Search Engine Marketing & Optimization Blog

Google recently launced Google Analytics, a FREE product which will tell you everything about your site visitiors details.

Matt Cutts in his post announced the launch of this NEW product from Google.

With the help of Google Analytics, once you have added the code which is provided to you after you sign-in, you will be able to track the movement of visitors to your site and much much more.

For instance you will be able to know from which source (Search engines or websites etc) visitors have found your website and which pages they have visited durin’ their stay on the site. Armed with this information, you will be better able to target your marketin’ strategies and add more action call events on your site to trap as many prospect clients as possible.

This is what Google has to say- “Google Analytics delivers all the features you’d expect from a high-end web analytics offering, and provides timesaving AdWords integration features.“. More can be read on its official website at http://www.google.com/analytics/

Google Analytics is available in 16 languages. If you already have a AdWord account then this product will integrate with it without a hitch.

With Google Analytics you can know which keywords your visitors used to find your website, which Ad was most successful in pullin’ visitors to your site and which landin’ page was effective in terms of marketin’ objective.

Spend on your Marketing not on web analytics

Google says

Get all you want to know about Google Analytics from below:

- Features
- Feature Benefits
- Case Studies
- Help Center: Supporting Google Analytics

I’m sure everyone must be aware of the famous episode where Matt Cutts’ blog -http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ (a Google’s employee) was replaced in rankings by another blog using contents from Matt’s blog.

This process of called Google Wash, where site using your content (duplicate entry) to gains ranking and your site is pushed/removed from the search results. This definition is in contact to the current episode.

The entire work was done by a French team - Dark SEO Team. They wrote a letter (Open Letter to Matt Cutts) to Matt explainin’ what had happned and where Google went wrong.

The post from Matt’s blog dealt on the recipe of bacon polenta. Earlier the top ranking was from Dark SEO Team. Though Google has now managed to get his employee’s blog anagin on Top.

One strange thing you will notic is that Dark SEO Team’s website http://www.pr10.darkseoteam.com/ is PR10. But if you see their cache page through your Google Toolbar the cache page is that of Google’s home page. http://www.google.com. So this team from France have showed to the world that how people can Fake Page Rank 10.

So they have managed to hack Google’s PR for their website.

Anyway so now debate is on as to how Google is or rather is not able to ditinguish between the original content and duplicate contents.

Google definitely needs to take this twist in his story and make something out of it.

Few weeks back on 7th October ‘05 Google announced the release of web-based feed reader called Google Readerat the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

This is from the Google’s official announcment post at its Press Center

Google Reader is part of effort to offer Google functionality with personalized web content to make information more relevant and useful to users. Please visit Google Labs at http://labs.google.com/ to give this new product a try. A reviewer’s guide and additional press materials are available at http://www.google.com/press/guides.html.

One can read more about Google Reader at Google Reader FAQs

In its official blog post, Tom Oliveri from Google admits that they are testing a new way to submit contents to Google.

Before the official confirmation, rhumors were doing the round which were all put to rest by him. This new way will complement the existing ways such as Google Crawl and Google Sitemaps.

Accoridng to Tom, its an exciting development.

It will be exciting to see content writers and webmasters’ reactions when Google is helping them in their eforts to distribute as much as they can.

Read what people have to say on Search Engine Watch Forums thread Submit Content To Google

I will keep you updated through my post here.

Lot of efforts are underway to make the current web a more intelligent entity both in terms of how information are presented and retrived as well as in our way of using this huge amount of data and information stored on hundreds and thousands of servers all over the world.

Efforts are there to make theses information strored on different servers to be linked together intelligently in odere to be easily processable by humans and machines, on a global scale.

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW, URIs, HTTP, and HTML, initiated the drive to develop the -Semantic Web.

Web spam pages use various techniques to achieve higher-than-deserved rankings in a search engine’s results.

Google recently registered -TrustRank as a Trademark.

A Technical Report titled Combating Web Spam with TrustRank submitted in Stanford University delves deeper into what exactly a TrustRank is? The Report was submitted by Zolt´an Gy¨ongyi and Hector Garcia-Molina from Stanford University and Jan Pedersen from Yahoo! Inc..

The Technical Report in a PDF format is also available.

According to the Report, to combat Web Spam (hyperlinked pages on the World Wide Web that are created with the intention of misleading search engines.), the TrustRank Algorithm evaluates every page against a set of Seed pages.

Seed pages are good pages selected by Human experts which are belived to be reputable, meaning these are most relevant to the searched keyword. Once reputable seed pages are identifed, these are used as a basis to discover other similar pages on the WWW.

In selecting seed pages, preference is given to pages from which we can reach many other pages. In other words, select seed pages based on the number of outbound links.

This is a Inverse PageRank algorithm as in PageRank algorithm, seed pages are selected based on the number of inbound links.

Since the pulled search result pages would be evaluated against seed pages, the results would be much more relevant and will have minimal spam pages.

Search engine experts are interpreting this as an important move by Google to combat Web Spam and in turn improve the search results.

I recently read this article on ZDNet where they have compared Top 9 Search engines. You can also get to read a detailed description about each of them.

For those who don’t have time to read all the details, here is a one page Comparision chart: Beyond Google and Yahoo!

To read individual Search engines reviews click below:

A9
AltaVista
AOL Search
Ask Jeeves
Google
LookSmart
Lycos
MSN Search
Yahoo Search

Though Google and Yahoo are still the leaders, in terms of overall search experience, we found that almost every SE has somthing unique to offer ot its visitors.

For instance AOL Search offers real-time search suggestions while you type in your query; Ask Jeeves on the other hand offers a cool thumbnail preview of Web pages on its search results; and LookSmart has a unique periodical search feature, plus a one-of-a-kind page archiving tool.

The rating given out of 10 are Google (8), Yahoo (7.7 ), A9 (6.7), Aol search (6.3), Ask Jeeves (6.3) , MSN Search (6), AltaVista (5.7), Lycose (5.3), Look Smart (5).

If you see Aol Search and Ask Jeeves are tied at fourth place.

The comparison chart brings out interesting informations to the viewers which otherwise would not have been be possible.

SearchEngineWatch (remember Danny Sullivan) which is owned by Internet.com and is part of the Clickz and Jupiter Media Network have recently launched their affiliate forum.

Linda AKA Catalyst is the new moderator of the forum.

So, if you have affiliate issues to discuss, visit the SEW Affiliate Issues Forum.

I visited it and though it is still new but you really get to read nice posts.

So make it a point to visit and make the best of their new service.

A Closer Look at Pay-per-Call Search Marketing
Last week, AOL became the largest online service to offer the comparatively new pay-per-call format to search advertisers. Pay-per-call is rapidly gaining traction among search marketers, especially those targeting a local audience, and if you’re not familiar with the format, it’s worth a look.

Google Personalizes the Web
Say goodbye to bookmarks: Google has rolled out a seriously cool search history feature that automatically keeps track of all of your web searches and every page that you view from search results.

Google AdSense in RSS
It looks like Google is experimenting with putting ads in RSS. [Via MP.]

Google’s CPM Ads Meet Lukewarm Reception
Google’s foray into CPM -based advertising is a clear attempt to woo more brand advertisers, but that may not be as easy as it seems, many marketers say.