Google PageRank New Year Gift

I am confirmed that Google PageRank was just updated on New Year's Eve. For many webmasters, it might be the best New Year gift. My site's PR went up from 2 to 3. Although Pagerank is not that important for a good ranking as before, most people still view this as a proof of site quality and webmasters treat it as a hard-working certificate.

However, a little improve on PR may not help too much for many sites during this holiday season. Many small ecommerce sites may have seen a small jump following a huge drop on traffic. Only winners are Amazon and Wal-mart. If you see your site traffic climbing back quickly, congratulations! Your site must be well ranked on popular keywords and economic-proof.

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Google Operators you should know

1. check your site indexation: site:xxxx.com

2. check backlinks: link:xxxx.com
note: result page only shows samples links, not all of them. to find all backlinks, you have to log in webmaster.

3. check your site indexation in main index: site:xxx.com -allinurls:xxx.com

4. diagnose your site: http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://www.xxxx.com

5. site status: http://hvys.xxx.com.
note: if pr is 7, your site is just fine; pr is 4, banned; pr is 0, penalized. all of those is not officially confirmed.

6. search forums: inurl:forum keyword

7. search posts: intitle:forum keyword

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Quantcast is amazingly accurate

Most people use Alexa to figure out how popular a site is. It used to be the only option on the Internet world. But something on Alexa pushaed me to search for other sources:
1. It only tells relative ranking of a site, no estimated traffic volume.
2. Only top 100,000 sites have historical data graph.
3. Its traffic ranking data is from only alexa toolbar users, so it's easy to manipulate the result.

Two of best known substitutes of Alexa are compete.com and quancast.com. To find out which one is better, I tried three sites which I have access to their actual traffic data:

Alexa Compete(people/m) Quancast(people) Actual(visitors/m)
site 1 7217 for US 420403 378.9K 332939
site 2 22531 for US 200804 170.2K 180372
site 3 68295 for US 20311 9K 42000
site 3 is very new so the results from all three sources are not even close. However, for long time being

site 1 and 2, quancast.com works better. I am wondering how it collects and analyzes data to get such an amazing accuracy. Although it allows site owner to paste a special tag and configure audience profile so Quancast.com will get more accurate data, I doubt how many site owners will do so. It claims that the company was founded by "a team of engineers and mathematicians " though both co-founders have only CS degrees, I guess it must have a better statistical model to predict based on limited sample date.

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Things to pay attention when rewriting URLs

Most common advice you may get for SEO is to rewrite dynamic URLs to static ones. It's not hard to do so. But several things you should keep in mind when doing so: First, avoid special characters like %, $ in the URLs. If you have to use them, annotate those before you put them alive. Sometimes, such characters will make your URLs unreachable. Second, restrict all old, dynamic URLs by using robots.txt. So that search engines will not consider new URLs as duplicate pages. Third, when using title, keywords, or product names as your URLs, you may consider add a short unique section id after the new URL in case that same title, keyword, or product name will show up in the future. Last but not least, rewriting URLs may affect your ranking temporarily. The reason is that you block old URLs, which may have already been indexed and ranked well, and search engines need time to index and rank new URLs. It may take weeks, even months to get back where you have been. However, there is no doubt that you will benefit from rewriting URLs in long term.

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Hitwise tells you secrets about your competitors

Have you ever heard of Hitwise? It claims itself as a competitive intelligence and search intelligence source for online advertising and search marketing. It is totally ture. Yesterday I just got a short training from its account manager and totally fall in love with this tool now. Basically, it collects web browsing data directly from ISP servers and actively monitors 1 million websites traffic in US. (It also cover UK, HK, and several other countries.) Then it categorizes, reorganizes, analyzes, and finally presents those data to you. You can select your competitors in a specific category and see their traffic data. Most valuable, it can tell how much organic/paid traffic your competitors get, where they get it, and what top performance keywords are. It is amazingly useful when to design a SEM campaign or conduct SEO activities. I believe there are more functionalities lying on this cool SaaS. I will tell you more in my "SEO Toolkits" section after I play around with it.

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Who are behind Google Webmaster Forum?

Recently I asked and answered several questions on Google Webmaster Forum. I am surprised to see that some extremely active users are there to answer your questions. I am also surprised that those extremely active users are trying to do SEO in such a good conscious and aggressively advocating creating unique content in a natural way. What I am really curious is who they are, what they do for living, and why they are working so hard on this forum. It seems some of them stay online 7/24 to answer questions and discuss interesting topics. I am a webmaster and I am busy. Involving into one or two questions per day is already too much for me. How could you answer ten, twenty, or more questions and keep talking all day long? Thanks for them, I will go to Webmaster Forum whenever I have a question. :)

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IE 8 did something to Google SERP

I found this weird thing accidently. Googled 'vitamins' on Firefox and Chrome, I got same results with a lot of sponsored links. But googled it on IE 8 beta, I got totally different results. Clicked on one result, it directed me to another SERP. Most importantly, none of sponsored links showed up. My IE 8 version is 8.0.6001.18241. I don't think it's IE's bug. My guess is MS did something to its top competitor on its new browser. Correct me if I am wrong. Try it and let me know whether you see the same phenomenon.

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My Watchlist

The best way to keep yourself on the edge of industry trend is to read blogs, forums, and news. Books are good but quickly outdated. Most important, books are cooked meals and blogs/news/forums are raw material. I personally follow many blogs and forums and benefit a lot. I don't mind to share my reading list with you. If you are too lazy, just read my blog. :)

BTW, I just list most valuable sources here. My own reading list is much longer than the list here and I am sure there are a lot more such sites. I just don't want to waste your time before I am fully confident on a source's quality. Read my blog. If I find anything interesting from other sources, I will talk about it there.

Top SEO Watchlist

No.1: Matt Cutts's Blog

This blog is important because who Matt Cutt is. Most people read this blog to try to read Google's mind. No doubt, Matt often addresses some very important issues here. But I find it is also fun to read his blog. There was an article about how he sent a bait to a spammer and the spammer bite the bait. LOL!

No. 2: SEOmoz Blog

SEOmoz is a very professional SEO service institute. It has a daily official blog and a user generated blog. Both of them are worth reading. It also provides many useful online tools for SEM and SEO. Not all of them are free. I will cover some of them in 'SEO Toolkits' section.

No.3: Google Webmaster Official Blog

Reason to read is simple: It's Google's. Do you use Google Webmaster? If not, you are definitely a beginner.

No.4: SEO Chat News

Another SEO service institute. I personally don't like SEOChat's website. It's ugly, but well optimized for keyword 'SEO'. There is gold in their news feed, but you have to dig into it.

Top SEM Watchlist

No.1: Google Official Adword Blog

Again, it's Google's.

No.2: Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog

When talking about SEO, it's OK to totally ignore Yahoo! and other search engines. Get one done, get all done. However, no one will tell you not to use Yahoo! SM when you want SEM. Although I don't like Yahoo! SM's interface and prepaid method.

Note: At this point, I don't have a long list for SEM because I am more focused on SEO. After all, SEM is not so complicated as SEO. I am not saying it's simple, but it's easier.

Top Affiliate Marketing Watchlist

I think most reliable sources about affiliate marketing is major affiliate networks official blogs. Unfortunately, those networks are lazy and not updating blogs frequently.

* Google Affiliate Network Blog
* Amazon Assoicates Blog
* Linkshare Blog
* ShareASale Blog

There is also an ABestWeb Affiliate Marketing Forum where content is well organized by affiliate networks and I see some good threads on it. Beside those, a lot of blogs by affiliate marketers are out there. I don't fully trust what they say. Remember, they are publishers and you are their potential leads.

Top Web 2.0 Watchlist

My only recommendation is Webware's Blog. Webware used to be an independent Web 2.0 focused startup. It has a great blog and operated 'Webware 100' competition in past. But now the company has been acquired by CBS and its blog are integrated into CNet news. It might be a good thing for both the company and subscribers. I would be happy to see this company keep standing alive during such a recession period.It doesn't have a clear business model, but represents the whole Web 2.0 trend somehow.

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Getclicky Introduction

You may know many traffic tracking solutions, the most famous and popular one is Google Analytics. Here I want to introduct another similar tool, GetClicky.com. Why? Because it looks cool and has some unique and useful features.

First, what you may not know is Google Analytics updates data on daily basis. Therefore, you can't see real-time traffic data there. But GetClicky.com can. I think it's very useful, especially for new sites. I strongly suggest you create a hourly traffic tracking sheet for a new site so that you can closely monitor your site performance at the begining. It's always good to know what is your peak hours and when your traffic begins to drop.

Second, beside viewing visitors by locations, IP address, host names, and organizations, you can name your visitors and choose to ignore traffic from particular visitors. I use this feature to filter visits from my team and myself. In this way, I know the real traffic to my sites. Google doesn't have this feature.

Third, it has a "spy" view feature. You can watch a visitor comes in, browses page by page, and then leaves your site in real time. It is meaningless but fun to spy.

Last but not least, it has an iPhone version. It is cool for all road runners.

The service claims to have more unique features than other traffic analytics softwares. However, not all of them are that useful. It has a free version, but you will soon find out you have to upgrade to enjoy its advantages. My major concern is that it has daily pageview limit. That means it only targets at small sites and webmasters have to move to other platforms once your sites grow up.

Anyway, it's a well designed online tool. If you are a small sites owner, it is worth trying.

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Who do you want, Affiliate Networks ?!!

Sometimes I really hate affliate networks. Not because of their services, but because of their arrogancy. I just got denied by Neverblue, a CPA network I applied last week. They called me from British Columbia, asked several questions, and then quickly sent out a deny email without saying why."According to our program Terms & Conditions we reserve the right to deny participation for any reason." What the Fxxx! If you respect your publishers, please at least list several possible reasons for such a rejection. It's not unusual to be rejected by advertisers on any affiliate network, but you always get a nice written email with possible excuses. Such a nonsense just humiliated me. Whatever! It's your loss. For any affiliate network, a broad network of high quality publishers is always critical. If you don't respect us, you will lose us.

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Google Webmaster Introduction

You may already know Google Webmaster very well. But I have to start with this. If you miss it, you miss the greatest channel to communicate with Google.
Google is doing a great job with this tool, much better than Yahoo! and MSN. Whenever you start a new site, there are several tasks on your must-to-do list:

1. Verify your site on Webmaster;
2. Create and submit a sitemap to Webmaster;
3. Generate a robot.txt file to let Google know which pages to crawl and which not to;
4. Check your sitemap status one day later and fix any problems reported by Webmaster.

I strongly recommend you check Google Webmaster once a week. Things you should pay attention to include but are not limited to:

- URLs Errors;
- Duplicate meta tags;
- Crawl stats;
- What Googlebot sees;
- Top search queries;
- Pages with external/internal links.

With webmaster, you can easily figure out what's wrong with your site and how to improve your site. For example, if you see low Googlebot activities on your site, you may have to update content harder. If Google sees a lot of irrelevant keywords and phrases to your site, you should find more relevant inbound links.

Anyway, read its online help section and get its forum feed. A SEO master must be a Google Webmaster Ninja.

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