only to rank in the search engines with no real content.
18) White on White text � very old method of 'cloaking'.
19) keyword stuffed alt tags � very old and crude method of ranking higher.
20) Click Fraud � Clicking on competitors ads just to drive up their PPC costs.

Top 10 SEO Mistakes

2009-05-23T05:41:00.000-07:00

1Targetting the wrong keywords

This is a mistake many people make and what is worse – even experienced SEO experts make it. People choose keywords that in their mind are descriptive of their website but the average users just may not search them. For instance, if you have a relationship site, you might discover that “relationship guide” does not work for you, even though it has the “relationship” keyword, while “dating advice” works like a charm. Choosing the right keywords can make or break your SEO campaign. Even if you are very resourceful, you can't think on your own of all the great keywords but a good keyword suggestion tool, for instance, the Website Keyword Suggestion tool will help you find keywords that are good for your site.

2Ignoring the Title tag

Leaving the tag empty is also very common. This is one of the most important places to have a keyword, because not only does it help you in optimization but the text in your <title> tag shows in the search results as your page title. <br /><p style="padding-left: 3px; "></p><p align="justify" class="defaultfont" style="padding-left: 3px; font-size: 11pt; font-family: 'Verdana, Arial'; "></p><h2 id="simplicity" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms', arial, tahoma, verdana, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.005em; color: rgb(156, 8, 8); padding-left: 0pt; font-size: 21px; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-right: 0pt; padding-bottom: 0.2em; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-right: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: 0pt; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(156, 8, 8); "><span class="faint" style="font-size: 20px; background-image: none; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; -webkit-background-clip: initial; -webkit-background-origin: initial; background-color: rgb(156, 8, 8); color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin-right: 0.4em; padding-top: 0pt; padding-right: 0.3em; padding-bottom: 0pt; padding-left: 0.2em; text-align: center; width: inherit; background-position: 0% 50%; ">3</span>A Flash website without a html alternative</h2>Flash might be attractive but not to search engines and users. If you really insist that your site is Flash-based and you want search engines to love it, provide an html version. Here are some more <a href="http://www.webconfs.com/optimizing-flash-sites-article-14.php">tips for optimizing Flash sites</a>. Search engines don't like Flash sites for a reason – a spider can't read Flash content and therefore can't index it.<p style="padding-left: 3px; "></p><p align="justify" class="defaultfont" style="padding-left: 3px; font-size: 11pt; font-family: 'Verdana, Arial'; "></p><h2 id="simplicity" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms', arial, tahoma, verdana, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.005em; color: rgb(156, 8, 8); padding-left: 0pt; font-size: 21px; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-right: 0pt; padding-bottom: 0.2em; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-right: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: 0pt; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(156, 8, 8); "><span class="faint" style="font-size: 20px; background-image: none; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; -webkit-background-clip: initial; -webkit-background-origin: initial; background-color: rgb(156, 8, 8); color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin-right: 0.4em; padding-top: 0pt; padding-right: 0.3em; padding-bottom: 0pt; padding-left: 0.2em; text-align: center; width: inherit; background-position: 0% 50%; ">4</span>JavaScript Menus</h2>Using JavaScript for navigation is not bad as long as you understand that search engines do not read JavaScript and build your web pages accordingly. So if you have JavaScript menus you can't do without, you should consider build a sitemap (or putting the links in a noscript tag) so that all your links will be crawlable.<p style="padding-left: 3px; "></p><p align="justify" class="defaultfont" style="padding-left: 3px; font-size: 11pt; font-family: 'Verdana, Arial'; "></p><h2 id="simplicity" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms', arial, tahoma, verdana, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.005em; color: rgb(156, 8, 8); padding-left: 0pt; font-size: 21px; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-right: 0pt; padding-bottom: 0.2em; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-right: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: 0pt; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(156, 8, 8); "><span class="faint" style="font-size: 20px; background-image: none; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; -webkit-background-clip: initial; -webkit-background-origin: initial; background-color: rgb(156, 8, 8); color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin-right: 0.4em; padding-top: 0pt; padding-right: 0.3em; padding-bottom: 0pt; padding-left: 0.2em; text-align: center; width: inherit; background-position: 0% 50%; ">5</span>Lack of consistency and maintenance</h2>Our friend Rob from <a href="http://www.blackwoodproductions.com/" target="_blank">Blackwood Productions</a> often encounters clients, who believe that once you optimize a site, it is done foreve. If you want to be successful, you need to permanently optimize your site, keep an eye on the competition and – changes in the ranking algorithms of search engines.<p style="padding-left: 3px; "></p><p align="justify" class="defaultfont" style="padding-left: 3px; font-size: 11pt; font-family: 'Verdana, Arial'; "></p><h2 id="simplicity" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms', arial, tahoma, verdana, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.005em; color: rgb(156, 8, 8); padding-left: 0pt; font-size: 21px; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-right: 0pt; padding-bottom: 0.2em; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-right: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: 0pt; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(156, 8, 8); "><span class="faint" style="font-size: 20px; background-image: none; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; -webkit-background-clip: initial; -webkit-background-origin: initial; background-color: rgb(156, 8, 8); color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin-right: 0.4em; padding-top: 0pt; padding-right: 0.3em; padding-bottom: 0pt; padding-left: 0.2em; text-align: center; width: inherit; background-position: 0% 50%; ">6</span>Concentrating too much on meta tags</h2>A lot of people seem to think SEO is about getting your meta keywords and description correct! In fact, meta tags are becoming (if not already) a thing of the past. You can create your meta keywords and descriptions but don't except to rank well only because of this.<p style="padding-left: 3px; "></p><p align="justify" class="defaultfont" style="padding-left: 3px; font-size: 11pt; font-family: 'Verdana, Arial'; "></p><h2 id="simplicity" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms', arial, tahoma, verdana, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.005em; color: rgb(156, 8, 8); padding-left: 0pt; font-size: 21px; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-right: 0pt; padding-bottom: 0.2em; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-right: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: 0pt; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(156, 8, 8); "><span class="faint" style="font-size: 20px; background-image: none; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; -webkit-background-clip: initial; -webkit-background-origin: initial; background-color: rgb(156, 8, 8); color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin-right: 0.4em; padding-top: 0pt; padding-right: 0.3em; padding-bottom: 0pt; padding-left: 0.2em; text-align: center; width: inherit; background-position: 0% 50%; ">7</span>Using only Images for Headings</h2>Many people think that an image looks better than text for headings and menus. Yes, an image can make your site look more distinctive but in terms of SEO images for headings and menus are a big mistake because h2, h2, etc. tags and menu links are important SEO items. If you are afraid that your h1 h2, etc. tags look horrible, try modifying them in a stylesheet or consider this approach: <a href="http://www.stopdesign.com/articles/replace_text">http://www.stopdesign.com/articles/replace_text</a>.<p style="padding-left: 3px; "></p><p align="justify" class="defaultfont" style="padding-left: 3px; font-size: 11pt; font-family: 'Verdana, Arial'; "></p><h2 id="simplicity" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms', arial, tahoma, verdana, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.005em; color: rgb(156, 8, 8); padding-left: 0pt; font-size: 21px; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-right: 0pt; padding-bottom: 0.2em; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-right: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: 0pt; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(156, 8, 8); "><span class="faint" style="font-size: 20px; background-image: none; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; -webkit-background-clip: initial; -webkit-background-origin: initial; background-color: rgb(156, 8, 8); color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin-right: 0.4em; padding-top: 0pt; padding-right: 0.3em; padding-bottom: 0pt; padding-left: 0.2em; text-align: center; width: inherit; background-position: 0% 50%; ">8</span>Ignoring URLs</h2>Many people underestimate how important a good URL is. Dynamic page names are still very frequent and no keywords in the URL is more a rule than an exception. Yes, it is possible to rank high even without keywords in the URL but all being equal, if you have keywords in the URL (the domain itself, or file names, which are part of the URL), this gives you additional advantage over your competitors. Keywords in URLs are more important for MSN and Yahoo! but even with Google their relative weight is high, so there is no excuse for having keywordless URLs.<p style="padding-left: 3px; "></p><p align="justify" class="defaultfont" style="padding-left: 3px; font-size: 11pt; font-family: 'Verdana, Arial'; "></p><h2 id="simplicity" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms', arial, tahoma, verdana, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.005em; color: rgb(156, 8, 8); padding-left: 0pt; font-size: 21px; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-right: 0pt; padding-bottom: 0.2em; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-right: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: 0pt; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(156, 8, 8); "><span class="faint" style="font-size: 20px; background-image: none; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; -webkit-background-clip: initial; -webkit-background-origin: initial; background-color: rgb(156, 8, 8); color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin-right: 0.4em; padding-top: 0pt; padding-right: 0.3em; padding-bottom: 0pt; padding-left: 0.2em; text-align: center; width: inherit; background-position: 0% 50%; ">9</span>Backlink spamming</h2>It is a common delusion that it more backlinks are ALWAYS better and because of this web masters resort to link farms, forum/newgroup spam etc., which ultimately could lead to getting their site banned. In fact, what you need are <i>quality backlinks</i>. Here are some more information on <a href="http://www.webconfs.com/importance-of-backlinks-article-5.php">The Importance of Backlinks</a><p style="padding-left: 3px; "></p><p align="justify" class="defaultfont" style="padding-left: 3px; font-size: 11pt; font-family: 'Verdana, Arial'; "></p><h2 id="simplicity" style="font-family: 'trebuchet ms', arial, tahoma, verdana, sans-serif; font-weight: bold; letter-spacing: 0.005em; color: rgb(156, 8, 8); padding-left: 0pt; font-size: 21px; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-right: 0pt; padding-bottom: 0.2em; margin-top: 0.5em; margin-right: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-left: 0pt; border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(156, 8, 8); "><span class="faint" style="font-size: 20px; background-image: none; background-repeat: repeat; background-attachment: scroll; -webkit-background-clip: initial; -webkit-background-origin: initial; background-color: rgb(156, 8, 8); color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: normal; margin-right: 0.4em; padding-top: 0pt; padding-right: 0.3em; padding-bottom: 0pt; padding-left: 0.2em; text-align: center; width: inherit; background-position: 0% 50%; ">10</span>Lack of keywords in the content</h2>Once you focus on your keywords, modify your content and put the keywords wherever it makes sense. It is even better to make them bold or highlight them.</span><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Finally Google becomes a website with Wonder wheel</h1> <p>2009-05-15T04:59:00.000-07:00</p> <h1>Finally Google becomes a website with Wonder wheel</h1><div>Google just finished its Searchology 2009 event. In previous years, Google has used Searchology to introduce Universal Search and Personalized Search. So what was new this year? Several things:<br />Google Search Options. Marissa Mayer referred to this as a handy “toolbelt” that lets you slice and dice your search results. You can do a search such as [cfl light bulb] and look above the search results for a “Show options…” link. Click on that to get a ton of useful ways to power search. You can see web results with images, like this:<br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_wqx2__gZ_t0/Sg1ZldWl5GI/AAAAAAAAAFk/pJuHgXGICLE/s1600-h/Google-New-Changes.png"></a><br /><br />My personal favorite is to sort by time (e.g. only show me results from the last week). That’s super-handy, and the option previously required clicking around in our Advanced Search. You can also search by genre, including forums and reviews. If you sort by reviews, Google will perform sentiment analysis and highlight interesting comments. You can also request longer snippets, see search results on a timeline, or explore more related search queries.<br /><br />You can use a tool called “Wonder Wheel” to explore searches and see the results update as you click. For example, if you search for [matt cutts] then the Wonder Wheel will suggest that you might also be interested in search engine optimization. Click on that and the Wonder Wheel and the search results will change in real-time: </div><div><br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_wqx2__gZ_t0/Sg1aNP2z0UI/AAAAAAAAAFs/NWDnGdmc2Hs/s1600-h/Google-wonder-wheel.png"></a> Google Squared. You can type in any search and this Google Lab (scheduled to launch later this month) will try to build a useful “Square” that you can save. In the demo, if you typed in “small dogs” then Google would try to return types of small dogs, along with facts like how much they weigh. It’s easy to add a row to the Square, so you could add a row for Lhasa Apso and Google will try to infer the relevant facts from the web. You can also add new columns, e.g. if you type “energy level” then Google will look for corroborating facts across the web and try to guess the energy level of each type of dog. I can personally attest that Google Squared can be as fun as Google Maps--you can easily burn an hour just typing in random things to see what Google can do for that search.<br /><br />Rich Snippets. See the official webmaster blog for more info, but this one is destined to be a favorite for webmasters. Essentially, you use some open standards (RDFa and microformats in the initial launch) to add some additional markup to your web pages. The markup is pretty simple and you don’t need to register with Google. Then when Google thinks it will help users, we show a “rich snippet” that has more information than a typical search snippet. Here’s a result on Yelp for a yogurt place, for example:<br /><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_wqx2__gZ_t0/Sg1a9gbd8vI/AAAAAAAAAF0/LefUGSF4IEk/s1600-h/Google-rich-snippets.png"></a><br /><br />Note a couple quick points. The markup annotates existing text that’s already on the page, and this richer markup exists out on the web. That means that any search engine can make their own rich snippets (there’s no proprietary data that only goes to Google). I like that Rich Snippets relies on open standards, that the markup is simple, and that the data is out on the web; it’s not locked up by Google in any way. I would expect Google to roll this out cautiously at first (much as we did with Sitelinks), but that more sites will see rich snippets over time.<br /><br />Google SkyMap. Google also announced SkyMap, an Android app that lets you star gaze. With GPS, an accelerometer, and a compass, SkyMap can tell you what stars you’re pointing your phone at. You can also search for stars and the application will guide you until your phone points in the right direction.<br /><br />http://www.dullest.com/blog/google-searchology-2009-search-options-google-squared-rich-snippets/ </div><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>How Hacked Servers Can Hurt Your Traffic</h1> <p>2009-05-09T05:29:00.000-07:00</p> <h1>How Servers Can Hurt Your Traffic</h1><br /><br />Unfortunately there are all kinds of devious server hacks making the rounds these days. They usually depend on two factors: sites that use a common CMS (such as Wordpress) and site owners who do not update their software to keep security solid.<p style="text-align: auto;"><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;">But the average site owner may not have the resources or understanding to investigate thoroughly. All they know is that their Google traffic went away.</span></p><p style="text-align: auto;"><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;">But if you can discover that you've been hacked, the fix is straightforward:<br /></span></p><ol><li style="text-align: auto;"><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;">fix the security problem<br /></span></li><li style="text-align: auto;"><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;">restore a clean version of the site<br /></span></li><li style="text-align: auto;"><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;">request reconsideration</span></li></ol><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;"><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;"></span><p></p><div style="text-align: auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; ">Malware</span></div><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;"><div style="text-align: auto;">One thing that hackers do is find sites to help distribute malware. This one should be easy to detect, because Google will post a warning notice in the SERPs "This site may harm your computer." <a href="http://www.webmasterworld.com/redirect.cgi?f=30&d=3802274&url=http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3486931.htm" target="_top" title="www.webmasterworld.com/google/3486931.htm" style="text-decoration: underline; ">This discussion</a> covers the details of how to handle a malware hack.</div></span><p></p><p style="text-align: auto;"><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;">One common footprint for a malware hack is an iframe that doesn't belong in your code - especially one with a lot of hex coding.</span></p><p></p><div style="text-align: auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; ">Defacement Hacks</span></div><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;"><div style="text-align: auto;">These are really "old school" - they're more like online graffiti than anything else. The hacker usually just wants to brag that they got you, and they put up a message on your pages for all to see. Well, that's easily detected because you just go to your pages and there it is!</div></span><p></p><p style="text-align: auto;"><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;">But as I said, this is old school and many hackers are looking for something with some financial value these days.</span></p><p></p><div style="text-align: auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; ">Robots.txt Hacks</span></div><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;"><div style="text-align: auto;">This one is either done for sheer malicious delight, or perhaps for competitive disruption. How often do you check your robots.txt file? If someone replaced the first line and disallowed all indexing, how fast could you catch that?</div></span><p></p><p style="text-align: auto;"><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;">In addition to visually inspecting your robots.txt file on a regular basis (and especially if your urls start disappearing from the Google index) you can also set up a Webmaster Tools account and check it regularly. Google will report to you when urls get blocked by robots.txt.</span></p><p></p><div style="text-align: auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; ">Parasite Hosting</span></div><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;"><div style="text-align: auto;">This one is sneakier and depends on the value of backlinks, either for PageRank or for the traffic itself. The hacker places links on your pages (they may be hidden through various means) and you may not be inspecting your content close enough to see those links.</div></span><p></p><p style="text-align: auto;"><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;">The tool you need is a link checker, such as Xenu LinkSleuth, that can give you a report on all your external links. You are careful about who you link out ot, right? So anything really bogus is going to jump out at you from that list. Running a link checker on a regular basis has many other benefits as well, such as keeping those accidental 404s out of your site. So I consider it to be something like getting a regular physical (but I recommend doing it more often.)</span></p><p></p><div style="text-align: auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; ">Cloaked Hacks</span></div><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;"><div style="text-align: auto;">Now we're really getting devious. Over the past year or more, hacks have been showing up that cloak their parasite content so that only googlebot sees it. If you visit with a regular browser (user agent) you only see what you expected to see.</div></span><p></p><p style="text-align: auto;"><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;">Your main tool here is a user-agent spoofer of your own, such as the User Agent Switcher extension for Firefox. Just fire it up with a googlebot user agent string and see if your page content changes.</span></p><p></p><div style="text-align: auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; ">Complex Cloaking - using IP and cookies</span></div><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;"><div style="text-align: auto;">This is getting deep - and it's also not so common, but it is out there "in the wild." The hacker in this case paces complex scripting on your site so that not only do they cloak for googlebot by user agent, they also cloak by IP address. In some cases the script also places a cookie so you get only one chance to see what they're doing.</div></span><p></p><p style="text-align: auto;"><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;">And your tools here are 1) learning how to browse your site with coolies turned off and 2) studying your server logs for what your server replies to googlebot.</span></p><p></p><div style="text-align: auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; ">Cloaked Redirects - .htaccess hacks</span></div><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;"><div style="text-align: auto;">Google's John Mueller (JohnMu) has just made an excellent blog post about this. I'll refer you to him:</div></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;"></span><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="1" border="0"><tbody><tr><td bg="" style="color:#000033;"><table cellpadding="4" width="100%" cellspacing="1" border="0"><tbody><tr><td bg="" style="color:#f2f2f2;"><span style="font-family:arial;font-size:85%;color:#000000;">The first symptom that you would see is hard to interpret: URLs from the website are just not indexed anymore...</span><p><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;">When you submit a Sitemap file, Google will show warnings for URLs that redirect. By design, you should be listing the final URL in your Sitemap file, so if the URL is redirecting for our crawlers (as in this case), we’ll show a warning in your account.</span></p></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;"></span></p><p style="text-align: auto;"><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;">I urge you to <a href="http://www.webmasterworld.com/redirect.cgi?f=30&d=3802274&url=http://johnmu.com/pagerank-hacker-using-suomi-co-in/" target="_top" title="johnmu.com/pagerank-hacker-using-suomi-co-in/" style="text-decoration: underline; ">read JohnMu's entire article</a>. He's offering a lot of help here.</span></p><p></p><div style="text-align: auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; ">DNS Troubles</span></div><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;"><div style="text-align: auto;">Some of the sneakiest hackers have used various kinds of DNS tricks. Over two years ago we discussed this rare but still possible problem in<a href="http://www.webmasterworld.com/redirect.cgi?f=30&d=3802274&url=http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum23/4545.htm" target="_top" title="www.webmasterworld.com/forum23/4545.htm" style="text-decoration: underline; ">this thread</a>.</div></span><p></p><p style="text-align: auto;"><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;">If your traffic totally dries up, you would hit the panic button pretty quickly - so these hackers have been more clever than that. With DNS tricks they might syphon off only 20% of your traffic. One thing you would see was a traffic drop with no corresponding drop in rankings.</span></p><p style="text-align: auto;"><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;">There's been some good effort here on the part of the DNS servers to get more secure from this type of thing, but it's still worth mentioning as a potential. The moral is to check your DNS settings and fix any warnings you get. It might seem like a foregin language to you if you never waded into these waters before, but it's worth climbing the learning curve - especially if your traffic is evaporating. However, it's something that I wouldn't suspect until I ruled out all the rest of the hacks I listed above.</span></p><p></p><div style="text-align: auto;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold; ">It might be an employee, too</span></div><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;"><div style="text-align: auto;">Sorry to say, it's not always an external hacker. Sometimes a person your trusted with server access gets greedy and places parasite links to earn some csh on the side. We've had such reports here, and it even happened at Google a few years back.</div></span><p></p><p style="text-align: auto;"><span style="font-family:verdana;font-size:85%;color:#000000;">Don't get crazy about this possibility, but if you do find junk on your server and there's no real sign of an external hack - then consider who you might have given server access to. This is one solid reason always to changes passwords (strong ones) when anyone leaves the company, or when your contract is over with anyone who had access. Even great companies sometimes hire a bad apple. </span></p></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>SEO News</h1> <p>2009-04-18T05:03:00.001-07:00</p> <h1>SEO News</h1>Top Webmaster Headlines<br /><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/another-yahoo-re-org-says-report-2009-4">Bartz's Yahoo Re-Org Coming Soon</a><br /><a href="http://www.dailytech.com/IPhone+Gets+Down+to+Business/article14856.htm">IPhone Gets Down to Business</a><br /><a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10218850-94.html">Google touts Android 1.5 features to coders</a><br /><a href="http://www.imediaconnection.com/news/22711.asp">Rivals join forces to compete with Google</a><br /><a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_future_of_firefox_no_tabs_built_in_ubiquity.php">The Future of Firefox: No Tabs, Built-In Ubiquity</a><br />Breaking Blog News<br /><a href="http://www.sitepronews.com/2009/04/14/smx-sydney-twitter-tips-etiquette/">Twitter Tips and Etiquette</a><br /><a href="http://searchengineland.com/twazzup-new-twitter-search-engine-17502">Twazzup: New All-In-One Twitter Search Engine</a><br /><a href="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/04/stumbleupon-buys-itself-back-from-ebay.html">StumbleUpon Buys Itself Back from eBay</a><br /><a href="http://www.seobook.com/ftc-clamp-down-social-media-marketing">FTC To Clamp Down On Social Media Marketing</a><br /><a href="http://www.lockergnome.com/blade/2009/04/14/another-survey-84-wont-upgrade-to-windows-7/">Another Survey - 84% Won't Upgrade To Windows 7</a><br /><a href="http://www.micropersuasion.com/2009/04/aol-espn-others-seek-to-bypass-google-with-address-bar-searching.html">AOL, ESPN, try to Bypass Google with Address Bar Searching</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.seo-news.com/">http://www.seo-news.com/</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Google touts Android 1.5 features to coders</h1> <p>2009-04-18T05:00:00.001-07:00</p> <h1>Google touts Android 1.5 features to coders </h1>Google has released an <a href="http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2009/04/getting-ready-for-android-15.html">Android 1.5 software developer kit</a>, giving programmers access to several new features, such as video support and a faster browser that will appear in a forthcoming version of the company's open-source mobile-phone operating system.<br /><br />Android competes in the <a href="http://www.cnet.com/smartphones/" section="luke_topic">smartphone</a> market with operating systems such as Apple's <a href="http://www.cnet.com/apple-iphone.html" section="luke_topic">iPhone </a>OS, Nokia's Symbian, and Microsoft's Windows Mobile. Although Google attracted many partners to participate in the Android project, called the Open Handset Alliance, so far, only Taiwanese handset maker HTC is offering models. New options are expected this year, though.<br /><br />Google has said it initiated the Android project in an attempt to jump-start heavier and more sophisticated use of the Internet on <a href="http://reviews.cnet.com/cell-phones/" section="luke_topic">mobile phones</a>. Search advertising on mobile phones is a new area of potential revenue growth for the company, but Google also is eager to extend its online services such as Gmail more deeply into the mobile realm.<br /><br />Among the changes users will be able to see in <a href="http://developer.android.com/sdk/preview/features.html">Android 1.5, code-named Cupcake</a>, are the following:<br /><br />• Video recording and playback, and videos can be uploaded to YouTube.<br />• Stereo Bluetooth and auto-pairing for better Bluetooth headset support.<br />• A Web browser with the latest WebKit technology, including the Squirrelfish technology for faster JavaScript. The browser also includes copy-and-paste support, search within the page, the unified search and address bar that debuted in Google's Chrome browser, and faster scrolling.<br />• "Much faster" acquisition of location through the GPS system.<br />• A "soft" screen-based keyboard.<br />• More widgets on the home screen, including a music player and picture frame, along with the current search and clock widgets.<br />• Applications can rotate when the phone's accelerometer detects a new orientation.<br />• User interface improvements to messaging, Gmail, calendar, browser, and other applications. The Gmail application supports batch operations so multiple messages can be deleted or archived at once, for example.<br />• Faster camera start-up and operation. Photos can be uploaded to Google's Picasa photo-sharing site.<br />• User photos in the contacts application.<br />There are changes under the hood, too, including the new Linux kernel version, 2.6.27. Android applications run at a higher level, though, using a variation of the Java technology for writing and running programs, and here there are changes too. Developers will be able to tap into several new application programming interfaces, providing easier support for a number of phone features:<br />• APIs for recording and playing back audio and video.<br />• Some support for the OpenGL graphics technology.<br />• A text prediction engine to speed typing.<br />• A framework for speech recognition.<br />• A framework to make it easier for background processes to interact with running applications' interface processes.<br />• APIs for widgets on the home screen and frameworks for various widgets.<br /><br />However, Google cautioned, the APIs aren't final and could change before the final software developer kit is released, sometime toward the end of April.<br /><a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10218850-94.html">http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10218850-94.html</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Search optimization techniques for RIAs</h1> <p>2009-04-05T04:06:00.000-07:00</p> <h1>Search optimization techniques for RIAs</h1>A variety of technologies and platforms are used to create rich Internet applications (RIAs), including Ajax, Curl, JavaFX, Microsoft Silverlight, and the Adobe Flash Platform. It's no secret that RIAs present challenges for search engines. Understanding the importance of this issue, Adobe has partnered with Google and Yahoo! to get to the heart of the issue and to come up with solutions that can not only work with the Adobe Flash Platform but also provide insight and fundamentals that can influence future technological advances.<br /><br />In fact, a similar issue arose a few years ago with the PDF format. At the time, search engines had trouble recognizing the content contained in these documents. Now, search engines can crawl and index PDF files rather easily. The point is that eventually this issue will be solved, and Adobe, Google, and Yahoo! are leading the charge.<br /><br />Last year Adobe <a href="http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/swf_searchability.html">announced a major breakthrough</a> with the release of optimized Adobe Flash Player technology (since dubbed "Flash Player for Search Engines"), which is essentially a "headless" version of Flash Player that can change states of SWF content and gain access to the text content residing within. For a quick overview of how Flash Player for Search Engines works, please watch Duane Nickull's <a href="http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2009/01/flash-search-engine-optimization.html" target="_blank">video blog post about it</a>.<br /><br />While Adobe, Google, and Yahoo! continue to collaborate to solve the problem, there are things you can do today to improve the relevance of your SWF content in search results. This article explains what the issues and challenges are and how to overcome them, whether you are a developer, designer, content owner, website owner, project manager, or even an SEO expert.<br /><br />For example, suppose you've got a site built using Adobe Flash technology. You've received rave reviews on the slick design, smooth animation sequences, and overall powerful user experience. It does a great job of establishing a unique brand experience, it was developed for easy updates, and it is just flat-out cool. Schedule, budget, and content challenges were overcome and now everyone is basking in the glory. This article will help you answer one of the most important questions, and one that few people ask at the onset of a project: "Oh, by the way, does the site work with search engines?" Sound familiar?<br /><br />This question usually arises only when the work is completed and your client begins searching for terms related to their brand, only to find that the site ranks much lower than expected. Most of the time, creating a search-friendly site was not part of the scope, nor was it considered or discussed when establishing the information architecture, design, and functional specifications.<br />Considering all the different criteria that need to be considered and prioritized when developing RIAs—client expectations, design decisions, content requirements, functionality decisions—it is very important in the planning stages to outline exactly how your RIA will comply with search. You will benefit in the long run if you spend the time up front to create a search-friendly RIA. The goal of this article is not to add another discipline to juggle, but to provide you with search best practices that can be integrated into the development cycle. Yes, it can be done.<br /><br />To make best use of this article, you should be familiar with Adobe Flash technology and rich Internet applications, and have an advanced understanding of web development techniques.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.adobe.com/devnet/seo/articles/techniques_ria.html">http://www.adobe.com/devnet/seo/articles/techniques_ria.html</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Google to Announce Venture Fund</h1> <p>2009-04-05T04:04:00.000-07:00</p> Google to Announce Venture Fund<br />Published: March 31, 2009<br />SAN FRANCISCO — <a title="More information about Google Inc" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/google_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org">Google</a>, which has invested in many startups over the years, will announce on Tuesday that it is creating a venture capital arm whose main objective will be to turn a profit.<br />The group, called Google Ventures, is expected to invest up to $100 million over the next 12 months. It will be overseen by David Drummond, who will continue in his role as senior vice president of corporate developing and chief legal officer at Google. Investments will be vetted by William Maris, who joined Google about a year ago, and Rich Miner, a co-founder of Android, a mobile software startup that Google acquired in 2005.<br /><br />Mr. Maris said in an interview that Google will tap the connections of its employees and its ties to the venture capital world to find promising startups in areas like the Internet, clean technology and life sciences.<br /><br />Many other companies have set up venture capital units. But those groups typically have dual missions of profiting from investments and advancing their parent company’s strategic goals, and their track record has been mixed.<br /><br />The venture unit comes as Google is rethinking the mission of Google.org, its corporate philanthropy, which has invested in areas like clean energy. Some of those investments will now be made by the venture unit.<br /><br />“A lot of the things we have done in the energy area the kinds of things you might see from Google Ventures,” Mr. Drummond said. He said that Google’s corporate development arm will continue to make other investments.<br /><br />Google Ventures has already made two investments: Silver Spring Networks, a company that makes technology to help manage electric grids, and Pixazza, which links online images with related products that can be purchased. Google declined to say how much it invested in those companies.<br /><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/technology/companies/31google.html?_r=1&ref=technology">http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/technology/companies/31google.html?_r=1&ref=technology</a><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> </main></body></html>