It might not be a clever decision to make money out of your high page rank. It looks like Google is penalizing websites who place paid links on pages with good Page Rank.

Google seems to be not taking websites with less than 4 page rank seriously. However, pages with 5 or more page rank are being scanned by Google continuously. If you have a paid link on your PR 7 page and you find your PR drop to two or three do not be surprised. You have just been penalized.

Following Bob Massa of Search King who first started the “PR Ad Network” selling text links openly, Robin Good of Master New Media was also penalized after Google found out that paid text links were placed on their high PR pages.

Google reduced and also removed the page rank on most of the Massa’s network of websites. This was followed by Massa filling a law suit against Google which was won finally by Google.

Google is becoming smarter day by day as SEO strategies get smarter. If you have paid text links on your home page with high PR, it is time you rethink on whether to keep them or remove it. If you are already penalized, remove all the advertisements and try to submit your site again to Google.

Google Adwords is coming up with interesting features lately. The recent one being Demographic Bidding.

The new demographic bidding feature can help you display ads to only specific age and gender segments within the Google Content Network. This can not just help increase click through rates but also understand and analyze how the ads perform under each segments.

With this feature, you can utilize two options:

1. Increase your bid rate for certain segments like teenagers or the middle age segment based on your ad product category.
2. Exclude certain groups from viewing your advertisements. For example: If you are displaying ads for kids like toys or children books, you can avoid them from being seen by the older generation. This can help you reduce cost and stop ad viewership by non-targeted audience.

The reports can be run using the Report Center. The report center provides various campaign performance metrics like conversion data, CTR, clicks and impressions based on the age and gender of the viewer who viewed your advertisement.

Are you looking out for a SEO job? Have you been selected and requested to do an SEO report for their company to analyze your capability and skills? PLEASE STOP!! They are just cheating you.

Recently, a number of companies are asking SEO job seekers to create a detailed report on how SEO can help the company increase product sales and details about how the SEO job seeker would do it. Some even ask the directories where they would submit. Once they get your report, they are done with you. They no longer need you as you have provided them all the information they need to do it themselves.

Below is one such mail from a company called Softbrands in India:

Assignment:
Work on creating a campaign to increase SoftBrands Hospitality online presence, please be specific when it comes to the directories you are referring to

This company wants you to create a campaign and even asks you to provide in detail the directories where you will post. Its high time SEO professionals have to be clever not just in increasing the search rankings but also tackle such mean companies who get all that they want from you for free and just dump you in the end.

Anyone else who experienced the same please do share it with us along with the company details to help the SEO community.

Google has added a new “Data Quality” tab to the Google Base account. This new tab can provide you various recommendations enabling more shoppers find your products.

In its official Google Base blog, Jessica Ng, Product Marketing Manager for Google Base mentions, “We’ve always emphasized the importance of submitting high-quality product feeds to Google Product Search. This means submitting accurate, up-to-date product information in the form of attributes, as well as abiding by best practices for formatting these attributes. Doing so goes a long way toward helping shoppers find your items more easily.”

Adding up to the importance of submitting high-quality product feeds, she further added, Today, we’re pleased to announce the addition of a new “Data Quality” tab in your Google Base account. On this tab, you’ll find a host of suggestions for improving the quality of the item listings in your product feed. For example, you can find recommendations on the length of your title and description fields, or get a snapshot of the number of items in your feed that are missing key attributes. By addressing these issues, you’ll be able to improve the quality of your feeds and help more shoppers find your products.”

Google Base Data Quality tab is a welcome initiative as most of online sellers have very little or no awareness on the importance of submitting accurate and up-to-date information. The new tab would be of great help for these sellers.

May be I should have posted this a year ago. 

A report submitted by Brian Krebs in Washington Post shows that Internet Explorer was unsafe and prone to security issues 284 days in 2006. Surprisingly, Mozilla Firefox was on a security threat for just nine days in the year.

The huge difference shows that Internet Explorer still could not be regarded as reliable even though it has the largest market share of 80 percent.

The detailed report by Brian Kerbs was started in 2005. Kerbs contacted nearly all researchers who had informed about the critical flaws in products by Microsoft. He also examined the dates these security trends or anomalies were found and their submissions. It has been found that Internet fraudsters had used the security flaws in Microsoft for their own benefit all round the year.

Compiled by Brian Krebs, washingtonpost.com - January 4, 2007

The first major flaw was done by organized criminals who hacked sites and placed codes which can steal passwords using spyware on systems which use Internet Explorer. Microsoft did not take this attack serious and within few days, thousands of customers were already attacked due to this spyware. Since Microsoft was stubborn, a third-party patch was created by some security experts to fix the bug until Microsoft finally developed the fix.

Again in September, hackers used an unpatched flaw in non-Microsoft web server software and installed malicious codes in a huge number of legitimate websites. Websites affected with this malicious code can infect Windows systems if a user just opens the sites using their browser. Again Microsoft was lazy enough to become serious about this huge treat and third-party patches became the savior until Microsoft issued an official update many days later.

With many more browsers coming into the market, it is time that Microsoft realizes the importance of security and gets alerted and responds promptly than ever before.

Readers of the Wall Street Journal were surprised to see the ad, “McCain Wins Debate!” in the morning when results were supposed to be in the evening after the presidential debate in Mississippi. 

The ad which declared “McCain Wins Debate!” had McCain’s headshot with the American flag as the background. Though the advertisers mention this as a mistake and blamed it as a purely human error, many think it’s a fix to support McCain. 

Joseph Gallagher, Vice President of Advertising, Wall Street Journal stated that the mistake was found out immediately and was removed from the site.

The opposition party has not yet raised a voice regarding this fault.

Many Google Adwords users received a mail stating that the exchange rate displayed in their Adsense account is incorrect. The exchange rate was listed as 1:1.

Google adwords account holders from countries where the dollar rate was lower than their rates, were surprised, rather shocked to see the exchange rates issued incorrectly. However, users with rates lower than the US dollar were happy as the income would be higher. Well, Google is not that faulty or dumb. 
Here is what Google had to say about this issue:

Sub: Important message about your AdSense account

Hello,
We’re writing to let you know that your AdSense account is displaying anincorrect exchange rate for your most recent AdSense payment issued onSeptember 23, 2008. While the exchange rate is incorrectly listed as 1:1,please rest assured that your payment has been issued with the correctexchange rate. You can expect your check to arrive according to the normaldelivery time, within two to four weeks.

If you normally receive communication from us in a language other thanEnglish, we will provide additional information in your preferred languagenext week.We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team
Google Inc.1600
Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, 
CA 94043
USA

Similar issue occurred with Google Adsense few years back.

Google had requested young people aged between 5-16 across the UK to design their Google Doodle. This year Google had requested to design a logo based on the idea “My Community”. This is the third year the competition was held. Now, its your turn to chose the best Doodle among the top chosen ones.

Google Doodle competition has created a lot of interest among young people especially in schools. Last year more than 60,000 doodles were created based on the theme, “My Future”. The winning Doodle was displayed on Google UK home page for a day which was viewed by 18 million people.

Visiting Google’s Doodle, you would be requested to vote for the best Doodle under ages 5-7, 7-11, 11-14 and 14-16. Among 70,000 doodles, 48 were selected by the judging panel for voting.

The winning doodle will be used on the UK Google homepage on 1st October.

Adding Meta Keywords was considered a common practice during the last century. It is now considered prehistoric and of no relevance. But not according to the Massachusetts District Court which ordered McGills Glass  Warehouse to pay $426,487 in damages, attorney fees and other costs.

McGills and Venture Tape Corp sell competitive products. McGills as was a common practice, placed Venture Tape’s trademarks, “Venture Foil” and “Venture Tape” in their Meta Keywords and as white font texts in a white background to get some traffic from search engines using Venture’s popularity.

In 2003, Venture Tape found this out and sued McGills in the district court. The court ordered $230k to be paid for damages during 2000-2003, $7k in costs and $188k for attorney fees incurred.

Though McGills defends stating that there are no evidence that any consumer were lured to their site, Court does not accept this claim. The court stated that “By the conduct of its case below, McGills effectively admitted seven of the eight elements” and also mentioned that the defendant’s conduct was willfull.

Even after McGills showing that their entire profit during 2000-2003 was only $230k, the court seemed unconvinced. McGills will have to pay their entire profit to Venture and in addition also pay the attorneys fees and other costs of $195k.

With the launch of the much hyped Google Chrome, there is yet another competitor in the tough browser market. Google though it repeatedly states it would not hurt Firefox is on the other hand actually marketing the browser in full throttle swallowing most of Firefox users.

Google Chrome is light, fast, easy, simple and powerful. The appearance is impressive and provides no unnecessary options that cover your window view. It is also smaller in size and simple to install. From a technical perspective, it is one of the best open source browsers. The rendering engine WebKit was well chosen as it was an already proven success with features like “speed”.  

But then, Internet Explorer which holds monopoly among browsers does not seem to be threatened due to Google Chrome. Google Chrome is yet to overtake Firefox. Well, I might be expecting too much as its not even a month Chrome was released. Will Google Chrome ever be able to overtake Internet Explorer in popularity and usage?

Many internet users do not even know that there are other browsers existing in this planet apart from Internet Explorer. Some feel, till the day Windows operating systems rule, Internet Explorer will also rule.

Let me know your views through this poll and comments.