Andrew Ooi has compiled a short list of Malaysian sites, many were as much as a PR5 previously, and currently show a PageRank of zero (a white bar)

Examples include:-

Colleen’s Simple Kind of Life and 5xmom

The numbers seem to be stable across multiple data centers

There doesn’t seen to be any change in prominent Search Marketing sites such as Search Engine Round Table and Search Engine Journal, and other popular bloggers such as Emom and Yaro still seem to have their degraded but still "head above water" rankings.

Meanwhile Matt Cutts is playing around with $200 PCs and the negative views of the blogosphere regarding Google.

Meaning Of PageRank Unchanged

Google have had more than a month to change the description of PageRank on their website.

I haven’t seen any change to Search Engine Rankings and there is still no way to request reconsideration without admitting guilt.

The Webmaster Help Center also doesn’t give an option to report that you think Google is making a mistake in their manual evaluation.

How do I request reconsideration of my site?

If your site has previously violated our webmaster guidelines, and you’ve made changes to it so that it now meets our guidelines, you can ask Google to reconsider your site for inclusion in the index.

In addition, if you recently purchased a domain that you think may have violated our guidelines before you owned it, you can use the reconsideration request form to let us know that you recently acquired the site and that it now adheres to the guidelines.

To request reconsideration of your site:

1. Sign in to Google webmaster tools. The webmaster tools Dashboard opens.
2. Under Tools, click Request reconsideration and follow the steps.

Google do now call this reconsideration, not just reinclusion, and Matt notes that you can still be in the index even though you have a penalty, which he updated November 4th 2007

I did find something cool though which I hadn’t seen before, maybe I missed it being reported, or didn’t pay much notice.

I am still being crawled frequently and there are some interesting spikes. It is a pity that the graph doesn’t line up with the scale.

From January people using PayPerPost will be able to use SocialSpark.

SocialSpark Alpha screenshots do still have PageRank listed, and that will likely be removed totally unless Google change their stance.

I still don’t sell PageRank, but traffic hasn’t changed, if anything it has increased as I write more content that people want to read and link to, and it even brings in some search traffic.

Google is making huge mistakes with these updates. I know many people receiving penalties sell links, and I am not trying to defend them.

When you get someone like regular reader Rob, a real expert in SEO, who based on the links he receives should be a comfortable PR4, or possibly a PR5, currently a PR0, because he wrote one paid review using nofollow on the links.

Then you get affiliate marketers like Vlad who may have written a couple of high quality reviews, and sold some advertising.
At the same time he also is an affiliate with some affiliate services which offer SEO friendly "clean links" for their merchants.
For a website owner they are still links from which they will be making money, though the money from affiliate marketing is variable – the links still affect search engines, as do many other affiliate links which feature 301 redirects.

Now whilst Aaron’s issues might be appeased as a result of the recent interchange with Matt, that is really just the tip of the iceberg. Aaron hasn’t been lynched.

To finish I am just going to steal the words of Michael VanDeMar which he posted as a comment on Matt’s Reporting On Paid Links post.

Honestly, Matt… and if your legal team won’t let you answer this, then I understand, but if you are allowed to answer then I (and I’m sure others) would really, really like to know… as the G algo stands now, exactly how much off balance would you say it is due to the insidious act of buying and selling text link ads? How many man hours have you spent combating this crime against humanity, and at what cost? And is it seriously skewing the results that much, that all the efforts spent on it were, and continue to be, justified? Is the algo that fragile?

The other main reason that I disagree with this idea is that you think (or appear to be implying, anyways) that Paid Link === No Human Review. This not the case 9 times out of 10. You should know that.

Update – Official Statement From Izea (PayPerPost)

An official statement finally from Izea (PayPerPost) on their blog regarding Google PageRank Updates.

We now know from some of our friends inside of Google (thanks "bob") that they are now looking for phrases such as PPP, PayPerPost,ReviewMe, Payu2blog, etc. in the text of your post. For that reason I would suggest refraining from using any type of this text in the body of your posts, sponsored or not. When you disclose thank the sponsor, not PPP.

I would like to thank Ted (CEO of Izea) for having the courage to say something about this in public, something it seems Google so far have not managed to do, and rarely do so on an official company blog.

Lisa Stewart of Bigfoot Web Marketing also has an excellent writeup of the decision process on the PayPerPost boards that ultimately led to Ted Murphy making a statement.

Comments

*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

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First up, for those counting stats such as Darren Rowse, Robert Scoble and Techcrunch here are my numbers.

Google Reader is currently showing 3 different feeds that are all providing the same content, which you might think would be better served as a single number as appears in Feedburner.
Hopefully that will never, ever happen, as those split numbers are incredibly useful.

Why Are There Split Numbers?

It is vital to understand why split numbers occur to fully appreciate how useful this is.

There are 3 main ways people subscribe to your RSS feeds using Google Reader.

1. Using A Subscription Button

   My subscription buttons point to andybeard.eu/feed/ and this is the URL used by feed readers to collect my feed, even though that redirects to Feedburner using the Feedsmith plugin.

2. Autodiscovery

   This is that little orange icon that appears in your browser alongside the URL for RSS subscription. It is handled in different ways by various feed readers. Google Reader evaluates any redirect before you actually subscribe, thus you end up at feeds.feedburner.com/Exploring-Niche-Websites before making a decision. Historically speaking this isn’t a very good thing to happen, because as a feed publisher you "lose ownership" in some ways of those subscribers, as they are not subscribing to a page on your site that can be moved to somewhere else.

3. Javascript Bookmark

   This again uses the autodiscovery URL in the header of your blog, but for some reason, maybe my own oversight or mistake my autodiscovery URL is andybeard.eu/feed – notice this URL doesn’t have a trailing slash.

RSS Feed Subscription – Evaluation

This is where we gain a unique perspective on Feed Subscription

1. 580 people are subscribed to http://andybeard.eu/feed/ – those people used a subscription button to subscribe to my feed.
2. 196 people are subscribed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/Exploring-Niche-Websites – those are either very long-time subscribers from my time on blogspot, or they used RSS Autodiscovery to subscribe using Google Reader
3. 146 people are subscribed to http://andybeard.eu/feed – those people most likely used a javascript based subscription button in Firefox to subscribe to my feed.

Now if you are very smart, you could use this method to split test subscription methods, and rely on Feedburner for your aggregate data.

This isn’t an attempt to get on a list of SEO blogs or back-slapping.

In this post I am trying to highlight some unique information that no one has ever revealed before, and could be extremely useful.

This isn’t the same as tracking RSS subscriptions, in many ways it is better because the tracking only gives you a click on a button, and doesn’t give you anything from autodiscovery, losing half of the data.

I for one hope Google doesn’t "fix" this "problem" with aggregated feeds, because it could prove to be very useful.

Comments

Originally published at AndyBeard.EU

Wayne writes:

"Chris-

Thanks again for having me at the CRM 2.0 workshop. I can’t believe how much I learned in those two days. The presentations were outstanding, and the interactions with you, Paul, and the other attendees greatly stimulated my thinking.

Here is a link to my first podcast http://pmwarstories.com/

Let me know what you think.

Consider me another convert in the Church of CRM 2.0.
Wayne"

(Wayne, thanks for the good words and you’re very welcome! Thank you for spending the time with us. The podcast sounds great. We’re actually featuring it in the Naples session. Nice job!)

I have to say…it’s highly gratifying to see people like Wayne grabbing a hold of the reins and going from student to trailblazer in such short order. Now go check out his podcast, Project Management War Stories.

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The editorial is based on the keynote piece Hal did at cf.Objective() 2006 and also echoes views he has expressed on his Out Loud podcast (episode 32 I think).

Hal was an early advocate of adding Java-like features to ColdFusion but has changed his position for a number of reasons and thinks ColdFusion’s success depends on allowing developers to innovate quickly, which means providing unique features that help get certain types of job done quickly.

I like the article but I don’t think it’s really a “new vision” (as its title claims) because ColdFusion has always been about providing unique features that help developers innovate quickly.

For a contrasting view, read Vince Bonfanti’s evaluation of Hal’s article – and Hal responds in the comments (in fact, the whole comment thread is very interesting!).

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Sean is currently Senior Computer Scientist and Team Lead in the
Hosted Services group at Adobe Systems Incorporated. He has worked in
the IT industry for nearly twenty-five years, first in database
systems and compilers (serving eight years on the ANSI C++ Standards
Committee), then in mobile telecoms, and finally in web development.
Sean is a staunch advocate of software standards and best practices,
and is a well-known and respected speaker on these subjects. Sean has
championed and contributed to a number of ColdFusion frameworks, and
is a frequent publisher on his blog, http://corfield.org/

The language of web analytics is driven, to a large extent, by the tool vendors. When you use a tool, you are naturally going to adopt the language of the tool – to do anything else would be cumbersome and probably ridiculous. But that language hasn’t always served the community well. In the post on Segment Reporting, for example, I noted how misleading and confusing the concept of time-period uniques (daily uniques, weekly uniques, etc.) is. There is a similar, though slightly less damaging confusion around visitor segmentation – one that obscures a serious deficiency in most analytic tools.

In the common language of web analytic tools, a visitor segment is taken to be the set of visitors who meet certain behavioral criteria (the segment definition). But this isn’t quite the way visitor segments are actually implemented. It would be more precise to say that a visitor segment in a web analytics tool is a set of filter criteria that can be attached to a report (possibly any report) to remove any visitors not matching the filter set. Is there a difference between these two definitions?

I think there is – and here’s why.

Suppose you want to track the behavior on the SEMphonic web site of visitors who viewed the webinar I did with Paul Bruemmer on SEO measurement and Process. Let’s say the link to the webinar was posted on the site in November and, presumably, will remain there for at least a few months. In January of next year, you sit down and build a segment of visitors who clicked on the link to view the webinar. You want to see their behavior before they viewed the webinar and you want to see their behavior after – and your main interest is in seeing if the webinar drove online lead generation and your secondary interest is in understanding how viewing the webinar changed visitor’s behavior.

This seems like a classic web analysis problem. It’s the type of problem web analysts’ are asked to study over and over again – with the only real changes being the qualifying behavior and the conversion behavior. And it seems like the kind of problem that visitor segmentation is going to solve.

Seemingly, all you have to do is a setup a visitor segment where the qualifying behavior is “viewed the webinar.” Start your segment in October (so you get behavior prior to the webinar) and either run it forward to whenever you’re doing the analysis or pick some “close” date like the end of January (behavior after the webinar). With that segment in hand, you can run a report of site usage for the segment. That gives you a profile of “webinar users” behavior. You compare that to overall site usage and you’ve got your comparison of “webinar” vs. “non-webinar” users. If lots of visitors view the webinar, you can create a negative segment of visitors with the qualifying behavior “did not view the webinar” to get a cleaner contrast. You can also compare how many of the webinar visitors generated a lead (a conversion event) vs. either all users or the “non-viewed” segment. That gives you a measure of how effective the webinar was in driving lead conversion. So it seems like you’re done.

Except that none of that is really right. It might work. Indeed, we regularly do exactly this sort of analysis. But we also regularly have to discount it because it contains serious problems. You can count on any behavior you look at in October as prior to the webinar – since the link wasn’t available then. But once the link is posted, you have a mish-mash of behaviors. Some of the behavior is prior to viewing the webinar – even if its behavior from yesterday – since the visitor may just have the viewed the webinar. Some of the behavior is after the webinar. And, here’s the crux of the matter – you have no way in any specific report using the segment to tell which is which. Indeed, you can’t even tell (without some extra work) how much of the conversion came before the webinar and how much came after. It might be that lead generation is driving webinar views and not the other way around. The problem is that the segment isn’t “locked” down to a specific group of visitors in a specific time.

This problem becomes especially acute for the many situations where you want to track long-term behavior after a key event. Suppose, for example, that you want to understand the behavior of new customers. You need to “lock-down” a segment of new customers and then track them over an extended time-period – almost like an online focus group. You want to know how they behave in month 2 and month 3 and month 4. But the more extended the time-period, the greater is the mishmash of before and after events – and the harder it is to separate out what you care about from the noise.

From a tool perspective, it’s not as if the way vendors have usually implemented visitor segments is completely off-base. There are plenty of times when an open-segment – one that constantly introduces new members when they meet the qualifying behavior – is ideal. But, you really need to be able to “lock-down” a segment as well – to say that this segment is no longer a set of criteria, now it’s a set of visitors. And you want to be able to see the behavior of just those visitors for any time-period – whether it be a year ago or two years from now.

Once you see the difference between “locking” down a visitor segment and the standard implementation in web analytics, I think you’ll immediately grasp how important this feature actually is. Having it allows an analyst to do clean analysis against many of the most common real-world web analytics problems. Without it, you’re constantly going to be trying to adjust for all the noise in your data. That’s makes for lots of work and lots of very uncertain – and therefore pointless – analysis. Organizations don’t like to act on analysis when all you can say is “well, it looks like it might be this way though I can’t really tell for sure.”

What if your tool doesn’t support this kind of analysis? There are some work-arounds we’ve developed. And even though this series is ostensibly about tool evaluation, it’s worth discussing our two favorite solutions to the “lock-down” problem.

Solution number one has a single big drawback – it’s a tagging solution. Here’s the idea: you setup cookie logic that tags a visitor with a date when some key action is performed for the first time. It might be registration. It might be a PPC referral. It might be a purchase. It might be a class. Regardless, you write a permanent, non-expiring first-party cookie that says the event occurred. You use that cookie to write (once or every time) a custom variable in your analysis solution that contains the event date – formatted consistently and logically. Now, you can build visitor segments using the custom variable. You could, for instance, select all visitors who took the webinar in a specific week. But you could select a much wider date range for analysis – the month before or the month after as an example. This will provide a classic before and after analysis of the segment. And the only noise is the behavior immediately surrounding the week.

For some events, that’s still too much noise. But particularly for solving long period analysis problems like how new customers behave over time, this method is quite powerful.

But there’s no denying the tagging aspect is daunting. Getting a tagging change is too big a deal to realistically expect it to happen for something like tracking a webinar. So this technique is mostly useful for tracking behaviors that are of obvious and enormous importance to the business (like buying for the first time or signing up for an account).

Fortunately, we have workaround number two for situations like the webinar. This technique depends on the fact that vendors have to support online campaigns (which change often) – so they frequently provide good ways to define campaigns based on web site behaviors without having to fuss with the tag. You can take advantage of this capability to build a campaign that is only in-place for a specific period of time. Suppose, for instance, you created a campaign for the first week in November – and made clicking on the webinar link the defining behavior. Then you did another campaign for the next week. And so on. Now, you can construct a segment of visitors that responded to the campaign in week one of November. And, just as with the tagging solution, you can study the behavior of responders before the week and after. You can even study the behavior during the crucial week – though, of course, you’ll have all the old issues about did they take the webinar on Monday or Friday.

The “campaign” method has the very considerable advantage of not requiring a tag – and it’s the method we use most often to solve the “lock-down” problem. But there’s no denying that it’s a lot of work – since the campaigns have to be created on an ongoing basis.

The existence of these work-arounds can certainly help. But, both methods have serious drawbacks, not the least of which is that you have to plan for them. That means you can’t back-engineer an ad hoc analysis with them. Unfortunately, back-engineering is the way most analysis actually happens. It’s heavy weather to tell your boss or your client they’ll have to wait three months while you put the analysis infrastructure in place and then wait for enough before and after behavior to accumulate. Clients (and bosses) expect better – and they are right to do so. Which is why I put this ability to “lock-down” segments quite high on the list of features to look for when evaluating the visitor segmentation capabilities of a web analytics tool!

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Gary Angel is the author of the “SEMAngel blog – Web Analytics and Search Engine Marketing practices and perspectives from a 10-year experienced guru.

VARs/resellers were the main source of IT technologies for less than half of respondents.

The online survey had a reasonable number of respondents (124), but the results were not as unquestionable as they might have been – Citrix admitted to a “margin of error of 6.75 percent with a 90 percent confidence rate.”

Still, the company’s conclusions seem clear.

In Citrix’s evaluation of the study, Bert Wakeley, director of State and Local Government, said, “State and local IT buyers are one-hundred percent focused on program performance. Their emphasis is on maximizing the value of the taxpayer’s dollar and deploying IT solutions that improve citizen services. The survey results point to an opportunity for IT providers to improve their relationships with state and local executives through deeper partnerships and continued high service levels.”

The last lines of Wakeley’s comment reflect on the finding that survey respondents “ranked personal relationships with a sales representative’ as only moderately important.”

And only 38 percent of respondents “characterize their IT providers as trusted partners, rather than mere product providers.”

“The survey results underline the market’s requirement for best-value, performance-tested solutions,” Wakeley said. “Buyers will not tolerate distractions. They are looking for reliable, easy-to-procure tools, enabling them to stay focused on their mission of supporting the business of state and local government.” VARs would do well to take heed of the survey’s results.

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Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.

That’s the reason I’m liking the idea of SpeedPitches, a new service that matches busy business owners with local vendors.

I’ve seen this type of thing work well – recently at a Frost & Sullivan event in Phoenix – and often helps both sides quickly determine if there’s a connection worth pursuing.

The first SpeedPitches event takes place May 18th in London and focuses on SEO/SEM.

SpeedPitches is the brainchild of Denise Russell and Chris Ridings. From the forthcoming press release…

“People have applied the speed dating approach to business before”, said SpeedPitches’ Chris Ridings, author of several SEO Papers and founder of popular SEO Forums SearchGuild.com, “but these events have only had the aim of introducing local business people on the speculative basis that they might be useful to each other in the future. We feel that the concept is far more effective when there is a specific business goal that both parties have in mind”.

Best of luck Chris!

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

The lastest version of this product, which was released a little over a month ago, expands on management abilities with a new configuration wizard, additional device support, and increased support for HIPAA and SOX compliancy.

ActiveWorx is meant for companies who take their security very seriously (which should be every company). It provides quality information management software that works with many security products such as Snort, Checkpoint, and other intrusion detection system products, such as firewalls, vulnerability assessment tools, and others.

There are a lot of security products on the market (possibly ones you are using) that just don’t have good analysis features. This could be a great tool to compliment such products and make things a whole lot easier on you.

Luckily, BrightTools allows you to try an evaluation copy for free, so you can test it out before deciding if you want to purchase it or not. How can you say no to that?

Chris is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.

Which Desktop Search Ranks Highest?

In order to make choosing a desktop search utility easier for those concerned, the University of Wisconsin-Madison E-business Institute conducted a study titled: There’s More to Search than Google & Yahoo! An Evaluation of 12 Leading Desktop Search Tools. As indicated by the study’s name, it evaluates the usability and safety of the various desktop search tools.

To ensure their test would be considered comprehensive, the University tested the following DTS utilities:

The DTS tools were tested against the following criteria and given a 1-5 score, with 5 being the highest:

1. Usability
2. Versatility
3. Accuracy
4. Efficiency
5. Security
6. Enterprise Readiness

While reading the findings, one thing immediately stood out: Copernic’s tool ranked first in 4 of the 6 criterions, while finishing second in another. These results seem to indicate Copernic is indeed the best DTS tool available. The UW E-business Institute also establishes this conclusion by saying:

Copernic is the most well-balanced desktop search tool among those evaluated. The tool is intuitive and easy to use. The new beta version supports FireFox for Web history search, and Thunderbird and Eudora for e-mail (as well as IE, Outlook and Outlook Express)

Click for criteria rankings image

However, even Copernic did not escape criticism. The study concluded Copernic would be better served by allowing users to select their default Internet search engine, instead of using Copernic’s choice (alltheweb.com). Although, if this is the biggest criticism of Copernic’s tool, they must be doing everything else correctly (or just better than their competitors).

Not only did the study anoint Copernic as the best desktop search utility, it also ranked the other tools that were tested. Surprisingly, Google didn’t represent themselves as well as one might expected (fifth place finish).

The rankings:

1. Copernic Desktop Search
2. Yahoo! Desktop Search
3. Wizetech Archivarius 3000
4. MSN Toolbar Suite
5. Google Desktop
6. Ask Jeeves
7. Enfish Professional
8. ISYS Desktop
9. dtSearch Desktop
10. diskMETA Pro
11. Blinkx
12. HotBot Desktop

Click for rankings image

While Copernic may not be their intended target, one can imagine the search engines that didn’t fare as well as expected to improve their product in an attempt to outdo their competitors. With the search engine industry becoming more and more cutthroat, studies like these should only fan the fires of one-upmanship. However, congratulations are due to Copernic for developing such a successful DTS tool.

Although, with the release of Mac’s Tiger OS featuring Spotlight (Apple’s proprietary desktop search tool) all of the tools present in UW’s study may have to move down one spot to make room for the impending champ, at least that’s what I’m hearing.

For those of us who happen to be “stuck” in the Windows environment, Copernic seems to be the logical choice for people wanting an effective DTS tool.

Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest search news.

The idea of writing out business plans, let alone revising them, is enough to send anyone into cardiac arrest, but it doesn’t have to be that bad. Depending on the type of business you run, you may not need a full fledge business plan, but more of an outlined goal sheet broken down into bite-size, or more digestible, goals.

The idea is to determine how you did last year in terms of profit and loss, business growth, and accomplishing the goals outlined in your business plan.

If you surpassed your target, you did a great job! It’s time to write a new plan, with new goals and a higher profit margin.

If you barely broke even, you did a good job, but there are areas you will need to improve on. Take the time to evaluate your business and see where your strengths and weaknesses are and determine how you can turn your weaknesses into strengths.

If you lost money, you did a poor job of running your business. You need to take a hard look at how you ran your business in the past year. Did you run it more as a hobby or did you put forth a good effort? What areas did you struggle the most in? How can you improve those areas? Is there a product or service that just didn’t perform as you planned? It may be time to dump that product or service and find a better one. Did you do a sufficient amount of outside advertising in both print and online venues?

The important thing to remember when going over last year’s business records, business plans, and goals sheets is that while your business is a vital part of your life, it should never take over your life to the point that you miss out on important opportunities to enjoy time with your family and/or circle of friends. Learn to balance both business and personal goals.

Take the time to make sure that your business goals are structured around the goals you set for your family and you’ll find it much easier to reach those business goals!

Alyice Edrich is the author of several work from home e-books, and
the editor-in-chief of a national publication for BUSY parents.
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