Original title: Don’t know what you got til it’s gone

I just had some fun making up fictitious Google technologies on April Fool’s Day. I left out one product that is not funny and just might be real: Google Rollercoaster. A better amusement park analogy would be one of those rides that takes up hundreds of feet in the air, stops for a while, then drops you suddenly like The Great Gasp. That’s what happened to me. Let me explain.

March 22: I realized that something really strange was going on with the Google search results. Not only had Clickfire lost most of its rankings, but other sites appeared perched atop the first page where we once sat. Here is what I observed for searches on brand names:

• First and second pages flooded with brand subdomains, some very odd
• Third party registered domain names that include brand names (still seeing some of this)
• Commission Junction affiliate domains–not affiliate sites, but pointing directly to jdoc..-whatever .com

For any keyword phrase that did not have a brand name in it, the results look much better (except for the fact that I wasn’t there anymore). I was starting to get worried. My traffic had dropped by around 70%. Affiliate and AdSense revenue had shriveled to nearly nothing. Is it me or is it Google? Will I ever know? I would give my right navigation to know what aspect of my site might have tripped this filter of grief. Worrying wasn’t helping, so I hit the forums and blogs in search of an answer.

April 2nd, Barry Schwartz of SEO Roundtable posted that that Matt Cutts was seeking feedback on a new update called “Dewey.” Uh oh. But Matt seemed to be seeking differences in SERPs on 2 datacenters and not so much on poof cases like mine, where pretty much all rankings from aged white hat sites had disappeared. However, I did notice a few posters here and there who had reported cases similar to mine. I felt a little better. Was this mysterious google update an algorithm update? Was it a software upate. Was it a… hmm… could it be? No… was it a datacenter update? Bigdaddy, yes, I’ve been here before. I remember that during the Google Bigdaddy datacenter, I saw the exact same goings ons in the SERPs during almost the exact same time period in 2006. Had Bigdaddy come back to haunt me?

April 9th: whatever this misery was, it began to go away.

This experience was a reminder that we who rely on organic search results are just one update away from a brick and mortar job.

That which does not kill me, only serves to make me stronger.

Nietzsche might have been a good SEO.

A new product from the search engine giant…

I don’t normally post a lot of news, but I heard that Google Bedroom beta is slated for a 2Q release!

This one has been kept under the covers, but from I understand, Google Bedroom is best described as a giant digital baby monitor for Internet users. Originally conceived as a highly extensible component of Google personalized search, the new product creates a trackable, search engine friendly, XML compliant live feed of every event that occurs in user equipped bedrooms from snoring to pillow fights. The new product has kept privacy advocates up late trying to figure out how far Google will go to deliver relevancy. The FBI is reportedly interested in learning how the new technology can be applied to politicians. A later phase of Google Bedroom will be integrated Google revenue generating products like AdWords and AdSense. There’s already a WordPress plugin. It remains to be seen if Google Bedroom will be the sleeping giant that delivers the final wake up call to the competition.

Other Google Products Due This Year:

• Google Colonoscomy
• Google Personalized Frisk
• Google Girlfriend
• Google Afterlife Ads
• Google Lost Dog Search
• Google Snipe Find
• Google “Where’s the Remote?”
• Report Yahoo/MSN Link
• Google UFO Search
• SEO ID Card
• Google Yahoo

And another batch just in…

• Gmail Custom Time
• Virgle
• Google Wake Up Kit

A friend of mine asked an interesting question the other day…

Have you ever come across any information stating that Google may increase a certain listing if it all of the sudden starts to receive a lot of clicks? I’m working on a search reputation management thing for a client. He had a negative result from an old article ranking on the second page, and since we have been working on it over the past few weeks the result has slowly increased to the number 2 position. Could this be because we have been clicking on the link a lot? Thanks a ton!

The famous Google March 2005 patent talks about measuring clickthroughs in organic. I have never seen anyone prove that Google is actually doing this, but seems they’d be crazy not to take it into account at some level. Instead of trudging through the patent application itself, I recommend reading this SEOMOZ article that breaks down each component and explains it well. Researching and understanding the patent stuff back in 2005 really helped me see the direction that Google was going in and probably helped me avoid making some mistakes that could have hurt me in the long term.

So, I’d say yes it is possible, but I doubt anyone will ever be able to game Google by clicking their own results. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense that an old dead result could come to life if it suddenly got clicks vs. a top result for a competitive keyword. But, then again, who knows, it’s just a patent application.  It would be very interesting to try and test this. Find a bunch of old articles from the same site that appear in search results. Use one set as a control and give the others a sudden bunch of clickthroughs from many different IP addresses. See if it has any effect.

For quite a while I have been reading about Google Sitelinks and seeing them appear for large established sites and competitors, but never for Clickfire. I hear that Google has expanded the number of sites that show Sitelinks in their results. Not long after hearing this, I noticed my Sitelinks appearing in Google Webmaster Tools. Today, for the first time, I am seeing Sitelinks for Clickfire!

To prove I am not hallucinating and just in case they get yanked, here is what I am seeing in my browser for a Google search on the word, “clickfire.” I don’t see Sitelinks appearing for any other terms, but I’ll take what I can get!

“You see that link?”

“Yeah, that’s a good’un.”

Every webmaster seems to be talking about his new Google Sitelinks. I am seeing more of these, are you? We had mentioned Google’s recent display of generosity. Well, finally, after being in line for 10 years, I got ‘em! Did you hear me? I said I actually have those little shortcuts generated algorithmically by Google when I rank number one for my brand name! Or do I? Now that we can all log into Google Webmaster Tools and view Sitelinks, I see them. There. But, I do not yet see them where they count: the search results. Below is what appears in Google Webmaster tools, but alas, a search for “clickfire” returns the same old results.

For those of you who have achieved Google Sitelinks, how are you finding them?

O! You better link out
You better not buy
You better nofollow
Or your pr will die
GoogleGuy is coming to town

He’s making an index
And caching it twice
Gonna find out who’s buying PageRank
GoogleGuy is coming to town

He crawls you when you’re sleeping
He scores you when you’re awake
He knows if your hat’s black or white
So wear white for Google’s sake!

O! You better link out
You better not buy
You better nofollow
Or your pr will die
GoogleGuy is coming to town

With little ten SERPs and little toy tools
Ranky tank tanks and linky link juice
GoogleGuy is coming to town

Finally, the sequel to How to Win a SEO Contest! This is based on article promotion content from the SEO Contest. I guarantee these 3 principles will help you achieve defeat. To my surprise, several webmasters actually republished this and I ended up getting a few links and laughs.

Let’s suppose you want to lose a search engine optimization contest such as the retsambew dash klat for charity competition. How would you go about doing it? Rather than offer theories on how to win first place based on personal anecdotes or debates on SEO discussion forums, consider some reliable methods that will ensure you successfully lose the SEO contest you have entered.  

Avoid Strategy
To effectively lose a SEO contest, it’s important to avoid any temptation of having a deliberate and coherent strategy. As the contest moves forward, remember not to observe the activities of your competitors in the search engine results (if you must, look at the losers only and learn what you can from them). Avoid SEO forums, tutorials and blogs belonging to search engine engineers. If you feel boxed in by all these rules, just trundle along and do what feels good for your site. Following these guidelines will not guarantee that you finish last, but they should put you in striking distance.

Stay away from Keywords
Assuming the SEO contest is similar to most wherein the entrants try to rise to the top of a search engine results pages for an obscure and difficult to pronounce keyword phrase such as retsambew dash klat for charity or nigritude ultramarine or supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, you will want to avoid any referance to such keywords in the text, title tags, anchor text, etc. of your competing site’s pages. Mentioning these words will put you at a higher risk of not losing.

Do not Rely on Inbound Links
Links from other sites pointing to your contest site may be seen by search engines as a vote for your site. Make sure you avoid such practices at all costs to ensure losing the contest.  If you catch a webmaster of another site linking to your site, it may be advisable to send a brief communication asking that the link be promptly removed. If you are faced with a case where someone absolutely must link to your site, insist that it be done without anchor text inlcuding the SEO contest keywords. “Click Here” is a good alternative.

Good luck!

Anonymous Webmaster asks…

Several of the Google AdSense ads on our site are showing a “page not found” error within the ad space. I have checked from multiple locations and still see the errors. Our ads are not showing in all cases. Can you advise as to how I can correct?

This error had been puzzling me until recently when I saw the problem on one of my own sites and had to do some debugging. The answer starts with Google AdSense Alternative Ads, which provides a way to display your own ads if Google cannot display an ad on your page:

Alternate ads allow you to utilize your ad space in the event that Google is unable to serve targeted ads to your page. By default, Google shows public service ads (PSAs) if no targeted ads are available.

To display an altnernate ad, users are instructed to specify a URL pointing to their alternate ad resource, which looks this way inside the AdSense code:

google_alternate_ad_url = http://www.example.com/docs/alternatead.html;

A further advanced feature allows webmasters to collapse their ad if there are no targeted ads available so that it takes up no page space. This URL is given as an example:

http://www.example.com/scripts/google_adsense_script.html

I discovered that in my haste, I had copied the example above and replaced “example.com” with my own site name. That should work, right? Nooo… because I left the directory “/scripts/” in the path  which made it point to a dead file instead of “google_adsense_script.html,” which lay in my root directory. 

To answer the original question, if you are seeing the ”page not found error” inside your AdSense units, it is likely caused by an invalid alternative ads path. Make sure your alternate ads URL path is pointing to the correct file location.

Remember that the page not found error only appears when Google cannot display an ad. It is difficult to test your fix because most of the time Google displays ads. If it displays an ad, it’s not looking for the alternative ad path and therefore not showing the error. ¿Comprende?  Read more of this post »

The Google.com domain turned 10 years old today.

I read earlier somewhere that Google.com was about to be a decade old, so I checked the whois record and yep, it’s true.  Google.com was registered September 15, 1997 to be the domain for a search engine project begun by Larry Page and Sergey Brin which they had orginally called “BackRub.” Think of the enormity of impact that this domain has had on the Internet and world.

At a personal level, my life has been positively affected by the technologies available on the Google domain. My career, finances, relationships–everything seems to have some intertwining with Google. I’ll take it a step further. I am happier, richer, wiser and more socially satisfied because of what began happening on Google.com after it’s registration 10 years ago. So, I say happy birthday Google.com and keep hosting life-changing technologies for webmasters. And, please, please don’t forget to renew.

I’ve been wanting to have some fun and publish some of the material I drummed up for the SEO Contest held last year by Webmaster-Talk Forums: Retsambew Dash Klat for Charity. When the contest was over, I realized that I had ended up creating a ton of content, some of which is worth sharing. I threw together the piece that follows for the purposes of article promotion (in case anyone was thinking of taking it too seriously). If any of you are considering entering a SEO contest, this may be helpful to think about before committing. It helped me. I promise you I’ll eventually shutup about this contest… just give me a little more time :)

How do you win an search engine optimization contest? That’s the question that  SEO’s and webmasters ask themselves before investing what could turn out to be a great deal of time competing in an SEO contest like Nigritude Ultramarine, Isulong Seoph or Retsambew Dash Klat for Charity. Consider a few points before embarking on the journey to win a SEO contest.

Understand the Rules
Don’t dive into the water without first knowing how shallow the pond is. It’s easy to get caught up in the lucrative prize offerings promised by SEO contest sponsors. Carefully examine the rules as publicly stated by the contest sponsor. Are the rules fair? Do they give advantages to experienced competitors who control lots of links or does the average Joe webmaster have a reasonable chance? Also ask if the contest rules have safeguards against cheating, spamming and unethical practices.

Know Thyself
Perhaps the next most important questions to ask is can I win the contest?

Realistically assess your SEO talents and capabilities against the rules of the contest.

Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry character made a statement that should resonate for any potential contestants: “A man’s gotta know his limitations.” If you are an aspiring SEO or SEO newbie who will be competing against hundreds of professional SEO’s for tens of thousands of dollars in prize money, you may wish to make your debut in a smaller stakes contest. The risk of wasting valuable time may be far greater than the chances of reaping the reward. After all, you may be better off working on your own web site’s long term growth.

Have a Strategy
If you’re convinced that you have a reasonable chance to win an SEO contest, formulate an initial strategy based on what you know works and especially what has worked for you in the past. Of course, you can and should adapt your strategy. As the contest progresses, you will want peak in on your competitors and see what’s working for them. Even if you don’t win, you will probably learn a few new tricks.

Was I being naughty to assume that I could upload a few web hosting reviews to Google Base? Most, not all of the reviews had 1 or 2 affiliate text links appearing in context. As most of you probably know, the affiliate relationship helps compensate our expenditures to hire an objective reviewer to log in and test each host and report back the findings to Clickfire visitors. The reward of making even a small profit helps justify those sunny weekend afternoons spent in front of the PC.

My bulk upload of about 10 web hosting reviews was declined and account “disabled” because my Google Base account was being used to:

direct Google users to affiliate or commission-based programs. We have therefore disabled your Google Base account. Please know that we don’t allow the promotion of affiliate products or sites.

I was referred to the program policies where the only thing about affiliates that I could find was this statement:

Posting is not permitted for the promotion of affiliate sites or products sold through an affiliate marketing relationship. This includes item pages that are made up primarily of advertisements, or pages where advisements obstruct the view of the item.

While Clickfire does rely on advertising to support the site (I think most sites do), we certainly don’t have pages that are “primarily” advertisements or obstruct user views. In fact, most of our advertising is through Google AdSense (2 ads per page) at the time of this writing.

I noticed that my login still worked fine. I still have permission to post items on Base. So, I tried uploading individual reviews with no affiliate links such as the one below, but was disapproved:

Read more of this post »

Just saw this posted at Jim Boykin’s blog.

Ever have one of those arrghhh… I wish I had thought of that moments? This is a case of I wish I had thought of that and it is so cool that I still want to do it.

This is may be the best example of link baiting that I have ever seen. Judging by the buzz I’ve been seeing today, the bait is being taken. The game is a simple Flash game and not very entertaining, but that matters not. What matters is that it’s about SEO and that someone has taken the time to develop a funny game around what search marketers do every day. The object of the game is to punch out the various search engine guideline violating characters until the referee, Matt Cutts (who else), gives you a thumbs up.

Here’s an excerpt from the GSINC press release about the SEO game:

UK company GSINC Ltd today launched an online game dedicated to webmaster guidelines.

Covering the basics of search engine guidelines laid down to help webmasters, the SEO game is the latest educational experience by the Birmingham based firm GSINC who have previously produced a range of tutorial videos to help webmasters.

The latest game takes a light hearted look at the somewhat controversial debate of black hat versus white hat website marketing strategies in the form on an online game. The player has to fight their way through a number of search engine enemies. Some of the characters include a hidden text kid, duplicate content girl and there is even a Spam lord to do battle with.

This character, Keyword Stuffer, reminds me of the boss in Doom. 

Ever pull up your Web site’s rankings and get this?

Have you noticed how we SEO’s love to use the phrase “according to Matt Cutts?” Read more of this post »

This appeared on Google.com when I performed a search for “Liberals.” Don’t ask why I did that. To my surprise, I saw this single eBay ad.

Why would eBay want to sell their liberals? Are there too many in inventory? Do liberals constitute a high profit margin?

None of the above. It turns out that eBay is using a Google’s DKI to insert keywords into AdWords ads. Kevin Lee, writing for ClickZ, explained it this way:

Google has an automated method to allow you to have the searcher’s keywords inserted into your ad (assuming the keyword string isn’t too long to fit). The Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) system uses a creative template and keeps all the other ad copy the same.

I wonder what other interesting automated ads we’ll see this election season.

If you want to get a feel for how controversial Google’s new paid links reporting policy is becoming among webmasters, take a look at these screen shots from the Google SERPs a few days ago. Over 600 comments appeared on Google engineer Matt Cutt’s blog post entitled “How to Report Paid Links.”  Judging by the whirlwind of debate that followed, both on the Cutts blog and many SEO blogs, I’d say the post seems to have caught many webmasters off guard and left them upset. The flurry of comments appear to have pushed the limits of the WordPress blogging software used by MattCutts.com. Google indexed the error:

This is what came up when I tried to access the actual page: Read more of this post »

We have all seen indented results on occasions when doing Google searches. Google explains that indented results occur when Google finds multiple results from the same website. When this happens, ”the most relevant result is listed first, with other relevant pages from that site indented below it.”

Up until now, I have never seen a case where more than one full Google result has been indented. The example above shows 2 indented results when searching for the keyword clickfire. The strange thing is that this occurred within the Google Toolbar search. I could not replicate the 2 indented results using the regular Google.com search.

My question is have you seen this before and if so, what do you think it means?

Are user submitted buttons disappearing from the Google Toolbar Button Gallery? Old categories have been removed. Links to author sites appear incorrect, broken…

When Google announced the Toolbar Button feature last year, it was too cute of a gimmick to pass up. I made a some custom buttons and found them quite handy to have sitting up on my toolbar. Not only that, but I made a few for SEO clients that resulted in extra traffic and even a few leads–yes leads, believe it or not.

According to the Google Toolbar Submit Button page, you can

“create a custom button XML file, upload it to your website and use this form to tell us about it. We’ll review it to make sure it meets our Editorial Guidelines, then display it in the Button Gallery for others to enjoy.”

I did this and my button soon appeared in the Google Button Gallery. I became quite endeared to the whole idea of Toolbar Buttons after seeing these PR 4/5 gallery pages with my buttons reported as backlinks by Google.

Like myself, most users who took the time to create and submit a Google custom Toolbar Button and even entire Toolbar Button sites didn’t expect any guarantees that their buttons wouldn’t be discarded. I did expect them to remain intact longer than a year. Think of how long the ancient Google Directory has been with us. Yet, on approximately April 30, 2007, the date iGoogle launched, entire categories of buttons started disappearing. Specifically, these categories were dropped:

• Blogs
• Education
• Entertainment
• Jobs
• Local
• Other
• Reviews
• Search
• Shopping
• Software
• Travel

Comparison of the old Google Toolbar Button Gallery with the new

The new menu (right) looks very similar to the menu that appears on iGoogle under “Add stuff to your homepage.”

Where are the buttons previously listed in the above categories? They are viewable only by searching the gallery for the specific site name. Worst of all, the buttons appear adjacent to broken and incorrect links back to the authors’ sites:

Feedster shows geocities.com as official site

GameSpot official site shows as i.i.com.com

Looks like TechCrunch has been acquired by a cable company

So what are Toolbar Button fans supposed to do? Do we resubmit or move on? Is Google discarding user buttons or should we assume this is a temporary glitch?

Update: I am seeing the old categories and buttons returning to life in the Google Toolbar Button Gallery! Looks like a happy ending.
Update: Oops, now the old categories are gone again. Broken links appear fixed though.

It’s spring time in the United States. Flowers are a’blooming and webmasters are stirring about the discussion forums and pollinating threads. Forums rock, but one annoyance I have is the same topics seem to get posted over and over. This is due to the way forum software is designed–threads asking/answering the same question descend into the nether regions of unbumped posts and eventually get buried.

As sure as the seasons, every SEO knows that Google updates toolbar PageRank and backlinks about 4 times each year. It’s quite comical to observe how one person, usually a newbie, posts a new thread in the webmaster forums announcing that he is not sure, but he may have discovered a Google update is underway. Lurkers chime in, questioning, rebutting, ridiculing in prosaic banter until finally everyone agrees that a Google update has occurred. Then, there remains only one thing to be said.

“Google is updating.”

“I’m seeing changes.”

 ”Me too!”

“I don’t see anything. Wait, now I do.”

“When is the next update?”

The inevitable “Google is updating forum thread” became such an annoyance at SitePoint that the Google Forum moderator posted a sticky thread explaining the frequency of Google PR updates and warning members not to “start any new threads asking about when the next update will occur.” I checked a few forums and quickly picked out the Google update threads. Like the seasons, I doubt that this ritual will ever change.

SuppleMENTAL results were discussed a great deal last year by SEO blogs and forums after many webmasters, myself included, noticed a large number of pages appearing in the Google search engine results pages. I remember getting a streak of fear in my gut when doing the “site” operator and seeing page after page of my sites’ results appear with the word “supplemental” beside them. Here is an example of a current “supped” Clickfire.com result:

Read more of this post »

Before search, were directories. Intenet users instinctively know this, but a lot of us webmasters are still not so sure. Thanks to a few well coded and low priced directory scripts, there seems to be no shortage of new general web directories appearing. Most of them seem to mirror the taxonomy of DMOZ except they have only a fraction of the listings. There are even entire forums and blogs devoted to building and promoting web directories.  From the user perspective, I think there is very little debate that directories resemble anything like the wave of the future.

To support my point, I’ll ask a question:

“When was the last time you opened your browser and visited a web directory to find anything?”

The exception might be niche directories, perhaps even directories with feeds or user generated content or some social media functionality.

Any objections? I rest my case.

Now, what about the usefulness of web directories for webmasters? What about the content building and organic search benefits? A quote from Nick Wilson stuck in my mind so much that I went back and Googled it up:

Many years ago, webmasters worked out that owning directories was a great way to give yourself links, get free content in way of submissions and great revenue by putting affiliate links dressed up as real listings on the pages. Google didn’t like this much, and nowadays, most directories are worthless in terms of link value because of this.

Google appears to have done some filtering of directories, souring the flavor of their link juice. You may have noticed some paid directories losing their PageRank altogether. A lot of these directories have PageRank on their main page, but when you drill down to a random category, the page is not cached by Google. Having your link on a page like that doesn’t excite many SEO’s. Subterranean billboard advertising probably wouldn’t be so great either.

Despite the improvements in search algorithms, I still see some value in running web directories, especially niche directories, if you can keep the content robust, unique and well edited and the listings of high quality. That’s not always easy. One of the most boring tasks a webmaster can perform is shuffling through the haystack of daily directory submissions to find the one guy’s a good needle.

Enough of me trying to answer the question. Let’s hear from the Google Webmaster Guidelines:

Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.