Google’s noteworthy engineer Matt Cutts stirred up the SEO world with a little note on his blog. The always-sparkling discussion of PageRank and its secret sauce got a nudge from Cutts with his announcement.

“I

Count us among the sites noting reports of Google Toolbar’s bad behavior with 404 error pages. As the old saying goes, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

Google’s Matt Cutts explained why everyone should calm down and take a breath. The Toolbar behavior had been disclosed in a couple of places, but probably didn’t receive enough attention.

“If you

Astute webmasters quickly realized the value in making their 404 Page Not Found messages offer more than an oblique error message. A custom 404 can help a visitor get back on track within a website; the custom 404 proves its value quickly by serving as a retention aid.

The Seoker blog witnessed something disturbing after adding the beta of the Google Toolbar to a computer:

Google grabs the 404 error code returned to the web browser in certain situations and instead of displaying the 404 error page of the website you are on, it creates a custom 404 error page – made by Google. The “new” 404 error page ‘conveniently’ includes a Google search box and if used by a visitor will drive the visitor away from your website.

“I find it humorous that Google, who has horrible 404 pages, is replacing 404 pages for other sites with the toolbar,” said Rustybrick at SEORountable. “Besides for the humor and irony in this, replacing a 404 page with something else is purely evil in many webmaster’s minds.”

For months, the speculation surrounded an apparent decrease in PageRank scores on Google’s Toolbar. It seemed the decrease in rank was connected to penalties associated with buying and selling links that passed on PageRank, a practice Google not-so-quietly condemned last autumn.

But what was more confusing was that though the toolbar scores were dropping, the actual search rankings looked to be unaffected. Google appears to have updated its Directory on January 8 along with PageRank scores that are significantly higher than listed on the toolbar.

Observers say the Google Directory update seems to be pulled directly from DMOZ, the open directory project. As a result, Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable joins others in discrepancy reports:

"…it seems like the Toolbar PageRank of this site is a PageRank of 4. But if you look at the most recent Google Directory update, this site appears to be a PageRank of 7."

There are few theories posted about why this is occurring, Andy Beard explains how this could be problematic for advertisers looking to assess the true value of a website:

"It seems Google used their real dataset for PageRank for the Google Directory export, forgetting that they are telling their millions of users lies on their toolbar with manual penalties, which until now had no visible proof.
 

"Google have the right to do whatever they like with their search engine, but this is another major demonstration of how Google are manipulating public and advertiser opinion." 
 
 

There’s quite a spread of features packed into this new product.  For newbies (or people with clumsy fingers), “Suggestions for navigation errors” will try to guide them to a working address.  More advanced users (and many of our readers) should instead be interested in a “PageRank Display” option.

And there’s just about everything you can imagine that falls in between, as well.  Convenience seems to have been a big focus of the update, and Ionut Alex Chitu writes, “Probably the most interesting new feature is that you can choose to save your settings on Google’s servers so you can access your buttons, settings and AutoFill data even if you don’t use the same computer.”

Google has yet to formally announce this update, so it may not be in absolute tip-top condition.  Still, it should be fun for whatever group of people uses IE and is interested in the Google Toolbar.

For most everybody else, the warning shot was nigh on bursting your eardrums. Once the din was done, webmasters – especially those of marketing sites – looked around to find everything except their toolbar PageRank still in tact. It was sound and fury signifying, well, something.

The most obvious thing it signified was that your toolbar PageRank is virtually meaningless, and is probably why Google slapped it. It’s an attention-getter without causing any direct harm. Reports from around the blogosphere have reported no affect on traffic afterward.

But what if – if nobody listens to the warning – Google did start taking out these same marketing sites with paid links and cross-linking schemes? Would they crash out of existence? Is Google that powerful?

Search Engine Guide’s Robert Clough, whose site dropped from PR 7 to PR 4 over the past month, hasn’t decided how much he needs Google.

Are we willing to risk losing the traffic Google sends simply because we don’t buy into this crazy notion? Will we nofollow every paid link just because Google demands it? At this point, I don’t know. It’s a decision that will be made based on what is best for, and with the input of, our readers, advertisers, contributors and employees.

A tough call indeed. But Debra Mastaler at Search Engine Land suggests it’s time to stop sucking at the Google teet and diversify, so that, if you want to be truly independent, you can create a world without them.

You’ve heard the line: it takes seven impressions before a user takes action? It’s even harder on the web where a person can click away and reach a competitor in seconds. It’s not always possible to find and advertise on all the sites your buying public visit. Since many people report assigning credibility to sites they see both on and offline, it’s a good idea to start looking for offline advertising venues.

Google isn’t the only site on the Internet and it’s time we stop treating it as such. Start looking for online sources within the traditional and web2.0 areas, experiment with all until your find the right mix.

You can probably guess the problem and solution from the title of this post. After installing the Compete toolbar as an extension for Firefox, Analytics started acting funky. I couldn’t change the dates for the reports or view the majority of things I wanted to view. Graphs wouldn’t display and clicking on one of the tabs did nothing more than highlight the tab color without displaying the requested info. The one extension seemed to break about 80% of the functionality of Analytics and made the application 100% useless.

After a couple of emails to the Analytics team they responded with the suggestion that it might be a Firefox extension causing the problem. Fortunately for me I had only installed a couple recently and was able to quickly identify the Compete Toolbar as the culprit. Still Michael is right when when he said in a comment

this should be a lesson, using programming that depends on client side code or functionality is a dangerous. You have no way of knowing what is on an end users machine, and how it will interact with your JS or AJAX application.

There really isn’t any good reason why you shouldn’t be able to use both Analytics and the toolbar. And forcing use of Analytics in IE is not a reasonable solution. You shouldn’t have to make a choice between the two. In this case the choice for me was easy since I’ll use Analytics more than the Compete toolbar, but that ease of choosing won’t always be the case with every application.

Had the problem been with the Web Developer Toolbar I’d be looking for a new stats package.

JavaScript, particularly when it’s incorporated as Ajax is a very cool thing, but it’s important to keep in mind that your application might not work for everyone and if you happen to break a popular extension your application and your site might not get the love it deserves. Most people will only know your site doesn’t work and not come back.

Comments

Sure Google owns Orkut, but they don’t need it. Google already is a social network, and became one by targeting and partnering with the power users and influencers, but few people think of them as a social network.

If you are a webmaster there is a good chance that Google delivers your ads, controls your feed, is your analytics provider, and is a leading source of traffic to your site. News sites and other trusted editorial partners are rewarded with high Google rankings, and become addicted to Google’s traffic the way LookSmart was addicted to Microsoft’s traffic a few years ago.

On top of having touch-points with most webmasters, Google also has touch-points with mass information consumers. Google’s Toolbar gives them web history, which knows where you have been and how long you were there. Google Reader is the most popular feed reader service on the web. They know what voices you trust and subscribe to, and allow you to share your subscriptions or favorite items with friends.

Google’s personalized homepage is also the most functional, customizable, and useful service by any of the major portals. Google gadgets are easy to create and syndicate, and Google allows you to publish gadgets or tabs with anyone.

Mini Web
	Gadgets powered by Google

They go so far as recommending information via the interesting items for you gadget, a recommendations tab on customized homepages, and toolbar recommendations.

Google Maps allows you to link to any location, adds data layers from trusted third parties, and accepts public comments on maps.

YouTube makes it easy to upload and syndicate videos, and now those are highly ranked in Google’s search results. Look at YouTube’s TestTube to see the community features they are planning.

Google offers an auto-complete feature, which makes it easy to refine your search based on the searches of others. They also show related sites and hot searches, and let you note sites you like via Google Notebook. If you don’t find their results entirely relevant they make it easy to create a custom search engine using their data.

Keep track of time and your projects using Google Calendar and Google Docs.

Sure Google has Orkut, but they don’t need it. By default Google keeps hold of your attention so they can use it to improve their relevancy algorithms and ad targeting. Tie in search personalization with automated ad optimization and their information sharing tools and it is easy to think of Google as the web’s largest social network, though most people don’t think of them that way, largely because they put information at the center of it, and are so good at separating signal from noise.

Comments

OpenDNS Accuses Dell, Google Of Spyware

Removing the Google Toolbar from a new Dell system doesn’t completely take away Google’s effect on a PC. Ulevitch thinks this borders on placing spyware on new computers, for the sake of boosting the razor-thin margins in Dell’s PC business.

"(T)he opportunity for Dell to get a recurring revenue stream from an existing customer long after the sale of the computer is more than just enticing, it’s huge," said Ulevitch. "It also means a couple other things:"

1. Dell and Google have an incentive to make it very hard for users to turn this off.
2. Because users can’t get rid of it, Dell and Google can get away with putting more ads on the page and pushing user-relevant content off the page.

The toolbar installation is only part of the problem, according to Ulevitch:

In fact, uninstalling the Google Toolbar won’t get rid of it. Dell and Google are now installing a second program on computers that intercepts all sorts of queries that the browser would normally try to resolve. This program has no clear name and is very hard to uninstall. In some circles, people would call this spyware.

A piece of software called Browser Address Error Redirector, or Google AFE on older systems, has to be uninstalled to make the redirection behavior go away for good.