Have you come across marketing emails that guarantee you link placement on a PR9 (PageRank) web site? It’s highly unlikely that your link will be included on a PR9 page and in most cases they will place your link on a highly ranked web site, but your link will be placed on deeper pages inside the site that have a much lower rank or no rank at all (unranked).

This is a scam to take your money by making false promises and this type of scam has been around for a very long time. There are also other issues that can occur without your knowledge by having your link added to sites that are deemed malicious, dangerous and or have a poor reputation.

In order to properly build your Pagerank in Google, you will need to do it the old fashion way by commenting on blogs within your niche (relevant to your sites content) and sharing your web pages on social networks. There’s no guarantee that the sites you comment on have the nofollow attribute removed, but if you’re using Firefox as your browser of choice you can download the add-on NoDoFollow. This Firefox add-on simply highlights links in a page according to nofollow / dofollow status. Pink highlight for NoFollow links and Blue highlight for DoFollow links.

Be careful about what people promise as there are too many scams on the internet that could empty your pockets without delivering the service/s they guarantee.

There are some reputable marketing firms that can get your link posted on a PR9 web page, but in many cases there are time restrictions and your link is eventually removed when the time frame expires.

You just launched your site and now you want to be rich and famous and you may go about it all wrong. The first thing most people do is try to find a way to rank high in search results in a matter of a week or two, but it doesn’t come that easy. Your site must build trust and authority to be considered in search results. The first thing you should focus on is getting your pages indexed in Google and other search engines. In time, you will begin to climb that long steep mountain that us SEO’s call SERP, (Search Engine Results Page).

There are a couple of important things you should understand and I have listed them below for your reading pleasure.

SEO is Long Term

You can’t set it and forget it. This is not cooking; this is a process that takes time. SEO takes time to build upon itself and just because you reach that pinnacle (first page in search), it doesn’t mean you have completed your SEO to do list. Search engines (Google) continually making changes to its algorithm and you want to stay on top of the latest and greatest by visiting the official Google blog or the Google Webmaster forums. One day you may be on top, but the next day you can fall off page one, it happens often. Be a student and try to absorb as much as you can each day.

Adhere to Search Engine Guidelines

Google, and other search engines want to serve up the most accurate and relevant search results and they count on you to follow their guidelines. You can say we make search results better through best practices when it comes to SEO. A better search result makes for a happier search engine user. Search engines are in the business of providing users exactly what they’re looking for. If your site can’t help them do that, you won’t ever rank well. That’s why every site owner should be familiar with Google Webmaster Guidelines. These guidelines are your lifeline to implementing effective SEO for your site. You should also pay attention to the not-so-good-side of SEO called “Black hat”. You should avoid black hat like the plague as this will put your site in the sand box which means none of your pages will reside in Google’s index. If you feel your hard work is not paying off or it is moving along slowly, don’t attempt to use black hat tactics to give your site a boost or your site will be penalized.

In addition to SEO, you should familiarize yourself with social networking to build your brand awareness. You can find a lot of excellent information on the internet on how to effectively utilize social networking. One site that comes to mind is Kikolani.com, authored and owned by Kristi Hines covering a wide range of related topics including online marketing, social media, and search optimization.

SEO Resources
Google Webmaster Forums
Google Official Blog
SEO Book
Kikolani.com

This has to be the shortest time between Google PageRank updates in a long time or at least since I can remember. The last Google PageRank update happened on July 18th to correct a bug with the update that occurred at the end of June 2011.

Google pushed the update at around 12:00 PM CDT on August 4. The update is completed. I noticed that my inner pages received some love from Google, but my main index page is still a PR 4.

It is a bit strange and out of the norm that the toolbar update was done so soon. Before the June 27th update, Google didn’t update the toolbar for over 6 months.

This could be a sign of more frequent updates in the future, but trying to get that information confirmed is like pulling teeth.

Did your site get some PageRank love?

If you are currently running ad campaigns using Google AdWords, you may have received an email that your Google AdWords campaign may have stopped running. The email is not from Google, it is a phishing scam trying to trick users into visiting a bogus website that looks just like the Google AdWords login page.

If a user logins to the bogus Google AdWords site, they not only have your AdWords credentials, but also your Gmail, Google Docs and Google+.

Example Email

Google AdWords

Your Google campaigns may have stopped running today (Monday, July 25, 2011)

Dear AdWords Advertiser,

For quality services and running your ads without any problems (Innactive account meaning Pausing your Ads) check your AdWords account regularly.

Click here to check your AdWords account now.

2011. Google

The bogus site “google-oa.net” was just registered on 7/26/2011 according to the WHOIS database.

Source: Sophos

Google+ is still in beta and only a small user base has the privilege of giving it a long test drive, but it made a huge splash amongst iPhone users – more on that in a bit. According to one analyst, Google+ user base is just under 18 million.

During a Thursday earnings call, Google said its service now has more than 10 million users, who share about 1 billion items each day, including 2.3 million uses of the “+1″ feature.

Yesterday, Apple added the Google+ iPhone app to the App Store, and it became the most popular free app. It is a small milestone for Google, if you want to call it one, but it’s a clear message that Google has the potential to become a major player in the social arena. The only win here is to compete with Facebook and if Google says anything otherwise, they are kidding themselves.

While people are still signing on for Google’s social experiment, sign-ups have slowed in recent days according to Paul Allen (not the same Microsoft Paul Allen), but the Ancestry.com founder Paul Allen.

Prior to this app, iPhone and iPad owners have been forced to use an HTML5 version that Google offers online. Although it allows for basic Google+ access, it lacked the Huddle IM system and other components.

First it was Google Buzz, and last August it was Google Wave and now Google+ (Plus). Google the leader in search holds two-thirds of the U.S. market in search and now it is trying once again to compete with the largest social network – Facebook. Will Google strikeout or is three the charm?

What makes this new social experiment Google+ different than its predecessors?

• It lets users share things with smaller groups of people through a feature called “Circles.” You can allow specific groups such as co-workers, childhood friends see your photos, links or updates that you post.
• Another feature called “Sparks” finds content you care about the most. This content can be about gadgets, tech news or whatever you find most interesting. You can then share this with you social groups who also have the same interest.
• Want to share photos? There’s a group messaging service called “Huddle” and it lets users instantly upload photos from their smart phones. The photos are stored in a private photo album on Google’s servers, and it allows users to access them and share them whenever they want.

How does Google gain market share that Facebook is dominating with more than 700 million users?

There are millions of people who use Google for search, email, and sharing and if Google can come out with a product just as rich as Facebook, it could gain popularity they need to compete in social networking. Unfortunately some skeptics see if differently.

Lou Kerner, a social media analyst with Wedbush Securities, believes the game is over in the competition to become the world’s global social network. With 700 million users, Facebook has won, he said.

Google+ is only accessible by invitation only and not yet available to the public. The only thing now is to wait for Google+ to go public.

So you like it on top? Get your mind out of the gutter! I am talking about a feature for Adwords called Position Preference. Google has announced they’re retiring the position preference bidding feature in AdWords. Advertisers will no longer be able to select a preference to what position they would like their ad to be placed.

You can learn more about the Average Position metric on Google’s blog. Google will begin to disable this feature early in May. In the meantime, if you’re going to disable position preference before May, Google recommends that you first export your manual bids by downloading a keyword report to back up any bids you set before you turned on position preference. This report will include keyword-level maximum CPC bids.

Advertisers who would like to continue to target specific ad positions, you can use “Automated Rules.”

What are automated rules?

Automated rules are changes to a bid, budget, or status on part of your account (scoped/filtered lists of keywords, campaigns, ad groups, or ads) that are triggered at a particular time. Creating a rule can help you manage your account without having to regularly monitor your activity and make changes.

Learn more about automated rules.

Other Google Articles
Bounce Rate Not Weighed in Google Algorithm
Google Search Update Already Impacting Content Farms
Content Farms and Auto Blogs Beware!

Many webmasters still look at this metric as a ranking value and they really need to dispel this myth.  Bounce rate as defined by Google is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. In fact, bounce rate can be skewed in several ways, let’s take a close look at some facts;

• When a person searches for something on Google and they click on a search result, but then they click back to Google results only because they didn’t like the page they clicked on. This wouldn’t count as a bounce. Google would look at this as a result that had little relevance or poor quality.
• Google has repeatedly said that a “bounce” on a single page-view is a measurement that’s too noisy to use as part of its ranking algorithm.
• Sites that offer downloads get hurt the most by bounce rate; because users leave the product page once the download is completed.
• Many blogs will see higher bounce rates because once a user reads the article they found or an article that was shared via social channels, they leave from the same article page.

Bounce rate shouldn’t be used to measure the quality of a page. The indicator that means most to me is how long a visitor stays on a given web page or web site. This measurement is called “time on site”.

If you have a high bounce rate, you could say that users are finding what they want on your site and Google is sending people to exactly the page they were looking for.

Hopefully, the New York Yankees will get a few good bounces go their way on opening day.

Even the Mighty Casey struck out and Google may be the next to fall from being the most visited site on the internet. Since March 2010, Facebook has gained a ton of ground on the King and is currently less than 10% less in unique visitors daily according to Compete.com.

Facebook is currently the second most popular website behind Google and considering Google made its debut in 1997 whereas Facebook launched in 2004, it’s remarkable how much popularity Facebook has gained in such a short time.

The other factor to weigh in is that most Facebook users spend more time on site (Approx. 30 minutes) than those users who visit Google (Approx. 10 minutes). The biggest concern for Google is that Facebook seems to be moving into the search arena or at least it looks that way after making a deal with Microsoft last fall to add results from its network to the Bing search engine. The new startup Blekko also has a search that includes social results based on Facebook “likes” and other activity.

Google could fall from #1 by the end of 2011 and that didn’t seem possible a few years ago. Though Google has expanded its business into other technology areas, I don’t think that Facebook will have a negative effect on Google’s earnings or continued growth.

Web analytics are based on unique visitors and were obtained from Compete.com and Alexa.com. Both services provide approximate statistics and shouldn’t be considered as 100 percent accurate.

About Blekko: Blekko is a search engine that serves up relevant search queries from trusted web sites and excluding material from such sites as content farms from its index.

Related Articles
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Blekko Search Engine Filters Out Spam Web Sites
Free SEO Tools and Web Analytics

The most important metric I use when measuring my blog success is traffic from search. This metric tells me that my articles are being indexed and they are positioned high in SERP (Search Engine Result Page). If visitors are coming to your blog from search, it means they are looking for content you are publishing on your blog.

I know too many people who get caught up in measuring blog success based on a few ranking and analytic services. These services are not telling the true story on how well your blog is performing.

Here are a few services that provide web site ranking and analytics that are either not important or irrelevant in measuring your blogs success. I wouldn’t put too much weight into any of these services.

Alexa: Is a web analytics service that measures sites by way of a ranking algorithm based on visits and the overall popularity of a site. Alexa is not accurate for sites that are above 100K and even then, it’s not a system I would go by to measure your blogs effectiveness. Alexa provides users to compare up to 4 sites by clicking on the “Site Info” link on the home page.

Compete: Just like Alexa, this site also has a ranking system. Compete is more accurate then Alexa, but not by much. Compete also provides users to compare up to 3 sites based on unique visitors, visits and Compete rank. To get more data you will need to sign up for their Pro version which costs $199 for the intro version and up to $499 for the advanced version.

Google Pagerank: This is a touchy topic and one that many SEO enthusiasts ignore, but many web site owners and advertisers use this ranking as a gauge on how well their site or blog is performing and valued. If you go back 3 years ago, I would say Google Pagerank was the ultimate measurement, but it has lost clout over the years.

These are just a few of the most popular web ranking services that people use today to measure blog success.

There are many metrics and tools to measure your blog success, but as I stated earlier, it’s best to measure your overall traffic and how much of that traffic is from search. Other measurements that you should also focus on are;

Bounce Rate: You want to keep this percentage down as this indicates people are entering and existing from the same page. Your referral traffic can cause your bounce rate to increase especially when you share an article on a social network. Think about it – you share it, they read it, they’re done.

Direct Traffic: These are visitors who bookmarked your site or typed it in the browser address bar. These visitors are considered fans of your site and at one time they probably came for a referral or search.  You would consider this a conversion, which in the marketing world is golden.

Avg. Time on Site: How long are your visitors engaged? The longer, the better, but what affects this measurement are blogs that write short articles or only serve up photo/s. The other problem is sharing a site on StumbleUpon where visitors stumble across your site and leave to move on to the next stumble (web site). If your content is compelling, your visitors may stay around longer to read other articles you have published.

Adsense: Is your blog a good earner? This is another great way to measure your blogs marketing effectiveness.  If you serve up ads using Google Adsense, you can get a good gauge on how well your blog is earning and the articles that have the highest conversion of clicks.

Best Web Analytic Tools
Google Analytics
StatCounter
Website Grader

I hope you find this article interesting and I would like to read what metrics and or tools you use to measure your blogs success.