Webmaster Pro Guide

 Google Favicon change : Small ‘g’ added .

 Many people noticed that Google has a new favicon. Here is the lowdown on the story, and a quick roundup of the reception and some screenshots of the potential new brand for google.

I spent a good couple of minutes trying to find the right tab–I couldn’t find it because of a change to a very small image from a section of the browser I hardly every look at. You never realize how much these small things really incorporate into your overall web image. I’m amazed that such a small detail can prove to be so important to such a huge audience.

This PR update is about to end . and I observer that google has been too generous comparing to last updates .
Even some directories which was panalized got some good rankings like AvivaDirectory (pr4) .

and about 80% of the site have increased their PR . Seems like google is using the old algorithms .

but instead of that we find many site which lost their PR . like usual .

I would like to know what do you think about this Update

For most of us, Google is a hard nut to crack. Efforts upon efforts are put forth to increase your site’s SEO and while your efforts are working in other search engines, they just seem slow when it comes to Google. So what do you do? Try romance!

Yes, romance. Who isn¡’t looking for romance? Non-human bot or not, the Google Bot also wants it. It wants to be romanced and feel the love from your site. If it doesn’t, oh, look out! Just like a scorned woman, you are going to pay. Come on, everyone knows what I mean. It’s either “Penalty City” or “the silent treatment”. It all depends on what you did or didn’t do. (more…)

Logging into analytics this is what I saw.

In order to improve your experience with google products, google analytics is updating its data sharing policy. You now have the ability to share your analytics data with other google services. This will improve integration, enable additional features in google's advertising services (including google analytics, AdWords and AdSense) and improve your experience with these products.

i got two choices. one for sharing for google products and the other for anonymous sharing across google and benchmarking with promise of info for verticals etc. i chose the second.
the first may help adwords users though

Some members have chosen NO , to not sharing their secrets ….

Recently on ReadWriteTalk, we interviewed Scott Switzer, the CTO and Founder of OpenX. Until recently they were known as OpenAds, but they’ve since rebranded as OpenX. Shortly after the interview was recorded, Google announced a competitive product called AdManager. Scott responded on the OpenX blog by saying that “Google’s announcement of a free ad server, Ad Manager, validates our marketplace”. But he also cautioned: “as a publisher, I would find this a dangerous cocktail and I would worry that it may marginalize my revenue.”

I agree that publishers who let Google serve all of their advertisements via AdManager, even the non-Google AdSense ads, are taking a big risk. This was already a risk with Google’s Acquisition of Double Click, even before Google’s announcement of Ad Manager. See our post last year, Google’s Potential Vulnerability: An Open Ad Network, for more on this topic.

If you agree that a viable alternative is important to the marketplace, an interesting question is: what will OpenX’s business model ultimately be? We’ll focus on this question for the rest of this post. (more…)

Microsoft Corp. made an unsolicited $44.6 billion cash and stock bid for Yahoo on Friday, a deal that could shake up the competitive and lucrative market for online advertising.The deal would pay Yahoo shareholders $31 a share, which represents a 62% premium from where Yahoo stock closed on Thursday.

Shares of Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500) were up 47% with less than an hour of trading left, while shares of Dow component Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) had tumbled more than 6%.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, called the move the “next major milestone” for the software giant.

“We are very, very confident this is the right path for Microsoft and for Yahoo,” he said.

Microsoft hopes to close the deal by the end of the year. Ballmer said that Microsoft has been in “off and on” talks with Yahoo for 18 months and said he called Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang Thursday night to tell him the bid was coming.

A Microsoft-Yahoo combination would create a powerful number two player in the online search business, which Google commands. It would also be one of the biggest tech deals ever, on par with Hewlett-Packard’s $25 billion acquisition of Compaq in 2002.

Microsoft announced the bid early Friday. In a statement, the company said the offer allows Yahoo shareholders to elect to receive cash or a fixed number of shares of Microsoft common stock, with the software giant’s offer consisting of one-half cash and one-half Microsoft common stock.

In a statement, Yahoo acknowledged receipt of the offer and said its board would evaluate the proposal “carefully and promptly.”

Searching for solutions

Both Microsoft and Yahoo have fallen far behind rival Google  in the lucrative field of Internet search. Yahoo’s earnings and share of the online search market have badly trailed Google.

Google reigns over 58.4% of the U.S. market, while Yahoo has 22.9% and Microsoft’s share is just 9.8%, according to comScore, a research firm that tracks Internet traffic.

The combined forces of Microsoft and Yahoo would also make a stronger force in online display advertising - the type of targeted banner ads Yahoo is known for.

In a letter it sent to Yahoo’s board of directors, Microsoft disclosed it had explored a Microsoft-Yahoo deal a year earlier, only to be rebuffed by Yahoo, which said at that time it was confident of the “potential upside” for Yahoo from operational changes it planned.

“A year has gone by, and the competitive situation has not improved,” said Ballmer.

On Thursday, former Yahoo CEO and current Chairman Terry Semel, who opposed an earlier approach Microsoft made last year, resigned from the Yahoo board.

Yahoo announced Tuesday it would lay off 1,000 employees by mid-February, citing what CEO Yang described as “headwinds” facing the company. It also reported lower fourth-quarter earnings that still beat Wall Street’s now modest expectations for the firm, but it gave a 2008 revenue forecast that disappointed analysts.

“Last year, Yahoo told investors it needed more time to get on the right track,” says UBS analyst Benjamin Schachter. “But you only get a certain amount of time to turn things around.”

Gunning for Google

But even Google has run into recent problems. After the bell Thursday it reported earnings that fell a penny a share short of forecasts. The company reported a slowdown in its fourth-quarter revenue growth, attributed partly to difficulty selling ads on social networking sites.

A Google spokesman, Matt Furman, declined to comment on Microsoft’s move on Yahoo. “It would be premature to comment at this point,” he said.

Google shares have fallen 24% since hitting a record high $747.24 in early November. But Yahoo shares have lost more than a third of their value over the same period.

Still, online advertising, particularly ads tied to Internet search, is by far the fastest growing part of ad spending. That’s caused problems for traditional media, which have seen ad spending fall.

Microsoft said it projects the online advertising market to grow from over $40 billion in 2007 to nearly $80 billion by 2010.

In the letter to Yahoo’s board, Microsoft said a tie-up would achieve economics of scale while allowing combined research and development efforts to achieve breakthrough products, particularly in the growing areas of online video and mobile Internet connections.

Microsoft said it intends to offer significant retention packages to Yahoo engineers, key leaders and employees across the firm. It said it believes the proposed combination would receive all necessary regulatory approvals.

Shortly after the announcement, a U.S. Justice Department spokesperson said that its “antitrust division is interested in looking at the competitive effects of the [Microsoft and Yahoo] transaction.” But with Google’s strong lead in the search industry, analysts said it is highly unlikely Microsoft’s proposed deal would violate antitrust laws.

Stifel Nicolaus analyst George Askew gives the deal an 80% change of being completed.

“This acquisition offer is a bear hug - and the two companies may well come to terms on a deal at a modestly higher price than the $31 offer,” Askew said in a written note.

But some analysts say the integration of the two companies could be tricky to pull off. For one, Microsoft and Yahoo use different platforms to run their search engines, and they would have to decide which one to use.

 Source : CNN.com

 Andy and Aaron just put out an excellent guide of 101 link building tips, and it kicked me in the butt to get it done, so I could give their article the proper link love it deserved.

Types of links and how to get them

Using a arbitrary ficticious example of an informational site about real estate law. **I do not currently work with any sites of this type.

In this example, we have two specific themes to dive deeper into that are relevant to our search - real estate and law. Starting at this level gives us hundreds of thousands, if not millions of sites to start to filter from (not to mention the backlinks of THOSE sites), and sites that share similar themes.

1. Authority links
How to obtain them: Start with your related category in the Google Directory
What to look for:
-Top rankings for big terms - city or state + real estate, vertical category + lawyers
-Sites that currently offer links out
-Sites that would benefit from offering users your content
Examples: real estate law
Other Notes: Authority links are an absolute must for improving your trust score these days. This is a MUST for a new site, and should be where you start your efforts, and always be dedicating SOME time. Suck it up, and take the time it takes to get some quality, trusted links. The existence of trusted authority links will make or break your site. Find the 800 lb. gorillas in your field, and **find a way to get on a dozen or so of them. Failing that, hunt their backlinks, and find a way to get on some of those pages. Use some creative queries with the combination tool. Give the tattler a shot.

2. Directory links
How to obtain them: Pony up some cash
What to look for: Generally easy to find niche directories, don’t go overboard with more than a few directories per month, quarter, etc.
Examples:General directories, real estate directories
Other Notes: My gut feel is that too many directories triggers a filter. I wouldn’t go over 10 - 15% of my total link ratio on my own sites for my own sites at any given time. Start with a few highly trusted directories. (Yahoo dir, business.com, MSN SBD, BOTW), and add some others after you have many more links added to your profile. (more…)

1. Google receives daily search requests from all over the world, including Antarctica.

2. Google’s Home Page Has 63 Validation Errors. Don’t believe me?: Check Google Validation

3. The Google search engine receives about a billion search requests per day.

4. The infamous “I’m feeling lucky” button is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.

5. Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied “We are waiting for the rest of it”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.

6. The name ‘Google’ was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ‘Googol’.

7. Google has the largest network of translators in the world.

8. Employees are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects. Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that grew from this working model.

9. Google consists of over 450,000 servers, racked up in clusters located in data centers around the world.

10. Google started in January, 1996 as a research project at Stanford University, by Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were 24 years old and 23 years old respectively.

11. Google is a mathematical term 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasne.

12. Number of languages in which you can have the Google home page set up, including Urdu, Latin and Klingon: 88

13. Google translates billions of HTML web pages into a display format for WAP and i-mode phones and wireless handheld devices.

 NEW YORK (AP)–The online advertising leader Google Inc. (GOOG) said Friday it would help make it less lucrative for users to tie up millions of Internet addresses through a loophole, as the compnay wants to keep those domain names available for legitimate individuals and businesses.

Over the next few weeks, Google will start looking for names that are repeatedly registered and dropped within a five-day grace period for full refunds.

Google’s AdSense program would exclude those names so no one can generate advertising revenue from claiming them temporarily, a practice known as domain name tasting: the online equivalent of buying expensive clothes on a charge card only to return them for a full refund after wearing them to a party.

“We believe that this policy will have a positive impact for users and domain purchasers across the Web,” Google spokesman Brandon McCormick said.

The company said it notified participants via email Thursday.

Name tasting exploits a grace period originally designed to rectify legitimate mistakes, such as registrants mistyping the domain name they are about to buy. But with automation and a burgeoning online advertising market, entrepreneurs have generated big bucks exploiting the policy to test hoards of names, keeping just the ones that turn out to generate the most revenue.

The practice ties up millions of domain names at any given time, making it more difficult for legitimate individuals and businesses to get a desirable name.

Jay Westerdal, who earlier wrote about Google’s change on his DomainTools blog, said in an interview that the ban should make domain name tasting far less lucrative. He noted that Google’s chief rival, Yahoo Inc. (YHOO), already tries to ban tasted addresses that infringe on trademarks and account for much of the problem.

“If Google and Yahoo are not monetizing these types of sites, I think domain tasting as we know it will come to a screeching halt,” Westerdal said. “The alternative advertising is just not as effective.”

In October, Yahoo sued several domain name registration companies over tasting, accusing them of targeting trademarks owned by Yahoo and other leading brands. The lawsuit is pending in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Dell Inc. (DELL) and BMW (BMW.XE) have filed similar federal lawsuits in Florida.

The Internet’s key oversight agency, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, already is looking into name tasting and will soon ask a committee to review the issue and craft recommendations. A public comment period on draft procedures closes Monday.

The operators of the “.org” suffix already won approval to charge companies that make too many returns. The number of deletions dropped to 152,700 in June, compared with 2.4 million in May, after the new fee took effect.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

Google is not so good after all!! Here are a few reasons why!

1. For most of the searches wikipedia comes on top of the search results! Then why not go to wiki pedia directly rather than wasting my time on Google search.

2. You tube results: When a web search is made and not a video search then it is quite certain the person searching dose not wants to see video results. If he wanted you tube results then he can directly go to you tube or simply search the Google video search. This is pain stupid to show videos in web search.

3. Cashing contents like text, videos and images from websites without site owners written consent. But then Webmaster and bloggers, all including myself love to see Google cache all the datas from our site. We are more than happy and thankful. But we became extremely angry when we see our copyrighted things cached from our competitors sites which are illegally copied by our competitors from our website. I think it’s also illegal to cache illegally copied content.

4. Paid links: How are paid link bad and a non-paid link good. Every link should be treated on merit and not on the basis of paid and non-paid.

5. Too much importance on domain names: Rather than giving importance on the quality of the information, the importance is given to the relevancy of domain name and Meta description and title tags.

6. Stupid PR that dose not make any sense: The PR [page rank] is a useless way to rank sites, I don’t want pr, but the problem is PR n/a means am banned, and PR0 means less promoted site or new site. At least that’s how most people look at it. Removing the visual PR will solve many problems.

7. Google groups: The interface and working is really poor, with deep enough pockets if they can’t improve there discussion rooms then it is really sad.

8. Google dose not owns the results that it shows in the SERPS, so in other words the poor webmasters have made Google so huge, and the SEO companies who have helped Google and it’s bots to crawl those sites in a more efficient way.

9. Adsense: A great way to make money, but has no answers to click bombs.

10. Indexing sites without consent. 99% of the webmasters including me, wants to be in google’s index, but there are still some that don’t want Google to crawl their sites. So why don’t Google ask people to upload a file that says Google crawl, and if that site is not available on the site, don’t index the site. It is better than asking webmasters to stop Google bot! I mean only index sites on invitation.