Google Broadband Very Popular

Google is getting into everything. We had generation X, the baby Boomers, etc. etc. Are we now in the generation Google phase? Will our children and grand children just automatically be connected to Google somehow in the future?

Anyway, found this at CircleID.com and thought I’d sahre it here.

Over 1,100 Communities Request for Google’s High-Speed Broadband Program

Google has received over 1,100 community requests in response to their up coming experimental, “ultra high-speed broadband networks,” according to the company. Google plans to announce their target communities by the end of the year. “Of course, we’re not going to be able to build in every interested community—our plan is to reach a total of at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people with this experiment,” says Google’s Product Manager, James Kelly, in a blog post.

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Google Adds New Way To Verify You Are The Owner Of Your Website

From the Google Webmaster’s Blog

DNS Verification FTW Posted: 31 Mar 2010 01:28 PM PDT Webmaster Level: Advanced A few weeks ago, we introduced a new way of verifying site ownership, making it easy to share verified ownership of a site with another person. This week, we bring you another new way to verify. Verification by DNS record allows you to become a verified owner of an entire domain (and all of the sites within that domain) at once. It also provides an alternative way to verify for folks who struggle with the existing HTML file or meta tag methods. I like to explain things by walking through an example, so let’s try using the new verification method right now. For the sake of this example, we’ll say I own the domain example.com. I have several websites under example.com, including http://www.example.com/, http://blog.example.com/ and http://beta.example.com/. I could individually verify ownership of each of those sites using the meta tag or HTML file method. But that means I’d need to go through the verification process three times, and if I wanted to add http://customers.example.com/, I’d need to do it a fourth time. DNS record verification gives me a better way! First I’ll add example.com to my account, either in Webmaster Tools or directly on the Verification Home page.

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How Do You Determine Selling Price?

I sometimes like to read Aaron Wall’s blog. And sometimes I don’t. He’s a guy whose insights range from brilliant to ridiculous. At times he whines (as in when he takes on Google for some supposed injustice) and borders on pedantic immaturity. Then there are times when I actually learn something and enjoy reading every sentence right down to the last line. This post on fake website buyers is one of those posts that I thought was near genius.

Last year I put up a blog for sale and had the privilege of selling it fairly quickly. I was actually hoping that I’d find a local buyer since it was a local geotargeted website. But a buyer is a buyer.

The offer came in from an investor in Europe. He looks for websites with value and turns them into passive income machines. That’s cool with me. Everyone has their own method of making money. A few years ago when I was into real estate investing I knew other investors who were flippers, others who were landlords and some who were into other types of investing. As long as it’s legal, cool.

I know I priced my blog low. I know it for two reasons. First, it sold quickly. And secondly, the buyer didn’t balk at the price. No quibbles, no questions, he just said “I’ll take it; your price is fair.” That, to me, means I priced it low. I probably could have got twice as much for it as I did.

My buyer wasn’t shady. He didn’t ask me for any analytics data and I don’t think I’d have given it to him if he had. My goal was to sell the site and I knew I had it priced fairly (What I didn’t know was that I’d priced it so low). So my question to you is, What criteria do you use to price your websites when you sell them? What do you base your asking price on? Is it traffic value or do you evaluate your web properties on search engine rankings or income it has produced? Maybe it’s a combination of these. Let’s discuss.

Dashes or Underscores? That is the question

I get asked all the time about whether it’s better to use underscores or dashes between keywords in a file name. I’ve always said dashes are better and I still say dashes are better and people still argue the point.

In a domain name, you aren’t allowed to use underscores, but you are allowed to use dashes. That should be your first clue.

But this is from the Google Webmaster Blog, just so you can see why you use dashes instead of underscores.

Underscores vs. Dashes
Webmasters asked about the difference between how Google interprets underscores and dashes in URLs.

In general, we break words on punctuation, so if you use punctuation as separators, you’re providing Google a useful signal for parsing your URLs.

Currently, dashes in URLs are consistently treated as separators while underscores are not.

Keep in mind our technology is constantly improving, so this distinction between underscores and dashes may decrease over time.

Even without punctuation, there’s a good chance we’ll be able to figure out that bigleopard.html is about a “big leopard” and not a “bigle opard.”

While using separators is a good practice, it’s likely unnecessary to place a high priority on changing your existing URLs just to convert underscores to dashes.

I hope that resolves the issue for anyone wondering whether dashes or underscores are better.

SEO Tracking Tools – Crawler Simulation by Guest Blogger Gushchin Dmitry

First I’d like to thank Gushchin Dmitry of Easy SEO Tracking.com for being a guest blogger at the SEO Discussion Blog. We encourage our readers to send us their blog posts or become a regular contributor. We don’t mind if guest bloggers want to tell about their own product or service as long as it is useful to our readers.

User: I am the owner of the site. I did a good job by exchanging the links with other site owners, by increasing my page rank and creating the best content. Unfortunately, my site doesn’t appear in search engine results. What’s going on?

Don’t panic! One of the possible reasons might be that

Your site is “SEO Unfriendly”

User: What does it mean?

Let’s review the process of indexing the pages by the crawler:

strong>How Crawler Indexes Pages

First of all the crawler doesn’t treat the page the same way the users do.

Let’s consider the following example. What do you see at the screenshot below?

User: Umm… Well…

• Text box
• “Google Search” button
• “I’m feeling Lucky” button
• Logo

Excellent!

Do you want to know how Google “sees” the page above? If yes simply click “view page source” in your browser:

Exciting isn’t it?

The crawler doesn’t treat the pages the same way the users do, because what it “sees” and interprets are the HTML elements only. So one of the reasons your site is SEO unfriendly is the following;

The content of your site is not visible for the crawler as for the improper HTML. This scenario might appear for example in case when the developer or user who created the content incorporated JavaScriptcode or Javaapplets or Flash or things like that.

User: How can I found out whether my site is visible for the crawler or not?

By using Crawler Simulator like the one provided by Easy SEO Tracking.

Crawler Simulator Description
Crawler Simulator performs pretty straightforward operations:

1. It gets the page as if the crawler requests it.
2. And shows what part of the content the crawler actually “sees”

If you want to make sure that your site is visible for the crawler, simply enter the URL of the page in the Site URL field and click the “check” button:

In the example above the content of the page is visible for the crawler.

In cases when the “Content” field is empty or it contains too much JavaScript code it is a signal that the crawler will not see any information at the page (consider the example below):

In the example here there is not too much useful information for the crawler.

User: I entered the URL of my page in Crawler Simulator and it returns nothing. What I need to do?

Find the developer or someone who familiar with the HTML and ask him or her to fine tune the HTML! (If you need help adding content to your page that the search engines can see, click here and fill out the form or call us at 786-317-8774)

User: Thank you! Hey developer. I got some work for you!

Visit Easy SEO Tracking.com for more info.

Who Is Google’s Competition?

One of the things that SEOs and Internet marketers like to talk about quite a bit is the Google dominance over the Web. Some SEOs even go so far as to call Google a monopoly because there are no search engines who truly compete with the search giant for the share of the search market. But I think this is misplaced envy.

I’m not going to defend any Google policies because I think we all know that Google isn’t perfect. That’s not the point. This is simply a discussion about the nature of online competition.

Defining ‘Competition’

The first step to determining who constitutes a competitor for any company is to define, first, what constitutes competition and to do that you have to first define the nature of the business in question. So let’s do that.

What does Google do? And who do they do it for?

Obviously, Google provides information for people searching for it. But are the searchers looking for information from Google’s databases its true customers? No. They don’t pay for those services. They get them for free. Google’s true customers are another subset of its audience.

Some light can be shed on Google’s relationship to its audiences by taking a look at the news business. Newspapers provide news for readers, but they aren’t the true customers for the newspaper. The true customers are the advertisers that pay for space so that the newspaper can stay in business. Without advertisers there is no news. The same can be said of television and radio. The programming sponsors (advertisers) are the true customers.

Likewise, Google’s true customers are its advertisers. Without advertisers Google could not spend money to improve its technology to provide the services that it provides searchers.

Let’s dig a little deeper. What service does Google provide? All of Google’s services can be summed up in one word. Whether we are talking about PPC, organic search, Google Reader, Google Buzz, or one of the several other products that Google offers, it all boils down to one thing – traffic. Google is in the website traffic business.

Google Analytics allows webmasters the tools necessary to analyze their traffic. Webmaster Central gives webmasters more tools for analyzing traffic and building their web business. Google Docs is a tool for webmasters. Google Scholar, Google Books, Google Video, et. al are all traffic building products for Google users. We could go on, but I think you get the picture.

So there are two aspects to Google’s business – traffic and the revenue it needs to generate to provide the traffic benefit that it provides through its free services for its user base.

So Who Else Is In The Traffic Business?

Google is in the traffic business. Everything it does is for the benefit of webmasters who want to receive traffic to their websites. Some of those services – pay per click advertising, for instance – are a “pay as you go” traffic generation service. Others are paid for by the advertisers (Google Knol, organic search, Google Reader, etc.).

When I was in college I was given an assignment to write an essay about whether or not my local newspaper would be considered a monopoly. I was living in Dallas, Texas at the time. Long-time residents of Dallas will know that at one time there were two daily newspapers that served the Metroplex (Dallas Morning News and Dallas Times Herald.) Now, there is only one. The Times Herald went out of business in the early 1990s. This was in the late 1990s. So that would make the Morning News a monopoly then, right?

Wrong. While the daily newspaper served up news on a daily basis its real business was advertising, which means that anyone in the city that sold advertising was a competitor. Businesses have only so much money to spend on advertising. They will either spend it on the local newspaper or somewhere else. Therefore, the local daily newspaper was not a monopoly because it competed with advertisers in other media.

However, in another sense, the newspaper was a monopoly. After all, it was the only daily newspaper in town so if readers wanted an alternative, there was none (although I argued in my essay that even then the lone daily had creeping competitors such as the WSJ and Houston Chronicle, both of which sold heavily in that market).

Just the same, Google can be said to be a near monopoly in a certain sense, but in other senses, it has lots of competitors. Since there are other search engines where searchers can go for information (even if that information is not as high a quality as that which Google provides) it isn’t fair to say that Google has a monopoly on information online. But it does enjoy a position of dominance in the search sector.

However, its true business is traffic. Therefore, any website online that provides traffic to webmasters is a Google competitor. In that regard, Google is far from a monopoly. It does, in fact, have some strict competition. Facebook is the obvious competitor, but there are other websites that compete on a smaller scale, though some of them are growing quite fast.

It’s Time For A Paradigm Shift In Thinking

Internet marketers have got to stop thinking of Google as the evil empire. It isn’t perfect. But it does do a good job of providing webmasters with traffic. For most of us, it is our No. 1 traffic source. But there are a few websites that can say other websites are their primary source of traffic (either Twitter, Facebook or something else).

Some day, Google may not be the No. 1 traffic source online. The cyber world is constantly changing. Focus on the traffic and it all falls into perspective.

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SEO is Dead According to Web Pro News Video

Seriously, just anything titled; is SEO dead? is going to be kind of dumb in the first place. In the 90’s, before Google was a search portal, we knew that getting traffic from every possible source was the way to do Internet marketing.

After Google became a search portal, there were people, and still are people that think all they need is Google for traffic. Any good Internet Marketer or SEO Professional knows that getting traffic from many sources is how you become successful. The fact that there are more sources for that traffic now doesn’t change the method.

That knowledge has been around since the 90’s, even before Danny Sullivan started studying the search engines and how they index pages. Now the guy in this Web Pro News Video, Greg Jarboe, the president and cofounder of SEO-PR is telling people that SEO is dead if you think of SEO as just building websites.

More WebProNews Videos

In the 90s, your Internet Marketing efforts were dead if you thought of it as only building websites. What amazes me about the video ios that they are talking about this as if it is something they just discovered.

You know, I think I’ll start a website using software that allows me to write content to it everyday, kind of like a journal or a log. Web Log or Blog would be a really cool name for that. Wow! look what I just invented!

Seriously, Web Pro News, are you running out of people to interview and topics to cover? SEO hasn’t been about just building websites for more than the ten years this guy in the video refers to.

Google TV Search

Soon, Google will probably have a program to help me find my car keys. Now Google and Dish Network are teaming up to let you search television content from the web.

I found this at the Wall Street Journal Website;

Google Tests TV Search Service

BY JESSICA E. VASCELLARO

Google Inc. is testing a new television-programming search service with Dish Network Corp., according to people familiar with the matter, the latest development in a fast-moving race to combine Internet content with conventional TV.

The service, which runs on TV set-top boxes containing Google software, allows users to find shows on the satellite-TV service as well as video from Web sites like Google’s YouTube, according to these people. It also lets users to personalize a lineup of shows, these people said.

With the test, Google moves deeper into a crowded field of companies, large and small, that have been trying …

What’s next Google? Note to Google; can you guys fix Google Chrome before inventing universe search to find planets that we don’t know exist yet?

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How Important Is Owning Your Personal Name As A Domain Name?

More and more I’m seeing people buy up their name as an URL (ie. JohnSmith.com, MarthaBartha.net, etc.). Is this just for the sake of vanity or is there a real purpose to it?

By way of full disclosure, I have an URL that represents my name. I went for AllenTaylor.com, but it was already taken. Therefore, I settled for the more specific AllenLeeTaylor.com, using my middle name. I’ve seen some people take their name with a .me extension.

I do think there is a good reason for doing this. For me, it’s a matter of reputation management, but that’s not all. I also believe it’s a good branding tool, particularly for creative people.

In terms of reputation management, you’ll have a better chance at ranking for your name as a keyword if you use your name as a domain name. Google now will only rank a couple of pages per domain for any keyword search term. If the search term is your name then what will searchers find? Your company site should be at the top of the list and you’ll likely have a few social networks on the list as well. A personal domain name should be on that list too.

If you have three social networks, your company website, a blog and your own personal domain name then that’s a potential 12 top spots on Google. Since there are only 10 page 1 listings this increases your chances of being at the top pretty considerably. That’s effective reputation management.

But how about personal branding? I’m a writer. I write SEO content, ghostwrite blogs and write fiction and poetry. I have also worked as a journalist. A personal domain name with a CV and portfolio is a good marketing tool. While I still have to develop my domain name, I am looking forward to the day that it is actually drawing in some new business and fans. That day should not be far off.

On personal domain names, you can count me in favor. I’m sold.

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Google Chrome Stalls Again

You know, I wasn’t sure what I would blog about today, but Google made my mind up for me. I’m using my IE browser to write this blog post because Google Chrome once again, stalled for no reason.

What do I mean by stalling? I type web addresses into the address bar and hit enter . . . and wait . . . and wait . . . nothing. I can’t even go to Google.

This happens a couple of times per day. I thought it was some kind of cache problem because it usually happens after I’ve had it open all day while working. But this morning it happened on about the third time I tried to use it.

Google says they can handle running DNS for millions of people through their Google DNS initiative. If they can’t serve up their own browser consistently, there is no way ICANN should work with them to run people’s DNS.

What does one have to do with the other? It comes down to server abilities. Google Chrome has no way for you to set your own cache limits. I assume that is because they are preset and the Google Chrome Browser depends on their servers to carry the load.

I may have it totally wrong. If I am, I hope there are some programmers or IT people that can tell me why Google Chrome stalls the way it does.

Ok, a search found this thread. It says to do the following;

 If you run the latest dev build with the command line –new-safe-browsing, the issue should be resolved. To do so, follow these steps:

You can add the command line flag to shortcut used to launch Google Chrome by:

1. Right click the Google Chrome icon on the Windows Quick Launch bar or desktop shortcut

2. Select “Properties”

3. Choose the “Shortcut” tab

4. Add –new-safe-browsing to the “Target” field after chrome.exe

5. Click OK

6. Restart Google Chrome from the shortcut you just modified

7. Make sure that “Enable phishing and malware protection” is checked (wrench menu –> “Options” –> “Under the hood”)