Unless you’re over 90 years old, live in a nudist colony on a remote island, or have been in a coma for the past 10 years, you know that Google is an internet giant. Google processes over 20 petabytes and handles somewhere around 250 million searches daily (there isn’t really a way to get an exact number). With nearly 70% of all searches being conducted using Google, the California-based web company has effectively put a stranglehold on internet search results. Serving up search results, however, is just the tip of the ice berg in examining how far Google’s reach extends throughout the web.

As of March 2008, Google has acquired a total of 51 companies. These acquisitions include high-profile companies like AOL, YouTube, and DoubleCLick, which Google purchased for $3.1 billion. Google also owns well over 500 domain names, with that number growing everyday.

Aside from the numbers, Google’s internet reach is exemplified by the wide array of products and services they offer. From web applications to business solutions to advertising networks, Google has positioned itself into as many profitable niches as possible. Today, the list of products and services offered by Google includes Gmail, Google News, Google Product Search, Google Goups, Google Maps, Google Video, Google Checkout, Google Apps, Google Earth, and Google Labs, just to name a few.

Perhaps the most well-know (and most profitable) Google service is Adwords, which allows advertisers on the web to reach a highly-targeted segment of potential customers at a fraction of traditional media costs.

Because of it’s affordability and ease of use, thousands of business owners and webmasters have chosen to make Adwords their main advertising vehicle. Google has also established an ad-serving network, called Adsense, in which website owners can allow other Adwords ads to be shown on their site. Because of the widespread use of Adwords, it is not uncommon for a website owner to make a living entirely from Adsense revenue.

The widespread use of search engines, and specifically Google, has also given rise to an entire industry dedicated to improving a website’s search rankings. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become less a commodity and more a necessity for businesses looking to establish their presence on the web. A major goal of SEO companies is to increase the rankings of a client’s website for certain keywords. Because Google is the most widely used search engine on the web, increasing organic exposure on Google has become a main focus of the search engine optimization industry.

It isn’t hard to see that Google is a major force on the internet landscape. When your company name becomes a verb (”Google” was added to Webster’s Dictionary in 2006), you must be doing something right. And they show no signs of stopping. Google has recently begun to expand into television and radio advertising. They have also been developing mobile services software called Android, which is an open platform allowing users of any cell phone type to access a range of features including the web, messaging, storage, and media support.

Any way you look at it, Google’s influence on the web is far reaching to say the least. With growth and revenue continuing to increase, that influence is only going to become greater.

A couple of weeks ago Spot Runner contacted us by phone stating that the following post “Google TV vs. Spot Runner” contained inaccurate information about their company. They asked that we either remove the post or correct the inaccurate info.

We have corrected the inaccurate info in the original post and we are posting their official responses (below) to our previous statements. We have also provided a link from the original post pointing here for updates.

Here’s the exact response to our points that Spot Runner submitted to us in it’s entirety.  I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this info but I’d love to hear what you all have to say about their services.

The items marked in bold are the original descriptions written by Best Rank from our previous post. Directly below Best Rank’s description is Spot Runner’s revisions:

1. BestRank: Customers can select from a huge video library, Spot Runner charges a modest fee of around $500 to personalize your video.

1. Spot Runner customers can select from an extensive library of professional, high-quality ads which will then be customized with a customer’s images, messages and a new voiceover for as low as $499 depending on the level of customization. Spot Runner can also produce a completely custom ad from scratch, and can deploy the Spot Runner Production Network to any business in the United States to capture on-site footage of our clients’ businesses – such as images of their storefronts, customer testimonials, employees at work, product demonstrations and local landmarks. A customer can also use an ad they have created themselves.

2. BestRank: Spot Runner owns and controls your ads.

2. If a customer already has an ad, they can bring it to Spot Runner for placement and they retain ownership of the ad. When using a Spot Runner library ad, Spot Runner retains ownership of the template; however that ad is reserved for the customer’s exclusive use in the selected geographic area for the duration of their campaign and for a period afterwards.

3. BestRank: The minimum amount for a television schedule is $1000 per day

3. Spot Runner does not have established minimum buys. Based on its extensive experience in this space, Spot Runner works with clients to determine the minimum budget necessary for a campaign to be effective, especially relating to a client’s geographic target and campaign type.

4. BestRank: Spot Runner manages your ads according to your budget and preferences, you don’t have control on any negotiations.

4. Spot Runner’s media planning division works closely with a client to define their target audiences and locations to develop a media plan. Spot Runner then negotiates the buy on behalf of its clients.

5. BestRank: Spot Runner controls when and where your ad will show. You can see where the ad was shown only after the ad was aired

5. Spot Runner relieves their customers of the complex issues of buying airtime themselves and provides every customer with the services of an expert media planning team. After working with the customer to define their targets and the goal of their campaign, Spot Runner’s media buying team places the ad buys accordingly. Customers are well aware of what channels their ad will be running on as well as the daypart.

6. BestRank: You are not allowed to control your ad on any shows

6. Customers work closely with Spot Runner to define the best channels to advertise on to reach their target consumer. Spot Runner can also negotiate advertising during specific programming.

7. BestRank: You can buy local and National, the company is going after National Advertisers

7. With Spot Runner you can purchase local, regional and national advertising. Spot Runner’s proprietary geo-targeting technology allows customers to target down to individual neighborhoods. Spot Runner focuses both on local and national advertisers.

8. BestRank: You are allowed to run political ads

8. Spot Runner recently launched its Political Advertising Program catering specifically to the needs of candidates and causes. With this program, Spot Runner aims to leverage the internet and new technologies to open the door for candidates and cause-related initiatives to run highly targeted ads on TV, radio and online.

9. BestRank: You do not have the ability choose specific TV programs

9. Spot Runner can negotiate advertising during specific programs.

10: BestRank: Spot Runner controls when and where your ads will show

10. Spot Runner builds an airtime schedule to reach a customer’s target consumer on the channels they watch in their area of operation, providing detailed reports after the ad airs so they can track their results and grow their business.

11. BestRank: Spot Runner cannot tell you when your ad will air ahead of time

11. Spot Runner provides clients with information on when and where their ads are going to air.

12. BestRank: Greater Broadcast with mostly cable providers which provide a bigger coverage. Dish Network and other direct broadcast combined reach less than 17% of U.S. households, according to Nielsen Media Research (source Spot Runner FAQ section).

12. Spot Runner’s reach includes national and local broadcast and cable networks, a significantly larger portion of U.S. households than what is reached by satellite direct broadcast alone which, all providers combined, reaches less than 17% of U.S. households. Not only does Spot Runner have a geographical reach throughout the U.S. but it also has the proprietary technology to geo-target down to individual neighborhoods.

We still believe that Google TV has a more friendly service, which is easier to integrate with other marketing efforts. But we apologize for any inaccuracies in the original post. Sorry Spot Runner, no hard feelings.

How to Get Your Site Re-Evaluated by Google

First, The Background

One of my client’s has a very robust, enterprise level site. Thousands of pages, 50k plus inbound links, lots of original content, and a damn fine technical SEO structure (if I do say so myself). However, the client’s site was not showing up for any search queries in Google and only about 150 pages were indexed. Despite months of banging our head against the wall trying to figure out what was going on, we still weren’t getting any love from Google. We didn’t think that the site was being punished, we just thought that something was blocking the site from being crawled and indexed properly. We were getting crawled/cached regularly, but not increasing the number of indexed pages or the search rankings.

We spent months trouble shooting this site, making changes, increasing site efficiency, only to see our efforts get smacked-down by Google. This site was only getting about 3-5 hits a day from Google…not what you would call a successful campaign.

We finally came to the conclusion that we had to have gotten punished or flagged somewhere along the way. We thought that maybe the person who owned the domain before our client had conducted some spammy practices and gotten the site flagged…that wasn’t it. Then we started digging into all of the backlinks on the site. When we took over the project, there were approx. 35K backlinks pointing at the site, a majority of them were from a very large affiliate who was running ads for our client. As we dug into these backlinks and ads we noticed that they were not redirected through a 3rd party like Doubleclick or any other ad tracking software. We thought that was kind of elementary and glanced over it. When we inquired about all of these links we found out that all of them were implemented on the affiliate site and pointed at our client’s site in a 1-week timespan. AH-HA!!! This is when it hit us! Our client’s site went from a hundred or so links to over 30K in just under a week…all from the same domain.

It was obvious at that point that our site had gotten flagged by Google and was being left out of the results pages.

What to do Next??
We had to convince someone at Google to re-include our site in the SERPs. So, we logged in to our webmaster account (Google Webmaster Tools) and clicked on “Request Reconsideration” in the bottom right of the dashboard screen:

I read the guidelines for submitting a reconsideration request and crafted a couple of paragraphs about the situation and why our client’s site should not have been flagged. I kept in mind that a human will read this and I tried to appeal to this person logically and from a business perspective. Here’s the exact request that I submitted:

We purchased the www.ExampleSite.com domain back in Oct 2007. Within weeks of launching this domain we 301 redirected www.PreviousDomain.com (a Page Rank 5 site at the time) to www.ExampleSite.com. Despite having a large, content rich site we have been unable to establish any PageRank or rankings in Google; we can only conclude that we are being penalized for something. Is it possible that there was a penalty levied on the www.ExampleSite.com domain by the previous owner, which has carried over to our ownership?

Also, within weeks of launching the new site we struck an affiliate relationship with a site named www.AffiliateSite.com. We believe www.AffiliateSite.com, at that time, may have been using a very primitive ad serving system and listed all of our banner ads on its site, but all of those ads were not re-directed through some type of intermediary, they were all straight links to our site. Since www.AffiliateSite.com has nearly 100k pages, we instantly received tens of thousands of links pointing to our site. We realize this could have triggered the Google algorithm to penalize our site. So, we have changed tactics and are now using the proper redirects for all of our affiliate ads.

www.ExampleSite.com is an ethical, legitimate business. We are running a valid business model that people find valuable; we are not using any unethical tactics. We believe that we have been penalized for actions outside of our control and are requesting an investigation into our site and it’s ability to rank well in Google. Any info you can give would be appreciated. Please feel free to contact me:My Info, email address, phone number.

The Results
After I submitted my request I received the typical confirmation statement, something like “we get a lot of inquiries and it may take us a while to get back to you and there’s no guarantee of getting re-included…..blah, blah, blah”. I never received any response from Google about my request, nor did I get any follow up (it’s been over 2 months at this point).

However, within about 2 weeks of submitting the request, the number of indexed pages skyrocketed. After about 1 month of the request we saw our client’s organic traffic take on an exponential curve. Here’s the analytics graph from Mar 1 through Jun 6 for our client’s Google organic traffic:

As you can see, the request appears to have worked. We’re now realizing the traffic that we should have gotten several months ago.

The Lesson
- Always investigate what has been done to a site before you take on a new client. We spent months trying to figure out how to get this site ranked, when all we needed to do was look at what happened before we took on the account.
- When you submit a request, make sure you write a compelling case for your site and try to leave emotion out of it. This is business and the receiving entity on the other end is a person. Appeal to their logic, make your case, and cross your fingers.

Despite never receiving a formal response from Google, seeing our traffic take-off is good enough. It’s nice to know that our request for reconsideration was taken seriously and that we actually got results.

Cloaking defined by Wikipedia

Cloaking is a black hat search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the users’ browser.

From Google’s FAQ section for webmasters you can also find the following statement:

To preserve the accuracy and quality of our search results, Google may permanently ban from our index any sites or authors who engage in cloaking to distort their search rankings.

Webmasters have many different opinions when cloaking can be used and when it should not (you can read more cloaking threads at webmasters.com). In one particular instance I was looking at a website from a Fortune 100 company that I really liked (bcg.com), and it surprised me to find a cloaking technique in their H1 header text.

Are they really cloaking? Yes they are.  A person visiting the website only sees a logo on the top left corner, while the H1 tag is what the search engines index.

How are they doing it?: The company’s cloaking solution uses a simple css technique: they wrap a link around a div (named “logo”) which is then wrapped around an H1 tag.  Here is the html code:

<a href=”http://www.bcg.com” style=”cursor:hand”>
<div id=”logo”>
<h1><span>BCG - The Boston Consulting Group</span></h1>
</div>
</a>

Then they use CSS in order to hide the text behind the logo (so that only the picture logo displays to the user:

#logo {
width: 260px;
height: 111px;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
background: url(’/img/logo.gif’) top left no-repeat;
text-align: left;
float: left;
}

h1 span {
display: none;
}

Why not separately display the image logo and H1 tags?  Having a visible H1 tag on every page may not look aesthetically pleasant to the end user and some companies would prefer to show just a well recognized logo to their uses.  Cloaking H1 tags under an image logo provides a way to show the logo to the user while still have each page’s H1 tag include their brand name.

Are they alone? No.  Many other Fortune 100 companies (like Qualcomm, Quicken Loans, Ohio Health, Gore Tex, SAS) are also using this particular technique. I don’t believe Google will ban any website from cloaking their H1 tags with their image logo as long as it is clear that they just want to provide a better user experience and not distort search rankings.  In most cases all the companies that I’ve searched and found are just cloaking H1 tags with images for their brand name.

Recomendations on Cloaking Images: Because the sites in question are not already banned from Google’s search index, it’s probably the case that cloaking H1 tags with your brand image logo should be ok and won’t get your site banned.  In this case, it should be clear to Google engineers that you are not trying to change the message you give to people vs search engines,  but want to provide a better user experience.  They keyword here is “should”, so keep in mind that any form of cloaking in the long run is probably not going to be worth the effort - only the search engines know what is acceptable when it comes to what is considered “cloaking” and what is not - so it can become difficult to guess.

Also keep in mind that it’s usually not too difficult for a site to rank well for their brand name because normally there isn’t going to be a large number of competitors with the same company brand name out there.  Keeping a brand text in visible H1 tags, in the site’s title tags and or in backlink anchor text might be a better option instead of cloaking on any level.

I get a lot of questions on Google’s page rank meter. I was asked by a friend of mine:

Question 1: Based on the Google Page Rank, the highest rank I’ve come across so far has been with latimes.com (8 out of 10) and nytimes.com (9 out of 10). Besides Google, Yahoo and the rest that calculate page rankings, do you know of any sites that have a perfect 10 ranking?

Question 2: Last week I saw the LATimes.com site ranked 9 out of 10, but this week it’s back to an 8. Any thoughts on why they dropped?

To be short and sweet, I don’t know of any sites that have perfect 10 page ranking. But should you even care?

Page Rank is one small portion of Google’s total algorithm and only looking at one small portion of a larger picture often times doesn’t give you the best point of view. A site can rank in different positions for many different keyword phrases, so PR isn’t going to, in itself, indicate where in the results you will show up for a given keyword - since your positioning is based how a person searches for your site along with many other factors that happen to include Page Rank in the equation.

Well, what does the Page Rank (PR) meter indicate anyway?

You could say PR tells you how “networked” your site is. PR is thought to be a logarithmic function of the number, and possibly the total quality, of in-bound links a site has accumulated. So, the more in-bound links you have, the higher your PR. But it gets harder and harder to climb up the PR ladder since the equation has a logarithmic base.

Page Rank meter, Not Always Accurate

You may have noticed: the Page Rank meter that you might have installed on your FireFox or IE web browser is not always accurately reflecting Google’s internal Page Rank numbers for 2 reasons:

1. Google updates their PR values once every 3 or 4 months - so the PR value you see for any given web page is not always going to be up to date.
2. The Page Rank meter has to guess a page’s value some times, for example, the meter PR shows a value on the Gmail interface page (which shouldn’t have a rank since your private email messages don’t appear in public web results) - so we don’t even know which pages the meter is guessing on!

With all this said, Page Rank should probably be taken with a grain of salt in that it can be very misleading piece of information.

OK, but how can a site’s Page Rank drop?

A site’s Google PR can drop for a few reasons that I am aware of:

1. a reduction of in-bound links to the site
2. a Google engineer manually penalized the site in question for spammy web practices
3. the meter might actually be “guessing” a page’s PR value to a certain extent, almost like a random number

Is there any value to the PR number of a web site?

Yes. Since the Page Rank number of a web page is updated every 3 months or so, we know we are looking at historical data (an image from the past). For this reason we can usually judge the past activities of a site in terms of in-bound links and how much “link” juice a site receives in general - and if all else equal (the site has not participated in any type of known web spam activity since the last update) then we might even be able to determine the current health of the site - weather or not we want to acquire a link from the site or if we want to link out to the site.

Why does Google make the Page Rank numbers public?

• When you think about it, Google wants to do everything in their power to stop people from gaming their search engine. So why make an internal number from their algorithm public?? (It’s possible that they don’t even use PR in certain ranking calculations, but that’s another story)
• Google uses the PR meter so it’s user population will learn to value sites the a high page rank and devalue sites with a low page rank.
• If they can get you to think in their terms, they can control your fear: what do you think Google does to sites with a healthy page rank that commit “spammy” practices (such as selling links), or anything else they deem as “bad”… they drop the site’s page rank down or even to zero as a scare tactic - sort of like a slap on the wrist and “let that be a lesson to the rest of you!” - even though the site’s rankings, and traffic don’t change - the things they can’t obfuscate with a simple reduction in PR.
• Google uses the “Page Rank” (PR) metric as a means of controlling the behavior of the population when it comes to judging the “quality” or the ability of a site to rank in the search results - that’s why they make the information public.
• The PR meter helps prevent people from spamming their search engine, so they can generate cleaner web search results, make it harder to perform organic SEO and drive more money to their adwords program.

And no, other than Google’s home page, I don’t know of a web page that has a perfect 10 PR, do you?

I was setting up a new analytics account today when I noticed something funny in the Google Analytics Tracking Code page: Google now has a brand new analytics code that fixes the annoying warning message you get from your internet explorer browser when a secure page is requested using an analytics code that is non-secure.

The new code will refer to either the http or https protocol to match the web page’s protocol from which it was called. For example, if a page on the http protocol was requested such as http://www.bestrank.com/about, the analytics will reference Google’s http site. If https://www.bestrank.com/about is referenced, the analytics code will reference Google’s https site.

What this new fix does for the web

• Helps increase user trust with websites that use Analytics. The new code stops web pages from displaying a warning message of “non-secure items”, such as on your IE browser when an https page has an analytics code that references http.
• Increases Google’s web analytics market share by dumming down the installation process for analytics: one size fits all.
• Increases Google’s knowledge of web activity

I thought it was interesting that I mentioned the potential fix some months back on my post of how to use https with analytics… I’m sure others were asking and it looks like they were listening.

Big news in the search industry…Google has finally updated their PageRank system. It’s been a long time since the last update. There was a lot of speculation on when this was going to happen; many “experts” were banking on July and Aug 2007…that didn’t happen. Sep 2007 was a popular guess…nope. So, then comes late Oct and all of the sudden the PageRank changes.

Depending upon what kind of site you have and the activities that you have been conducting determines how you feel about the latest PageRank update. I’ve seen many sites that have dropped in PageRank as a result of this last update…I’m sure those sites are a little bummed. I’m happy to report that every single one of our client’s sites have experienced a significant increase in their PageRank (I’m now patting myself on the back).

Ok…I know what all you SEO’s are thinking right now…PageRank doesn’t mean a whole lot when it comes to search results, and I agree. PageRank can be a very misleading measure of a site…just because you have a good/bad PR doesn’t mean that it correlates with search results. However, as most of you know, webmasters are very hesitant to link out to a site with no PR. So, when a webmaster is considering linking to your site they will always do a cursory analysis of your site’s metrics; PR being one of those metrics they will inevitably look at. If your site has a PR0, then you probably won’t get any link-love from them. But, if your site has a PR2 or 3, they might be a little more willing to give you some lovin’.

There is also a perceived value in high PR…there are literally millions of people who evaluate pages based solely on PR. This method of evaluation should make any knowledgeable SEO shutter with disgust…but at the same time, we cannot ignore the power. PR is a useful marketing tool for anyone involved in Internet marketing. Not everyone that you deal with will know that PR is really an unreliable measure and you don’t have the time to explain it to them. So, why not embrace it and use it to your advantage.

So, get out there, puff up your feathers a little bit and tout that new PR.

Today I ran accross a nice little tip: use Google Webmaster Tools to view all your back links to your web site. By looking at your back links you can potentialy catch and prevent people from creating unwanted anchor text links to your site in an attemp to knock your pages out of the SERPS.

Google really hates SEO people, those who perform search engine optimization. But why? Well, at least that’s what the following video explains about people doing SEO work: essentially SEO’s have a “parasitic relationship” with Google in a way that not only feeds off of them but brings Google down.

Does this mean that Google tries to kill the SEO business?

No, they just want to kill spammers or anyone who tries to move search results away from what the majority of people actually are looking for (under a given keyword search), i.e. spammers trying to put Viagra affiliate web sites at the top of search results for quick and easy gain. Sadly, there is little distinction between good SEO people and spammers, since we all have to follow the same rules and guidelines set forth by the search engines. But there is hope.

Leveraging interest of the general population

As the major search engines increase their search engine A.I., SEO can be thought of as moving away from manual link building and into the realm of natural buzz and interest of public relations, i.e. the most talked about articles and pages will show up first, not necessarily the content that has been submitted to directories a million times over for SEO purposes.

How can we generate interest and or “buzz”?

It’s not that directory submission are bad, some of them are good, like the Yahoo! directory, DMOZ and Business.com, links created in these directories have been known to be syndicated else where, and there may even be other quality niche directories worth your time depending on what market you’re optimizing for - but submitting your site to hundreds of directories is losing it’s value as the search engines get smarter. A better idea would be to create Google alerts for your top keyword competition (and URLs) to see where they are getting their directory links from.

Online profile sites can also be a good place to generate buzz, places where you can write a page of fresh content about your web site and generate some value to the reader, search engines love this. Some good places to start are: Squidoo, City Search and Merchant Circle.

Social media sites are a great place to leverage interesting material such that you can generate back links & interest if your content is actually worth talking about. Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit are among a few of the worthy sites. Having an article on the front page of a social media site such as Digg can generate thousands of free back links, this can be an efficient use of your SEO time.

Every morning I wake up and launch Sage (an RSS feed reader for Firefox), which is a great way to view a summary of all your favorite blog posts quickly. This morning I opened up an interesting little post, titled Yahoo Traffic Jam, from a company called Apogee Search.

The blog post pointed me at a press release on comScore that summarizes web traffic for May 2007. According to their analysis, Yahoo! sites garnered 10 million more unique visitors than Google sites during the entire month of May; 130MM and 120MM respectively. Also, Yahoo! ads had a greater reach to all internet traffic than did Google ads; 73% vs. 64%. My first instinct, after reading numbers like these, is to question their validity. Where did the numbers come from? How were the numbers obtained? How big was the sample size? If you scroll to the bottom of the comScore article you will see the following explanation:

This capability is based on a massive, global cross-section of more than 2 million consumers who have given comScore permission to confidentially capture their browsing and transaction behavior, including online and offline purchasing.

Anyone who’s suffered through a statistics class knows that a sample size of 2 million is more than enough to get an accurate measure of web traffic. So, what do these numbers really mean? After all, Google is still the behemoth that dominates 80%+ of search traffic, right? Well, according to these numbers, Google is coming in second place for unique visitors and I’m not so sure that we (SEO’ers) are targeting the right search engine.

Now, let me take a step back. More unique visitors to Yahoo! sites than Google sites does not mean that there are more searches done on Yahoo! than Google; I think that is fairly obvious. It simply means that more people are visiting the Yahoo! suite of sites, like Finance and Sports, instead of the Google suite. But to me, an internet marketer by trade, it means that there are more eyes on that Yahoo! suite than the Google suite and maybe we should re-think our targeting strategy a little to be more compliant with the actual results.

We all spend countless hours targeting both Yahoo! and Google, usually in proportion to the search traffic (approx. 15% and 80% respectively). But, with these numbers, does it make sense to spend a disproportionate amount of time targeting both of these giants? I really don’t know the answer to that unless I actually spend some time testing out the strategy to see its effects. I do know that I’m going to tweak my methodology a little to see what happens. Maybe there’s an opportunity, within these numbers, to see some gains in website traffic. What do you think?