Achieving a top ranking position in Google is every webmasters dream. Unfortunately very few ever make it high enough for it to make a big difference on their traffic volume. If you are one of the few to make it onto the Top 10 list, you have probably found out that your listing doesn’t always stay on top. So, besides all the other advice online, it is also extremely important to under stand your competition, and to properly use their key words to your advantage. This article is the conclusion in a 2 part series. In part 1 we looked at how to effectively use Google rankings in helping us better understand our competitors. Part 2 will discuss how to maximize and use Google Suggest to determine the frequency of various key word searches.

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

As discussed in before, not only is it important to find out how your competitors rank for a certain term in Google, but it is also perhaps even more important to find out how many times that specific phrase has been searched for. Google Suggest Beta is the perfect answer for this problem. Just type in a few words and it will immediately display multiple results for that specific term, and variations of it.

***Hint*** Remember, it is not always necessary to have a top 10 listing for the most popular searched phrase. Just imagine the potential of having 5 top listings for keywords that are not quite as popular. Not only will it be easier to achieve a top 10 listing, but while all your competitors fight over 1-3 key words, you are capitalizing on all the others. In the end this will mean a literal financial windfall depending on your product, etc.

Just hold on, we’re not done yet. It is also important to pinpoint your key words even farther, and most people always seem to miss this step. Use the same keyword(s) in Google Suggest, but this time place apostrophes around the term and hit “submit”. This time you will find out how many competing sites exist for that exact phrase, not just every word in your phrase.

For instance the phrase – Natural Acne Cure shows 796,000 results However, now do a search for “Natural Acne Cure” as of today it shows 9,820 results.

In the end, if you can find a specific term that ranks 5000 or less, you have an excellent chance of receiving a higher ranking within Google once you start marketing and implementing successful strategies to maximize your specific key word.

Remember, while the marketing and promotion, and “how to’s” are extremely important, you must always start with the correct keywords first, and properly understand your competition or else you will fail before you ever begin. Or at the very least, you will be climbing a mountain of adversity instead of a leisurely stroll in obtaining your first Top 10 ranking.

Darren H. currently owns and is involved with various online marketing and management companies. He is the author of “How to Get Listed in Google within 72 Hours.” and prides himself on helping many individuals and business customers achieve top 10 rankings within Google in an extremely short time frame. To learn more and get started today please visit: http://www.marketingoutlet.com/google_article.htm

Achieving a top ranking position in Google is every webmasters dream. Unfortunately very few ever make it high enough for it to make a big difference on their traffic volume. If you are one of the few to make it onto the Top 10 list, you have probably found out that your listing doesn’t always stay on top. So, besides all the other advice online, it is also extremely important to under stand your competition, and to properly use their key words to your advantage. This article will be part one of a two part series. Below we will look at GoogleRankings.com and how this useful tool will help you in your quest to achieve a top listing within Google. Just as an addendum, we use these tools on a daily basis to achieve top 10 listings for our web properties.

GoogleRankings.com is an incredible tool that every webmaster should consult. Now, because Google rankings fluctuate multiple times a day, the site is sometimes a couple hours delayed, however it provides a great resource in quickly finding how your competitors stack up against your website. Not only that but you can use different key words in conjunction with a website to see how they rank. Incredibly useful in determining which key words should be used in your content and advertising.

As an example, if you were to decide on using a specific keyword phrase. Type in that key word into GoogleRankings.com, along with your competitor’s website, and you will see how they rank in regards to that specific phrase and/or word in Google. This will allow you to specifically pinpoint which phrases and/or keywords your competitors rank low in, which you will in turn begin to focus your attention on.

Once you have figured out which key words your competition ranks low in, you are well on your way in implementing specific strategies in achieving a Top 10 ranking in Google. Part 2 will discuss how to become even more specific in targeting your keywords, and virtually ensuring a top 10 listing.

Darren H. currently owns and is involved with various online marketing and management companies. He is the author of “How to get Listed in Google within 72 Hours.” and prides himself on helping many individuals and business customers achieve top 10 rankings within Google in an extremely short time frame. To learn more and get started today please visit: http://www.marketingoutlet.com/google_article.htm

There are a lot of operators (commands you can enter in the Google search box to return specific results) you can plug into Google in order to find what you want. For webmasters and website owners, however, a few particular operators can be especially useful. Operators can be used to locate potential link partners, evaluate current inbound links, and determine what pages of your website still need to be added to the index. Here are the operators we think you should know:

link:

Simply enter this operator followed by your full url (including http://) with no space. Ex: link:http://www.googleadvisor.org

This operator is one of the most popular and widely used. It simply shows you what (and how many) webpages within the index have a link to your url.

Using this operator, you can also plug in the url of your competitor(s) to see what sites link to them. These websites may be a good place to start in your search for link exchanges (or even one-way links).

site:

This operator will restrict all results to webpages within the domain or website you enter. For example, if you enter site:googleadvisor.org you will find all of the webpages of this site that are listed on Google. This a good operator to use if you want to see just how many webpages of your site Google has indexed, and likewise, how many pages are not listed - the ones you may want to submit, or resubmit, to Google.

allintitle:

Here you enter the operator and some keyword that you are interested in. The results will show you websites and webpages that have that keyword(s) in their title. For example, intitle:google will return all sites that have google in their title, including Google Advisor. This may be used to once again find link partners within your subject area, and to evaluate possible competitors.

Similarly, you can also use intitle: if you want to do a similar search, but open your results to those webpages with the keywords in their content as well . For instance, intitle:google advisor would give you all sites with google in the title and advisor somewhere on the webpage.

info:

This operator is not terribly useful, but its interesting to see what you find. Simply place your url in front of the operator like info:www.googleadvisor.org to get a Google page with your website title and desciption. The page will also contain links to your website’s cache, related websites (you can also use the related: operator for this), and more. If your website is new to the index, and you are not appearing for any keywords yet, this is an easy way to find your website and confirm that it is indeed listed. Note: some operators like related: will not work for new websites.

To obtain the full list of operators, visit: http://www.google.com/help/operators.html.

We hope these few operators mentioned above will be of the most use to you as a webmaster or website owner.

Bradley James is the Webmaster of GoogleAdvisor.org [http://www.googleadvisor.org], an informational site providing free information to casual searchers and Webmasters about the Google search engine.

Internet users have never had it better what with Yahoo!, Google and MSN planning to roll out more goodies. Yahoo! is launching its Yahoo! 360 and Google has already made its beta version of the Desktop Search tool widely available for anyone to download it for free to enable one to search e-mails, book marked web pages, or content from your desktop with the use of keywords in the stored Microsoft Word or PDF files. Not to be left behind MSN is readying itself to pose another challenge to Google after its launch of MSN Search. Microsoft is launching its own paid search advertising services like the adwords of google.

Yahoo! 360 an invitation only beta service to be launched from 29th march is already making waves on the internet. Yahoo! 360 will provide a seamlessly integrated platform for all its services like Yahoo! messanger, Yahoo! Community! mobile blogging, Yahoo! photos, Yahoo! Local and the yet to be launched web logs or Blogs. If you want to be one of the early users, rush to the invitation site for 360 and join the queue for the invite.

MSN is already well into its beta version of its blog MSN Spaces.

It is to be seen who wins the war of the blogs which is projected to be next big thing on the internet after emails providing anyone the facility of creating their own web pages without any technical knowledge.

The last word on the email storage capacities haven’t been said yet. According to informed reports Yahoo! is planning to offer its email users 1 GB of email capacity ahead of google coming out of Beta and opening up its email offering to public. Together with its plans to add more space by increasing its email to 1 GB across the glob for Yahoo! mail users, it is making a determined bid to counter Google with My Yahoo! which is undoubtedly the best place to integrated all your internet activities. One can expect Hotmail to follow suit with its own offering of 1 GB mail box from its current 250 MB.

Customers can expect a line up of features with the three giants battling it out to increase their respective market shares.

"Consumers are looking for a new type of service that takes the best of first generation social networking services and successfully integrates it with communications, self-publishing and community tools," said Dan Rosensweig, chief operating officer of Yahoo! "Yahoo! 360 will offer consumers an innovative and engaging way for people to share their lives, leverage their community and get the most out of their online experience."

Market and users are waiting with bated breath for the imminent launch of Yahoo blogs with new features with Yahoo! 360.

Exciting times are ahead for the internet users. Whoever said Competition makes the consumer king must have had prophetic visions of the internet. The industry too matures and grows to new levels of performance and profits.

This article is copyright © of R.G. Srinivasan a Certified Trainer, Small Business Consultant, Writer and Author. He also writes a regular blog on home-business resources which you may check out at http://www.home-businessresources.blogspot.com for online marketing tips, small and home business resources, opportunities and online promotional strategies

Google has always been the search industry’s innovator and that’s just what Google’s aging delay symbolizes, the evolution of search innovation… yet another significant step forward for Google.

Google’s success as a search engine can undeniably be attributed to its ability to consistently return the most relevant search engine results. That’s what kept the search giant on top of the pack and leading the multi-billion dollar search industry & that’s what’s going to keep them there!

Now that said, is it any wonder why Google incorporated the infamous aging delay into their ranking criterion? The simple truth is, Google’s aging delay is a full frontal assault on artificial link inflation.

With the induction of multiple clever off-page reciprocal-linking strategies engineered to artificially inflate link popularity and PageRank, Googles aging delay wasn’t only necessary and long overdue; it was the next logical step in the evolution of search.

The confusion and misunderstanding of the aging delay among site owners is nothing short of amazing. Many of my clients are confounded because their new sites are well positioned in Yahoo, MSN & the other large search engines while they’re site is no where to be found in Google’s search engine result’s pages (SERPs)… except for perhaps on the most obscure search terms.

Current and unconfirmed speculation has been misplacing the blame on Google’s ‘sandbox’ effect. While this is a possibility I believe it’s also highly improbable.

The sandbox holding period is typically anywhere between 90 to 120 days, the aging delay appears to be much longer. I’ve seen new sites delayed for up to 6-8 months.

The premise of the sandbox delay theory suggests that new sites are being penalized for gaining too many links too fast. To date I haven’t seen a scrap of evidence to support that claim.

The sandbox theory is further disproved by the fact that newer sites engaged in procuring relevant links experience the same delay in climbing Google’s SERPs as other new sites utilizing scores of purchased text links. This lends credibility to my thought that new sites are not being penalized on the premise of acquisition or quantity of inbound links and; supports my theory that it’s the reciprocated links that are being delayed by an aging filter.

It just doesn’t seem ‘reasonable’ for Google to penalize sites for acquiring legitimate directory listings & building an optimized reciprocal link based network. In my opinion, mainstream SEOs are confusing the existing sandbox effect, with Google’s new ‘aging filter’ that arrived on the search scene earlier this year.

It seems more likely that Google’s aging filter is weighing the ‘maturity’ of inbound links and not the new site itself. Meaning that in addition to the traditional ranking criterion, the age of a sites inbound links are also now considered.

My own theory is that newly acquired inbound links are placed on a ‘probationary’ status until they’ve ‘matured’ before they’re considered. For example, a new and relevant inbound PR 6 link would not be given the same weight or consideration as a ‘grandfathered’ PR 6 link until the aging delay expired.

By placing newly acquired links on a probationary period and delaying the ranking of newer sites Google has effectively offset the instant free ride to the top of their SERPs. Purchasing volumes of brokered links to that end is now a moot point. After all, your site will still be delayed regardless of the amount of links you purchase and you won’t see any return on investment (ROI) for at least 6 - 8 months.

Existing Site owners interested in immediate (ROI) are now strongly motivated to build new pages or expand existing sites in order to avoid Googles lengthy aging delay. With the ‘all-the-rage’ mini-network strategy shifting to more of a long-term commitment it seems likely that’s exactly what will happen!

Whether by clever design or not, the only alternative to riding out the aging delay that produces immediate results in Googles SERPs is to advertise through Google’s AdWords Program. So it seems that Google’s solution vis-à-vis the aging delay has turned out to be an excellent vehicle to promote Googles own AdWords Program as well. Hmm…

How do you survive Google’s aging delay? By taking pro-active action!

I haven’t seen any new sites with new domains appear at the top of Google’s (SERPs) since early to mid 2004. I’ve consulted with and tracked many of my clients’ new sites and despite the fact they have hundreds of #1 positions in Yahoo, Alta Vista, AllTheWeb & MSN for their keywords I’ve yet to see any remarkable results in Google until the 6 - 8 month period.

The trend I’ve noticed suggests that new sites are initially indexed; ranked accordingly in Google’s SERPs for a week or so and then literally vanish from the SERPs for several months. In most cases they can’t even be found with the most obscure search terms… including their own name and address.

If you’re launching a new site don’t panic. Once you’ve registered your domain name and configured the hosting, you should set up a few temporary pages. Obtain links to them from other sites in Google’s index to start the aging delay count down. I recommend launching a site immediately with enough content to set up and facilitate the requirements for directory listings to start. The sooner Google is aware of your domain the better. Just don’t hold your breath waiting to see results… It could be as long as 6 - 8 months!

Gauge your optimization efforts by where your site ranks in the other search engines. Provided you’re not engaged in unethical practices and followed Google’s Webmaster’s guidelines this should give you a ballpark indication of where Google will rank your site after the aging delay, just be patient.

To that end, don’t keep tweaking and changing your pages source code and trying to manipulate your rankings until your site has been in Google’s index for at least 6 - 8 months. In other words, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel here because it doesn’t seem to matter what you do, your site will still be delayed regardless.

Don’t keep submitting your pages to Google either! It won’t make any difference.

Check your server logs to confirm Googlebots’ crawl and then forget about it. Googlebot will find your site again if you’re actively reciprocating links so your time would be better served building an optimized reciprocal link network to get your site out there and linked to as early as possible.

If traffic from Google is crucial to your marketing and promotion plan, and I don’t know anyone who would argue otherwise… budget to run an AdWords campaign for a few months until the site is indexed and positioned. You might even consider running an Overture campaign as well!

If you purchase non-directory links, reallocate that budget to Adwords advertising.

It’s pointless to purchase links when you can invest in an AdWords or Overture campaign. Purchasing links is an investment you won’t see a red cent ROI for at least 6 - 8 months while an Adwords campaign will drive targeted traffic to your site that can convert immediately. Keep in mind that Lycos, HotBot, AOL, Ask Jeeves, Iwon, Netscape & Teoma also receive paid results from Google! MSN, AllTheWeb, AltaVista & Yahoo receives paid results from Overture.

Do other search engines have an aging delay?

Google provides primary search results to other search engines. It only seems reasonable to expect that your site may be delayed in Google’s partner sites as well.

One-way you may be able to work around this, and I can’t emphasize this enough; is to make sure you submit your site to DMOZ, the open source directory. Google, in addition to the other major engines, receives directory results directly from DMOZ.

Yahoo and its partner sites don’t seem to be utilizing an aging delay, nor does MSN, so focusing your early efforts on these search engines might give you a competitive edge in the Yahoo network.

At the end of the day when it’s all said and done surviving Google’s aging delay is just a matter of time. The days of purchasing instant link popularity and PageRank are over and in due course you will see Google give your site the recognition it deserves.

Copyright 2005 Lawrence Deon

Lawrence Deon is a Search Engine Optimization/Marketing Consultant, Author and Developer of the popular search engine optimization and marketing model Ranking Your Way To The Bank. http://www.rankingyourwaytothebank.com

Attaining a top ranking in Goggle or any other major search engine nowadays is a herculean task indeed. But webmasters are archieving this enviable position continuously. The common thing about many of these top sites is that they have plenty of good content and quality one way inbound links.

These are the two most important elements in search engine optimization today. Content and quality links are the most difficult aspects of present day SEO. I guess that is why the major search engines have adopted these two elements of SEO as a must for top ranking. They are right of course. Content is what the search engines crave and quality one way inbound links is what makes a site an authority site for a particular keyword.

CONTENT:

Providing quality content at your website is not an easy task. It involves research, coming up with good ideas always, visiting forums and discussion groups to know what the latest trend is and so on. There are so many ways to come up with great ideas to write on. Some of these are;

1. Visit discussion forums and learn what problems people are seeking solutions for.

2. Browse other relevant sites and see what other webmasters are doing. This could give you creative sparks.

3. Subscribe to quality newsletter that give the latest trends, tools and resources in your line of business.

How to create content for the search engines..

The easiest way to creating content for your site is through publishing other people’s Articles. You can setup your site to receive and automatically publish articles after reviewing them. The trick here is to go for very good, useful and quality articles. Once your site becomes known for quality articles, visitors will keep coming back for more.

However, the downside is that a visitor reading a good article would want to click to the author’s site. Another disadvantage is that most times articles are not written for good search engine optimization. Important SEO techniques like keyword Density, keywords in headings etc may not be taken into consideration by the author.

Another way to easily create content is to hire a ghost writer. You pay a certain amount to have somebody write articles for you. You can find good writers at elance.com

Using a blog to create content.

One way to continuously provide content for your site is by using a blog. In your blog you can link to the rest of your site. The blog could be part of your site. For example, http://www.ebizstartups.com/my-business-tips.html. That is the URL of my blog. I have links to the main site from my blog this ensures that the search engines visit my blog and the main site quite often because the blog is updated often with content and if you have a new product you want to introduce at your site, start from your blog and link to the product page. Updating your blog frequently with new content ensures the search engines visit often. Once the frequent updating trend is set you will find that the search engine spiders will visit even when you stopped updating for a while.

ONE WAY INBOUND LINKS.

How do you get these one way inbound links? This is the million dollar question. For an in depth strategy for acquiring these type of link go my site at http://www.ebizstartups.com and download a free PDF version of the report. If you can generate these type of link you are on your way to the top of the major search engines. But wait a minute. Is it just to generate links to your site? If it is just that, it’s easy.

Write articles and submit to article submission sites. At the bottom of your article or your resource box you are allowed to put in a link to your site using the URL of your site. But what good will that do you? It will bring you traffic okay. But that is as long as you keep writing those articles. Once you stop the traffic stops. However, the links you acquire through articles using your site’s URL may only increase your site’s link popularity but not link reputation.

While link popularity is the amount of links that point to your site link reputation is the amount of links that point to your site with your keywords in the anchor text. Search engines use this anchor text link carrying keyword to judge your link reputation and determine whether your site is an authority site for that keyword. Understand all that? No? okay let’s look at it in another way. If all the links pointing to your site have the text a s the URL of your site. Unless somebody searches using the exact URL of you site your site will never be found. And people do not conduct searches using URL like www.ebizstartups.com but if the other site pointing their links to your site with the link text having for example "link popularity" then you are on your way to the top for that keyword.

The author, Salihu Ibrahim, has several good articles to his credit. Examples are, "Google adwords made easy" and "How to acquire one way inbound links". These and other articles could be found at his site at http://www.ebistartups.com. He is also the owner of http://www.autoresponders4all.com which provides completely free autoresponders for webmnasters.

The popularity of weblogs or blogs has gotten a lot of attention from the media recently. In fact, “blog” was picked as the word of the year by Merriam-Webster, a U.S. dictionary publisher.

There are many ways you can start your own blog. One of the easiest ways to set up your own blog is to use Google’s free Blogger.com (http://www.blogger.com).

Blogger lets you choose and customize your blog template. With just a few tweaks, you can easily integrate your blog into your existing website. By doing that you can also use Blogger as a website builder.

Here are 8 good reasons why you should consider using Blogger to build your website:

1. A sitemap is instantly generated for you. Each page you create automatically gets added to the list of created pages either on the left or right sidebar. All the individual pages are linked from the main page and link back to the main page. This link structure is optimized for the search engines. You can change the title to read “Sitemap” instead of “Previous Posts” which is the default setting.

2. Get your pages spidered quickly. Do you have a website that has been created for months and you’re still waiting for the search engines to index it? Believe it or not, blogs with frequently added content get visits from search engine spiders a lot faster.

3. You can easily change the entire look of your website. Just by changing the main template, you can republish your entire site to have a new look. You don’t have to manually change each page.

4. Each page or entry is automatically optimized for the search engines with the appropriate page title.

5. Generate income with Adsense. Adding Adsense to your website is simple. If you have an Adsense account already, you just have to paste the code into the template and the ads will automatically show up on every page.

6. Get more traffic. Submit your “blog” to blog directories. People will find your website through the listings in the appropriate category. Having your blog listed in blog directories also provides your site with backlinks.

7. Automatic notification. Using a free service such as Pingomatic (http://www.pingomatic.com), you can notify the most popular blog directories that you have new pages added to your site.

8. Syndication. With RSS, you can syndicate your blog to many readers. This will help you increase the traffic to your site. You can use a free service such as Feedburner (http://www.feedburner.com). You can also create email or forum signatures that link to your blog.

So start thinking out of the box and look into using Blogger as a niche website builder. If you already have a website, consider creating a blog that complements that website. Use the blog to drive traffic to your main website as well.

Hock Ng is the founder and editor of The Marketing Tools Review website (http://www.marketing-tools-review.com) and newsletter providing tips and tools for internet and affiliate marketers. He also maintains an active marketing blog.

You read that right.

I’ve told Google to push off.

Stop spidering me.

I no longer want my online business to depend on its ever changing whims as to what makes a good or bad ranking.

I don’t want to spend time collecting thousands of backward links then find that they are probably worthless because the anchor text does not contain a suitable keyword, or the site does not have sufficient page rank, or whatever the latest algorithm is.

I don’t want to buy expensive cloaking tools and run the risk of penalization.

I don’t want to be bothered about whether a domain has a static or dynamic IP address or have to use different hosts to make a network of minisites.

What’s that you say ? You don’t need fancy tricks - just provide good relevant content.

My answer ?

Nonsense.

I have a huge content site devoted solely to ClickBank, the only one of its kind.

If you wanted to find the most relevant content for a search on the keyword ‘ClickBank’ don’t you think that would be at the top ?

Well Google used to agree with you.

It was ranked number 2, with only ClickBank.com itself at number one.

Today it is ranked … wait for it … number 426.

It is beaten out of sight by sites which have nothing to do with ClickBank but happen to mention that keyword once.

I asked a search engine expert about this and he suggested that it was due to keyword density, in other words too many mentions of the word ClickBank.

Well that has to be the case - the site is after all a ‘Complete Guide to ClickBank’

His advice - try replacing the word ClickBank occasionally e.g. use ‘CB’.

No way.

That was the last straw and became the inspiration for me to develop a revolutionary approach to getting traffic.

It led to me being called ‘The Guru who said goodbye to Google’ in the marketing forums.

And this new approach ?

It uses some of the fundamental pillars of Internet marketing that you already know - techniques which will never become obsolete.

But they are combined together in a new way and with a viral twist that you won’t have seen before.

It includes giving out free information in a certain way and I show you how exactly in my book, The Ultimate SuperTip.

And just to illustrate the principle: the book is free and you can reproduce this article and change the URL to point to your own rebranded version.

—————————————————

Read the 24-page book which took the Internet by storm http://www.supertips.com/ultimate.htm

More rebrandable SuperTips Articles at http://www.supertips.com/articles/

Google applied for a patent on their ranking algorithm as of 15 months ago on December 31, 2003 and that application was posted on March 31st at the US Patent Office. It got the discussion forums buzzing this weekend. Even though I had substantial work to do and was behind on a project, I couldn’t resist the temptation to read the very long 14,000 word, 45 page application and see what it could mean to the volatile world of search.

So I tripped on over to the the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) and started reading the document United States Patent Application: 0050071741 seems to be Google applying for a patent on their search algorithm. There seems to be no reference to PageRank here, but it seems to be PageRank redefined with a few variations to limit link spamming and reduce stale results, along with multiple innovative elements not previously considered.

They discuss link spamming limitations extensively, which would be a welcome relief as Linking Psychosis is rampant and I’d like to see an end to it. Much of historical data related to pages seems to be a bit onerous because it would appear to limit the perceived value of a page unless it becomes wildly popular over time. Bigger is better seems to be a enduring theme of this algorithm as described generically in text of their application.

An odd addition to the historical ranking discussion is amazingly - the "Advertising Traffic" for a particular document! They will rank a site based on the advertiser choosing to advertise on a particular site. If Amazon wants to advertise on your site, then Google will rank you higher!

That’s good, I guess, if you have a site that attracts highly rated advertising, and don’t rely on cross promotion of your separate products or those of suppliers to appear in your site advertising. Example: If I have a discussion forum on coffee, don’t I want to advertise my coffee products? Why would I serve ads from highly rated advertiser Starbucks to rank higher at Google? What if I sell thousands of products and simply cross promote and upsell my own products sitewide? Odd stuff, ranking based on advertisers.

How does affiliate advertising factor into that advertising element of the algorithm? Do they know you are advertising a book from Amazon as part of affiliate program through your direct Amazon affiliate program links and do they recognize tracking links through affiliate management companies differently than the tracking URL’s of ad serving monsters like DoubleClick and confer higher ranking upon the big boys of advertising above affiliate tracking firms?

Also seems to call into question their own Adsense ads and how that factors into this algorithm! Do the Adsense ads along my blog border gain more ranking score because it is from a monster advertising company - Google - or is it downgraded because I’m not a "Premium" advertiser serving over 20 million content page views? Again, seems that reward for being large outweighs relevance in this formula. Or does it? How do they value Overture advertising in the formula? Adbrite? Smaller ad networks versus large advertising aggregators?

They extensively discuss historical data related to rankings over time, looking at seasonality, popularity during spikes in traffic due to news coverage of a particular topics and changes in ranking related to those items. The historical data related to ranking over time are interesting since they refer to link spamming, relevance, and topicality when they say:

"As a further measure to differentiate a document related to a topical phenomenon from a spam document, search engine may consider mentions of the document in news articles, discussion groups, etc. on the theory that spam documents will not be mentioned, for example, in the news. Any or a combination of these techniques may be used to curtail spamming attempts."

They’ve added another interesting element in the algorithm of determining value of pages based on "user maintained/generated data" (patent item 113) read that "bookmarks" and "favorites lists" built into your browser. Is this one of the reasons that Google recently hired Ben Goodger, the lead developer of Firefox?

Snooping into my favorites and cookies on my machine seems like a bit more than I want Google doing on MY machine. It strains the limits of privacy as well. We can stop sites from serving us cookies, but can’t stop who reads them? Ouch!

Further, they reference user’s browser cache files as a method of determining value of a site. "For example, the "temp" or cache files associated with users could be monitored by search engine to identify whether there is an increase or decrease in a document being added over time. Similarly, cookies associated with a particular document might be monitored by search engine to determine whether there is an upward or downward trend in interest in the document." Apparently they can see this info, but I’d like them to stay out of my cache and cookies too!

It appears to apply further penalties to new sites by keeping them poorly ranked for even longer periods and applies an apparently new item to algorithms not seen or (at least discussed publicly) of long term purchase of domain names and historical data related to IP address and hosting company! Here’s the snip about that longevity of domain registration to ranking:

"[0099] Certain signals may be used to distinguish between illegitimate and legitimate domains. For example, domains can be renewed up to a period of 10 years. Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith."

I’ll be extending the term of my domain registrations ASAP! What a boon to registrars if that element of ranking becomes as valued as linking has been! Everyone will get 10 year registrations if they want to rank well. The domain name aftermarket will also be changed dramatically if this becomes as important as this element makes it appear to ranking. People will buy and sell domains when disposing of them rather than simply letting them expire at the end of the registration period, as most do now.

It appears they will be penalizing domains "associated" with "illegitimate" domains. Hopefully they have a method of determining that it isn’t a competitor linking to your domain from their "illegitimate" domain! That suggests they will be able to eliminate "Domain Scrapers" that have been known to scrape search engine results of high ranking domains and posting those on "illegitimate domains" which in effect drags down the ranking of those previously highly ranked domains. How odd the search world is sometimes!

Altogether, it seems that older content will suffer overall because it hasn’t changed, because nobody new is linking to it and because it will lose links over time. What if you are posting a historical document that you can’t change or an authored piece that is copyrighted? Does it decrease the value of the information? Hmmmm. I guess links would continue to increase if the information remains valuable, so there is some protection in that. But older site content may be unchanged because it is popular, not because it is stale - that’s an odd Catch-22.

The anchor text issue discussed in this patent application suggests that "[0118] Unique Words, Bigrams, Phrases in Anchor Text " are significant in determining rank, because if natural links develop, they would vary when webmasters link to a document differently, some would use the URL and embed the link in that, others would use requested text from the webmaster if it were a link request that successfully garnered a link and still others might simply use Google’s own Blogger "Blog This" link which simply takes the page title. (I routinely change link text generated by "Blog This" in my blog posts to emphasize the topic discussed and eliminate business/publication names usually added ahead of the topic of the page.)

The US Patent office has a link to images including illustrations and figures that are linked to the filing but they are absurdly large and don’t fit in the viewable framed window. This is silliness. Do they mean to hide it by making it unviewable?

I’ll attempt to post a smaller version of images on my blog.

The final notable item seems to me to be the clickthrough data that Google sees to sites from their own search results. They will rank site higher that get significant clickthrough rates from the Google SERP’s.

"Google may monitor the number of times that a document is selected from a set of search results and/or the amount of time one or more users spend accessing the document. Search engine may then score the document based, at least in part, on this information."

How will they know how long I spend accessing the document unless they can monitor my actions AFTER I’ve left the Google SERP’s to visit the linked site? Wonder what’s at work in that? Do they have some way of tracking our actions after we leave their site? I wonder if this has anything to do with the Google acquisition of Urchin traffic statistics company last week.

Well, it’s back to work for now, but it will be interesting to see where this patent application is discussed in forums and SEO blogs over the coming week.

Mike Banks Valentine is a Search Engine Optimization Specialist and blogs about the search world at: http://RealitySEO.com while operating a small business ecommerce tutorial at: http://website101.com

I started a new site 10 days ago. As any other webmaster would do, I went to various "submit your site" websites and attempted to submit my website to the promised 100’s of search engines.

I got confirmation for some… nothing for others…. eventually I got tired of it. Whenever I went to google or alexa and typed my url in, nothing happened.

So I went and did some snooping around, and found a way to submit my site and get it indexed very fast.

I read about this problem online and I found out it takes a few weeks before the bots from Google or Alexa get sent to your page to index it.

For google:

Go to http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl and submit your site url eg (http://www.onebillionviews.com)

Then go to www.google.com and search for your full url

You will get a message something like this : your search had no results ..try clicking on the link directly.. and wil provide you with your url as a link

Click on it

Wait an hour or so … be patient .

Then search for your url again on google and voila .

Your site is indexed by google. It shows as the only result with your url (obviously) but it’s a nice feeling.

For Alexa

Go to http://pages.alexa.com/associates/sitereport.html and submit your page url and email for review. A bot gets sent out to your url and looks at your content, your links and so on.

You’ll get a report (usually within a day) on your email about your site (broken links, sites that link to yours).

And a week after, you’ll see your ranking on Alexa (hence you’ll be indexed too.)

I hope this article was helpful to you as it was helpful to me at the time!

That Aussie Bloke http://www.onebillionviews.com - 1 billion reasons to see. 5 million reasons to try. You be the judge!