Leo Laporte’s Keynote Address:
Marketing in the Social Era and the Future of Search

Leo Laporte is an Emmy Award winning veteran of technology broadcasting, and a great thinker with respect to internet and marketing. He had some noteworthy messages.

Leo offered some insights into where advertising and marketing has evolved to the present day. If we look back to say, 1890, and examine a Sears catalog, we’ll see basic descriptions of “features and benefits”–no marketing fluff there. But as the 20th Century progressed, marketers injected skill and technique to bend a product’s message to appeal to buyers on an emotional level, or to force brand identities upon consumers. An effective technique to be sure, but not necessarily in the interests of consumers. A related idea: “brands are the refuge of the ignorant.” In other words, a brand is what a consumer refers to when they have no true benchmark for the underlying quality or suitability of a product or service. More recently though, in the very recent few years, consumers have come to depend on online reviews, ratings and recommendations from their social circles to make buying decisions. This is a fundamental shift in purchasing motivation. As Leo notes, it’s as if the circle has closed and “features and benefits” now become the linchpin of purchasing decisions. He sees social media and websites with engaged users as the great drivers of purchasing decisions in the present and near future.

Leo also offered some predictions about the future of search engines and Google specifically. He does not feel that Google will be as relevant in the future and went as far to say that Google will have some serious challenges in the future. The example he gave was Apple’s new Siri app. Siri lets users speak a command like “find me a dentist near 78704″. Siri then completes the search and offers the user an answer to that query. Note that something very fundamental just changed: the interface (Siri) now controls how the query is executed, rather than the user (as is the case with a simple search at Google.com). So, if Apple chooses to direct Siri queries to Google, then Google controls the query. Leo noted that the internet was a “disintermediary”–it killed travel agents because users could simply make their reservations at the airline directly. Services like Siri are “re-intermediaries”– they insert themselves between the user and the search engine. So, theoretically, if a manufacturer like Apple can control the user interface (as is the case with Siri), Apple can control the search, thereby threatening Google.

Google’s Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal Talk About Upcoming Initiatives at Google

Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s spam team (he also authors and appears in Google’s Webmaster Central Channel Videos on YouTube), and Google’s Amit Singhal spoke at the commencement of the 2nd day of the session. Conferences like this are a great way to learn what Google thinks is important and how they value sites and decide rankings.

I ran into Matt Cutts at the Wynn Casino. He was gracious enough to spend a few minutes speaking with me and my wife.

Beside some expected disagreement with Leo Laporte’s earlier warning that Google was in big trouble, one particular highlight caught my attention:

Google Testing an “Above the Fold” Algorithm

Matt Cutts stated that Google was testing an “above the fold” algorithm change that “so far…looks pretty good.” The term “above the fold” refers, simply, to the top of a webpage. The term is inherited from the newspaper industry, the fold being the upward-facing part of the newspaper as it lays flat. This algorithm change would look for quality content at the top of a webpage. So, if a particular website were stuffed with ads, that website might not perform as well in search following the change. No word on if or when this will be implemented.

Some additional insights into search headed forward: Mobile search will continue to grow in importance, and Google will be working to continue to build quality in that area. Social sharing and activity will continue to be more important headed forward. Matt Cutts also proposed a way to protect the original creators of content from having that content stolen by scraper sites. He said that Google may soon begin allowing a notification system that works as follows: when new content is created by a website owner, the creator can ping Google with an alert that confirms that “I am the creator of this content and all other copies are not to be indexed and appear in search.” If implemented, this improvement will be a valuable tool for website owners. Matt also spoke about author reputation in search, noting that author reputation and authority can serve as a great measure of the value of content created by those authors.

General Ideas Presented at PubCon

From the broad pool of speakers, some general ideas emerged that present great opportunities for ranking, placement, and visibility headed forward.

Author Profiles in Search Results

This idea echos what Matt Cutts said about author reputation. In the screenshot below, you’ll note a screenshot image of some search results with a thumbnail photo of Matt Cutts and the text “by Matt Cutts – In 135,595 Google+ circles”. This is a recent search feature that links an author’s content to his or her Google+ profile.

This feature is easy to implement by tagging content with a link to each author’s Google+ profile. We’ll be rolling this out for our clients in upcoming weeks, and of course, we’ll be working with clients to help build out properly optimized Google+ profiles. It is also important to note that this connection between author profiles will add authority to the content and potentially can increase the ranking positions of such content. In a WordPress environment, this feature will apply to posts, but not to your commercial pages, and contact pages, etc.

The Power of Social Sharing

Another prominent theme at PubCon (the second PubCon in a row, actually) is the power of social sharing to increase ranking and visibility. Besides the obvious effect of gaining additional placement through the sharing of content (after all, if content is shared, that means other people will see it), sharing of content can serve as a signal to search engines that “this content is valuable” and “this site is a legitimate source of content.” Remember, Google’s mission is to filter out thin content and deliver valuable content in response to search queries. Social sharing continues to rise in importance as a ranking factor within Google and other search engines.

Site Value Over Page Value

Another topic discussed at PubCon was the continued shift in how Google values individual pages of content. Typically, in the page, Google would tend to rank an individual page based on the merits of that page: the page elements, keywords used, load speed, inbound links. More recently, Google is shifting its focus to the value of the site as a whole. And so, a loose collection of well-optimized pages will not perform as well as a website that has developed overall authority. Ways to achieve this? Start by removing weak content from your site–weak content can actually harm your valuable content by lowering the authority of the site as a whole. Also, social sharing, discussed above, can increase the authority and power of a site.

[tweetmeme] We’ve discovered a sure-fire way to reliably and certainly determine when and if Google has recently updated its toolbar PageRank. Knowing the Google PageRank for your recent pages lets you know if your pages are popular and have garnered links. Here’s our step-by-step guide.

1. First, you need to find a page on a high-value, high-authority, high-PageRank site such as BusinessWeek.com. High authority sites like BusinessWeek are going to be crawled by search engines very regularly, so you can be sure this test is accurate.
2. Next, find a popular, regularly-posted article series or column that conveniently lists posts in reverse chronological order. The more often that articles in the series are published, the more accurate this PageRank update test will be. We’ve found a great page for this (and a great article series by the way), it’s Karen Klein’s Smart Answers column. Karen posts to her column about twice a week, which is perfect for our purposes.
3. Then, click through the posts starting with the most recent date first. If there’s no PR for that page, there’s been no update since that publish date. Eventually, as you click through older posts, you’ll click on a post and see PR registering. When you see that, the PR update took place just after that post.
4. For example, if you Karen’s article from April 12 and there is a PR of zero, but the article from April 16 has no registered PR, it’s fairly certain that the latest PR update fell between April 12 and April 16.

The following is an excerpt from our upcoming book SEO for WordPress. You can sign up for an advance copy. [tweetmeme]

If you undertake black or gray hat techniques, you run a fair chance of having your site penalized in the search results. But even if you are not engaged in these techniques yourself, your site may be punished for associating with black hat purveyors. Hosting on a shared server or sharing domain registration information with bad neighborhoods can lead to to ranking problems, if not punishment. Certainly linking to a bad neighborhood can lead to discipline. If you purchase a domain, you’ll inherit any penalties or bans imposed on the prior version of the website.

There are a wide range of penalties and ranking filters that search engines impose and a still-wider range of effects that those penalties produce. In diagnosing and correcting ranking problems, more than half the battle is figuring which penalty, if any, is imposed and for what violations. Ranking problems are easy to fix but arduous to diagnose with precision. Sudden drops in rankings might lead you to suspect that you’ve received a penalty, but it might not be a penalty at all.

In the following section we’ll look at some specific penalties, filters, conditions, and false conditions, and how to diagnose ranking problems.

Google Ban

The worst punishment that Google serves upon webmasters in a total ban. This means the removal of all pages on a given domain from Google’s index. A ban is not always a punishment: Google “may temporarily or permanently remove sites from its index and search results if it believes it is obligated to do so by law.” Google warns that punishment bans can be meted out for “certain actions such as cloaking, writing text in such a way that it can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in removal from our index.”

One of the most newsworthy instances of a total ban was when Google, in 2006, issued a total ban to the German website of carmaker BMW (http://www.bmw.de). The offense? Cloaked doorway pages stuffed with keywords that were shown only to search engines, and not to human visitors. The incident became international news, ignited at least partially by the SEO blogging community. BMW immediately removed the offending pages and within a few weeks, Google rescinded the ban.

How to Diagnose a Total or Partial Ban

To diagnose a full or partial ban penalty, run the following tests and exercises:

• Check Google’s index. In the Google search field, enter the following specialized search query: “site:yourdomain.com.” Google then returns a list of all of your site’s pages that appear in Google’s index. If your site was formerly indexed and now the pages are removed, there is at least a possibility that your site has been banned from Google.
• Check if Google has blacklisted your site as unsafe for browsing (type http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=mysite.com with your domain at the end).

• Check for Nofollow/Noindex settings. It might seem obvious, but check to make sure you haven’t accidentally set your WordPress site to Noindex. To check, go to your WordPress Dashboard and click the “Privacy” option under “Settings.” If the second setting, “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors” is set, then your site will promptly fall out of the index. A stray entry in a robots.txt file or in your WordPress template file can instruct search engines not to index your entire site.

• Check Google Webmaster Tools. Sometimes, but not always, Google will notify you through your Webmaster Tools account that your site has been penalized. But you won’t always receive this message, so you can still be penalized even if you don’t receive it. See the image below for an example message.

Google Webmaster Tools penalty message. In this example, the message notes, “we detected hidden text….”

PageRank Adjustment/PageRank Penalty

An alternative penalty short of an outright ban is a PageRank adjustment. The adjustment can be partial (a drop from a PR4 to a PR2) or can be full (a drop to PR0). With a PageRank adjustment, Google simply adjusts or removes the PageRank value for a site. Google often imposes this punishment upon low-value general directories that sell links. Part of the difficulty with diagnosing and repairing a PageRank penalty is that the PageRank that Google shows to users is historical, sometimes six months pass between PageRank updates.

How to Diagnose a PageRank Penalty

To diagnose a Google PageRank penalty, run the following tests and exercises:

• Check your inbound links. Whenever your PageRank drops, the most likely reason is that you’ve lost valuable links. Check your link profile in Yahoo Site Explorer. Have you lost any premium, high-PR links you had formerly? Use the reliability of the PageRank algorithm to help diagnose: if you have a PR4 link pointing into one of your pages, and that PR4 link has only one outbound link, that one link alone will be strong enough to make the destination page a PR1 or a PR2. If despite such a link your page remains a PR0, that raises the likelihood of a PageRank penalty.

• Check all pages. Be sure to check every page on your site, you might just have your PageRank shifting around within your site. It is true, however, that generally your home page will have the highest PageRank value of any page of your site. So, if you’ve got a PR0 on all pages including the homepage, a PageRank penalty is suspect.

• Check canonicalization. Recall the “www” and “non-www” distinction and that search engines see these as separate domains in some cases. WordPress handles this automatically, but some online tools don’t check this for you so you have to be sure your are checking both the www and non-www versions of your domain.

• Compare PageRank. Compare Google’s reported PageRank score for your pages with SEOmoz’ mozRank. Typically, these two scores will correlate loosely (within about 10%). If the Google score is much lower than the SEOmoz mozRank score, it’s likely that Google is trimming some PageRank. You can see the SEOmoz Page Rank score with the free SEO Site Tools plugin or by visiting http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/.

Visible evidence of a Google ranking penalty in the SEO Site Tools plugin; all the elements of a ranking penalty are present. The inbound link count is healthy with over 3,500 links pointing to this domain. SEOmoz' mozRank (erroneously called “Page Rank” in the screenshot) is a healthy 4.41. Nevertheless, Google's PageRank is a zero. This is clear evidence of a Google PageRank penalty.

• Check internal links. In Google Webmaster Tools, Google reveals its profile of internal links on your site. See the figures below for examples of an unhealthy internal link profile, and a healthy link profile. If your site has 100 indexed pages, but Webmaster Tools references only a handful of links, it means that Google is not properly processing your internal links. We need to be careful here because a range of conditions can cause this. It can potentially arise from a PageRank penalty but also from poor internal navigation structure.

This Google Webmaster Tools screenshot shows an unhealthy internal link profile, and is the same site shown in the screenshot just above. This site is a low-value link directory, a likely candidate for a Google PageRank penalty.

The -950 Ranking Penalty

Google sometimes employs a -950 ranking penalty to individual pages (but not to entire sites) for particular search queries. The -950 penalty means that for a particular search, your page would have 950 positions added to it. So, a term for which you ranked on page one of Google’s search results in position three, you’d now rank on page ninety-five of the search results at position 953. Sound harsh? It is, and Google has made faint references to it as a penalty for over-optimization. Some SEO professionals contend that they have seen the penalty imposed for shady link building practices.

How to Diagnose a -950 Ranking Penalty

Diagnosing a -950 ranking penalty is easy: try search terms for which you formerly ranked (hopefully you noted their exact former position) and follow the search results out to page 95 or 96. Remember that you can always set Google to display 100 results instead of ten by using the advanced search option at Google.com, which is convenient for checking ranking position in the 100s and above.

The -30/-40 Ranking Penalty

Google often serves up another variety of penalty: it’s the -30 or -40 position penalty. This is an often-imposed penalty, and is applied by Google to entire sites, not just particular pages and not just for particular search queries. This penalty is common enough to trip up legitimate webmasters for very minor oversights or offenses. Most signs point to the -30 penalty being applied algorithmically and is “forgivable,” so changing the condition that led to the penalty automatically reverses the penalty. This penalty has historically been imposed upon sites for serving up poor quality content. For example, the penalty has been imposed upon sites that display thin content. Thin content is content that is partially generic, as with an affiliate site repeating common descriptions of products it sells. Low-value directories have also been served this penalty.

How to Diagnose a -30/-40 Penalty

If you suspect that your site has been been hit with a -30/-40 penalty, there is one sure-fire test to determine if you tripped the penalty. Perform a Google search for your domain name, with out the “www” and without the “.com” or “.net” part of the domain. This search, in normal circumstances, should return your site at or near the first position (depending a bit on the competition of that term). If this test yields your site showing up in a position dropped to the 40s or 50s, it is almost certainly is a -30/-40 penalty.

False Positives That Aren’t Penalties

Don’t assume you’ve been penalized by Google just because your rankings drop or because your rankings remain poor for a new site. Ranking positions can jump around naturally, especially just before algorithm updates, when Google updates its search engine rules. You may also have lost one or more valuable inbound links, that can lead to a drop in rankings. You may also be alternating between Google’s personalized search modes. Personalized search is a Google feature that returns results based on your personal browsing habits. So, if you’ve visited your own website in the past few days, Google will return your website near the top of the results, figuring that it’s one of your personal favorites. Personal search is a convenience tool, but it doesn’t return true rankings. To see actual ranking results you need to make sure personalized search is off. To do this, look on any Google search results page in the upper left hand corner for “Personalize Search On.” Click on the link just under it that reads, “Turn it off.”

Google penalties are almost never imposed for no reason at all. Yes, Google imposes penalties on light offenders while more egregious violations go unpunished. While that might not seem fair, it doesn’t change the fact that if you have perfectly complied with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, you are extremely unlikely to be penalized. If you’ve been penalized, there’s a reason.

[tweetmeme]

Authority Links: What They Are and Why You Want Them

There is a measure of power that some links possess that is independent of PageRank and it is the principle of authority links. Authority links are links from websites that have established a substantial degree of trust and authority with search engines as a result of their age, quality, and size. Authority is a somewhat subjective concept. Unlike PageRank, neither Google nor the other search engines offer any public reference or guidelines as to what constitutes an authority site or authority link. Authority sites are going to be the market leading sites, sites representing established government and educational institutions, large corporations, or leading websites. Authority links can bring tremendous ranking power to a website if one is lucky enough to obtain one or more.

Authority links are the golden eggs of link building. They tend to be extremely difficult links to get, and for that reason most webmasters rarely get them. The best approach to authority links is to be vigilant for opportunities to obtain them, but it is most likely fruitless to waste time in seeking them out.

Our discussion of PageRank and authority links leads naturally to the notion of the relative power of inbound links. No two links are the same in terms of power. The degree of authority of a site, the PageRank of the page upon which the link appears, and the number of outbound links on the page where your link appears will all effect the relative value of the links you obtain. That said, almost all links are worthwhile, even lower value links. With what we’ve learned in the previous few pages, you will have a strong sense of how to evaluate link opportunities and to evaluate the relative strength of links.

Sometimes, you’ll be forced to settle for lower value links but in higher volumes, as is the case with link directories. But never fall into the trap of thinking that the only links worth getting are high-authority, high-PageRank links. All links are good for your rankings (except links from link farms and content farms, from which you should never seek out links).

Link Anchor Text

A vital concept in link building is link anchor text. Link anchor text is the word or words that constitute the visible text of the link itself, the “blue underlined text” as it is often called. The anchor text of a link is a powerful ranking factor; anchor text serves as a signpost to Google as to the content and subject of the destination page.

How Anchor Text Appears in HTML Code

The anchor text of a link is coded by placing the desired text between the open and closing markup of the hyperlink:

<a href="http://www.tastyplacement.com/">This Is Anchor Text</a>

Controlling the link anchor text of inbound links is vital whenever possible. The problem is that you can’t always control the anchor text of inbound links. And unfortunately, the higher quality the link, the more restricted you’ll be in choosing anchor text. A perfect example is the Yahoo Directory. A link in the Yahoo Directory is a great link to get, but Yahoo dictates that the anchor text you select be the name of your website or the name of your business. Yahoo does not allow you to stuff keywords into the anchor text. Here lies another good reason to choose a keyword-rich domain name for your website and business. When your business name is carefully crafted to comprise keywords, like “Austin Air Conditioning,” then you can employ those high-volume keywords more easily in your link building efforts.

To continue an example from an earlier chapter, if you have identified the phrases “Jacksonville air conditioning,” “Jacksonville air conditioning contractors,” “Jacksonville air conditioning companies,” and “Jacksonville air conditioning repair,” as the keywords around which a specific page is built, then your anchor text selection is nearly complete. You can use the same keywords as your desired anchor text.

When you can control the anchor text, you should craft the anchor text of links based upon the keywords you have designated for each destination page. With this device used in connection with sound on-page optimization, tremendous ranking power comes into focus. Remember that Google and the other search engines have a primary goal of returning quality search results to their visitors. When anchor text accords with the on-page elements of a web page, that gives search engines confidence as to the subject of that page. And, when a search engine is confident about subject matter, it rewards the page with high rankings.

But be careful with anchor text when gaining links in high numbers. It is unwise to secure hundreds of links all with picture-perfect anchor text; this manner of link building does not appear natural to search engines. There is a risk of over-optimization when your link anchor text is too perfect. Generally, you never want more than 70% of your anchor text for a particular page to be solely based upon a small family of perfect keywords. Thus, there is a hidden benefit to garnering links for which you can’t control the anchor text because these links dilute your principal keywords to some extent.

If your anchor text isn’t varied naturally, then you should intentionally vary the anchor text. Clever SEO professionals sometimes go as far as to obtain noise links. A noise link is a link with common generic terms used as the anchor text like “click here,” or “website.”

Not all hyperlinks have anchor text. Images can be hyperlinks, but do not use anchor text. In this case, search engines register the link, but have no anchor text upon which to determine the subject matter of the link. Links in image maps and flash files suffer from the same limitation. For this reason, such links are less desirable.

Buy the Book Today at Amazon

[tweetmeme] Millions of pages of popular forums sites have disappeared from Google’s index in the past few months. Testing the index, a Google search for the custom string “site:forums.digitalpoint.com,” which would normally return tens of millions of pages, returns only 256,000 results. Simila2ly, the tremendously popular forum site, fanforum.com, shows only 58,000 indexed pages in Google. Typically the “site:” search query generates a reliable count of the number of pages indexed by Google for a particular domain.

Testing in other niches shows that the trend is broad: ClubLexus.com shows only 57,000 indexed pages–a narrow fraction of its total page count. If you prowl around, you’ll see the same thing: notebookforums.com, sitepoint.com, every forum site I checked gave the same result.

Here’s the kicker: all of the pages within these forums sites appear to be searchable–the pages are indexed and searchable but not reported as indexed,

Hmmn…not sure how to parse this but it could reflect Google making a formal, algorithmic devaluation in the way it treats forums pages. This change might mean that links on those forum pages would be significantly devalued.

[tweetmeme]

The Mathematics and Operation of Google PageRank

Google’s PageRank is part of its search algorithm; the other search engines’ ranking algorithms work similarly. Yahoo and Bing, while they obviously measure inbound link counts as a ranking factor, do not disclose to web users any measure of page value equivalent to PageRank. PageRank works through complex mathematics. Understanding the mathematical intricacies is not vital, but can help illuminate how PageRank impacts your link building efforts. PageRank works the same on all platforms, WordPress or otherwise.

The PageRank Calculation

PageRank calculations works as follows: Google assigns a numerical value to each indexed page on the Web. When an indexed page hyperlinks to another page on the Web a portion of that numerical value is passed from the linking page to the destination page, thereby increasing the destination page’s PageRank. Inbound links increase the PageRank of your web pages and outbound links decrease PageRank. PageRank, often abbreviated as “PR,” is expressed as a number from 0 to 10. Google.com and Facebook.com, both of which benefit from millions of inbound links, enjoy a PageRank of 10. In common parlance, a PageRank 10 site is referred to as a “PR10 site.” Remember though that PageRank refers to pages on the web, not just sites themselves. A PR5 site simply means that the site’s front page is a PR5.

So how is PageRank specifically calculated? Every indexed page on the web enjoys a small amount of PageRank on its own, a PageRank score of 1. This inherent PageRank is the original source of all PageRank on the web; it is only through linking between pages and sites that some pages accumulate higher PageRank than others. However, a page can never send all of its PageRank to other pages—this is where the damping factor comes into play. The damping factor is simply a number between 0 and 1 (but think of it as zero to 100 on a percentage scale); it represents the amount of PageRank that can be sent away from a page when that page links out to other pages.

If a search algorithm’s damping factor were set to zero, no page would ever send PageRank away, and the entire PageRank calculation becomes pointless. On the other hand, if the damping factor is set to 1, then 100% of a page’s PageRank is sent away through outbound linking, and any page with any outbound links retains no PageRank. In this case, the algorithm also fails—the internet would be populated entirely sites of either PR0 or PR10 with no sites in between. As it happens, the damping factor employed by Google is widely believed to be .85. This means that 85% of a page’s PageRank is available to be passed to other pages through linking, while 15% of a page’s PageRank will always be retained. It is believed that Google can alter the damping factor for particular sites.

Consider for a moment that Google manages PageRank calculations for billions of web pages. If that wasn’t daunting enough, consider that Google undertakes the even more staggering task of managing the mathematical calculations of immeasurable numbers of links between those billions of sites.

PageRank, Diagramatically

This graphical illustration of Pagerank calculations for a hypothetical group of web pages shows that the PageRank distribution is accumulated in site “B” because it enjoys a high number of links. The sites represented by the small circles at the bottom of the illustration retain only 1.6% of the PageRank distribution because they link outward and have no inbound links. Note also that site “C” enjoys a healthy amount of PageRank simply because it enjoys a single link from site “B.”

You Have to Share Your PageRank

Also bear in mind that the amount of PageRank available to be passed by a page will be equally divided among all the outbound links on that page. So, if a webpage has a total of six links: three internal links and three external links (links to outside websites) then the PageRank passed away by that page will be shared equally among the six links on that page.

What does that mean for the link builder? Well, it means that if you have secured a link on a great PR4 page, but that page has 200 outbound links, then you’ll be sharing the available PageRank with 199 other sites. That’s why you want to seek out pages with low numbers of outbound links. When there are fewer outbound links, your link will enjoy a much greater percentage of the available PageRank.

The Logarithmic PageRank Scale

If the mathematics underlying PageRank weren’t complicated enough, there is another facet that you must consider. The PageRank scale of PR1 to PR10 isn’t linear, it is logarithmic. Therefore, it takes ten times as much linking power to rise from a PR2 to a PR3 page. Expressed another way, a PR4 page has 100 times the linking power of a PR2 page. As each level of PageRank is reached, it becomes harder and harder to reach the next level. There are only about 120 to 150 PR10 pages at any given time, and generally this elite class of pages and sites includes Google.com, Microsoft.com, WhiteHouse.gov, and other sites of equivalent popularity and character.

PageRank Is Historical

PageRank is historical and only updated every three months or so (although sometimes much longer periods pass between PageRank updates, it’s really up to the whim of Google)—when you check the PageRank of a page, you aren’t seeing the current PageRank, you are seeing the PageRank reported as of the last PageRank update.

Buy the Book Today at Amazon

What Does it Do?

Google’s secure search protects the transmission of data between a user’s computer and Google’s server. So, a user searching for “ways to pass a drug screening” would enjoy enhanced security for that search: the user’s search query could not be intercepted in transit by persons snooping on internet traffic–which in an unsecured environment, is largely open to viewing by anyone. It’s the same technology that protects the transmission of credit card numbers.

However, it has limitations: the user’s browser settings may retain the search query, making it visible to coworkers, spouses, or anyone with access to the physical computer on which the search was made.

No Change in Search Results

But will this new feature change search results, the order in which search results appear? No. We tested a variety of phrases in both environments, and the search results are unchanged.

Who Won’t Like It?

That’s easy: the Chinese Government and the North Korean Government. These governments snoop on their citizens by intercepting all sorts of internet traffic–including search queries. The secure connection means that a dissident in China can search for information without having his or her search queries read by China’s ubiquitous internet police. Of course, once a person clicks on a link–the visit to the destination website will be visible to snoopers. And, of course, the Chinese government can simply attempt to block access to all of Google’s servers.

[tweetmeme]
Following a tip from Gary at Topside Media, I finally got a handle on Yahoo Search Marketing’s import function. Yahoo Search Marketing (Yahoo’s sponsored ad offering) is a necessary evil in competitive markets; but their Web web-based interface is both slow and unwieldy.

I was looking for a way to import some finely tuned AdWords campaigns into Yahoo directly. They have recently upgraded their import functionality, and now AdWords campaigns–complete with ad groups, bids, ad copy, and keywords can all be imported in one operation.

How to Import Into Yahoo Search Marketing

1. First of all, you need a file to import. If you are a user of the Google AdWords Editor software ( if you aren’t, you should be), you simply go to the file menu, and find “export as CSV”. You may select  all campaigns, orally particular campaigns; you can also select whether you want active campaigns, paused campaigns, or both. From the web-based AdWords interface, you do it a little differently: you generate a keyword report as a CSV file. Since I am an AdWords Editor user, I opted for that route–just another benefit of using this powerful tool.

2. Next, log into your Yahoo Search Marketing account. From the dashboard, in the upper right you will see a blue button titled “import campaigns.” Click on that button, and you will see a button to select your CSV file, add a button to import your file. That’s about it–the Wizard does the rest. You will be asked what you want to do about conflicting campaign names–I chose to simply add the new campaigns in addition to my old campaign names.

After the Import

Warning: your geo-targeting will not import–you will need to do that manually, or you’ll be advertising in far-off cities. Also, as with any import, you want to do a thorough review to make sure everything is working properly. Overall, a real timesaver.

[tweetmeme]

We have just launched an adsense revenue sharing site. The site is ArticleShare.info. It’s a general article site (like ezinearticles.com), except authors share in the revenue generated by adsense dollars! ArticleShare.info pays an 80% share of revenues to authors.

Signup is quick and free.

How to Get the Coveted “Show Map of” Tag

I learned this device from a power blogger in the search engine optimization business, and through some research reading Google’s Webmaster documentation. What the trick does is it enables a show map tag to appear within a Google result. The following photo will illustrate:

So what’s different about this Google result? if you look closely, you’ll see a cross with an invitation to show the map of the businesses location. This extra line in the search result can distinguish the result from other results on the page. And, as always, distinguishing factors in search results yield higher click rates.

Also, when a user clicks on the cross a map of the location is expanded to reveal a map of the location, the full address, and phone number. Again, this will yield a high increase in visitor conversions.

So How to Get the Tag?

The way to get the shell map tag is easy, but it’s a bit technical. First of all, the show map tag will obviously be of more value to a local business. In fact, a company has to have a Google local listing (a listing in the map section) as a prerequisite to displaying the show map tag.

Step One: Geo Sitemap

But a Google local listing alone will not activate the show map tag. Once the Google local listing is set up, one must also install what’s called a KML geo site map. A geo site map is a very small file, only a few lines long, which contains specially formatted information about the location of the business.

Here’s some sample data, a generic KML file:

<kml xmlns="http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2"

xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">

<Document>

<name>Company Name</name>

<atom:author>

<atom:name>Author Name (may be company name)</atom:name>

</atom:author>

<atom:link href="http://www.domain.com/" />

<Placemark>

<name>Name Of Location</name>

<description>

<![CDATA[

<address>

<a href="http://www.domain.com/">Company Name</a><br />

Address: [street city, state zip]<br />

Phone: [phone]

</address>

<p>A small company description.</p>

]]>

</description>

<Point>

<coordinates>latitude,longitude</coordinates>

</Point>

</Placemark>

</Document>

</kml>

Now, you’ll notice from the sample code above that the coordinates tag requires you to know the latitude and longitude of your business address as it appears in your Google local listing. You can obtain the latitude and longitude values, as well as generate a very simple but technically acceptable KML site map by going to one of my favorite new sites, http://mygeoposition.com/. You simply type in your address and click the KML tab to get the latitude and longitude numbers. Place those numbers in the coordinates tag, modify the file to include your name information, and you’re done.

Step Two: Register KML File in Google Webmasters Account

Next, the file must be registered in a verified Google Webmaster account. If you don’t have a Google Webmaster account already, it’s an absolute must for any website owner and offers tremendous search engine optimization benefits. Registering your Geo site map in your Google Webmaster account will activate the show map tag anywhere your result shows in a Google search.

Additional benefits

In addition, the show map tag will also display on Google adwords advertisements, which can be a further boost to that program’s effectiveness.

Your KML site map will also generate a location marker in the Google Earth program. In fact, KML technology has its origins with Google Earth.

There has also been some mention, although not a universal consensus, but a Geo site map can improve the rankings within the map display in Google local results.

Good luck from TastyPlacement