I use a content management system called DotNetNuke to build a lot of my websites. It's tremendous in its flexibility and power, and {gasp} it's an open source project for the Microsoft platform. I've used other CMS tools, but nothing comes close to the power of DotNetNuke, especially when extending it using ASP.NET.

One problem I've ran into when attempting to use Google Analytics with DNN derives from the fact that each page is built dynamically when the user requests the page. A single default.aspx file is used for all page requests, and the content, skin, objects, etc. are injected as elements into this default.aspx file to create the page. On the surface it would seem simple to just copy and paste the Google Analytics code into this single default.aspx file. Some problems arise from this:

• Sometimes multiple sites share this default.aspx file. Tracking reports from Google Analytics will then show the numbers for all these sites (or portals as they are called in DNN parlance)
• Pushing the Google Analytics code into every DotNetNuke page using a single default.aspx file creates an issue with the DNN administrative pages. Not that it hurts anything, but those pages shouldn't be counted in the usage totals - it skews the results.
• If you have any https pages in your site, they will fail the security test because the Google Analytics code uses plain-jane vanilla http requests. (Note - I've seen some workarounds for this, but none have been satisfactory).
• The Google Analytics code shows extremely skewed results for some pages because of the strange way that DotNetNuke builds the URLs for each page. The friendly URL problem will hopefully have a fix in a future release.

So what to do? The answer is simpler than it seems.

1. Login as either the DNN administrator or super user (host) account.
   
2. Navigate to your home page
3. Add a Text/HTML Module, preferable somewhere unobtrusive like the bottom of the page
4. First, change the settings on the Text/HTML module so that the container is invisible (uncheck the 'Display Container' under the Page Settings section) and save your changes.
   
5. Next, click the 'Edit Text' button on the module
6. In the Edit Text window, click on the 'Source' button to view the actual HTML. Delete whatever content is in there (if any) and copy and paste your Google Analytics code that you received from Google. Make sure to click the Update button to save the changes.
7. Next, go back into the Settings for the module, but this time expand the 'Advanced Settings' tab. Make sure the 'Show on every page' checkbox is checked and click 'Update'
8. If you have https pages, navigate to those and manually delete the module from them. You won't be able to track your secure pages (maybe someone has a suggestion about this).

Make sure that Google Analytics is picking up the code, and if so, you'll have to wait until the next day to view your stats through the Analytics reports. Google updates the stats everyday at about midnight Pacific time, so statistics are never real time and always one day behind, but they are a great tool to have.

Happy stats!

Some may not even know that MSN has a set of webmaster tools to track your websites' position in the Live.com search engine. For those who don't yet know about the tools, you can find them at webmaster.live.com. They are a far cry from the robust tools available from Google, but they're a good start. I track only my most important websites in the MSN tools (at least for now).

One problem I ran into was in the verification process. MSN requires you to either add an XML file to the root directory of your site, or add a META tag to your home page HTML file.

I use a Content Management System that allows me to build hundreds of web pages using the same database, file structure, and index file. Each page is built dynamically at run time based on the request from the user (what URL, which page, etc.).

This left me with a problem - I could add a new META tag to my default HTML file for each site that I track, or I could add the XML file to the root directory. Since hundreds of websites share the same default HTML file, it seemed inefficient to add the overhead for thousands of requests per hour to that file. Instead, I added the XML file to the root directory.

Here's where it got tricky. The file name is always the same for each website (LiveSearchSiteAuth.xml), but the content is different. It's a fairly simple XML file with a single Users attribute with multiple users nested with user tags. The first site I added was easy; I simply copied and pasted the text it gave me into the XML file and copied that into the root directory of the site.

The rest were a bit harder, but once I had it figured out, they were also easy. Instead of copying all the XML code that Microsoft gives you, only copy the information between the start and end users tags and add it onto the end of the file you created. You can add as many users tags as you would like - one for each website you want to track.

I don't think there's a limit - I have over 10 right now, and I assume that I can add as many as I'd like to the file.

The Associated Press is reporting that Google's stock dropped about 5% today. The tumble means a loss of about $12 billion in market capitalization. Other tech stocks also took large plunges today, with Apple down about 6% ($9 billion drop in market cap) and Cisco fell nearly 9.5%, costing its shareholders about $19 billion in market value.

The correction in Google's stock price shouldn't come as a surprise - no stock goes up all the time. But, the timing is odd, and reflects investor's ignorance of technology in general and tech companies in particular. The drop came about because of a warning from Cisco that demand is down (and partially blaming it on the real estate/mortgage industry woes). I guess that investors lump all technology stocks in together, but Cisco and Google couldn't be more different, and investors really don't understand the difference between a HARDWARE (Cisco) and a SOFTWARE/ADVERTISING (Google) company. The fact that investor's panicked and started dumping tech stocks shows a problem with how American's invest - i.e., they don't do enough research into the companies in which they invest.


Google is still on an upward track, with huge earnings and enormous growth potential. The ceiling for Google is still nowhere in sight, so while new investors might not be getting in on the ground floor, those savvy enough to do so might hop on now. Expect a bounce back for Google's stock soon.

The title speaks for itself, and although MSN won my most recent relevancy test competition, something is completely backwards about the search engine. When I say that it sucks, I'm speaking strictly as a frustrated webmaster and SEOer.

Complaint #1: I have sites ranked in the top 3 in both Google and Yahoo while MSN doesn't even recognize the site. Tens of thousands of backlinks, thousands of pages, a high level of authority, and MSN doesn't have the site in it's index yet? Something's wrong here.

Complaint #2: I can create a new website with a domain name of www.My-Keyword.com, and be ranked in the top 5 in less than a week. Why should domain name have that much weight?

Memo to the Live.com engineers: bring your search algorithm into the 21st century, because honestly, it's awful.

Just my 2 cents.

My first search engine relevancy test took some flak for not being scientific enough. This time around, I've set some strict guidelines that should make it a bit more fair to all the search engines. Yahoo won round 1, but I only tested one keyword and used only my interpretations as scoring guidelines. Here are the scoring guidelines for round 2:

1. Only sites returned on the first page of search results will be used (as opposed to the top 2 pages in part 1).
2. A result that directly links to content that fits my search objective will receive 3 points.
3. A result that links to a page that, while it may not exactly answer my question, has the information on its site, and it can be found quickly will earn 2 points.
   
4. Results that are Wikipedia entries, Yahoo Answers, About.com, etc. will receive 1 point. The reason for this is because these sites are so well known that if a user wants to search for the answer on them, they can go directly to those sites.
5. Any result linking to a manufacturer or retailer/wholesaler that does not provide the information I'm looking for will not receive any points.
6. Results returned to directories will receive -1 points.
7. Completely irrelevant results will receive -2 points.
8. Results from the same website will only be counted once.
   

Keyword #1 - "Fix a lawn mower engine"
The goal is to find instructions on how to fix a lawn mower engine. The keyword is long-tailed and fairly precise while the results might be pretty broad considering the number of different models and brands of lawn mowers out there. Note - I'm looking for answers on the internet with this keyword, and not for a book to purchase that helps me out.

• Google: 14 points
• Yahoo: 9 points
• MSN: 9 points

Keyword #2 - "XBox 360 game cheats"
Pretending for a second that I'm a 14 year old XBox 360 fan boy, and I want to find a website with cheat codes for lots of games. The results should have a good variety of XBox 360 cheat codes for a good share of all the XBox 360 games on the market. If the initial page that pops up is selling product or giving reviews, I'm going to give it zero points. I want cheat codes for this keyword. If I can't find cheats 1 click away from my landing page, I'm moving on. I'll be awarding three points to sites that have actual cheat codes, or a list of cheat codes on the landing page.

• Google: 16 points
• Yahoo: 19 points
• MSN: 22 points

MSN had an obvious advantage, considering that Microsoft owns both MSN and the XBox brands, and the results showed. One thing's for sure, there is WAY TOO MUCH advertising on video game sites. My eyes hurt.

Keyword #3: "Buy a used laptop"
I need a laptop, but can't afford a new one (okay, I know that with the price of new laptops at ridiculously low prices, it would be stupid to purchase used - humor me). The results that link directly to a listing for a laptop for sale will get the full 3 points (including manufacturers). A result that doesn't directly sell a laptop on that page, but has used laptops for sale somewhere on the site gets 2 points. 1 point will be given to sites that may not sell laptops, but link to other sites that sell laptops. Sites giving advice, reviews, or information on purchasing used laptops will not be given any points.

• Google: 13 points
• Yahoo: 10 points
• MSN: 14 points

I should note that while MSN had the most points for this keyword, 2 of their results were awful. One actually sold used laptops, but it was a Pakistani website selling to Pakistanis. Doesn't do me a lot of good. The other was a website with a directory like structure that didn't give me any information about what it actually did. There were some links to used laptop sales, once I dug into the site, but a normal is long gone before they reach that point. So even though MSN had the most points, it could have done better because I deducted two points for the crappy results.

Totals:

• Google: 43/90
• Yahoo: 38/90
• MSN: 45/90

Surprisingly, MSN edged out Google for the most relevant results in this test. But because the XBox 360 keyword gave MSN an edge, I'll withhold judgment until part 3. Stay tuned...

I wrote recently that, at least in my informed opinion, Google has become a monopoly. I base a lot of my editorial opinions in this post on the information I provided in that article. You can read it here:

Google has become a monopoly

Google's Stance
From Google's point of view, paying for links to gain Pagerank skews their ranking system, which as we all know is based in part on backlinks. The greater the rank of the page with the backlink, the more rank "juice" is passed on. Google has stated often that they want to return the most relevant results to their users, and I believe them, at least partially. If Google truly believed in that philosophy 100%, then they would return results without any advertising (ie - Google Adwords). Then, Google's stated goals of returning the most natural results would truly be achieved.

A Challenge To Google
I'm challenging Google to give users the options of turning off all advertising through their networks. This would mean that Google would have to put its money where its mouth is and truly give users the ability to have a completely 100% organic search experience. Not only that, but it would require users wanting to turn off advertising to sign up for a Google account. Those users that chose to do so could also give permission to Google to track their browsing behaviors.

This would give Google one more important variable to use in its ranking algorithm. That variable probably wouldn't play much of a part in the whole process, at least in the short term. In the long term, however, this could become an important metric in choosing which sites have the most authority simply by the traffic they have, how long visitors stay on a site, and what sites are clicked on the most when certain keywords are entered by the user.

For the privacy folks: this would be an entirely opt-in system, but I believe Google has the smarts to give users enough incentive to opt-in to the program.

As a positive for Google, they could use the new variable to decrease the value of all links, and implement user behavior as part of the Pagerank algorithm. For example if a website is visited a lot, but the bounce rate is 95%, then Google knows that the users are not finding what they're looking for. They can then track that back to the keyword and lower that sites' SERP for the keyword.

While this wouldn't entirely remove the paid link black market, it would devalue links enough that it would become far less cost effective to simply buy your way to a high Pagerank because part of the PR algorithm would be the actual effectiveness of the website. If users have a good experience and browse a certain website for 20 minutes, return to it often, and visit many of its pages, then the Pagerank would no longer be entirely based on the "backrub" system.

I know that there are a lot of holes in my proposition, but Google is staffed by hundreds of the smartest people in the world. I'm sure they could figure out a way to make it work.

Leveling the Playing Field
I've read many times that Google aims to "level the playing field" for websites, meaning that even the little mom and pop shop's website could compete with the "big boys" (large corporations) for business on the web. The idea is grand and noble and just, but it's a utopia that will never be reached, for several reasons:

• Large companies can spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on a website that has a pile of pages (whether useful or not), includes cool gimmicks such as mini Flash games, and has tens of thousands of their own dealers' websites linking back to them.
• The big boys can drop a six figure budget into a Google Adwords campaign and get instant top page placement. This point by itself shows that the Google mantra of "leveling the playing field" is one that died about the same time as the Y2K scare.
• Smaller companies, for the most part, don't have the technical savvy or budget to create, manage, grow, and optimize their websites. I'm not saying that those websites aren't valuable to the companies that own them, just that there are very few ways to compete on the web.
• Smaller companies get suffocated out by the big boys when running Adwords campaigns. It's not hard for a larger company to push up their bids when a smaller player comes on the scene. It's not hard for the big boys to simply wait out the smaller company's budget and time frame. Speaking from experience, there are some nasty things happening in the background of the entire Adwords system. I've run Adwords campaigns with varying degrees of success, but I stopped recommending them to my clients 6 months ago. I can't prove it but some of the larger advertisers have systems in place to click through the smaller guys' entire budget every day. For example, I was running ads in a competitive market with a budget of $200 per day. I went an entire month with about 2,500 clicks without a single conversion. The exact same group of landing pages, when users found them organically, had a 1-2% conversion rate. Cheating is rampant in the system - I can't prove it, but I know it's happening.
• Since Google uses domain age as part of the algorithm, established small businesses that may have a 50 year real-world track record of great service and stable operations start their website with an almost certain chance of short term failure.

Why Paid Links Help Actually Help Level the Playing Field
Faced with the notion of spending scarce advertising dollars on a website that will take years to show a return, a small business owner can take 2 or 3 hundred dollars and instantly level the playing field. With even a small link-buying budget, a business owner can purchase links that get their website ranked for local keywords. For most businesses, this is where they want to be - ranked on the first page for keywords using their local area name is part of the keyword.

For example, a piano tuner in Anchorage, Alaska might want to be ranked in the top ten for the keyword "Anchorage piano tuning". Even with a great on-page optimization plan, without the backlinks the website will probably take a long time to become ranked in the top ten. A couple hundred of dollars in link sales, and the website is ranked.

Google should recognize that their system is often what holds the little guy back when trying to develop a successful online presence. Purchasing links helps the little guy fight the inherent problems with the system. In addition, it actually provides MORE useful results for users. Using the example from above, if 6 or 7 of the top positions for "Anchorage piano tuning" are for national distributors, yellowpage/directory junk sites, or Wikipedia entries about pianos, then the user is not getting relevant results returned to them. Were the small business owner to purchase a sufficient amount of link "juice" to get into the first page of results, it provides one more relevant result. And that brings me to my last point:

Paid Links Actually Make the Index MORE Relevant
Let's say I start a website selling kitty litter at discount prices, and want to optimize for the keyword "cheap kitty litter". Purchasing links that increased the site's Pagerank and SERP values would provide the user with an excellent result that is nearly 100% relevant to the phrase they were searching on. Very few sites that purchase links for Pagerank and to increase their SERPs are optimizing on keywords that aren't relevant to their sites. And why should they? It becomes a huge waste of time, money, and energy to buy links that drive non-targeted traffic to their site. If the site is relevant to the keywords being optimized, then Google is getting half of their job done for them.

Google Is Shooting Itself In the Foot
The simple fact is that Google has created a system that encourages buying links for Pagerank, and now they want to stop those small businesses that buy or sell links.

Again, I'll make the challenge to Google - if they truly believe that purchasing links to get ranked above other sites is against the rules, then they should put their money where their mouth is and allow users to opt out of viewing all the advertising Google throws at them. After all, an Adwords ad is simply a paid link that the website owner spent money on to get pushed above other websites on the results page. The lines between the two methods are pretty blurry, and a judge in an anti-trust battle may see it for what it is: Google using brutal monopolistic powers to break up competitors' ability to make money.

Should the political environment change in the U.S. over the next 24 months, Google could be in real trouble, and putting a stop to link buying/selling could be the oven that cooks Google's goose in an anti-trust action. It's a blatant use of a monopoly to remove smaller businesses from the online advertising equation.

Google is the largest seller of links on the internet, and now is discouraging other websites from doing the same thing. Ain't it ironic?

I was browsing a little while ago, and noticed something strange on the Google home page:





It seems that the Google designers fat fingered an image tag in their HTML. So much for having a happy halloween - Google's ruined it for me!

How embarrassing for them...

(btw, sorry about the crappy resolution of the image, but I'm at home where my image software is limited to the that timeless Microsoft treasure: Paint)

On Edit: they've already fixed it, but I've still got the screen cap to prove it.

Google finally decided to throw webmasters a bone and updated the toolbar pagerank. After six months without it, the masses were growing restless. But what does it all mean?


That being said, I'm glad it's here because I rely on the toolbar pagerank as one of the criteria used with SEO clients. While SERPs are more important to me (and my clients), if the clients don't see increased pagerank, they start to wonder about my abilities.

Just thought I'd share some of the success stories in my SEO journey, which only began six months ago (about the time of the previous toolbar update).

• My primary web design site is now a pagerank of 5. I only started serious SEO on it in May, so that's pretty good. What's even better is that I'm ranking in the top ten for about 15 good keywords.
• I have over 20 clients with sites that have a pagerank of 4. All of them rank in the top ten for their primary keywords (some less competitive than others).
• Over 100 of my clients have sites with pageranks of 3. Nearly all of them rank in the top ten for their keywords (some are still works in progress).

Considering that I'm a self-taught SEO guy who only even heard about SEO about a year ago, and that I only seriously starting performing SEO for pay about 6 months ago, that's pretty good. Yeah, I'm braggin' a little.

I've even started my own SEO website for beginners. I'm sharing some of what I've learned for beginners on the site, and even though it's still in it's infancy, I would love for anyone who wants to contribute articles to the site to do so. You can contact me through the site itself.

Wikipedia describes a monopoly as:

"a persistent situation where there is only one provider of a product or service in a particular market. Monopolies are characterized by a lack of economic competition for the good or service that they provide and a lack of viable substitute goods."

I've bolded the part to highlight where Google has reached monopolistic conditions. While there are minor sideline players in the Search Engine game, Google has more search volume than all of it's competitors combined. According to HitWise.com, in March 2007, Google accounted for 64% of all U.S. searches, and I've read more recent (yet hazier) reports of Google nearing 70% of all searches.

Before the Google-worshipers start falling all over themselves with excuses like

• "but, but, Google has the best results!" and
  
• "Google can't help it that they're better than the others"
• and my favorite from the pro-corporatists: "Google has won the search engine battle because we let true market forces play out!!!" (usually with a stamp of their little jack boot on the ground)
  

Let's delve into the economics of online advertising. According to the blog SearchEngineWatch, online ad revenues reached a high of $4.8 billion in the final quarter of 2006. Google's own revenues in quarter 4 of 2006? $3.2 billion dollars. Read their own investor relations page to see the details. Their own information shows that "Google owned sites generated revenues of $1.98 billion dollars". In addition, the data shows that Google made $1.2 billion in AdSense revenue in quarter 4 of 2006. That's a total of $3.18 billion dollars on online advertising revenues

Calculating from the data from Google's own investor relations page, we can see that Google's share of the internet pie in quarter 4 of 2006 was about 66% ($3.18 billion / $4.8 billion). Even if we are to assume the $4.8 billion dollar figure is low, and that Google didn't make a full $3.18 billion in actual advertising revenue (financial reports are notoriously difficult to read for the layman - me), it's not hard to see that Google made more than half of all online advertising revenues in the fourth quarter of 2006. It's almost certain that that number has grown since Q4 of 2006.

So what does this all mean? Given the current political climate with a pro-business Presidential administration and the giddiness of Wall Street over Google's performance, maybe not much. But there are several factors that could change the outlook over the next 12-24 months:

1. Google's crackdown on paid links. Sure, its Google's search engine, and they can pick and choose which criteria they use for rankings. But, when a company in a monopolistic position begins to perform actions that reduce revenues for smaller companies and increase their own, then a problem exists that only tighter regulation can fix. Will Google's monopoly be busted simply because of the paid link crackdown? No. Does it shine a spotlight on some of Google's vulture-like business practices? Yes.
2. A possible change in national U.S. politics. It's appears likely that a Democrat will take the Presidency in 2008. That in and of itself won't provide a challenge to Google's monopoly, especially if a corporate-friendly Democratic candidate like Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama wins. But, if the anticipated increases in Congressional majorities for the Democrats continues its trend in 2008, there could be a similar increase in backers of Justice Department investigations into companies like Google and Microsoft that operate under obvious monopolistic conditions.
3. A sharp increase in percentage of online ad revenues. Yahoo's "Publisher" program according to even the most ardent Yahoo supporters, has not exactly lit the world on fire. It suffers from a multitude of problems; unrelated ads appearing on pages; a selection process for testing that left a LOT to be desired; a lack of strong advertisers to push the program out of beta and into a real-world advertising environment. The trends show that both Yahoo and MSN are losing ground to Google. And while that may not be Google's fault (both Yahoo and MSN have been absolutely awful at playing the online advertising game), what it does mean is that Google has an even larger stranglehold on the market and gains even more monopolistic power with every passing month.
4. A strong backlash from webmasters. Google's original creed was that every website, whether owned by General Electric or John Q. Public would be on an equal footing on the web. That's no longer the case - large companies can afford to pay large sums in the AdWords program to grow their online businesses. This has been an issue for quite a while, but it has come to a head with the crackdown on paid links. Webmasters, desperate to monetize their sites, started selling links based on their own Pagerank. With all of Google's progressive thinking, how did they not foresee this happening? What happens if there IS a large scale revolt? It might not hurt Google's bottom line, but bad press can hurt just as much as revenue drops, especially if investors get jittery about an online revolt against Google. A 25% drop in the price of Google stock would force a lot of folks outside the online community to take a look at what Google does.

My next post will be focused on Google's paid-link crackdown, and why it's wrong for the internet, wrong for Google, and bad for business in the long run. It will refer to this post a lot because the two issues may end up being intertwined. I decided to focus on Google's monopolistic position first, then use that as a catapult for my post on the whole paid-link semi-scandal.

Just to note: I have no inside information. I'm not talking to Justice Department officially or unofficially. I don't have some deep-throat feeding me information about what may or may not occur with a possible Google investigation. I do, though, have a brain, and the ability to Google all the information I need to at least make a semi-informed decision (ironic, ain't it?)

PS: no Googlebirds were hurt in the writing of this post, but at least one birdie has been fluttering around with questions.

Signed,
The Google Watchdog

After almost two weeks of working 18-20 hour days, I'm back in the Watchdog's saddle. I had a large booth at a business expo important to my company, and unfortunately, the GWD took a back seat to that for a while. The good news is I'm back with a vengeance, and I have a juicy tidbit to share (okay, it's only slightly juicy, but what's a blogger gonna do?)

There have been several issues of note to report on since my last post (10 ten days ago!).

First, there was another backlink update in the webmaster tools. This isn't a huge surprise; it's almost certain to be a 2 or 3 times per month deal from now on. Webmasters who have long complained about the horrid nature of the backlinks section in the webmaster tools can rejoice. While not completely up to date, the Google Gods are getting better at keeping the backlinks section updated and (at least partially) fresh. Webmasters who complain about Google not listening to their complaints should look at this as a refreshing reminder that Google DOES listen and sometimes even implements the changes we want.

{Semi-Juicy Tidbit}: Second, there has been some sort of algo shift since the beginning of the month regarding paid links. This is only a guess, but it's based on keyword performance on several websites that have used paid links to gain SERP rankings. The SERP values for the keywords that have used paid links are being pushed down the rankings quite dramatically. In one case, the ranking position dropped from #1 to #29. I've also seen some SERP increases for keywords based on paid links that are pretty well disguised (included in an entire paragraph of text with lots of juicy, related content surrounding the anchor text). I'm supposing that Google is testing their new paid link algorithm changes, but who knows, maybe this is a complete roll-out of the new algo updates. Or, I could be completely off base and the SERP changes have been caused by something entirely unrelated.

Third, regarding the brouhaha over my post about DMOZ. I received several nasty emails from ODP Editors about my post. On the flip-side, I also received a couple nice emails from ODP Editors who agree with me that the system is not working as well as it could and gave me some encouragement. There were several editors who posted comments on the story, and I appreciate the feedback. I'm still steaming mad, but I'm retracting my threat of applying to be an editor under a false identity. Instead, I'll wait a couple of weeks, and re-apply for a separate category, noting that I had been rejected before and linking to this blog. I'll keep everyone posted about how that goes. I did get personal confirmation of why my application was rejected, and while I still think that DMOZ was wrong to reject me, I at least understand the limitations placed on me, and should have a successful application this time around. If anyone has any suggestions about becoming an editor, feel free to leave a comment, or email me at fastweb73 {{at}} gmail {{dot}} com.

Here are a list of posts to look forward to over the next week:

1. My take on Google as a monopoly
2. I'll finally post about the whole paid link thing, with some thoughts on why Google has screwed the pooch on this issue.
3. My weekly "Search Relevance Test" pitting the three major search engines against one another will finally become a regular part of my blog routine. The results from my first search engine relevance test were surprising, but hardly scientific. I'll be changing the ranking formula quite a bit and the scores will probably be a bit more balanced. (for those not wanting to read the entire post, Yahoo kicked Google and MSN's fannies in the test).
4. I'm going to have a semi-regular feature written by a guest blogger that will deal with some of the issues surrounding Google's patents and how they effect webmasters, SEOers, and regular users. I hope to have the first post on this issue on the upcoming week. (Note: unless you have a rare specialty, I'm not going to offer just anyone the chance to guest post. If you do have rare information to share or a specialized topic to write about that is related to Google, you can email me at the address given above).
5. My "Google Week In Review" feature - this will be a post every Sunday night or Monday morning listing the top 5 Google-related stories of the week.

The Open Directory project is a joke. An absolute, pathetic joke. I am an expert in my field, I have time to devote to providing REAL evaluations of websites, and I'm extremely computer literate. I made an offer of MY time as a gesture of goodwill, and was denied. Of course, a reason wasn't given; instead a "go to hell" form email was sent out with a laundry list of possible reasons. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that my application was rejected because of my very expertise in web design and development. Not only that, but it took them less than 75 minutes to deny my application!

They have become so paranoid over at the ODP that an application from anyone related in any way to the internet industry is denied, thinking that the applicant has ulterior motives. I don't just guess this, I know this for a fact - I've chatted privately with several editors who have an inside track on the comings and goings of DMOZ. My motives in applying was to donate some of my time to a project that is going to hell and appears to be going in the wrong direction.

So here's what I am going to do: I'm going to create a completely false persona. I will change my gender, age, career, and other demographic information and reapply to the same category under which I was denied as a web designer. I will post an update as soon as they confirm or deny my application.

Anyone who read my previous blog post about my prediction of a major algorithm change (which was way off) knows that I track keywords using a little tool that I created. It gives me a variance figure that gives me an idea of how volatile the current SERP positions are (read the article to get more information about how the tool works). The higher the variance, the more change there has been to my keywords that tend to stay in fairly stable SERP positions. When the variance is high, I can make a pretty logical guess that something is going on over at the Googleplex.

A variance of 5-10 is fairly normal, and figures as high as 20 usually show some minor change in the SERPs, possibly because of a small algo change by the engineers over at Google. In the last week, I've run the test on my little application three times, and all three results showed a variance of at least 20. This morning's test showed a variance of 61, a number I've never seen before, and 26 points higher than any previous test. There are a couple of possibilities:

1. Google engineers are testing a small/medium/large algorithm change
2. Some seriously heavy hitters in the industries for which my keywords are targeted (about six of them) are pushing the SERPs around with some brute force SEO tactics.
3. The datacenter I use is being updated, and the SERPs are bouncing around during the update.

I analyzed the keywords I use to run my tests, and about 25% of them are completely non-existent in the SERPs. These are keywords and websites that have had stable results for quite a while, so I'm leaning towards option 3 as the reason for the large variance. If I see another large variance in the next day or so, and my keywords that dropped out of the SERPs are back in, then option 3 is definitely the reason.

I don't take option 2 seriously, for the simple fact that no one should/could/would have the power to manipulate the SERPs to that degree.

If option 1 is the reason, dare I say that we'll be seeing a toolbar update by the end of the month? I do see some harbingers of that:

• The large variance in my SERP tool - this indicates that SOMETHING is happening, I'm just not sure what
  
• In the last week, I've chatted with several webmasters that have had their PR dropped by a point or 2. These changes are showing up on the toolbar, and have propagated to all the data centers.
  
• Multiple backlink updates at a frequency we haven't had in the past. Until July of this year, I expected a backlink update about once per month, but I've counted at least 5 in the last two months. Possibly this is how Google will be working BL updates moving forward, or it may be a sign of often updated data - a signal that the enginerds at Google are running real world tests.
• A lack of blog posts from Matt Cutts - if he's busy working on real projects instead of posting to his blog, then something is happening. Caveat: whatever he's working on could be completely unrelated to Google SE stuff. For all I know he's managing and working on a project completely unrelated to PR, the SE, etc.

NOTE: I personally don't care when the next toolbar PR update occurs other than the fact that it will quiet the clamor I hear on a daily basis about the update and when it is going to happen. I just want webmasters to get back to their jobs of building good websites with great content instead of the obsession I'm seeing over Pagerank. For those so worried about PR, I have a PR1 site that ranks in the top 5 for a keyword that has a difficulty of 89 using this Keyword Difficulty Tool.

When I logged into my webmaster tools this morning, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my backlinks had been updated. Some of my sites are getting serious upticks in their backlink count, which as we all know is an indication of potential pagerank which leads to higher SERPs (with the proper SEO of course).

Google is becoming far better at updating the backlinks on a regular basis and keeping them fresh. Webmasters monitoring their sites' progress need timely information, and at one time, Google was only providing monthly backlink updates, and much of the information was already dated by the time it actually reached the tool. I still see some links that no longer exist listed in the webmaster tools, but the results are promising. Between this backlink update and the last update, a lot of dead backlinks have been removed, and some of my good backlinks are showing up.

The question still remains though: why are NOFOLLOW links being shown in the webmaster tools?

It's being reported across the internet and the blogosphere that the popular GMail service has hit it's first security issue. I read the report here. I enjoyed that report because it had a pretty good description of the vulnerability, how an account may become compromised, and what the fix is.

I've read a lot of comments that Google is the next Microsoft when it comes to security issues. It isn't as if either Google or Microsoft's products are particularly vulnerable, but that they are leaders in their respective industries and garner the most attention from hackers. It's actually pretty amazing that Gmail went this long without a serious security breach, and goes to show how much more difficult an online application is to compromise.

In the long run, the webcentric nature of applications like Gmail will help to keep them more secure than desktop applications (like Microsoft's Outlook for example). Since the applications are stored, operate, and communicate from centralized servers, it's far easier to patch than the hundreds of millions of personal computers which each have to download the patch. Personally, I trust a dozen Google engineers over millions of clueless end-users when faced with a security issue.

There's a lot of hoopla about this, but I can guarantee that not much will come of it.

Buried in the comments section of Matt Cutts' blog is a response to a poster about the upcoming PR update:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/still-chugging/

Scroll down into the comments section and you'll get this:

Matt Cutts Said,
October 1, 2007 @ 10:03 am
Ezhil, I don’t expect a full PageRank update for at least a few more weeks, and possibly longer.

My idea that Google is waiting until closer into the U.S. holiday season to perform the update is probably a pretty good guess.

From day one, Google proudly claimed that they wanted to "level the playing field" allowing the little guys to compete with large companies on the web. This was a tradition, and for a long time Google ranked sites based on their own merit and not on the size of the marketing punch behind the site. The idea was to create a more democratic internet, and Google was applauded for it.

I think that Google has strayed from this major tenet of their mission, and I have at least minimal proof that money has the power to change Google's mind about a website.

I've found 4 sites that took huge hits in the SERPs for their major keywords. I'm posting what the webmasters of these sites have experienced, but I won't be naming their sites or the keywords involved because of the fear of the Google wrath.

Site 1
The first site was completely banned from the index, even though it was an established site with over 5 years of high rankings and a good level of trust from Google.. They used an SEO firm that utilized some black hat techniques and Google caught on quickly. The black hat techniques were fixed, and the website met all of Google's guidelines. They requested re-inclusion, but their site still wasn't indexed after 2 months of waiting. Again they requested re-inclusion, and waited 30 days. Again, they were not indexed. 90 days after the ban, they started an Adwords campaign in an attempt to get traffic back to their site. About two weeks after starting the Adwords campaign, the site was re-indexed and started climbing the SERPs for their main keywords. It's hard to tell if one of the re-inclusion attempts was finally serviced or if the Adwords campaign had something to do with it.

Sites 2 and 3
Two sites were not banned, but had precipitous SERP drops for all their keywords. Both were owned by the same webmaster, and the two sites linked extensively. Both had good track records of white hat techniques, so the SERP drop was completely unexpected. The owner attempted to contact Google, to no avail. The sites were still indexed, they just didn't rank in the top 1000 for any of their keywords. All pages on both sites remained in Google's index, but they couldn't be found without using the site: operator. Both sites also ranked below 1000 on searches for their domain name, a search that should have them at #1. Once the owner put Adsense on one of the sites, it jumped back up to its normal rankings for all the keywords. The other site kept the penalty, until he put Adsense Ads on it. Both sites were able to regain their original rankings after putting Adsense on the sites.

Site 4
For no apparent reason, the fourth site got dropped from the SERPs for all the major keywords. Unlike sites 2 and 3, however, this site had some top 50 SERPs and some that dropped into the 900's. For three months, the site languished in poor SERP positions, and the site dropped from over 1,000 indexed pages to about 50. However, once the owner purchased Google advertising, the site immediately starting ranking again for the keywords. The pages are slowly getting re-indexed, but this was a major blow to a website that received most of its traffic from Google.

My Thoughts
I've actually spoken with many more webmasters who have had the same issue. I used these four examples because the site owner was upfront about what was going on with their site and gave me inside information and let me analyze their sites myself. So it's not a single website that coincidentally had this happen to it.

My understanding was that the entire logical and physical infrastructure for the Adwords/Adsense and search technologies were separate and disparate entities. If they are not, and rankings are being inflated because of advertising dollars is incredibly disturbing. Not only does it kill my opinion of Google as a progressive company, but it lowers my trust in Google's rankings.

I don't think its a coincidence that the rankings changed after becoming a part of Google's money machine, whether through Adwords or Adsense. Those are the two parts of Google that bring in the most money, and to have them compromise the natural, organic search results brings money into the equation. Is Google really "for the little guy" anymore?

You can read the original post and the updated post to see what I'm talking about.

I saw some minor variance in the SERPs, but nothing earth-shattering. The highest variance I saw was for a day this week was 29. I major algo change should have sent that number into the 50's at a minimum.

As I promised to some folks, I'm going to eat a pile of cat turds. My wife make a kick-butt kitty litter cake. If I get pics, I'll post them so everyone can see.

I haven't been playing the SEO game very long. My first foray into the art came several years ago when I bought an SEO for Dummies book and the SEM for Dummies book. (my take - SEO for dummies is good to learn some basics while the SEM for dummies was directions on how to use websites, something I already know, and was worthless).

As I delved deeper into the ins and outs of optimizing a website, one of the things that nearly all SEO "experts" talked about was the "snapshot" of backlinks that Google took every quarter. It was these backlinks that supposedly made up the backbone of the next quarter's Pagerank. I've seen a lot of folks posting on blogs and message boards recently about the "snapshot" taken at the beginning of July 2007, and that this was the "big one" in preparation for the Quarter 3 toolbar update (which hasn't occurred yet, just like I predicted). So its something that at least some folks still believe.

It's all hogwash. Hooey. Bunk. BS.

Google has become a much more fluid machine, and even if they don't yet have a real-time "snapshot" of each website, the backlinks, rankings, etc. are updated weekly for new, lower ranked sites, and as often as hourly for more highly ranked pages. Heck, even the Google Watchdog blog that doesn't yet have any Pagerank on the toolbar can have a new post indexed in several hours. Things don't work the way they once did, and the backlink "snapshot" is among the things that just doesn't fit with Google's updated modus operandi.

I've had at least 3 backlink updates in my webmaster tools over the past 6-7 weeks, and the webmaster tools are notoriously behind on the backlink list. If this were the case, why would Google used some arbitrary date months in the past to gauge the worth of a site? The answer is that they wouldn't. It may be entirely possible that when doing a toolbar PR update, they take a "snapshot" one day and begin the update over the next week. But, that would be for purposes of showing a public number that may rise or fall over weeks and months behind the scenes and in the hidden depths of Google's servers.

I can't ever guess what goes on in the giant borg brain over at Google for sure, but I'm almost positive that the idea of a backlink "snapshot" is already archaic in the fast moving and quickly developing world of search engines and SEO. I haven't yet learned enough about SEO to consider myself an expert, but I'm pretty good at deductive logic, and its a fairly simple deduction to make that Google has abandoned the quarterly backlink "snapshot". They've moved past that to better techniques that work more closely to real time. And while Google is evolving, a lot of so-called SEO "experts" are not keeping up. I guess (hope) Natural Selection will weed them out.

I have many (several hundred) backlinks from PR8 and PR9 sites that are marked as NOFOLLOW. Most of these links are from posts in blogs, comments on articles, etc. I don't expect any PR juice to follow from the links, they're simply me adding to the conversation.

None of these links were showing up in my webmaster tools list of backlinks. I expected that - they are essentially ignored by the Googlebot other than to note the location of the link so that it can be indexed at a later date. The fact that the links didn't show in my list of backlinks didn't bother me.

However, the other day I was browsing through my list of backlinks (over 42,000 now), I started finding these weird backlinks from PR8 and PR9 sites. I made a check and the links are stilled marked as NOFOLLOW, but they now show up in my list of backlinks.

Has Google just now started including these links in the webmaster tools? Do they have some weight, even though they are marked as NOFOLLOW? Or did I just miss them when I was looking before?

Something to ponder...

Unfortunately, the huge changes were all in Yahoo (which was acting funny today - see this thread at the Digital Point forums for some examples).

I've been optimizing three fairly competitive keywords for Google. I have them all up to page two in the Google SERPs, one of which is at #11, so I'm getting them close. Today for some reason, Yahoo had the website I've been working on ranking those as #1 for all three keywords. Until yesterday, they weren't even in the top 100!

What's funny is that I'm getting more traffic from Google for the keywords today, even with them ranked #1 on Yahoo. The ratio of Google referrals to Yahoo referrals is about 4:1 today. That should tell you something about the dominance of Google over Yahoo.

Here's a list of some of my favorite optimization tools:

• Ranking Check: www.rankingcheck.com - allows you to check the SERP values for 3 keywords. The check runs on a single domain. You can also store up to ten keywords for free that Ranking Check will track for free.
• Dig Page Rank: www.digpagerank.com - shows the actual Pagerank for a website from up to 700 DC's (data centers). Shows faked Pagerank also.
  
• SEO Moz Page Strength tool: www.seomoz.org/page-strength - shows an interesting set of data for a website including the Pagerank, link information, domain age, and a Page Strength value that they calculate for you. Very nice tool to see data in an aggregate form without having to go to many different sites. (If PR goes away, I see a tool like this becoming very popular)
• Backlink Watch: www.backlinkwatch.com/index.php - get a list of backlinks to your website.

I'll be back with more later.

Been out sick with the crud this week, but thought I post an update on my prediction from last week.

I made the prediction last week about a major algo change coming up from Google. It didn't happen this last weekend, but there were some small changes. (Read the original post to get the skinny)

The variance for each day since I made the prediction has been:

Saturday, 9/22: 8
Sunday, 9/23: 0 (this is the first time I've ever had a zero. The actual variance was 0.419...)
Monday, 9/24: 12
Tuesday, 9/25: 26

So something happened on Sunday (I assume it takes 24 hours to fully propagate). I actually saw a huge SERP change for an important keyword on Monday morning when I started compiling the stats (a keyword not used in my formula).

I'm still waiting for the "major" algo change that I predicted to occur, but like I told thegypsy over at Digital Point, I could be wrong. If I am, I'll eat a plate full of dog turds (provided the major algo change happens soon).

If the domain name is funny, then you know you're in for an f'ing treat! Check out the "Matt Cutts Link Spam Assassin" software over on Dave's blog:

Spam Assassin by Matt Cutts

Very funny stuff! Don't forget to check out his SEO Rants home page for some really good stuff. The current rant is entitled "Your SEO Sucks", and is a don't miss.

Many websites I've visited lately have been taking an overly long period of time to load. The page loads up quickly, but the indicator icon shows that the page is still attempting to load. Looking at the status bar at the bottom of the browser, I notice that the component still trying to load is pagead2.googlesyndication.com. As far as I know, this component is used as a referrer for Adsense ads.

Often, the pagead2.googlesyndication.com component of the page never finishes loading, and I can wait for minutes for it to complete. It's as if the connection between the host server and pagead2.googlesyndication.com is locked, and can never complete whatever request is being made between the two. I know that the page never fully loads (even though I can see the content) because the Pagerank value on the toolbar doesn't update from the value shown for the previous page I had visited.

The fix, as a user, is simple enough - I hit F5 and refresh the page (sometimes twice or three times), but is it fair to suck up that website's bandwidth with multiple refreshes because a Google process is either bogged down or broken?

I've only noticed this in the last 2 or 3 months, but over the last several weeks, it has gotten a lot worse. What's puzzling is that some of the pages loading the pagead2.googlesyndication.com component don't have Adsense on them at all, at least that I can see. In my Google Analytic Tools, here's what the big G has to say about it:

"Referrals from pagead2.googlesyndication.com are clicks on your AdWords ads showing on the content network - specifically, ads showing on publisher sites in the AdSense program."

So what gives - if the page has no obvious Adsense, is Google still tracking Adwords data even though I hit the page through a natural link? That doesn't seem right.

I created a little tool for myself that helps me track keywords that I'm optimizing on, and the websites associated with those optimization campaigns. This is a tool used offline, and I have to enter data into it manually. It works well when gauging the progress of some of my optimization campaigns. I wrote it myself using Visual Basic 6, and it has some nifty features.

One thing I use it for is to track keywords that I no longer perform optimization for. The SERPs for these keywords are fairly stable, moving up and down through the various Google dance steps. In general, they trend down, simply because I no longer focus on them. I can generally tell when Google is testing an algo tweak because these keywords bounce around in the SERPs then settle back to roughly their same previous positions.

I created a formula based on these keywords (there are about 100 of them) that shows the variance in SERPs over time. The formula produces a number that gives me a basic idea of the current volatility of the Google search results. The number can be anywhere between -100 and 100, with zero being absolutely no change from the previous week (I normally manually add the updated SERP data once per week, but the formula will work equally well on a daily, hourly, monthly, or yearly basis. The shorter the time period, however, the more pronounced are any small changes.)

Normally, the variance figure is between 5-10 (or -5 and -10), which means a variance of 5-10. (*Note-I'm not a math whiz, so if my terminology is incorrect, you know where you can take yourself). During some of the obvious algo tweaks, the variance goes as high as 15 or 20, but usually drops after one week. Since the formula uses about 100 keywords, a severe change for one keyword doesn't alter the end result as severely as it would were I only to use 5 or 6 keywords. When the variance hits 15 or 20, that means that I've had some fairly significant change in SERPs for my keywords. The change may be up or down because the direction of the SERP change isn't as important to me as the actual amount of increase or decrease.

Two weeks ago, I started entering SERP values in as often as possible (often once per day). I've been paying close attention to the variance looking for signs that Google is doing algo testing. Twice in the last two weeks, I've seen major SERP changes that showed variances of up to 35. Even factoring in the changes introduced by doing it nearly daily, that shows at least a minor algo change has taken place. My opinion is that those were instances of Google nerds testing algo changes in preparation for a larger algorithm change.

I may just be reading the tea leaves incorrectly, but I'm expecting the algorithm changes that have been tested over the last month or so to be implemented either this weekend or next. If it doesn't happen this weekend, and next week is fairly quiet regarding SERP movements, watch out - we may be in for a major algorithm change.

(For those who are going to ask the obvious question: no I don't see a toolbar PR update happening for quite a while still.)