If your site was deleted from the Google index would anyone other than you notice and care? That was a quote from Aaron in "How Does the Algorithm View Your Website?", and nothing has ever rang more true to me. See, I had a site in the same mold as so many others that I had had success with. It was a very easy model for making great money: find a ... Keep reading »
It's live now: http://www.google.com/chrome/
People will always pay more if they're confident in what they're getting. That's true whether we're talking about advertisers or for the eventual acquirer of your site. Not only that, given the choice of two otherwise identical sites, they'll always choose the one with greater transparency. Because of that, there are two free services that I strongly recommend signing up for. Google Analytics I know some people who I highly respect recommend avoiding Google Analytics, but I just haven't ... Keep reading »
I'm seeing reports around the web now that YouTube is completely down for everyone, but I haven't seen any word as to what's up. Very strange for a major site to just go completely offline like that. Update: Do these strange server names have anything to do with it, or is it just that no one has ever noticed them before? This is the best thread I've found ... Keep reading »
Monday, Frank Schilling coined the term Ballmerfreude -- taking pleasure from Steve Ballmer's misfortune. I shared that post from within Google Reader, so it shows up on my sidebar now. Well, an unintended side-effect of that is that I'm now the only site that ranks for that term right now in both Google and MSN, while Frank is the only one who ranks for it in Ask. (Strangely, Yahoo still doesn't have any ... Keep reading »
Of course, that's not because I have budged from my PageRank of 4, but because ProBlogger.net, CopyBlogger, John Chow, and Blog Herald have all been chopped to a PR 4 -- apparently for selling links. Again, I'm not taking a stand on it one way or another, but if this doesn't convince you to stop selling text links, you must be earning a ton.
If you care about traffic from Google, it's time to stop selling text links. They have confirmed that publicly now. I realize this may be pure FUD on their part, and I realize that I'm totally drinking their Kool-Aid, but if the largest source of my traffic says that they'll penalize me for selling text links, then hey, I'm not going to sell text links. I'm going to find another ... Keep reading »
Sounds like a scam, doesn't it? Well this time it's not. $9.99 is what GoDaddy charges for a year of domain name registration, and extending your registration by an extra year can have significant impact on your rankings. Back at the beginning of 2005, Google fulfilled the requirements to become a domain registrar. They had no plans to sell domain names, though. Instead, they were very up front about that ... Keep reading »
Many of you may hear a buzz this weekend about Google's "PageRank update," so I wanted to clear up some misconceptions so that you don't lose focus on what's important. PageRank (or PR) is a measure of the link weight pointing to a page. The more links you get from pages that have more links to them, the higher your PageRank. PageRank is just one of more than 100 variables that determine where Google ranks a page in the search results. ... Keep reading »
How many sites can rank in Google's top 10 for the basics of being great? Trick question: it's 10, and one of them is Ask Shane. You want do to be great, right? Well evidently Google thinks we're one of the best at covering the basics ;)
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