How Can I Tell if A Market is Worth Getting Into?

All too often I hear horror stories about how after many months of costly product research and creation, an eager entrepreneur sets up shop, spends another yacht load of cash SEOing the web site then, a dingy load of cash for an expert copywriter, only to find when launch day arrives, no one will buy the product. At which point our unwitting entrepreneur is pretty much sunk, pure and simple. The worst part of all, in that situation, the person frequently has no idea why they have failed. The facts of the matter are, our captain of modern industry wound up pitching a tent in Antarctica and ended up adrift on an iceberg headed for the equator!

Kudos for diligence to our entrepreneurial bastion of endurance. Managing a product from conception to market is no small feat and should in no way be underestimated. Unfortunately, many small businesses, at the outset of their world changing conception, overlook the single most important issue surrounding their initiative. Proof of concept or, more to the point, will your product sell? The process, in a nut shell should go something like this;

1. You have a great idea
2. You do keyword research
3. You set up a ‘quicky’ web site
4. You launch a PPC campaign

Now that you have overview of the process, whats most important here is the keyword research. Below is a list of some great resources I like to use.

• Google’s Zeitgeist, pronounced ‘zit-gist’ (a German word meaning general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era) shows weekly, monthly, and annual trends and patterns based on the countless millions of sear queries conducted through Google.

• Google Trends is an excellent tool that lets you compare the world’s interest to your chosen niche markets. Entering up to five topics, you may see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time. The result also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions.

• Magazines.com lists their 10 Top Titles on their homepage. These include publications such as Sports Illustrated, For Kids, Time, People, InStyle, Woman’s Day, Money, Newsweek, Women’s Health and Disney Adventures. Any of these topics are hot ones.

• eBay Pulse is a daily snapshot of current trends, hot picks, and cool stuff on eBay, listing it’s popular searches, largest stores and most watched items. You can also use the drop-down menu to filter the lists to show content for more specific categories.

• Yahoo’s Buzz Index focuses on the entertainment industry, providing their most popular daily searches for actors, movies, music, sports, TV and video games.

• comScore Networks provides insight into consumer behavior and attitudes by compiling reports based on a global cross-section of more than 2 million consumers who have given comScore explicit permission to capture their browsing and transaction behavior, including online and offline purchasing.

• JupiterResearch provides research, analysis and advice to help guide technology vendors and service providers on market opportunity. Guest access is available, however, to quickly gain access to salient sections of recent Jupiter Research reports, try Googling “jupiter research ____” with the subject of you inquiry.

• Google Insights for Search allows you to compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames as well as narrow data to specific categories, like finance, health, and sports so you can anticipate demand for your business helping you to budget and plan accordingly and know where to find your customers by seeing how search volume is distributed across regions and cities.

• Google Adwords Keyword Tool is another free tool that reports on search performance and seasonal trends on keywords and keyword phrases that you enter into the search box. Statistics show the relative amount of users searching for that keyword on Google.

• WordTracker shows you exactly what people are looking for online by showing you exactly which keywords and phrases they’re searching for. Wordtracker’s suggestions are based on over 330 million keywords and phrases that a sampling of people across multiple engines have used over the previous 90 days.

Now we are lrft with PPC. What is PPC you ask? Pay Per Click advertising. You know, those little ads on the right site of your web browser. What you need to do is blow some of that seed money on advertising before you spend a dime on development. After all, wouldn’t you like to know you have no chance of making money after spending only $250 instead of $25,000? More importantly, throwing a few hundred or a thousand dollars at proof of concept will save you the one thing that can never be replaced, YOUR TIME!

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and your FeedBurner feed!

After a long nearly fruitless search, I’ve uncovered a really great widget that you can put on your Blogger Typepad or WordPress blog. I’ve also found a neat little Java based Star Rating Script that can be placed on any web site.

A few points about Outbrain’s excellent Star Rating Widget

* No registration required
* Installation is super-easy… we adjust the widget’s design to your blog’s look&feel automatically
* It’s absolutely FREE

The Outbrain widget currently supports the following blog platforms:

* Blogger.com blogs are supported with a 1-click install (blogs using the “classic” template - use these instructions)

* TypePad blogs are also supported with a 1-click install.

* WordPress *installed* blogs are supported via a plugin that’s available here.

You can also get star ratings on your FeedBurner feeds

Enabling the Outbrain’s FeedFlare is super-easy. Simply follow these steps:

1. Login to your FeedBurner account.
2. Click on the ‘Optimize’ tab, and select the ‘FeedFlare’ option.
3. Scroll down to the section called “Personal FeedFlare” and paste the following URL into the text box: http://widgets.outbrain.com/FeedFlareUnit.xml
4. Click on the “Add New Flare” button, and check the ‘[x] feed’ check box.
5. IMPORTANT: Don’t forget to click the ‘Save’ button at the bottom of the page.

You can subscribe to my feed to see an example of plugin in action. You can also rate this post using the star rating widget plugin at the bottom of this post.

Things to keep in mind;

o After PETCO added reviews online, top-rated products were converting at a 49% higher clip; shoppers using the ratings section of the site for navigation spent 63% more than shoppers using other navigation column hotlinks; and shoppers who read reviews and shopped via ratings navigational hotlinks had an average order size 40% higher than the average shopper.

o The president of AWinestore.com told us that adding customer reviews was one of the critical factors that helped his ecommerce sales leap 80% in a single year. (The industry average is 20% growth.)

o Libida.com, an ecommerce site for women, considers reviews so critical to conversions that they insert fliers into all fulfillment packages offering $25 off their next order for all reviewers (even negative ones)

Other Star rating scripts include;

• Review-Script.com. The Amazon-style system allows users to rank a product or service on a scale of 1-5 stars and make comments (reviews) related to the product for other users to read. Email notification allows the administrator to approve comments before adding them to the website. Cost for licensing: $125 USD one-time.
• Rating System. This seems to be the more feature-rich of the two. Different types of ratings can be combined into one rating box. It offers an RSS feed and you can manage, modify and delete your customer ratings and reviews. Cost for licensing: Free up up to a maximum daily usage of 500 impressions. Above that, plans start at $10 per month.
• Bazaarvoice. Bazzarvoice is another popular ratings/review system, but starting at $2,000 per month, may be a bit pricey for smaller ecommerce sites.
• PowerReviews. While the services mentioned above charge a fee for use of their software, PowerReviews takes a different approach. They give merchants the ability to add reviews to their sites at no charge. The caveat is that the company reserves the right to aggregate review data to present on their own site, Buzzillions.

The last Start Rating script is a java script based utility called JS-Kit Ratings

Overview

JS-Kit’s Ratings service lets your visitors rate your merchandise items, services, pictures, blog entries, or any other objects on your site.

Benefits for visitors:

* express opinions quickly and easily
* intuitive, graphical view of community opinion
* ability to change one’s personal rating at any time
* seeing how other people rate the components of your site

Rate It With JS-Kit!!

So there you have it!

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keyword trends volume and unfriendly symbols

If you keep an eye on Google Trends or search for keyword suggestions regularly then you may notice strange results popping up from time to time. As an example you could could have a look at Google trends for date July 13th you will see the words .Pretty neat if you ask me. I’ve always been curious how to type upside down and backwards. Another blasphemy was recorded the day before as a Swastika. I wonder if the perpetrator were caught if they would claim the devil made them do it?.

A Google spokesperson stated:

‘The Hot Trends list is automatically generated by machines and algorithms that detect hot or breaking queries. In this case, it appears that the html code for this query was posted on a popular internet bulletin board, which led to quite a few people searching to find out more about this symbol. The Hot Trends list reflected that surge due to people searching with this query.’

This is obviously a short tern version of the long used key word suggestion manipulation only in this case it seems to be done expressly with the purpose to embarrass Google. Much like a Denial of Service attack, essentially, what these folks do, is find ways to spam the search engines with request for data only in this case it’s for the purpose of manipulating word counts. All the more reason It would seem, for Google to crack down on rogue blogs. The unfortunate consequence of this action I’m afraid will be ultimately hurting only the small manipulation player as I would think whoever is doing this has much bigger guns to draw on. So whats you opinion, is this practice pure evil or is it simple evel?

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SEM by the numbers

So now, at long last, Google had fulfilled one of it’s greatest promises. Actual, real search volume numbers. No more will we be forced to guess if a green bar 3 is good or, if a green bar 4 is almost 5 or almost 3. Thats right folks real live actual number for search volume. Rumor has it though, that the numbers, much like what Yahoo displays, are inflated.

A highly reputable SEO demonstrates this with excellent results. In a nutshell, comparing the external keywords tool volume data to the AdSense volume data will show the discrepancy. That aside, being able to use this development to get an actual number is so incredibly helpful in so many ways. No more guessing at what that green bar actually means. Hard and fast numbers can make all the difference. One can only wonder how well that bodes for Google’s Page Rank green bar. My guess it that won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. Certainly not until several years after Yahoo is consumed by Google.

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and add zero’s to your bank account

Now at long last part 5 of the series has arrived. No doubt by now you have figured out that it is, drum roll please…. the Headline. The headline much like it’s importance, comes in many sizes. With h1, h2, h3 and so on, each higher number is of lesser importance, smaller size and, lower value to Google, Yahoo, MSN Live, etc.

Each headline should contain your keywords. H1 with primary keywords, h2 with secondary keywords and lower tier keywords with each h# progression. Similarly, when it comes to linking, ideally speaking, you would want link to and from pages with thematically related keywords.

OK so here we go, you want to rank high in the SERPs for the keywords ‘blue widgets’. What you really want, ideally speaking is, to find a respected web site with a page on it that has ‘blue widgets’;

• 1st in the title
• 1st in the text as a headline
• 1st words in paragraph

You then want to get a link with the anchor text ‘blue widgets’ that is 1st in the 1st paragraph. Go ahead and try that for a couple of weeks, I’ll wait…. Now that you have realized that it’s almost impossible to do that, whats the next best thing? Well, you could do the best you can, paying webmasters for those primo links or, you can write original content and offer it to web masters of sites with relatively compatible content and hope for the best or, you could start a blog or become a member of of blog network where you can post exactly what you want, where you want. Each method has it’s pitfalls but there you have it.

Stay tuned for part 6

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another piece of the action

During the stone age of the internet, a new species was born to the affiliate advertising tree and it’s branch was know as Performics. After being consumed by DoubleClick in 2004 Google then this year devoured DoubleClick and , now, behold, the ultimate evolution of affiliate connections, the new Google Affiliate Network.

The $3.1 Billion paid for Doubleclick must carry allot of cosmic ca-ching because as if reborn from a previous incarnation, Perfomics seems to have retained it’s karmic essence as when you attempt to log in to the newly announced Google Affiliate Network, what you see is a redirect to connectcommerce.com Performics. One can only presume that what Google has announced is it’s intent to get yet another piece of the action. Hey all those phd’s are good for something after all.

So, now, the *all new* Google Affiliate Network offers;

• Industry-leading advertiser and publisher service
• Rigorous network quality standards
• Reliable conversion tracking
• Detailed reporting
• Automated payments to publishers
• Simple link and creative delivery tools
• Flexible commissions
• Access to top brands on the web

and features companies such as

• Target
• Kohls.com
• Citibank
• Circuit City
• Zazzle
• Bank of America
• Verizon
• Barnes & Noble.

No doubt, far from now, on a brilliant sunshiny day, Google will fully integrate it’s new affiliate network into AdSense and on that day all will rejoice and be thankful.

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bringing adwords to your desktop

plug in to the power

Google AdWords Editor is the nifty little application that has been around for years now yet no one seems to have heard of it. Currently at release version 6 with portions of code licensed under Mozilla, GAE brings the magic of Google AdWords campaign editing to your desktop. With Google AdWords Editor you can manage every aspect of your pay per click spend with such absolute ease it makes the quality guidelines actually look difficult!

Seriously though, this tool is very handy and quite easy to use. With it you can manage:

• Keywords
• placements
• Negatives
• Ads
  1. Text Ads
  2. image Ads
  3. Local Business Ads
  4. Mobile Ads
• Ad Groups
• Campaigns

You can also:

• Work offline, then upload your changes any time.
• Make bulk changes (such as updating bids or adding keywords) in just a few steps.
• Copy or move items between ad groups and campaigns.
• Navigate through your account quickly and easily.
• Circulate proposed changes and get feedback from other users.

Other resources are avaible too such as About, Getting Started, Release Notes, Help Center, and an AdWords Editor Forum. So jump right and get started, it’s all so Coolgle!

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and add zero’s to your bank account
continuing from part 3

Similarly, the words used in the links anchor text on your sites page are your own votes about your authority on the keywords you chose to self define. While your own internal links pointing to your own internal pages do not count as much with Google as the links others use to point to you from their web sites, they are a contributing factor to your SERP rank.

Title

The title tag, much like the road sign that tells you “Now Entering (any ‘Body’ of land)”, is used to define the overall body of content contained on a web page. Your page title typically consists of your primary keywords in order of importance. Something like “Dog, Dog food, Dog Bed’. 3 two word keyword phrases are whats considered best practice. When building inbound links to your site, try to get them from pages with titles relevant to you own pages titles.

Headline

Your headline tag, much like the street sign that tells you what street your on, is used to define a single section of content on a web page or pages. Heading tags include h1, h2, h3 and so on. The hierarchy denotes not only importance but character size as well. H1 carries the most algorithmic weight of the h tags as well being the largest visual size. As with the title tag, your h tags should contain your keywords. When building inlinks, exactly as with title tags, try to get them from pages with headlines relevant to your own.

On to part 5

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(more or less)
A.K.A, open a web store without spending a dime

Scenario A: So you have a the need to open a web store. You have your product all picked out and have found a drop shipper. What now?

Scenario B: You just found this super great affiliate program and don’t want the hassle of getting a web host and so forth.

Scenario C: You want to sell your service online and don’t want the same old hassles

Scenario D: Sell Google adSense.

Scenario E: Any other offer you can think of featuring.

Now there’s Totally Free eCommerce Have yourself a look. What we have is a web store serving adSense, selling a physical product, selling an affiliate product and offering services. Best of all, every single thing on that page is completely free to offer. In fact, the only time you need to spend anything is when a purchase is made and, that money is not out of pocket, it’s deducted from the physical product purchase as a PayPal fee. The site hosting is FREE, the products are sold FREE, the cart is FREE, it’s all FREE. The store even has a way to phone you for FREE or chat with you directly and yes you guessed it, EVERYTHING THERE IS DONE TOTALLY FREE!

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and add zero’s to your bank account

Combination factors, both on and off page, are the most powerful of all the ranking factors. Get these right and you will have a much easier time not only getting the search engines to understand what it is you want to be ranked for but also how well you should be ranked. After all, if you can’t get this part right, then you are certainly of no importance to the search engines after all.

So here they are

• Keywords
• Links
• Title
• Headline

Keywords

Keywords are the foundation for all you internet requirements, they act as signs which concisely show the direction in which you are going. Without keywords you have no means by which to intelligibly navigate the roadways of the internet. Keyword uses fall into three groups each of these groups will define what you are.
1st use, the keywords used on your web page determine and define what you want to say.
2nd use, and similarly, the keywords on someone else’s web page used in reference to you, define what is said about you.

Links

The 3rd use for keywords are the words being used in the links someone uses when linking to you Those keywords are the words they use to define what you stand for. The keywords used in links are a literal *word vote count*. The more links going to your site with the same keywords in them add up to pointing at you as an authority in Google’s eyes.

On to part 4

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strange as it may be

Google launched their new impressionist division of iGoogle today, iGoogle artist themes. When asked to comment, an obviously over worked red eyed deadline focused representative said “this has been an amazing and intense project, it’s been my baby for a long time now man, I was hoping this thing would get out before I had to re-up my oxy & vik”.

The release had typical little fan far with a simple link from your iGoogle home page. Now you can embrace such amazing pieces as Birthing Baby, Hallucinogenic Street Light, Racing Vacuums, Naked Dude With No Parts, Hold Dead Bodies and Pee On Snow, or my personal favorite, Anatomically Correct Dismembered or Shiny Female Mannequin Parts! Be sure to rush out and get yours now!

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and add zero’s to your bank account

Before we proceed I think I may need to define the acronym SERPs. What SERPs stands for is Search Engine Result Page or, similarly, Search Engine Results Placement. Essentially, what the data is that is returned from a Google (or other) query.

Google is a tool that runs on an engine. That engine, like the one that runs your car, requires very specific things to get you where you want to go. While the exact substance may vary somewhat, those things are absolute. In order to get where you are going, your car must have fuel . The fuel may vary in octane or be derived from different processes but, with out the fuel you get nothing you go nowhere.

The fuel for your search engines is what drives the results that will get you were you want to go on the internet. That fuel is very specific and, like the fuel that drives your car, will vary in substance and be derived from differing sources but, that fuel is required and, in that manner, can be controlled. The measure of that level of control is based on a very short list of criterion that we will begin to explore in the next installment. Before we begin, I urge you have a look at my Internet Terminology Glossary. You will no doubt have a much easier time understanding the content of this series if you do. On to part 3

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and add zero’s to your bank account

In this series of articles, we will examine individually, each of the major components of web page optimization. Mastering and blending each of these components can be tricky to say the least and , it is likely impossible to incorporate all the factors into every page. As the series unfolds, please keep in mind that combining some of the most powerful components of these search engine optimization factors can get your site quite a large over optimization penalty ding from Google. Just remember to pay close attention as I go over each ranking factor and I will point out the ‘fatal combinations’ as I write about each of them.

Lets start by going over the two forms of optimization

1. On Page Factors
2. Off Page Factors

On Page Factors

On page factors are exactly what you would think they are, the factors that Google, Yahoo, MSN Live and other search engines, look at on YOUR WEB PAGE in order to determine how to rank your web page.

Off Page Factors

Off page factors are also exactly what you would think they are, the factors that Google, Yahoo, MSN Live and, other search engines look at on OTHER SITES WEB PAGES in order to determine how to rank your web page.

Now instead of listing each off each of these components and factors individually, I thought that I would first discuss the most powerful overall which, not so coincidently, are the factors that not only exist as both on and off page factors but are also some of the highest weighted algorithmically. While any one algorithmic result is not perfect, most people agree that the Google’s algorithm is best and, make no mistake, the algorithm is what SEO caters to.

On to Part 2

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again

Google got *slapped back* yesterday with an advertising fraud lawsuit, yet again.

A Massachusetts based private investigator, David Almeida, is seeking class action status. The lawsuit claims Google defrauds advertisers by omitting a critical default setting during campaign set up. This default is set to display advertising on both Google’s search results pages and, all partner pages, through both shared search results and Google’s Adsense programs. Advertisers don’t see this option while creating a campaign. Only after creating a campaign is the setting in dispute both available and visible. This requires the user to go back and change in Adwords, this disputed campaign setting by un-checking the box labeled “Content Network” which is, you guessed it, checked by default.

No doubt Google will take action to remedy this legal *broad match* quickly as it is in Google’s best interest not to allow this joust to run *un-checked* as the lawsuit could become quite an expensive proposition otherwise!

On a more serious note, If you’re not creating separate search and content campaigns you really should be, it’s a best practice and, will help you spot these little gotchyas on the fly as they say!

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or aggregate many

No doubt many of you are familiar with Feedburners RSS service and, no doubt many of you are also familiar with Facebook. Now, if you have a membership with both, you are in luck.

For those of you not ‘in the know’, the Feed burner service is free from Google and essentially plugs into your site and enhances your RSS feed with lots of nifty features like subscriber tracking and adsense revenue. Facebook, is a social networking site that by use of it’s home page and profile page, allows you to keep in touch with all your ‘friends’ easily and in a fun manner.

So, now lets say you are a blogger who uses Feedburner for RSS and, also has one or two thousand close friends over at Facebook. Now you can get a Facebook application like Blog RSS Feed Reader and invite all your friends to join your Feedburner RSS feed directly from Facebook. Now you will be linked to feeds.feedburner URL instead of a normal site feed. I can’t tell you how thrilled I was when I found this little app! So there you have it!

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How To Get You Site Crawled by Google in Two Hours

more or less

Ever wondered how the pros get a site post or page crawled by a Google bot spider in just a couple of hours or, at the very least, get the Googlebot to come and say hello? It really doesn’t matter if the site in question is new or old, it only needs to be a site of low or no PR and, this method can be employed by any site with a page rank of zero or less strait up to a page rank of 6 or even higher.
Come to think of it,
this technique can be employed along side any site building technology as well. HTML to PHP, SWH to FLA any site of any technology, any site of any PR, any owner of any level of expertise, can use this technique to bring the Googlebot calling HALLELUIAH!

OK enough preamble. If you’re a WordPress fan you have probably heard of the Google Sitemaps Plugin by Arni Brachhold. An excellent utility that much like the Google Site Map Generator by SOFTplus (both now also for YAHOO!) adhere to and utilize the xml site map protocols defined over at sitemaps.org. Now the best thing about these two programs is they both create the xml.gz file. This file type employs a slight compression for fast uploading by the Google bot. What’s good about this is Google’s want to be pinged. In fact Google wants to be made aware of your new information so badly that, once your site is indexed, you can see your post or page in the index in mere hours.

OK so you want to know how to ping then. here is the format,

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=
http%3A%2F%2Fwww.YOURDOMAIN.com%2Fsitemap.xml.gz

Simply copy and paste that into your web browsers address pane and after clicking you should see a message similar to this;

Sitemap Notification Received

Your Sitemap has been successfully added to our list of Sitemaps to crawl. If this is the first time you are notifying Google about this Sitemap, please add it via http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ so you can track its status. Please note that we do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.

Keep in mind that you don’t want to set any interior page to more than .5 for update frequency and, don’t ping Google more often than you need to.

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Again

Did you know that Google may begin to incorporate site load times into landing page quality scores? Naturally we all know that when ever Google does anything for the common good (G’s bottom line) that YUP you guessed it, it’s the End oF tHe World!

Dan Thies has a nice little write up about it over at the SEO Fast Start portal. Here’s what I had to say about the subject;

Well I don’t know what to say guys, obviously this is an important issue that deserves serious thought but, since I’m sure that when Google throws that switch the earth will end in a brilliant supernova like flash, I guess I will just stick my head in the sand and wait for someone to kick me in the you know what before I look at my load times.

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Leaked & Genuine or Other?

I’ve given this document a thorough scouring and I get the impression that the Google Spam Guidelines Document is in fact either real or, a forgery of such impressive expertise that it can only be qualified as some type of counter intelligence and or mis-information document of a very high order. This document has been linked to Aaron Wall and after all, where else can you find these things discussed;

General Guidelines

Part 1: Rating Guidelines

1. The Role of the Quality Rater

2. Researching and Understanding the Query

3. Query Types

4. Rating Scale

5. Non-Rating Categories

6. Spam Labels

Part 2: Using EWOQ

1. Introduction

2. Accessing the EWOQ Rating Interface

3. Rating

4. Rating Home Screenshot

5. Rating Home Screenshot

6. Rating Task Screenshot

7. Resolving Tasks

8. Managing Your Task List

9. Commenting Etiquette

Part 3: Rating Examples

1. Introduction

2. Named Entities

3. Informational Queries

4. Targeted Information Queries

5. Queries That Ask for a List

Part 4: Webspam Guidelines

1. PPC Pages

2. Parked Domains

3. Thin Affiliates

4. Hidden Text and Hidden Links

5. JavaScript Redirects

6. Keyword stuffing

7. 100% frame

8. Sneaky redirects

Part 5: Quick Guide to Quality Rating 

Part 6: Quick Guide to Webspam Recognition

Google Spam Guidelines Document

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and other miscellaneous nuances

While Page Rank may seem ‘cut and dry’, PR really is much more convoluted. Below I show examples and go on to explain the meaning as well as related issues.

1. 0/10
2. Unranked
3. No Page Rank Available

The 3 States Explained

1. 0/10: The page does not have enough rank to show 1
2. Unranked: Google is aware of the page and has not yet assigned rank
3. No Page Rank Available: Google has not ranked the page/site or will not rank the page/site

Other Miscellaneous Nuances

• Were you aware that every page of the same PR is not created equal? Each Rank has many degrees within it and possibly many thousands of links separating each one.
• Did you know that the page rank displayed on the toolbar is not the same as the PR that Google sees (Gasp, yes it’s true!)?
• Were you aware that the toolbar PR you see is actually delayed several months?
• Also, my personal favorite, the PR you see in the toolbar may actually be deliberately misrepresented by Google.
  Oh Dear Google, please forgive us all for selling advertising on our own web sites…sniffle.

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Duplicate content is a pretty complex subject so I thought I’d send you some handy duplicate content tid-bits. Hopefully these may help clear up any possible confusion you have regarding how duplicate content is viewed through the eye’s of the Search Engines…

Code vs Text Ratio & Duplicate Content

Do the Search Engines consider the code of your page when looking for duplicate content? For example, if your code is huge and the unique HTML elements on each new page are small and few, will these pages be flagged as duplicate? Fortunately we have discovered that this is not a concern to the Search Engines. In an interview with Vanessa Fox from Google’s Webmaster Central she clearly mentioned that Google only looks at the content on your page and is not really interested in the code.

Navigation Elements vs Unique Content Ratio for Duplicate Content

Navigational and page layout elements (also known as boiler plate text) usually need to be present on every page of your website. After all, your visitors really do need a way to navigate your site easily. So if your site has a large navigation bar, plenty of header & footer items with just a small area left for content can this result in your pages being picked up as duplicates? According to seomoz.org Google (and Yahoo! and MSN) have been around for long enough to be familiar with website layout and so they do recognize that permanent elements on sites are perfectly normal. They state that the Search Engine’s simply pay attention to the “unique” areas of your pages and usually ignore the rest.

Licensed Duplicate Content & Meta Tags

If you’ve obtained licensed content from another online source and want to make it available to your visitors but avoid duplicate content problems what should you do? Simply use the following meta tag in your page html header:

<meta name = “robots” content=”noindex, follow” />

This will instruct the Search engine bot’s to ignore the page but will allow your visitors to view the page and link to it plus the links on the page itself will also still carry value.

Duplicate Issues vs Duplicate Penalties & Ownership

With all the talk about hard-hitting duplicate content penalties vs. lighter duplicate content indexing “issues” where do we stand? How do we know if we’ve been heavily penalized for duplicate content or have simply just had our content de-index or moved to the supplemental index? Penalties are usually only imposed on a domain if a fair amount of abuse has taken place. It does happen though, even on big name domains. *Penalties* only really happen if hundreds or thousands of your pages contain content from other domains and if your domain has little to no unique content of its own. Lack of unique content is particularly hazardous for new sites or sites that have recently changed ownership. At the end of the day the best thing you can do is just make every possible attempt to provide your own original content to your visitors. As a result you should stay clear of any severe penalties or supplemental index issues.

The issue of duplicate content remains a relatively grey area and is still widely debated. Either way you stand on the matter, it’s definitely something to be aware of and do your best to prevent.

The Above article was generously provided by Michael & Steven Grzywacz, creators of DupeFreePro. A 100% free duplicate content and LSI check tool. For more information about duplicate content see the Stompernet videos here.

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That’s right, geeking-out is now even more fun. Thanks to Google’s new webmaster tools gadget module, you can now have your Google Analytics data delivered directly to your iGoogle home page! All you need to do is click the big gray button.

While the data delivery is still prone to outage, it is multi site capable. You only need to click the button for each site you have in analytics and the data for each of the sites will be delivered to the same tab via a drop down in each of the available categories, SWEET! Thanks Google!

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I for one never believed Google when they claimed to be eliminating their Hell-dex. Much like the ‘Slow Death’ phenomenon that index created, I know many Internet Marketers and SEO’s who claim to believe that Google really did pulverize the index. What Big G actually did was make the Supplemental Index ‘for internal use only’ but, a simple ’site:’ query shows there are still hidden door ways or, back doors if you will, to the vast supplemental underworld.

Now what’s this? You have pages not showing in the main index? Do an ‘info:’ query for any page that did not show up in your ’site:’ command results and follow the Google cache link provided and check the cache date at the top of the page. Hey WOW, it’s a cache date from weeks ago. Remember how supplemental pages do not show unique expression searches unless the expression is of very rare words. Go ahead and try the search, I’ll wait. Now be very quite, what’s that you hear? Must Have liiinks!

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This result really speaks to me. It would appear that if you sell a product on several reputable online sources using Google Checkout and, have sitelinks enabled, you can own the top two spots on Google presenting 15 links to your offerings. What’s even more amazing is if you are running an adwords campaign and/or have an affiliate program with motivated members who are also running Adwords campaigns, you could effectively own the top 5 listings representing the top 6 slots on Google. As if owning everything above the fold wasn’t enough, now lets say that your affiliates are SEO savvy or, are in fact you, you could conceivably control the entire 1st page of Google. I can only imagine how SMM would play into this!

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