OK this is not exactly new news, but it appears that this MAJOR LEAGUE news slipped below the radar, and it could have a devastating effect on AdSense publishers who are not aware.
Thousands of people will be reading forum threads about using images placed alongside AdSense, many threads will even include emails from Google AdSense team confirming this is OK. But here is the thing.
IT HAS ALL CHANGED!
Many people have been running around screaming ‘woe is me, I am undone’ and ‘My poor family how will I live with the shame of telling them I have been PR Zeroed by Google?'’
WHY is this Old Welsh Guy’ I hear you ask, and a damn fine question it is as well 
For those of you who are wondering what on earth PR0 means, I ask you how on EARTH did you find your way hear LOL. The answer is that PR (PageRank) is the system Google uses for measuring the importance of a page (not to be confused with where the page ranks in a search, this is a different beast with over 150 elements combining to decide, with PR being one of them).
Anyhow back to the matter in hand. I have a rugby forum that has been PR zeroed. It still ranks top or close to the top for the phrase ‘rugby forum’ and traffic is as high as ever (in fact it has gone up).
So to those worrying about how they will feed their families now they have lost their PR I say ‘Worry not my friends, for PR is nothing, and Google is currently Updating’.
I will tell you the story of the two Bulls.
Once upon a time there were two bulls. The bulls one day were at the top of hill when the young bull noticed the cows were coming into the field. “why don’t we run down there and make love to one of them cows” said the young bull. ”
“How about we WALK down, and have them all” said the Old bull
The moral is not to worry, it is a situation that is not harming rankings, so it is nothing to worry about (unless you sell PR based links of course in which case you should be forced to dress up as a cow and meet the two bulls in the story above)
Back in work now, Christmas is over (i went to an Epiphany service today in church and the carols seemes SOOOO last year so it must be 
)
Work is here, 2006 has gone, 2007 is here, and to mark the occasion my good friend Matt has finally launched a blog (no doubt a new years resolution along with
1. lose weight
2. get the big promotion
3. reduce the credit card bills
4. have less sex!
OK I lied about reducing the credit card bills .
Anyhow Matt’s blog is now live and ready to roll. so please let me know if he stops posting so I can slap him around a bit on his Internet marketing forum where I moderate.
Is it any good? Well I moderate there so at least you can be sure that there will be plenty of off topic stuff going on.
Well folks it sems like DMOZ has gone forever! A post on Rich Skrentas blog (founder of DMOZ) says
Apparently the machine holding dmoz in AOL ops crashed. Standard backups had been discontinued for some reason; during unsuccessful attempts to restore some of the lost data, ops blew away the rest of the existing data on the system.
So for the past 6 weeks, a few folks have been trying to patch the system back together again (reverse engineering from the latest RDF dump, I suppose). But 6 weeks is a very long outage. Add in the massive AOL layoffs last week, and it’s not clear if there’s even any left over there who cares. Even if some form of the ODP editing system is brought back, the likelihood of continued existence within AOL seems extremely doubtful.
dmoz doesn’t exactly operate on a model of transparency, to say the least, so they have been keeping the details of what happened private. Perhaps they’re concerned about an exodus of the remaining editors, or gleeful proclamations of death from the SEM industry. The remaining ODP editors will probably be mad at me for discussing this, but they get mad at me whenever I talk about the ODP….ironic! :-) Hey guys, it’s 2006, open up.
read more at his blog…
Danny Sullivan yesterday wrote his final post on Search engine watch. It is of course his goodbye speach, but it was not goodbye and thanks for all the fish, indeed it was upbeat, and is a tribute the professionalism that Danny has.
read it here
Lately I am getting a lot of emails about SEO tools, bought, free online and offline. Questions range from “is this worth the money” to “will this get me to number 1 on Google”. This has brought me to the conclusion that I should add a product and services review on this blog, and also on my website!
The first product I will be reviewing will be Karon Thakstons Copy-writing Course To be honest I can’t wait to review this product (and another she has provided me with), as I have heard good things about it!
Here is the thing though, I intend to write no nonsense reviews of products, I am now asking anyone to let me know of any tools, websites, online or offline services like directory submissions etc, and I will review them here on the blog. If the tool is your own then please let me know as it will make life easier when I have to contact you to answer any potential questions I might have. Feel free though to propose other peoples products or services.
Hopefully we can build up a good resource for ourselves, and others.
I would like to add that even though there are affiliate schemes with some of the products I will be reviewing, I will not be including affiliate links from the site, as I feel it might be seen to undermine my objectivity.
So either suggest here, email me, or use the contact form on this site.
Is Google raising the LSI element in the algo? I have thought for a while now that Google is using some sort of semantic element in their algorithm, but now I think it has been increased. LSI will totally turn on its head the importance of on topic linking, and a lot of the sites that have ‘bombed’ their way to the top will take a hit. For those of you who do not know what Semantics is, the dictionary says…. (Read on …)
At Long last Google have decided to give webmasters the option of not using the ODP titles and description. In a blog post at the official Google site-maps blog Vanessa Fox a Google engineer said:~
“One source we use to generate snippets is the Open Directory Project, or ODP. Some site owners want to be to able to request not using the ODP for generating snippets, and we’re happy to let you all know we’ve added support for this. All you have to do is add a meta tag to your pages.”
So if you want to kill the DMOZ title and description, then use the following:-
About a week ago, Google started to roll out an update to their PPC quality score algorithm. That’s right I said ‘update’ not introduced the thing in its entirety. The Google quality Score system has been around for a while now. August 2005 to be precise, when it was announced that the following would affect your bids
Keyword’s clickthrough rate (CTR)
Relevance of your ad text
Historical keyword performance on Google
And other relevancy factors (more Google hidden sauce.
It was updated in December 05 when they started to introduce the landing page into the algo.
All of this is absolutely fine, because after all we expect to find relevant content at the end of a click, be it free or paid listings, relevancy is and always will be king in the world of search. But from around July 4 06 Google twisted the knife by altering the minimum bids of advertisers where they think their Google quality Score is too low. There is of course an almighty backlash across forums as advertisers who bid on low traffic low cost keywords/phrases see their minimum bids raise in some cases from $0.20 to $5.00, effectively pricing them out of the marketplace.
The question on everyone’s lips though is WHY. Officially Google say
“From time-to-time, we improve our algorithms for evaluating landing page quality (often based on feedback from our end-users), and next week we’re launching another such improvement. Thus, over the coming days a small number of advertisers who are providing a low quality user experience on their landing pages will see increases in their minimum bids. It is important to note, however, that the vast majority of advertisers will not be affected at all by this change, as they link to quality landing pages.” taken from here
Most people are saying that this is a direct attack on poor quality landing pages that are using Arbitrage (buying low cost AdWords, delivering them to a page with AdSense ads on and making money by people clicking on the higher priced AdSense ads.) If this is the case, then WHY are Google not simply removing these pages from its AdWords system? WHY are Google not enforcing the quality guidelines that say do not make pages just for AdSense. WHY are Google not altering their terms and conditions to make it unacceptable to deliver AdWords traffic to pages carrying AdSense? OR simply introduce a system where if the visitor is referred from AdWords then the AdSense click is not charged or credited. ALL of these things would result in this tactic being removed, but NOT A SINGLE genuine advertiser would be affected.
Another consideration is the landing page quality? Many PPC professionals use highly optimised landing pages (as you should) and part of this results in constant tweaking of these pages until they get to their optimum for the advert. (YES 2000 adverts might well result in 2000 landing pages, masses of work, but when you see the conversion ratio double, triple, quadruple and more, it is well worth it.) As these pages are tweaked, it is possible to have almost identical pages, and, as a result of this, top pro’s block the spiders from them. They are there SIMPLY for PPC, and NOT as part of the organic SEO, they are an SEM tool. SO how then are Google going to run their algorithm on a page they are not allowed to spider?
I have sent the following request to AdWords support
“Since you rolled out the quality score minimum bid increase that is focused (amongst other things) on the landing page, this has set alarm bells ringing in my head. Although I do not personally run Adwords myself, I do handle accounts for many of my clients, one of which is spending about $30k a month. My main concern is that as many of these landing pages are tweaked and developed to increase conversions, they often become close to duplicate, and anyhow as they are part of the PPC pages we do not want them to be treated as potential doorway pages or as part of the site (as they are not). For this reason we exclude robots from them.
My question is short and simple. How can you evaluate the quality of these landing pages when you are blocked from viewing them by spidering? Will the blocking result in a set score for this element, and will it affect the overall quality score.
I look forward to your reply, and will be posting the reply across the forums to help ease the worries of myself and others.
Regards
James”
Interesting to see what they say about this.
There are also rumblings of unacceptable business practice that might well be illegal in the UK & Europe (companies MUST have a clear and transparent charging structure, charging what you like to different people is not acceptable there) One thing is for certain though, while this might improve the quality slightly there are going to be an awful lot of people large and small who are going to be mighty peeved over the increase in minimum bids.
Odd goings on in the SERPS and various data-centres are leading to some pretty wild speculation around the forums. It all started about 2 weeks or so ago when some pretty wild fluctuations were seen in the rankings. Sites jumped up for competitive phrases, while other sites just disappeared. I have to report that my own and my client sites were those who benefited (which is always nice to report).
Then over the weekend went out the cry of ‘PageRank update’ yippee cried some with any luck I can get another step on the dumbass greenbar and charge people more for my page rank , (oops I mean ‘charge people more for high value advertising real estate and pick your own anchor text but it is nothing to do with link mongering, and of course I would never use the nofollow tag)
PR update was the order of the day. THEN things started happening, whispers in the night!
GOOGLE DON’T DIGG.COM NO MORE
No this was not an ageing hippies convention they were referring to the fact that digg.com was showing a PR ZERO on many datacentres. But digg.com is the darling of the web, say it isn’t so 
Then came the rumours, has Google broken the toolbar PR? is pr reporting the latest SEO tool to go the way of site: link: etc ? it makes sense to this old Welsh bloke that Google should disable toolbar PR as it serves no purpose. For those who don’t know let me explain. Google has 2 sets of PR
1. Toolbar pr which is a simple snapshot value gathered periodically, and has absolutely no part in the ranking process whatsoever.
2. Server side PR. THIS is the PR value that integrates with the indexing and ranking algorithms. This value is in a constant state of flux as pages are indexed, or de-indexed during the daily cycle that is google everflux.
Google has created this monster called PageRank, and like Frankensteins monster before it, this monster has turned ugly. In the early days, people linked to sites because they were a good resource that complimented their own page/site. Then people got the PR bug, and suddenly ‘link to anything with a long green bar’ is the order of the day. Sell high pr links
So the question remains, what exactly IS going on at Google, and is everything coming up roses at the plex (or is that just Matts house) ?