A discussion of earning with the Best Affiliate Programs, SEO, Wordpress Blogging and General Motivational Ideas for Internet Publishers and Affiliate Marketers.

Earlier this morning I was searching on Google for the Microsoft documents about using system restore. I was suprised when I looked at the first result in Google, which was for Microsoft’s documentation. I was suprised to see a warning from Google that Microsoft’s site may harm my computer. I took a screenshot…

Even more suprising was that Google had also marked the Wikipedia entry for “system restore” as harmful…

It seems Google was manfunctioning this morning and marking every single website in the search results as “harmful”. I went to check Twitter to see if anybody else was experiencing the same phenomenon. Twitter was buzzing with tweets about “This site may harm your computer” and numerous individuals other than myself had noticed that Google search was malfunctioning.

Maybe Google needs to stop spinning their wheels by launching new products and services until they get a handle on their primary business of search. It’s incedents like this that show how dangerous it is to have one company controlling internet search to the extent that Google does. I like Google just as much as anybody else but I there is a dire need for healthy competition in the search industry. Using only one search eangine is not unlike getting your news from only one news source.

Update: Google has released an official statement on their blog passing the buck on StopBadware.org…

Quite scary explaination from Google as to why it happened. Most software and internet development companies review new updates in a test bed. Once everything looks fine, they move it into production. I’m suprised Google’s team of programmers on this specific project didn’t catch the error before it went into production. Somebody must have been asleep on the job….

         

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In case you missed the Google Webmaster Central “Trick and Treats” live event today, I’m going to cover several of the myths and misconceptions that were debunked by the Google team in the question and answer segment of the live event.

The event was announced on the Google Webmaster Central Blog and was hosted by Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist at Google. Matt Cutts was also on the panel and he provided some fantastic answers to questions that attendees submitted before the event started. Here are some of the highlights…

Introducing Crawl Error Source Report

The highlight of the event was Jonathan Simon’s discussion about the “Crawl Error Source Report”, the newest addition to the Google Webmaster’s Tools, which allows webmasters to download a report of all the 404 “not found” errors their site may be throwing. Matt Cutts made it clear why webmasters should pay attention to 404 errors on their site in his article Free links to your site which doesn’t need repeating here because Matt already did a very thorough job of explaining it.

Jonathan suggested a logical path for resolving any 404 errors that the GoogleBot may find. He also stated that fixing broken links will definitely improve your site’s crawlability, which is essential to having your pages properly indexed by Google. His recommendations :

• Fix internal links first
• Contacting external sites to have them fix links
• Setup redirects for external links that can’t be fixed
• Implement a helpful 404 page.

One thing you don’t want to do is let old urls return 404 errors thinking that the GoogleBot will eventually find the new structure. This can cause the GoogleBot to miss crawling pages you want it to crawl because it encounters excessive errors.

Valid (X)HTML Will NOT Make Your Site Rank Higher

One of the questions asked by a webmaster was if Google used (X)HTML validation as a contributing factor in ranking a site. The answer was firmly “no”, Google does not put any precedent on properly validated code. The main reason being that there are far too many older pages with useful information that would be swept under the rug if Google showed preference to properly validated documents.

Shared IP’s Will NOT Cause Rankings to Drop

Another myth that was debunked by the Google team was the old myth that websites on shared IP’s tend to rank lower than websites on unique IP’s. They even went so far as to state that if you are hosting your site on an IP that has “bad neighborhoods” on it because of a less than desirable hosting environment, you will not be penalized.

301 Redirects *DO* Pass Pagerank

Another important question asked by an attendee was concerning the changing of a domain name and using a 301 redirect to the new domain name. The Google team confirmed that if you change url’s and use a 301 redirect, pagerank and all other page attributes will be passed to the new url.

Robots.txt is Not Enought to Prevent Indexing

If you don’t want a page indexed in Google, simply using the robots.txt will not suffice if external pages are linking to it. You must use the “noindex” META tag to keep a page from being indexed by Google. Matt Cutts equated the robots.txt file to hanging a “do not enter” sign on an unlocked door. If you need to keep pages out of Google, you must let Googlebot know on a individual page basis by using the META tag to prevent inadvertant indexing.

Thanks to Google

The event was generally well received except for a few of the typical idiots from DigitalPoint who were clouding the chat room with their stupid pagerank questions. Otherwise, I personally found it very enlightening to hear some of these important answers directly from the Google search team in a live setting.

The WebEx software that was used to host the event functioned smoothly and I listened in using my Sony wireless headphones which allowed me to roam around the house while tuned into the event. Overall, it was a very positive move by Google to bring interested webmasters into a live event like this. Hopefully Google will make use of this format in the future and provide more events for those of us who prefer direct answers rather than listening to all the “self proclaimed” experts and bloggers who might not know what they are talking about.

Happy Publishing
Dave

         

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For somebody who has a personal net worth of nearly $6.6 billion, the majority derived from his work as an “Internet strategist”, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt certainly has a low opinion of the medium that has made him a billionaire. In a recent article at Advertising age, Mr. Schmidt calls the internet a “cesspool” yet fails to acknowledge that his company has any responsibility for the rapid degredation of the internet.

Has Schmidt even taken the time to look at the splog spam farms known as Blogger and Blogspot, both owned by the company he heads up? Blogger and Blogspot have become a scourge for legitimate, domain owning and self hosted bloggers and webmasters alike. Both free blogging comunities are full of scraped and stolen content, useless garbage blogs and spyware/malware.

Then there’s Google’s free email service, Gmail, which has rapidly become the anonymous email service of choice for spammers, surpassing Yahoo mail and Hotmail which used to be the most commonly used free email services for exploitation by spammers. My company spends at minimum 1-3 hours per day policing spammers on our numerous forums and blogs, the majority of which are using Gmail as their email provider because they can easily setup new accounts without any checks or boundaries set by Google. This adds up to thousands of dollars in lost hours per year for just my small internet publishing alone.

Here’s a bit of what Mr. Schmidt had to say when speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus…

The internet is fast becoming a “cesspool” where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted.

Schmidt went on to say that “magazines” and “professional content creators” are essential for Google search to help people find desirable and relevant content. In my opinion, that statement is a 100% turnaround from Google’s “algorithm” which was designed to give authority to sites or articles that are voted upon by their peers through linking. Google’s original use of the university research paper model, where one paper cites another, never encompassed a “commercial” medium where content is professionaly created in order to ascertain relevance.

A commentor on the Advertising Age article also agrees with this sentiment…

Talk about double talk. Googles algorithms do not determine relevancy by quality of content. Quality content is actually buried in the cesspool that Google itself has created by ranking blogs, etc. As for Schimdt suggesting that journalism be a not for profit vocation…you get what you pay for. –Ft Lauderdale, FL

Is Eric Schmidt full of what his name rhymes with or is he just brown nosing a bunch of magazine execs into lucrative advertising contracts with Google? Maybe Schmidt is just crying foul because his company has lost over 50% of their market value in the last year? Generally speaking, a CEO who leads his/her company to a 50% loss of value would mean shareholders calling for his/her head. Considering Schmidt has banked $6.6 billion, I’m certain he is entirely “out of touch” with reality and his recent comments have clearly shown he is “out of touch” with the webmaster community at large.

Chris Crum over at WebProNews agrees with Schmidt in his assesment that the internet requires branding for relevance. Crum cites John Wu (founder of Bankaholic.com, which recently sold for $15mil to Bankrate) as an example of how branding increases authority.

hmm.. If you’re familiar with WebProNews, which is owned by iEntry Network, you know that trying to opt-out your email address from iEntry’s spam farm is more difficult than cancelling an AOL account was back in the 1990’s. Not to mention, most of us who operate blogs or websites in the financial niche are well aware of John Wu and Bankaholic’s incessant spamming to fellow finance webmasters to gain readership and/or backlinks.

That aside, Chris Crum is essentially backing Schmidt’s dangerous philosophy that the internet should be branded by big corporations who employ professional content writers and that small, independent publishers should be relgated to the netherworlds of the internet if they do not have a “brand” to make them appear as relevant to potential readers.

Good God man !!! What are these people thinking? Most of us have grown attached to the internet because it has been the last bastion of free enterprise, free speech and a place where everyone can voice their opinon in a collective conscious. Commercialization of the internet has generally been met with opposition from the community where personalization is the defacto of the medium. Many websites thrive on a “grass roots” level where “word of mouth” is still one of the most essential means for community growth. Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Crum seem to think the internet should become another closed media such as television or radio where only the voices of the rich and powerful are heard.

What do you think? Should “branding” increase relevance or should the internt not put emphasis on content because it is “professionally” generated?

         

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 It appears Google has been rolling out their pagerank updates with a frequency not seen since 2004/2005. Last year, pagerank updates were few and far between but this year we’ve been seeing them every few months. For the most part, these updates have been downgrades for the vast majority of bloggers and webmasters as seen here, here, here and here.

On the other hand, it seems some three month old blogs are being rewarded with a PR5 from a PR0 ??? I really think granting a three month old blog a PR5 authority simply because it’s distributing free Wordpress themes with links back to the blog in the footer is utterly ridiculous.

If the afformentioned scenario didn’t get your blood boiling and you want to have an aneurysm, check out this post about a network of bidding directories that have seen a significant increase in pagerank. Bidding directories? Google has been adamant about the fact that buying and selling text links for pagerank value is prohibited. Remember how Google destroyed PayPerPost bloggers last year? Ok, so somebody writing a paid blog post is essentially more improper in Google’s eyes than having people bid for text links on a site with no content ?

What the hell is Google thinking?

It seems more and more older, well established blogs are getting whacked in the pagerank department these days because Google is definitely not following up on policing natural link building, which they profess as a guideline for webmasters to follow. Google’s Matt Cutts has stated time and again that links should be relative to a blog or site’s niche, which means a “free template blog” getting backlinks from a “celebrity wallpaper blog” should not weigh in as relative. So why isn’t Google following their own standards which they have strongarmed white hat webmasters into following?

One blogger wrote about dofollow pagerank updates and how 3/5 of the blogs in his dofollow blog directory which were PR5 had dropped in this update. Looks like Google hates dofollow blogs so once again, webmasters and bloggers must bow down and alter their policies regarding dofollow comments as a reward to commentors.

Another blogger took it upon himself to do a fair value pagerank analysis of many of the various MMO (Make Money Online) bloggers. The assessment lists the blog, it’s current paregrank and what the blogger believes the pagerank should really be. hmmm, I wonder if he read 10 secret Confessions of the Super Affiliate?? Probably not.

I’m beginning to see that the old adage “nice people finish last” or “honest people never get ahead” certainly rings true, especially where anything related to Google is concerned. However, I refuse to be bullied into going “black hat” or changing the way I choose to operate my sites and blogs because Google wants to shoot themselves in the foot by alienating more experienced webmasters with their kindergarten “gold star” Google pagerank.

         

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