Do You Really Want That Indexed? On-demand indexing was a great value added feature for Google site search, but now it carries more risks than ever. Why? Google decides how many documents make their primary index. And if too many of your documents are arbitrarily considered "low quality" then you get hit with a sitewide penalty. You did nothing but decide to trust Google & use Google products. In response Google goes out of its way to destroy your business. Awesome!

If Microsoft used their primary product to bundle other free products they were giving away to gain market leverage Google would hoot and/or holler. Google demanded that Chrome be shown as an option in Europe when Microsoft was required to market their competitors via BrowserChoice.eu . Yet if you visit YouTube with an old browser you can see that Google claims it isn't an advertisement, yet somehow Internet Explorer didn't make the short list.

I was looking for information about the nuclear reactor issue in Japan and am glad it did not turn out as bad as it first looked! But in that process of searching for information I kept stumbling into garbage hollow websites. I was cautious not to click on the malware results , but of the mainstream sites covering the issue, one of the most flagrant efforts was from the Huffington Post. AOL recently announced that they were firing 15% to 20% of their staff.

I have long documented Google's preference toward brands , while Google has always stated that they don't really think of brand . While not thinking of brands, someone on the Google UI team later added navigational aids to the search results promoting popular brands - highlighting the list of brands with the label "brands" before the list of links. Take a look at what Matt Cutts shares in the following video,

Google has long maintained that "the algorithm" is what controls rankings, except for sites which are manually demoted for spamming, getting hacked, delivering spyware, and so on. At the SMX conference it was revealed that Google uses white listing : Google and Bing admitted publicly to having 'exception lists' for sites that were hit by algorithms that should not have been hit.

When Google did the Panda update they highlighted that not only did some "low quality" sites get hammered, but that some "high quality" sites got a boost. Matt Cutts said : "we actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side." Here is the problem with that sort of classification system: doorway pages .

Shortly after we found out that Google was to purchase Beat That Quote we highlighted how Google purchased a website that was deeply engaged in numerous nefarious black hat SEO practices . A friend just pinged me to confirm that Google has penalized the domain by removing it from the search results. From a competition & market regulation perspective that was a smart move for Google.

It looks like Money.co.uk was right on the money : BeatThatQuote.com today was sold to Google for GBP37.7 million. We think this deal is a tremendous opportunity for our company to develop new and innovative options for personal finance in the UK. Our team is excited about becoming a part of Google. We look forward to working with their engineers to create new tools making it easier for consumers to choose the right financial products.

Clowning Around There is a saying in the bond trading market that if you don't know who the clown in a deal is then look in the mirror because it is probably you. Business is the same way. Almost everyone gets taken for a ride at least once. What is Ignorance? Ignorance is often viewed as a condescending word, but it is how we are all born. It is only through learning and experience we are able to do much more than survive.

How often do you ever hear the phrase worst practices ? Probably never. Everything is a best practice approach, right up until things change. Consider AdSense websites. Hey Look, a Case Study! When you look at some of the biggest losers in the Google content farm update, many of them happened to be premium AdSense publishers which were even used by Google as case studies! For instance, Hub Pages or EzineArticles .

We are now fully open. Our membership area of the site has 2 separate tiers to it. The first gives you access to our tools, training modules, and newsletters, while running at $69 a month. The second level of access gives you access to everything in the first tier and access to our private member forums, while running $300 per month. If you do not have a free/basic account set up yet then you can go here and set up your account and advanced permissions at the same time .

Economics Drive Literally Everything Media is all about profit margins . eHow was originally founded in 1998 & had $36 million in venture capital behind it. But the original cost structure was flawed due to high content costs. The site failed so badly that it was sold in 2004 for $100,000 . The original site owners had GoogleBot blocked. Simply by unblocking GoogleBot and doing basic SEO to existing content the site had a revenue run rate of $4 million Dollars within 2 years,

...too bad Google is not ! Google just did their first content farm update & Mahalo appears to have taken a swan dive in the search results, freeing up space for higher quality websites. Google's Amit Singhal & Matt Cutts wrote : Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking"a change that noticeably impacts 11.

When I went to sleep last night all was well. When I woke up my inbox was exploded with angry emails about people getting dozens and dozens of emails from us...in some cases perhaps almost 100. Since we put the new design live on the site I think people are more receptive to it. And there are not many Drupal websites which have more registered users than our site does. The combination of improved usability )in some areas, still working on others(, better design,

The Amazing Power of Domains! A couple days ago there was a blog post on TheDomains about "how stupid SEOs are" and "the amazing power of domaining" where they highlighted how awesome domaining was because a guy registered a domain name he saw in a comic and it sent a bunch of traffic. What that article failed to mention was: That traffic wasn't from the power of the domain name'that was the power of free advertising & the distribution of the comic strip.

With some lower traffic smaller sites it is easy to get outlier data that is skewed & somewhat irrelevant )especially true if you have a website which happens to have relevant content in a category that Ask is spamming the heck out of Google in(, but one nice thing about comparing Yahoo! and Bing against each other is that they are generally driven by the same relevancy algorithm. Of course Yahoo!

An "Algorithmic" Approach When it comes to buying links, Google not only fights it with algorithms, but also ran a 5-year long FUD campaign, introduced nofollow as a proprietary filter, encouraged webmasters to rat on each other , and has engineers hunting for paid links. On top of that, Google's link penalties range from subtle to overt . Google claims that they do not want to police low quality content by trying to judge intent,

Since switching over our site design some folks have asked us what we were doing with the old design. I spoke with Chris Pearson )of Thesis fame( who made our old site design and he said it was cool if I turned it into a free Wordpress theme. And given the number of folks liked our old site design enough to use it without permission , we decided that we may as well turn the theme into a free Wordpress theme, so that everyone can benefit from it.

Quite Similar Results A few months back I was running Advanced Web Ranking and noticed that Google and Bing were really starting to come in line on some keywords. Major Differences Of course there are still differences between Bing and Google. Google has far more usage data built up over the years & a huge market share advantage over Bing in literally every global market.

Search can be used as a wedge in a variety of ways. Most are perhaps poorly understood by the media and market regulators. Woot! Check Out Our Bundling Discounts When Google Checkout rolled out, it was free. Not only was it free, but it came with a badge that appears near AdWords ads to make the ads stand out. That boosts ad clickthrough rates, which feeds into ad quality score & acts as a discount for advertisers who used Google Checkout.