Anyway, toolbar PageRank has been updated. Some things I’ve noticed:

• This blog is still a PR=5, as it’s been for a year or more now.
• SEMMYS.org debuts at PR=5.
• MattMcGee.com, my new personal blog, debuts with a PR=2.
• Inexplicably, my U2 site — which was a PR=6 two cycles ago, and then went to PR=5 — is now down to a PR=4. I looked at several of the other leading U2 sites/blogs, and they’ve also dropped a notch. Very weird. Maybe that’s because they haven’t put out an album in four freakin’ years! (Can you tell I’m grumpy about it?)
• My wife’s site and blog are both still PR=3.
• Four new blogs we just launched within the last month or two are showing no TBPR. They’re too new.
• My Flickr photo stream home is still a PR=5.
• Twitter.com is a PR=8. Wow. Has it always been that high?

Remember, much like WWE Wrestling and the sports betting lines published in your daily paper, Toolbar PageRank exists for entertainment purposes only. If you’d like a reminder of what real PageRank is and what it means, Danny S. covered it all last year:

What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Not That It Matters: Toolbar PageRank was Updated

It would be more un-evil if you would make it easier to opt out of that new data sharing “feature” (your word) that you recently added to Google Analytics. I tend to be much more forgiving of you than some of my friends, so please let me share a few suggestions.

Let’s start with this screen, the one I see when I login to an existing Google Analytics account:

You give me a nice, big “ACCEPT” button … so how about adding an equally big “NO, THANKS” button? As it stands now, it’s like I don’t have a choice but to accept. Well, I do have a choice, but it’s just a small text link a couple inches to the right of the call to action, buried in between two other links that make my eyes glaze over. Not good.

Secondly, when I’m making a new account for my wife, I stumbled on this:

Two suggestions: Make the data sharing stuff a little bigger so I don’t almost miss it, and don’t opt me in by default! What’s up with that? You’re like those awful sites that force me to uncheck a box so I don’t agree to be spammed halfway to tomorrow. Thankfully, I noticed the little “Edit Settings” link and took care of this. (Matt McGee, FTW!)

I prefer to help rather than scold, so here’s how this data sharing thing should be implemented:

There you go — just a few suggestions. If the whole data sharing thing is as benign as you say it is, there’s no need to hide the opt-out buttons, right?

Kind regards,
Matt McGee

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Google Wants Your Analytics Data Badly (An Open Letter)

I don’t think mine counts as “weird” or “wacky”, but it is annoying. When you do a search for [U2], this is what you get:

The band’s official site just got sitelinks for the first time, and what used to be the indented second link now stays in the No. 2 position as a non-indented, regular listing.

Is that really necessary? How about once you get sitelinks, you lose the ability to have a second listing on page one? You know, just for the sake of variety and all.

(FWIW, the same thing happens when you search for [small business sem], and I think that looks bad, too, even if I’m getting the extra spot in the SERP.)

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

One Really Annoying Search Result at Google

That may seem like a “let’s throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” approach to marketing, but the numbers show that Google’s non-stop effort to promote Google Maps is working. However, I suspect it’s much more to do with what Google is doing in its main SERPs than any of the above marketing ideas; the data seems to bear witness to that.

Heather Hopkins recently shared data on the Hitwise blog that shows Google Maps is the #5 Google property in terms of traffic, accounting for 1.56% of all visits to Google properties. That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a substantial jump over numbers from 14 months ago.

Before you look at the current chart, though, let’s go back to November, 2006, and follow the growth of Google Maps from then to now.

Hitwise: November 25, 2006

The above is a Hitwise chart from late November, 2006, which shows Google Maps accounting for less than 1% of all visits to Google sites. To put this in perspective, according to the chart above, only one out of every 100 Google visitors went to Google Maps. Let’s fast forward about six months:

Hitwise: June 2, 2007

The above is a similar chart from Hitwise comparing May 12 with June 2, 2007. We’ll use the June 2 data, which shows Google Maps accounting for 1.42% of all Google visits. To continue to comparison from above, at this point one of every 49 Google visitors went to Google Maps — that’s a huge jump from late 2006. Why the increase? In early 2007, Google made a dramatic change in showing Maps content in its regular Google.com SERPs. That was followed a couple months later by further Maps integration thanks to Universal Search. And finally, here’s the chart Hitwise just posted last week:

Hitwise: January 26, 2008

The above shows Google Maps now getting 1.56% of all visits to Google properties, only a small jump from June, 2007. But it’s still progress: At this point, Google Maps now accounts for one of every 45 visits to a Google property.

Will Google Maps Continue to Grow?

In all likelihood, it will. The most recent Hitwise chart doesn’t take into account the recent change Google made to show 10 results from Google Maps on many Google.com searches. A Google spokesperson told Greg Sterling that the new display is designed specifically to promote usage of Google Maps:

Google said today that the reason it’s showing more links is because usability testing revealed that many people didn’t realize there was additional local content available beyond the three listings, despite the “more results …” prompt. Accordingly, Google said that with the 10 links it is hoping to signal people that there is much more local content a click away.

When Google made the original big change a year ago to show more Google Maps listings on Google.com, traffic to Google Maps jumped 26% in one month. Here’s another Hitwise chart showing that spike:

Here’s hoping Hitwise produces another chart like this one a few weeks from now so we can see the impact of Google’s most recent effort to lead more people into Google Maps.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Charting the Undeniable Growth of Google Maps

On November 8, I reported some staggering drops in “pages indexed” by Google for many high-profile web sites.

Today, Google announced that the supplemental index is gone.

Result? Look at these major increases in the visible pages indexed returned on a site: query:

site:citysearch.com
November 8, 2007: 759,000 pages indexed
December 19, 2007: 35,800,000 ” ”

Question: Does this mean that 98% of CitySearch.com was labeled “supplemental”?

site:amazon.com
November 8, 2007: 8,640,000 pages indexed
December 19, 2007: 40,100,000 ” ”

Does this mean 82% of Amazon.com was supplemental?

site:walmart.com
November 8, 2007: 85,800 pages indexed
December 19, 2007: 2,150,000 ” ”

96% of WalMart.com?

site:yelp.com
November 8, 2007: 307,000 pages indexed
December 19, 2007: 832,000 ” ”

73% of Yelp.com?

site:smartbargains.com
November 8, 2007: 10,600 pages indexed
December 19, 2007: 12,100 ” ”

site:overstock.com
November 8, 2007: 166,000 pages indexed
December 19, 2007: 1,900,000 ” ”

site:target.com
November 8, 2007: 106,000 pages indexed
December 19, 2007: 940,000 pages indexed

Google has added some quality signal tools to Webmaster Central, but nothing like what the data above seems to reveal about the overall health of these sites.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

What the End of Supplemental Means to You

This service isn’t open to the public yet. I’m assuming that if/when it does launch, it will function like Squidoo in this sense: When you create a Knol, you’ll get to choose the URL where your Knol will live.

So, with that in mind, here’s what you should do right away if/when Google Knol launches:

1.) Sign up and create a profile. Judging from the screenshots, it appears each author will have a profile page. That’s a potential link opportunity, and Danny notes in his SEL article that Knol links might not have the “nofollow” tag.

2.) Create a Knol about your company. You’ll want to claim your space and your URL on this service (which you should also have already done on Squidoo and other similar services). Write a great Knol about your company.

3.) Create a Knol about your primary product/service. Again, you’re claiming a URL here just as in #2. Then write a great Knol about the product/service. Don’t overdo it so much that it’s spammy; as Danny’s article addresses, they’ll be watching. Be factual and educational.

4.) Create a Knol about your hometown/city. As local search continues to grow in importance, you’ll have a great weapon at your disposal if you have a pre-eminent content page covering your geographic area. Think of it this way: You know how we always say, Get links from the local chamber of commerce and other important local sites? Well, this is your chance to build that “important local site” yourself. Make sure to choose the appropriate URL … whateverthedomainis.com/yourtownhere should be great.

Okay. That’s four completely above-board, non-spammy ways to use Knol to your advantage if/when it launches. Now, if you want to be a jerk more aggressive and don’t mind risk, here are three more:

5.) Create different Knols for all of your target cities/towns. It sounds like an invitation to spam, but hey — if you have enough time and knowledge to write 10, 20, etc., great Knols with local content, it’s not spam (in my opinion).

6.) Create a Knol using your competitor’s business name. This may or may not work. If I’m Google, I’m going to have some wording in the legal documents to try to prevent this, and promising serious repercussions for this kind of abuse. We’ll see if they do. If you get away with it, you can hold on to it as long as Google lets you claim a Knol without actually building it out. (Or you can build it out, I suppose, and write incorrect or mean stuff about them, while linking to your own business … but I’m not devious enough for that kind of thing, myself.)

7.) Create a Knol using your competitor’s product/service name. See explanation on #6.

I’ll stop there. If nothing else, be sure to do numbers one and two above, and preferably three and four also. I don’t recommend five through seven, but maybe you’re not as risk-averse as me. And maybe, if/when the service launches, there’ll be additional ways you can use it to market your expertise while being a legitimate contributor.

How else might you be able to use Google Knol?

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

7 Ways to Use Google Knol

The questions were in reference to my old post, Linkbaiting for Small Businesses (or, What I Learned Last Week), in which I detailed how I wrote and linkbaited (is that a word?) an earlier post, the original Top 21 Signs You Need a Break from SEO.

s_jenkins asked:

Do you think that ‘baiting’ gives the term ‘linkbaiting’ a bad precedence? It seems that some people think that ‘linkbaiting’ automatically means a trap of sorts. In the same breath, does Google penalize for the term ‘linkbait’?

On the first issue, there’s been a lot of discussion about the word “linkbait,” and I agree it has possibly bad connotations. At the same time, I’m a No-BS, call-a-spade-a-spade kind of guy, and linkbait certainly fits as a name. Like it or not, the word has stuck. As a search marketer, it’s my job to make sure my clients get past any negative vibes they may get from the word itself, and focus on the positive vibes of crafting successful linkbait.

Plus, linkbait isn’t really new. Linkbait is all about the hooks, and the offline media have known that for ages. Listen to the first 30 seconds of tonight’s news — that’s their version of linkbait. Think back to the kid selling papers on the street corner, shouting a headline for all to hear; that kid was baiting people to buy a paper. Look at the magazine rack next time you’re shopping and you’ll see they all do their own version of linkbait:

I just grabbed three magazines off the shelf here in my U2 shrine office. (The junk stuff my wife reads is even worse!) “Bait” is everywhere, whether we like it or not.

On the second question, does Google penalize for linkbait? Not at all. Successful linkbait should lead to relevant links, and relevant links are Google’s friends. Matt Cutts (Google spam cop) has written about linkbait a few times on his personal blog. Here’s one:

“On a meta-level, I think of ‘linkbait’ as something interesting enough to catch people’s attention, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing…. Linkbaiting sounds like a bad thing, but especially if it’s interesting information or fun, it doesn’t have to have negative connotations.”

More recently, Matt wrote about a San Diego chiropractor who has started learning “great linkbaiting techniques.”

I hope this post answers your questions, s_jenkins. And I hope you’ll share more thoughts and questions here on SBS in the future.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

What Does Google Think About Linkbait?

No, not their stock price - that’s still getting bigger. I’m talking about Google’s index.

There are a couple sites I’ve been monitoring regularly since September to see how many pages are in Google’s index. Have a look at the data:

site:citysearch.com
September 18, 2007: 13,000,000+ pages indexed
October 24, 2007: 11,000,000+ ” ”
November 5, 2007: 835,000 ” ”
November 8, 2007: 759,000 ” ”

(From 13 million down to 759,000? Ouch.)

site:yelp.com
September 18, 2007: 525,000+ pages indexed
November 5, 2007: 303,000 ” ”
November 8, 2007: 307,000 ” ”

Here are some other snapshots of pages indexed on sites I haven’t been monitoring regularly, but did check earlier in the year:

site:smartbargains.com
January 30, 2007: 36,000 pages indexed
November 8, 2007: 10,600 pages indexed

site:overstock.com
January 30, 2007: 2,120,000 pages indexed
November 8, 2007: 166,000 pages indexed

I should probably be watching pages indexed on this blog, but I’m not. I do occasionally check my U2 site, which has historically been between 40,000 and 50,000 pages indexed. Today, it’s at 39,000.

Update

Here are three more sites suffering page drops from earlier in the year:

site:target.com
January 11, 2007: 355,000 pages indexed
November 8, 2007: 106,000 pages indexed

site:amazon.com
January 11, 2007: 11,700,000 pages indexed
November 8, 2007: 8,640,000 pages indexed

site:walmart.com
January 11, 2007: 753,000 pages indexed
November 8, 2007: 85,800 pages indexed

That’s Not All!

On Search Engine Roundtable today, Barry wrote about how Google is showing fewer results for some queries. He links to an interesting discussion on WebmasterWorld where people are sharing sample queries they’ve seen as evidence.

I’d love to have time to dig into this more, but from all that’s being said, it seems pretty clear that Google is getting smaller: fewer pages indexed and fewer results being returned.

The obvious question: Why?

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Alert: Google is Shrinking

Before I go any further: I don’t have the answer to that question, and you may have noticed I made no mention of Google Checkout in my recent SEL articles about which Google products a small business should use. (Missed those? Here’s part one and part two.)

If a client asked for advice, I’d suggest research and testing to find out which is best for your situation. If I were an online retailer, I wouldn’t like the fact that using Google Checkout means I have no control over the end of the sale. The end of the transaction happens on Google, not on my web site. I can’t upsell related products, and I don’t get to add the customer to my e-mail database for follow-up communications (marketing or otherwise).

But there are other benefits to offering Google Checkout, including the low processing fees and the benefit of having a Google Checkout icon appear with an AdWords ad.

Fortunately, all of these issues and many more are covered in a terrific article by Don Davis in this month’s Internet Retailer. And the article is available on the magazine’s web site, too. Nice.

The online article is missing one important graphic from the print magazine:

After reading the article, my overriding impression is this: PayPal aims to be more business-friendly, while Google Checkout aims to be more shopper-friendly. That doesn’t answer the question of which one to use, but it suggests to me that the debate is going to continue for some time to come.

If you’re an online retailer, I’d love to get your thoughts on the Paypal vs. Google Checkout debate.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Google Checkout or Paypal? The Debate Continues…

Which Google Products Should A Small Business Use? (Part Two)

If you missed part one, there’s a link in the intro.

I also have a 3rd article in this series that I planned to post here on SBS, but the article has gone missing. Or, my dog ate it. I’ll try to piece it back together, maybe on the flight to New York Monday if I can’t get to it sooner. Sigh.

Anyway, it’s 9:00 am and I need to get to work…..

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Latest SEL Column: Google Products & Small Biz, Pt. 2