Internet Marketing Blog by Noon-an-Night

Trying to crawl back into Google?

As I’ve discussed before, getting de-indexed by Google can happen to anyone. Therefore, if it does happen to you, it’s important to know what steps you can take to get back into the index as quickly as possible. Here are some concrete steps you can take for minimizing the amount of time your website spends outside of Google’s index:

How bad is your problem: The easiest way to find out how bad of a situation you are in is by using the site command to perform a search of your URL. If this search returns a lot of results, you are simply experiencing a penalty for trying to push the envelope too much. Although this is not an ideal situation, it can be remedied in a fairly short amount of time.

However, if you see nothing when you perform this search (or only your homepage), you are in a world of trouble. Google has officially kicked you out of their index, and trying to get back in is never a fun task.

Is Google Telling You Anything: If you haven’t registered your website with Google Webmaster Tools, you need to go ahead and do that. By registering your website, you will be able to find out if Google has anything to tell you about the current state of your website. Whether it’s difficulty crawling your website or your site being flagged as spam, Google Webmaster Tools is the closest thing you can have to a direct line with Google.

Could It Be Duplicate Content: A lot of webmasters think the whole duplicate content issue gets over-hyped. In reality, a big enough duplicate content problem can get you kicked out of the index. While it won’t come to that serious of an issue in relation to duplicate content on your own domain, if there enough other sites copying your content, you can run into some problems. Although Google does it’s best to figure out the original publisher of content, it’s not perfect, and it does make mistakes. If you determine that this is indeed your problem, you are probably going to need to file at least a few DMCA claims.

Did Your Risky Activities Finally Catch Up With You: In many cases, a webmaster knows exactly why they’ve been de-listed. Like a fugitive on the run, a webmsater engaging in risky activities such as link building campaigns that go against Google’s guidelines is living on borrowed time. Sooner or later, acquiring all of those questionable links is going to catch up to you. When Google finally punishes you for not complying with what they want, the only thing you can do is clean up and beg for forgiveness. Once you have cleaned up all of your dark hatted activities, you can explain to Google that you know you were wrong and ask them to give you a second chance by filing a reinclusion request.

While Yahoo is scrambling to save their company from completely falling apart, Google continues to plow ahead with a string of new products. Less than a week after their announcement of Google Ad Planner, Google is now debuting their own affiliate network.

Aptly named the Google Affiliate Network, Google took advantage of their March acquisition of DoubleClick Performics to create this new affiliate network. Because of the weight that Google carries, it seems they have already attracted a slew of major brands as advertisers, ranging from Barnes & Noble to Kohls to Sears.

So, what exactly does this news mean for you? If you are an AdWords advertiser that has been using Google’s pay-per-action referrals, your ads will no longer work. Although there are not many exact details yet about the Google Affiliate Network, I think it’s safe to say that you will be able to use it to create a campaign that is very similar to your original AdWords PPA.

If you are an AdSense publisher, the only immediate action you need to take is removing any referral ads you may have on your site. These should be removed before the last week of August. Other than that, it will be interesting to see how well the affiliate programs Google creates help publishers further monetize their websites.

Due to their dominance of the search market, it’s not unusual for Google to receive attention on a daily basis from bloggers and the press. However, as I was reading through my feeds today, I noticed numerous articles focused on the same topic: what can stop Google’s dominance?

Of the three articles that I read, I thought the most relevant one was written by ReadWriteWeb. This article presented eleven search trends which could potentially disrupt Google’s dominance. From tagging to whitelisting, this article looked at trends which would most likely not end Google’s dominance, could potentially put at least a small dent into their seemingly invincible armor.

When I started reading Wired’s post on the same topic, I was expecting a thought provoking piece. Unfortunately, it mainly consisted of fluff, and ending with a plug of several search engines that are looking to take a piece of the pie from Google.

Of the search engines that were mentioned at the end of the article, the most amusing was a startup called Quintura. In addition to being quoted in the Wired post (”We are not afraid of Google”), they wrote their own post in which they stated “search is a utility now and a winner is that one who can establish an emotional connection between search and user.” Although they will probably find a niche audience, as you can see from the screenshot of their homepage below, they are falling into the exact same pit that Yahoo did: trying to do way too many things at once instead of focusing on one clearly defined goal.

So, what’s the moral of this story? Although Google is going to remain the dominant general search engine for the foreseeable future, there are still plenty of opportunities for niche and alternative search engines to carve out their own (little) slice of the search market.

Back in 2006, Google was encouraging internet marketers to use linkbait as a way to attract natural links to their websites. Now, over two years later, it seems that Google has taken it upon themselves to start policing what counts as quality linkbait and what doesn’t.

The example that brought this issue to late was a story on Money.co.uk called 13 Year Old Steals Dad’s Credit Card to Buy Hookers. This story was so popular that it not only gained over 7,600 links, but it also attracted the attention of several mainstream news publications, including The Sun newspaper:

While this sounds like the perfect piece of linkbait, it didn’t last for long. After all the success it earned, the internet marketer behind it made a post on his blog describing how successful this piece of content turned out to be. He also announced that the story didn’t actually happen.

After lots of buzz and discussion about the truth behind this story, not only did the online marketer behind the story lose Money.co.uk as a client, Matt Cutts gave Google’s position on stories such as this (which boils down to they devalue links to pieces of linkbait that don’t meet their standards):

if a site says that they completely made up a story to get links, Google doesn’t have to trust the links to that site as much.

Now, let’s take a look at a site that is dedicated to producing fake news. Although The Onion has fooled the mainstream media on multiple occasions, it doesn’t seem to have any negative impact on the way Google is indexing them:

(Google has indexed over 400,000 pages from theonion.com)

While I personally enjoy The Onion, it’s a very good example of Google’s hypocrisy on the issue of devaluing links from articles and stories they feel are deceiving.

On a side note, as an internet marketer, if you find a technique that works extremely well but pushes the envelope, keep your mouth shut about it!

For all the time that other internet marketers spend reading blogs and forums, it never ceases to amaze me how many of them fail to keep up with the official announcements and news that comes directly from Google. While it is true that some of the communications that come from Google are purely corporate PR fluff, they also use their various forms of communication to dispense information which can be extremely useful to anyone involved in internet marketing.

Yesterday, Matt Cutts made a post about several changes that Google has made to their documentation. Here’s a summary of what Matt talked about in his post:

Doorway Pages

Google has a new definition of doorway pages:

Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.

NoFollow

Although most of Google’s official information about NoFollow was previously scattered through various pieces of documentation, they have condensed it into a single article in the Webmaster Help Center.

IP delivery/geolocation/cloaking

If you have ever had any questions about the difference between cloaking and IP delivery or geolocation, Matt pointed out an informative post Google had done on that topic.

Primarily for Users

Google added primarily to the following guideline:

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”

Robots.txt

In addition to a new booklet by Google about robots.txt, Matt also pointed out posts Microsoft and Yahoo had made about their support of robots.txt.

As you can see, Google made quite a few changes to their documentation, and while many of them were minor, many times the smallest changes make the biggest differences.

Back in February, I told you about Google Health, the internet giant’s latest venture. Google Health is launching, and as you can easily see on Twitter, people are buzzing with mixed reactions about this feature from the Big G:

“Creeped out by Google heath; way too much information for one company”

“Am I the only one who likes the idea of Google Health (and that MS Vault health thing too) but doesn’t like the fact that it’s Google?”

“Just read about (and began testing) Google Health. I’m blowing into my USB drive and I think it will tell me if I have diphtheria.”

“Even a “super hardened server” isn’t safe enough for me. Prediction: Google Health will bomb.”

“trying Google Health. Mom should like this.”

(from Search Engine Land)

TechCrunch provided some details about this new program, including:

“The big competition here is between Google Health and Microsoft’s HealthVault.”

“To gain consumer acceptance, Google promises never to advertise on Google Health (although ads in related searches should be fair game) and that people’s personal health information will never appear in search results (one would hope not).”

“But the key is importing your medical record in there. That is going to be a huge hurdle in terms of people feeling comfortable giving that sort of data to Google in the first place, and then simply getting the data in an electronic form from their doctors.”

Of all the commentary I’ve seen about Google Health, the most interesting (and useful for internet marketers) came from Andy Beard.

When Andy was playing around with G. Health, he added Chondromalacia Patella (Runner’s Knee) to his list of ailments. After doing this, he noticed where the potential for internet marketers could be:

As you can see, if you were trying to create a niche health site or PPC campaign, this would be an easy way to come up with ideas for additional, relevant content.

Silicon Alley Insider wrote a post yesterday about the two free, tasty meals that Google provides everyday.

When they originally wrote the post, they came up with the following calculation:

$30/day for two meals x 9,600 employees in CA and NY x 251 working days = $72,288,000 per year just to keep their employees’ bellies full!

They later added an update to the post that the food cost is closer to $20/day. However, this still means that Google is spending in the neighborhood of $48,192,000 per year on food.

So, why does this piece of information matter? Well, I think we all agree that Google is one of the most successful companies of our time. And it’s pretty obvious that one of the main reasons is that they value their employees and think it’s worthwhile to “invest” in them. So, if one of the most successful companies in the world places a huge amount of value on its employees, it’s probably a good idea to take some time to think about how much you truly value your own employees.

If you want another example of a company taking care of its employees food needs, look no further than another search engine. Back in March, this was tip three on a post Jason Calacanis (CEO of Mahalo) made called How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips):

Buy everyone lunch four days a week and establish a no-meetings policy. Going out for food or ording in takes at least 20-60 minutes more than walking up to the buffet and eating. If you do meetings over lunch you also save that time. So, 30 minutes a day across say four days a week is two hours a week… which is 100 hours a year. You get the idea.

So, next time you’re thinking about whether or not you should give your employees some new perks, think about this: not only can small things such as free food boost their morale, but it can also be a major investment in your company’s overall productivity.

Trying to find out when a domain was registered?

Wondering if you can snap up a domain when it expires?

Thanks to Google’s new Whois feature, finding out this information is easy as typing whois and the domain.

If you need information about the domain than the registration and expiration date, you can click the link and you’ll be taken to the Domain Tools page about the site. This page gives a full overview of the site and its registrant.

Although Google never formally announced this addition, Matt Cutts did make a brief mention of it at the end of this blog post.

Since the beginning of 2008, Google’s stock price has been steadily heading in the wrong direction. As we are all painfully aware of (thanks to the mainstream media’s incessant harping on the topic), the central reason for the weakening of the stock’s price was that data showed that Google’s paid clicks had gone flat. While those of us within the search engine marketing community realized that Google had intentionally reduced the click able area of their ads to improve conversions (which would allow them to charge advertisers a higher CPC), the mainstream media seemed to ignore this fact and simply focused on sensationalizing the story.

Even though they’ve endured a lot of bad press from people who really aren’t qualified to pass judgment on a cutting-edge technology company, it’s safe to say that Google got their revenge today (and then some).

When they announced their earnings earlier today, Google “reported revenues of $5.19 billion for the quarter ended March 31, 2008, an increase of 42% compared to the first quarter of 2007 and an increase of 7% compared to the fourth quarter of 2007. Google reports its revenues, consistent with GAAP, on a gross basis without deducting traffic acquisition costs, or TAC. In the first quarter of 2008, TAC totaled $1.49 billion, or 29% of advertising revenues.”

Here’s an excerpt from a New York Times article that really puts this news in perspective:

Excluding commissions paid to advertising partners, a widely followed measure, Google’s revenue was $3.7 billion, slightly higher than analysts expected. Its profit, excluding the cost of stock options, was $4.84 a share, handily beating forecasts.

On average, Wall Street analysts were expecting Google to report revenue, excluding commissions to advertising partners, of $3.61 billion and income, excluding the cost of stock options, of $4.52 a share.

At the time of writing, GOOG shares were up 17% in after hours trading.

While most of us involved in SEM realized that the online advertising industry is not falling apart, it looks like Google has hit a home run that will make the mainstream media finally grasp this concept (at least for the next few weeks).

Google is taking advantage of their incredibly large infrastructure with the launch of Google App Engine.

Google launched their App Engine last night during their Campfire One event. The purpose of the Google App Engine is to enable “developers to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power our own applications.”

An obvious competitor of the suite of web services offered by Amazon, including S3 (storage), EC2 (virtual servers) and SimpleDB (database), Google App Engine boasts the following features:

• No assembly required.

Google App Engine exposes a fully-integrated development environment.

• It’s easy to scale.

Google App Engine makes it easy to design scalable applications that grow from one to millions of users without infrastructure headaches.

• It’s free to get started.

Every Google App Engine application will have enough CPU, bandwidth, and storage to serve around 5 million monthly pageviews.

If you’re interested in using Google App Engine for your own application, here’s Google’s official statement on its current availability:

This is a preview release of Google App Engine. For now, sign ups are limited, and applications are restricted to the free quota limits. To get started, sign in to Google App Engine with your Google Account, or explore our documentation to download our SDK and learn about what we’re working on.

To see an example of Google App Engine in action, check out CrunchBase’s App Engine Test. This app is a kind of “Hot or Not” app for Web 2.0 companies, and was created start from finish by the CrunchBase developers in approximately 4 hours.