Google

At my Pubcon hosting session last November, I predicted that Google would make page load time a ranking factor in 2010.

The very next day in his PubCon session, Matt Cutts made the announcement that speed as a ranking factor would be coming soon, and Google did make that happen in April of this year.

According to Google Webmaster tools, an affiliate site of mine has over 26,000 links from several hundred different domains. That sounds great, doesn’t it?

One problem though – the majority of the links don’t seem to actually exist, and I have no idea where they came from!

I swear, I’ve been up to nothing fishy with this domain, (really!) but the vast majority of these links are coming from spammy sounding subdomains, and I can’t figure out what’s going on. Is someone trying to “linkspambomb” me?

"The horror of that moment," the King went on, "I shall never, never forget."
"You will though," the Queen said, "if you don’t make a memorandum of it."

Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking Glass

So, I would like to have a do-over on this old post that I wrote.  Not that I think the post was wrong or bad…I actually think quite highly of it.  But, it wasn’t really what I wanted to say given its inspiration.

“All a user has to do to turn off personalized search is to add &pws=0 to the URL of a search query” Matt Cutts – SMX Advanced 2007

As easy as that was to repeat for every search, it looks like Google is finally listening to users, who would like to be able to know that their results are being altered from what others see, and would like an easy way to disable that.

Even though many experienced search marketers shun the use of tools, I guess I’m still a rookie because I really enjoy them. No matter how efficient I think I can be, there’s always a better way to do something when you introduce a certain level of automation.

Inside Google Webmaster tools there was apparently a recent addition back in February but I just noticed, and it’s really pretty slick.

When we first set up this blog, we applied for an AdSense account, but for whatever reason, we decided not to add the AdSense code to this blog, so I never did. The account is there, and I’ve even got the code in a widget (I think), but I never made it go live.

Now, this past week, we received this e-mail from the AdSense team:

Dear Scott Orth (ed. – SEMpdx Treasurer)

I don’t really see how it could be true, but I found an interesting topic in our forum where Tom Hale, a local Portland PPC expert and SEMpdx member said this -

“…I have a hunch best practices for Page Rank may have a relationship to best practices for Quality Score…”

and I’ve got to say I’d be surprised. Tom also first points out that Google’s answer would be “no” and that was my initial answer too, but I’m really not so sure… Read the thread

Google is offering us experimental views for their search results and I urge you to participate. You and I can shape the future, by participating in the process that will define how we search in the future.

Why are they doing this?
While some of us may prefer Google classic, there are millions upon millions of webpages are being added every single week to the Internet.

Google’s Toolbar 5 has an interesting feature guaranteed to draw the ire of the domaining community.

From the features page:

Address Bar Browse by Name
Browse by Name helps you find a site even when you don’t know its URL. Just type the site name into your browser address bar, and Toolbar will take you there automatically. For instance, try typing “oxford” into the address bar to go directly to the university’s home page at www.ox.ac.uk.

The lack of AdSense access from my regular Google Account (IGoogle) page never did make sense to me, but it was something I didn’t use often, so didn’t really care.

Well I’m not sure when it happened, but Google has finally allowed me to combine the two, enabling me to access all my Google services from one place, which I think is a big improvement.