Archive for google
PR update: and the magic number is 3
Posted by: | CommentsIt looks like Big G wanted to do one more PR update before the new year! I am happy with this PR update has frogstr went straight from PR 0 to PR 3 and that, within three months. It seems like PR3 is the magic number this time as many people claim to have received a PR3: not more, not less. For my part, most of my websites have a PR2 or a PR3 right after this update. Honestly, nothing really changed except for frogstr, but that’s because the blog is only 3 months old and it’s the first real Page Rank update I go through with it. Overall, it’s all good.
How can I verify my Page Rank?
So you want to know what your Page Rank is? Well, there are a couple of ways to do so. I personally use SEO Quake for Firefox and the toolbar gives me the Page Rank of every website I visit so this is good. I once did a review of SEO Quake (it’s free!) and I suggest you have a look at it if you don’t use it, it’s one of the best tool out there. Otherwise, I suggest these other two Page Rank checker:
http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php
http://www.tareeinternet.com/scripts/pagerank/
Should you care?
Should you care about your Page Rank? Well, it is of course a metric of how “important” Google think you are, but this is not what will make the difference between 10 visitors a day and a thousand visitors a day. So I say, let’s get back to work, focus on creating content, build your brand, build backlinks and traffic and the PageRank will just be a result of all your hard work. Anyway, trust me, it’s possible to get 500-1000 visitors a day with a PR0 website, all from search engines.
See the PageRank the other way around
A lot of people will try to do everything they can to get a higher PR and then hope to rank higher in Google to drive more traffic. Instead of working on increasing your PR to get traffic as a result of that, work on getting traffic and the PageRank will come with it.
Are you happy with the update?
So, are you happy with this new update? Let us know if big G love you or slapped you!
Google traffic + Your brand Rocks
Posted by: | CommentsIf you don’t already know, I love analyzing statistics and that’s why Google Analytics is my best friend. Whether or not you like stats, it should also be your best friend because it helps you make smart decisions. If you don’t know where your traffic is coming from and you don’t know what that traffic is doing on your website, you’re never going to be able to grow. Why? Because you don’t have a single clue if the 500$/month ad you placed on some website is paying off! What if the FREE traffic you’re getting from Facebook or twitter for example converts more? That’s where Google Analytics comes into play, whether you like stats or not.
Direct Traffic
I love direct traffic because it makes me feel good! Direct traffic is someone who actually remembered your domain name and took the time to type it manually in the address bar to visit your site. If you reach my website on a consistent basis by typing the name manually in your browser, I love you. Direct traffic is about 30% of my blog traffic which I think is huge! Let’s have a look if you guys are good traffic 
If it’s green, it’s good. For people not familiar with Google Analytics, everything that’s green or red is the particular statistic compared to the site’s average. There’s no surprise here as direct traffic actually represents people willing to spend time on the site. The only bad statistics is the number of new visitors but I don’t see this as bad: you guys are coming back, that’s good!
Referring Traffic
Referring traffic doesn’t seem to be that good. Referring traffic is basically traffic coming from social networks or other blogs and a lot of that is because of comments I write on so many blogs. So, let’s have a look at how you guys can’t provide me with good traffic! Just kidding.
OK, so that sucks. I mean, the only good news is that it’s bringing me new visitors but I already knew that! When I look at the stats, these are pretty good stats to me but it’s below the website’s average! It doesn’t mean you guys should stop sending me love…!
Google Traffic
Now let’s have a look if the Google traffic loves me!
I am so impressed! The Google traffic ain’t that good on some other website I run so it really is a surprise to see how good in this niche the search traffic seems to be. Every visitor spent almost ten minutes of their precious time on my blog, visiting an average of 4 pages!
Build your personal brand
You see that referring traffic is good but not as good as direct traffic and Google traffic. What does that mean? Well, it means that we all have to continue building our brand. I don’t care if people subscribe to my feed, I much prefer to see them type my name directly in the address bar or in Google: it means people actually care! That direct traffic converts in word of mouth, because these visitors know who you are and can remember your website’s name.
As for the Google traffic I don’t know. It looks to be the killer, but it might go down in the future when the site gets a lot more traffic. I prefer to think people like what they read and decide to stick around.
Now it’s not because referring traffic isn’t the best traffic source that we have to stop commenting on blogs! You know why? Yes, that personal brand thing and the loop starts all over again. In the end, traffic is simple: it all comes down to establishing your brand out there.
Google loves fast hosts
Posted by: | CommentsI talked about the Google bot recently and how the bastard killed one of my website even on a decent reseller account. Seriously, I love the Google bot, it helps me get indexed What I want to talk about today is how a new host positively impacted my website and how it can positively impact your website.
Resources hungry
I talked about it, the reason I bought a reseller account is because one of my website is terribly resources hungry. Before I got on the new host, a page could easily take 4-5 seconds to load and I thought this was a pain. In fact, I’m pretty sure I lost some traffic because of that: people would just go away! The main bottleneck was the mysql performance which is SO much faster on the new host: it now only takes 1-2 seconds to load a page. To my great surprised, not only my visitors are happier, but the Google bot seems to like me a little more!
Google loves it
Let’s have a look at these two charts from Google Webmaster tools:
- Number of pages crawled per day
- Average time to download a page
The red arrow marks the point where I switched host. See how the average time spent to download a page significantly dropped AND the number of pages crawled per day significantly increased! I mean, Google spend less time downloading a single page, so it uses the same total time available to download more pages! Isn’t it great?
How does that helps your website?
This will help your website because even if Google spends the same total time on your website, it actually does a lot more during that time. Not only your new pages will get indexed faster, but your other pages will get updated more often.
Some stats?
The site went from 500 uniques a day to 1000 uniques a day in a single week, and it’s increasing a little everyday since them. That’s what I call a good result.
Do I have to go with a better host?
It all depends the type of website you run. If you run a blog with not much traffic and you don’t update very often, that probably won’t make a difference. On the opposite, if you feel your website is really slow to load, you are getting some decent traffic and you update quite often then I’d say go for it!
Be aware that a reseller hosting is something around 25$ a month, so if you’re website doesn’t make 25$ a month, don’t do the upgrade!
Happy birthday Google
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Google's 10th birthday
Today is Google’s 10th birthday. If you googled a little something you probably noticed this new Google artwork: to celebrate the event, Google used its original Google logo from 1998. It’s impressive really how they managed to establish their brand in such a short period of time. Everybody knows the name ‘Google’ and most people use their services everyday. They control something like 50-60% of internet searches and all that happened in only a couple of years. As Internet Marketers or webmasters we often bash big G, but we all have to admit they changed the way we used the web and…They give to some of us an impressive amount of money through AdSense for running websites!
So, happy 10th anniversary Google and thanks for giving me money even on your own bday!
When asked what they would like to for their birthday, Google answered on their blog that they’d appreciate a nice new server rack. Where do you want me to ship it, big G?
Google killed it!
Posted by: | CommentsWhat a day. I’m running a website with one of my friend and the project is going very very well. Within three months, we managed to get a steady 500+ uniques everyday and it’s going up everyday. We almost reached 1,000 uniques today and we are quite happy about the results we are getting for not too much work! We recently (2 days ago) switched to a hostgator reseller account at 25$ a month for this project because the database is so big (100,000+ entries), performance and server load is now an issue. So we switched without any major issues and the awesome tech support team at hostgator helped us resolve some minor problems, but today, it went completely crazy!
Google Crawl rate
If you run a website updated very often, you will notice a new option in Google webmaster tools: you will be offered to accelerate the Google Bot crawl speed for your site! This is the exact option:
We’ve detected that Googlebot is limiting the rate at which it crawls pages on your site to ensure it doesn’t use too much of your server’s resources. If your server can handle additional Googlebot traffic, we recommend that you choose Faster below.
A faster crawl will enable us to crawl your site quickly, but may put more load on your server.
How tempting is that? Being indexed faster, the dream of every webmaster! With that fresh new reseller account I decided to turn the faster crawl rate on.
What a bad idea
What a bad idea that was to turn the faster crawl rate on. Note that the website we run is very very heavy on resources, so what happened to my website may not happen to your website if you enable the option. It took a couple of hours before the Google Bot decided to crawl my site at top speed, but when it did, boom! No more website!
I checked my statcounter account around 5pm to notice no new visitors came to the website within the last 30 minutes. That’s really unusual when you get 500-1000 uniques a day, so I typed my domain name to see if there was anything wrong. The result:
500 - Internal server error
The evil 500 internal error! The error that tells you something bad has happened, but we don’t tell you what it is and there’s no way to find out! So I emailed HostGator and received an answer within a couple of minutes. The problem was that all 25 allowed processes were used, so no more request could come in. The rep killed the processes and guess what? 5 minutes later, same thing! Eventually, it went back up and I made sure to check the normal crawl rate.
Be careful
So be careful if you check that option. Make sure your server can handle the evil Google bot!
Google monopoly - Don’t blame big G
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Google monopoly
The recent deal between Google and Yahoo means that Google ads will now be displayed on the whole Yahoo network. Some say it’s good news, some say it’s bad news and some really don’t care. The biggest issue with that deal is concerning the monopoly Google would get in the Internet ads market. You know, they already owned a huge part of internet advertising and on top of that this year they aquired DoubleClick and signed a deal with Yahoo. It’s as close as it can get to a monopoly I agree.
The Google monopoly
People fear that a too strong presence of Google on the market will make the prices of advertising go higher for advertisers and down for publishers. That’s what having no competition usually does: you try to cash in the maximum you can before some other company come and take some of your market share. Google made sure to confirm the prices won’t go up because buying advertisements with Google is based on an auction system. I agree, I agree…But big G…You wrote that auction system, you can do whatever you want! Anyway…At least they tried.
It’s not Google’s fault
I’m really neutral when it comes to Google, I both love and hate the company. I’m just sick of people bashing Google on the monopoly issue because of that new Yahoo deal. We have to understand the core reason why Google is in a monopoly situation: there are no decent competitors! Google dominate the market simply because they are the best at what they do! I wouldn’t mind using another CPC system on my websites, but they aren’t as good as Google! I tried some other CPC programs, but none of them even come close to Google’s Adsense/Adwords system. I would put the pressure on companies to come with a decent system that can beat Google Adsense/Adwords. But for now, as a publisher, I only want Google to loose its monopoly if there’s a better alternative out there. Otherwise, they give me too much money for me to hate them and say go away!
I would do the same
We would probably be doing the exact same thing Google is doing right now. Let’s say you develop an advertising system that is so damn good it beats every other system out there. It’s also so good that publishers can put little code on their website to earn money easily. Nobody is able to beat your system, what would you do? Spread the damn thing! That’s what Google is doing my friend.
Come with a decent alternative
I put the pressure on other companies, not Google. Come up with a decent system able to beat Google’s system and we’ll open the monopoly debate again. Until then, they just do what every corporation would do.
Adsense clickers group & Understanding the business
Posted by: | CommentsI just visited DigitalPoint and was shocked to see this post:
Adsense clickers group.
messege me for info
Hurting the business
Less money
Search on Google pirate, yarrr
Posted by: | CommentsI’m sure you know that today is the official “talk like a pirate day”! For that reason, Google now support one more language: Pirate. We can read on Google’s official blog:
As we’ve written before, one of our goals is to enable everyone using Google to find the information they want easily, no matter what language they speak.
It recently came to our attention that Google was not accessible to a large, influential, and notoriously quick-tempered community: Pirates. As of today we are proud and rather relieved to announce that Google Search is available in Pirate.
If you want to experience with Google Search in pirate, you can do it here: Google Pirate.
From Google Trends, this graph clearly shows the trend of the keywords “pirate talk” and why Google decided to have some fun with it:
Pirate Talk Google Trends
Happy pirate talk day!
Impact of Google’s mistake with Chrome
Posted by: | CommentsYou guys are all aware of the mistake Google made with their license agreement for Chrome. Everybody blogged about it and I’m no exception, I also wrote an article last week about it. So, it was a big mistake and kind of a stupid one for a big company such as Google. Some might argue it was done on purpose just for the thing to go viral, but I’m not sure Google would do such a thing. We all agree that from the legal team, just doing a plain copy paste from the traditional license agreement template was really dumb, but everybody still downloaded Chrome without asking too much questions, so I guess it didn’t turn out to be a big mistake for end users in the end. The real problem is with corporations and It’s a mistake that will take time to fix.
Google Chrome banned
I work for a quite big consulting/software company (7,000+ employees) and we are strictly forbidden to download and install Google Chrome on our computers to protect the company’s intellectual property. I know, Google isn’t claiming rights to what you do with Chrome, they fixed the EULA, so why ban the browser? Well, the day Chrome was released, you can imagine that in a software consulting company everybody went totally mad and downloaded the new browser from Google just to test it. Somebody noticed the quite disturbing EULA mentioning Google was getting the rights to almost anything done with the browser and forwarded this to the legal department. Of course, it’s a big problem for a company when you transfer confidential and copyrighted material over a browser that automatically gets the copyrights. The legal department answered within a couple of minutes and of course they advised not to install the browser to protect the company’s intellectual property. We then received a confirmation from higher management not to install Google Chrome.
Businesses are important
You see how easy companies are on the trigger. Even if Google changed the license agreement, we didn’t receive anything mentioning it was OK to install Google Chrome from now on. The company simply don’t care: the browser was a threat, that threat is eliminated, now let’s move on. It will take some time before things get fixed and we are allowed to download the browser. Now, why is it such a big mistake? Where Microsoft succeeded and where Firefox failed is in the business market. Almost every business use Internet Explorer as the standard and every intranet/company portal/web application within these businesses has to be compatible with Internet Explorer for that reason. Firefox is extremely popular with end users/computer geeks, but failed to establish itself as a business browser and this is a problem. For a browser to completely dominate the market, it has to be popular with end users and also with companies. A lot of users use Internet Explorer at home because that’s what they use at work, it’s as simple as that. This is one thing I noticed, I like to test new software and download new stuff, but for most users it’s a pain!
So that’s it, I’m pretty sure Google Chrome is forbidden in a lot of businesses because of that first day license agreement. This is kind of bad and will take some time to fix. Google Chrome had an OK start with techies, but already has a bad reputation within businesses and that might turn out to be a problem in the future.
The Google Chrome madness
Posted by: | CommentsIt’s been two busy days in the blogosphere with the launch of Google Chrome. I’ve read it all: “Chrome is the best thing since sliced bread”, “Chrome is good, but doesn’t beat my Firefox”, “Crap, it’s not available for MAC/Linux”, “Another browser to support for us, web developer, what a pain!”, “Google wants rights to things I do online with Chrome”.
Delivering Breaking news
There’s no way I could deliver breaking news, I would feel like bringing potential lies to people. That’s what happened in the last two days with Google Chrome and that’s why I waited a before writing a little something about it. We’ll have a look at the common myths together.
Google want rights to things you do using Chrome
This little thing from the Google Chrome’s EULA was raised today:
By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.
This is scary isn’t it? Google is getting the rights to everything I post through their browser. What a luck I’m writing this post in Firefox! Instead of believing it without double checking this information, I visited Matt Cutts’ blog (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/). Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam team so he really knows what he’s talking about and here’s what he posted today:
I knew that Google didn’t want to assert rights on what people did using Google Chrome, so I asked the Chrome team and Google lawyers for their reaction or to clarify (probably several other people pinged them too). Here’s what I heard back from Rebecca Ward, the Senior Product Counsel for Google Chrome:
“In order to keep things simple for our users, we try to use the same set of legal terms (our Universal Terms of Service) for many of our products. Sometimes, as in the case of Google Chrome, this means that the legal terms for a specific product may include terms that don’t apply well to the use of that product. We are working quickly to remove language from Section 11 of the current Google Chrome terms of service. This change will apply retroactively to all users who have downloaded Google Chrome.”
Ok, and l checked the EULA tonight and it looks like this now:
11. Content license from you
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.
A lot less scary isn’t it? Issue resolved, next!
Another browser to support!
Again, Matt Cutts the Google hero answered this:
Q: Another browser? Geez, I’m a webmaster/search engine optimizer/front-end programmer and I don’t want to worry about another browser.
A: Google did not add another rendering engine. Google Chrome uses WebKit for rendering, which is the same rendering engine as Apple’s Safari browser, so if your site is compatible with Safari it should work great in Chrome. Personally, I do think creating clean code that validates and works on many different browsers will be an important skill for webmasters and web designers. These days a smart site owner thinks about how their web site looks to all browsers, from Internet Explorer to Safari to Opera to an iPhone.
So, just ensure your website looks fine on Safari and you should be fine!
Other general issues
For other general issues about Google Chrome, visit the following two posts on Matt’s blog:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/common-google-chrome-objections/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-communication/
My general appreciation of Chrome
I personally love it. OK, there’s a lack of features, but the thing is lightning fast. I’m a big fan of Opera and I’m pretty sure this little thing is faster. I hate the fact that there’s no status bar, no rss icon in the URL bar and no extension support, but that will come for sure. I will still continue to use Firefox because it offers so much to web developers: toolbars, firebug, etc, but I will also use Chrome because it feels lighter and is much faster.
