Well, Google’s said before that PageRank isn’t of much importance, and there’s more evidence today that the company continues to back that assertion.  Google has removed the PageRank section from its Google Webmaster Tools resource.

Googler Susan Moskwa explained in a Google Webmaster Help thread, “We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true.  We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.”

That makes a fair amount of sense.  Of course, there’s a difference between “not the most important metric” and “worth torpedoing,” so a lot of people may still miss the PageRank info.  A small detail can make a big difference in a tight traffic or ranking race.

Still, the move keeps everybody on an even footing, so it’s not like much is getting lost or gained.  This might just simplify everything, which would be nice.

By the way: Barry Schwartz notes that, oddly, PageRank values are still visible in the Google Toolbar.

We’ll admit right here: times are tough, conferences are not cheap, and New York City won’t be the most pleasant place to be come November.  However, an interesting conference is indeed coming up, and you can continue reading for details.

The Content Revenue Strategies (CRS) conference and expo is what used to be known as ADSPACE.  It’s focused on AdSense and contextual advertising, and aimed at small- to mid-size publishers.  Sound familiar and/or fitting?

Representatives from eBay, AOL, Reebok, and the Wall Street Journal will all be present to share their insight.  What’s more, so will members of Google’s AdSense team, so some of the advice will come straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

CRS will take place on November 5th in New York, and early bird passes (available through tomorrow) are supposed to cost $395.  Use the promotional code CRSGoogle to get $100 off and soften the blow, though.

We’ll try to cover the most useful tidbits that come out of CRS, but nothing can quite replace being there, asking questions and making contacts.  Consider looking up info about old ADSPACE conferences if you’re on the fence, at least.

Your humble author has a soft spot in his heart for forums; they provide invaluable education and entertainment concerning cars.  And now it looks like forums are due for a comeback, as Google may make it worth your while to start promoting brands on them once again.

Last night, a post on the Official Google Blog revealed, “[W]e introduced a new search feature that makes it easier for you to find forum posts or discussions related to what you’re searching for.  This new addition to Google search results applies to sites that tend to have a large number of posts on a specific topic.  When several different discussions on a site are relevant to your query, we indent them under the primary result and include the date of each post.”

So essentially, forum threads appear to be getting an SEO promotion, perhaps over other sites and blogs (depending on the situation).

Please don’t take this as a suggestion to troll forums, of course; forum moderators might simply ban you.  Or, if someone clicks through to a forum thread and sees nothing but self-promotion, no good will come of it.  It may just be wise to join some forums and become a member of the community, contributing when you can.

Don’t forget to spend time on a couple of car forums, too, if only because they’re so much fun.

Situational awareness (AKA knowing what the heck is happening around you) is invaluable in many high-risk fields; soldiers and racecar drivers, for example, need to know what’s next to and behind them at all times.  This week’s article, which touches on registered domain names, will hopefully provide you with some similar info.

Verisign, which takes care of things relating to the .com and .net top-level domains, recently released a quarterly report.  A Royal Pingdom post states, “Counting all TLDs there are now 184 million registered domain names (to be precise, this was the number at the midpoint of 2009).”

The post later continues, “There are now 74.4 million country code TLDs (ccTLDs), which means that 40% of all registered domain names are ccTLDs.”

And finally, “An interesting trend revealed by the Verisign report is that the renewal rate for domain names has been decreasing for some time now, at least for .com and .net domain names.”

So there’s an idea of what’s going on in the wide world.  Given how massive some of these numbers are, the situation may sound scary, but if you think about how many actual competitors you’ve got, it should hopefully become apparent that you’re already head and shoulders above many, many things without even trying.

Just about everybody wants more money.  Just about everybody also wants to work less.  With Google Web Elements, which was just introduced this week, the famous search giant should be able to help you on both fronts.

A post on the Inside AdSense blog stated, “You may know from our optimization tips that you can help increase your AdSense revenue by incorporating other Google products into your site. . . .  Web Elements let you easily add richness and interactivity to your site simply by copying and pasting a snippet of code.”

It then explained, “Inspired by the convenience of embeddable YouTube videos, each Web Element is built upon existing Google products. . . .  With the official launch of Web Elements, you can choose to include Web Elements from products like Google Custom Search, Calendar, Docs, Friend Connect, and more.”

Basically, then, you’ll wind up with a bit more filled space on your site - free of charge, of course - and the filler might act to catch people’s attention and earn you cash.

Google Web Elements is definitely worth a look.  Entities ranging from the Associated Press to an Italian heavy metal fan site have made use of the offering, so you should be able to, as well.

Twitter’s loss is your gain.  Facebook introduced a tagging feature using the “@” symbol that, while pretty similar to what Twitter’s employed for some time now, should help you get your site or blog in front of a few more eyes.

A post on the Facebook Blog explains, “[W]hen you are writing a status update and want to add a friend’s name to something you are posting, just include the ‘@’ symbol beforehand.  As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications and Pages.  Soon, you’ll be able to tag friends from applications as well.  The ‘@’ symbol will not be displayed in the published status update or post after you’ve added your tags.”

Then here’s the key point: “Friends you tag in your status updates will receive a notification and a Wall post linking them to your post.”

So you can give people what they may consider “shout outs,” but at the same time, be sure that they and their friends see your name.  This may get old after a while, of course, yet there should be a window of time during which you can take advantage of it.

Meanwhile, it looks like Facebook’s taken another one of Twitter’s edges away, so people who market themselves on that site may want to at least think about some backup plans.

Here’s an interesting - if rather sleazy - idea in the event that you try to do a ton of self-promoting on Facebook: rather than waste weeks or months building up a solid fan base, just buy friends from a business known as uSocial.

All right - we can’t, in all honesty, recommend that you embrace this option.  But it’s available if you want it.  A press release announced today, “uSocial.net — the company who recently began selling followers on Twitter — has just launched a new suite of services for Facebook, enabling people to purchase friends and fans depending on their needs.”

Packages start at $177.30 for 1,000 friends or fans.  You can buy 5,000 or 10,000 contacts at a time, too, if you want.

The idea is that you’ll be able to turn these people into customers of some sort, thereby recouping your investment and profiting, too.  Buyer beware (and we mean you, not them).  Yet presumably at least a couple of folks have had success doing this, or uSocial wouldn’t be in business.

And at least now, if you don’t bite and a competitor suddenly gets a gazillion friends, you’ll know what happened and not have reason to be jealous.

Tracking visitor habits and knowing much more about what is attracting and retaining visitors has led to many new types of systems for recording more personal information. It’s only for marketing use as companies need to know their visitors - are they potential customers or visiting by mistake? It began with tracking via cookies many years ago which record visitor settings and personal preferences.

Back in July, the U.S. government looked at changing the law on cookies by allowing them to be placed on user machines going against the law forbidding that action back in 2000. The law which is still being discussed is open to general discussion at http://www.whitehouse.gov/open.

Visitor trackers are powerful social media tools as they gather statistics that is presented in an analytical report. Tracking tools have become a core marketing tool for all businesses today.

One example of a tool that is very popular right now is Google Analytics which shows full analytical reports on visitors - pages read and stats on traffic, etc.

Google Analytics provides full reporting on your visitor stats

These tools are needed to be able to:

1. Observe ways to improve traffic

2. Gain real-time knowledge of customer behavior

3. View reports on visitor browsing dates and times

4. Optimize content to be search engine friendly

By focusing on your chosen niche, businesses can establish expert status within their niche by finding relevant customers. The big ‘but’ here is that there is a real-time element missing from most web marketing campaigns.

What are your visitors actually doing?  That is where an effective visitor tracking system makes the difference.

It is important to understand why visitors want to browse your site and what retains them. If some leave, why did they leave?  The success of your business is dependent on your knowledge of your surfing customers looking for products and services like yours.

The advantage is that bad site trends such as - why was that skipped, the form was not filled in, or gone in 60 seconds and never to return - can be prevented every day. One current popular tool for allowing you to accomplish this task is Clicktale which does exactly that. You can record visitor sessions for playback in your browser at any time.

So, to summarize:

1. Visitor tracking systems allow you to record browsing sessions and gain a real-time view of what is interesting or perplexing to visitors.

2. The importance of tracking lies within knowing what interests your visitors. What do they want? What do they really want from your site?

3. You may have asked yourself - Why did no conversions occur last month?  Traffic does not mean conversions.  Is the traffic relevant? Are your visitors finding your site as a result of a relevant search on Google?

4. Did you try to dupe your visitors into your web site using unrelated content? You will be sure to see a recording lasting a few seconds.

5. What is wrong with your site? You have done all the SEO optimization tasks - blogs, high traffic articles, great bios, slick copywriting on landing pages. So why are your conversions so low? Did a page fail to load?

By observing your target audience you become fully aware of your visitor browsing habits. This will allow you to gain an accurate insight on how to improve your site usability.

Tools that allow you to record visitor browsing sessions will prevent loss of customers by allowing access to a real-time view of your visitors so issues can be corrected before they damage your business conversions.

Although, strictly speaking, this article won’t help you earn more money with Google AdSense, we suspect you’ll enjoy its contents just the same.  That’s because it contains the news that publishers from other networks will now sometimes compete with regular AdWords advertisers for your ad space.

Google’s been informing AdSense publishers of this change with emails today (apologies if you’ve received one already).  It appears to mean that there’ll be a significantly larger group of entities competing for the opportunity to sell your visitors something and pay you a bit of money.

Better still, Google wrote, “[W]e’re certifying all participating ad networks for adherence to our standards for user privacy, ad quality, and speed. You’ll also have control over which networks can show ads on your pages - you can choose to opt out of receiving ads from specific networks, or all networks completely.”

So your blog or site shouldn’t wind up with any ads you don’t like as a result of the development.

Here’s hoping this’ll open the door to a glorious new era of rich AdSense users.  Or at least result in a few more dollars heading for your bank account every month.

People who want to promote things using YouTube are in luck, as we’re returning to that subject this week.  Moreover, rather than random advertising reps who dabble and pick up lessons here and there, the advice comes straight from YouTube employees who get to see everything that goes on.

Matthew Yeomans and Bernhard Warner are responsible for YouTube Brandwatch, a blog that reports on how companies use YouTube to their advantage.  There’s a big opportunity for individuals to get a head start in this area, as they agreed, “[T]he majority of major brands remain tone-deaf to the power and influence of a medium like YouTube despite the fact that it has a community of millions that interacts with it on a daily basis.”

So here’s the problem: “They are putting the videos up, but providing so little detail about how it’s made, who’s in it, what’s that music playing in the background.  For now, the YouTube community is going in and filling in these holes in the detail, but we rarely hear from the marketers again after they post the ad.  In effect, they are abandoning their most attentive followers.”

Try to stay in touch, then.  And note that this doesn’t mean you have to exhaust yourself producing new videos on a daily or even weekly basis; you can just swing by the comments section to answer questions or thank fans.

YouTube remains free, of course, so doing this is really one of the cheapest possible ways to promote something.