Basically, to give you the Reader’s Digest version (is that only a Canadian saying?), I was upset over the apparent hypocrisy of Google and their actions toward PayPerPost a few years back. It was wrong on so many levels that they would allow this to go on after their strong stance against bloggers using this same tactic.

A few days after the news broke, Google DID take action against their cultural affiliate. Google Japan, previously a PR9 site, has now been knocked down to PR5.

Wow. That’s an absolutely HUGE page rank hit. But does that really mean anything? It’s not like they’re a small time blogger selling advertising space  (where ad prices are often determined by PR). And it’s become increasingly apparent that page rank only plays a minor role in determining placement in SERPs. So, again, does this really mean anything?

Well, yes and no. Yes, because Google is publicly abiding by their own rules. They are showing the rest of the blogging world that they are not above the law. And no, since Google Japan will go on promoting their service, as PR means little to the Google Japan site. The only way this reduction will affect GJ is by reducing their Google search traffic.

I see this whole strange situation as a big publicity stunt. Think about it this way: Google wants to gain exposure in Japan whose current number one search engine is Yahoo. So they go out and buy a bunch of “followed” links, in violation of their own terms of service, which states that all paid reviews must have full disclosure and the “nofollow” attribute placed on outgoing links. The nofollow attribute… which Yahoo ignores anyway… Yahoo, the search engine they are trying to overtake and gain exposure on… Does anyone else see the issue here? They could have easily gained their exposure AND obeyed their own internal rules, bypassing this whole mess… Planned perhaps? Maybe they are just taking the Wildean maxim to heart - “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about”. But that’s probably just the conspiracy lover in me talking

I don’t doubt that more internal reprimands were handed out other than the public PR drop. I wouldn’t mind reading the Google exec emails from this little indiscretion. They would have been nice and juicy.

Here is an interesting interview with Matt Cutts by WebProNews dealing with the subject. And of course, the original news breaker, Akky Akimot’s update.

And finally, something interesting to note… CyberBuzz, somewhat unknown before this incident had to play damage control themselves. Akky stated that, according to a new press release Cyberbuzz

Do not offer to pay cash as compensation for bloggers to write blog articles.
Do not provide a paid-link program for the purpose of raising positions on SERP and PageRank.

Hah. Nice try. I’m not actually sure if they suffered the same drop in PR that was given out to Google Japan. Judging by their current PR of 5, I would guess that they probably dodged that bullet, but we will find out for sure after the next update.

First we have “How To Become A Blogging Pro” by Doug Champigny. He explains everything from:

• What the four best Web 2.0 bookmarking sites are for driving incredible traffic in your direction.
• How best to build your blog.
• THE single best platform to blog from.
• How to choose a the keywords you’ll be focusing your blog around.
• How to implement those keywords in a way that HELPS your readers and YOUR income.
• Where Best To Host Your Blogs – and include a video showing you how to set up your blog in 5 minutes on those sites…

Next we have “Real World Traffic Strategiees: How To Significantly Increase Your Website Traffic In 1 Hour A Day“. Through this eBook you will learn:

• Cut development time to a minimum
• Outlined and developed a worksheet to allow you to work out your niche and keywords
• Suggested the best social networking sites
• Explained what the ‘diggenomenon’ is, and why its both a good thing, and a bad thing
• Why working on social networking sites means that you’ve got to allow the community to rate you

And finally we have “Secrets of High Profit Websites: How To Set Up You Site For Maximum Profitability“. Through this eBook you can learn:

• How to Write Keyword-Enriched Content for Your Website
• Why Free Keyword Analyzers are a Waste of Time
• Why You Need To Include Links to Other Websites
• The Best Ways To Get Tons of One-Way Incoming Links
• How Search Engine Robots REALLY view Link Exchanges
• How to Avoid Getting Penalized From Search Engines
• Site Submission: Is it Necessary?
• How Buying Advertising Space Can Give You a Boost In Search Engine Listings

We are offering all three of these eBooks and their corresponding landing pages to our great readers free of charge, in another great Free Friday Giveaway. If you have something that you would like given away on our blog, please contact us – we are always looking for great freebies.

If you enjoy our free offers, please consider subscribing to our RSS feed to be sure to receive early notice about our weekly giveaways. Or, why not leave a comment thanking us! We would appreciate that

Download insideWebmaster – Free Friday Giveaway for 02-27-09.zip…

I just finished reading a very interesting post from a few years ago. It was written in late 1996, titled Marissa Mayer at Web 2.0. The post revolved around experiments Google did a few years prior, where a marketing survey revealed that users would prefer more search results per page. So Google, being the good company that they are, tried just that. They took a focus group and increased the search results to 30 instead of the usual 10. What they found was quite interesting.

They found that when they increased the results to 30, the total searches performed and revenue from searches dropped off by a whopping 20%!

But why so much? Well, it’s really quite simple. Marissa explained the the page with 10 results took .4 seconds to generate whereas the page with 30 results took .9 seconds. That’s a half second difference. This means that a half second would cause a twenty percent drop in revenue for Google

If that’s what it would do for Google, imagine what it will do for your site. Still think you can overlook your website load times? Not a chance.

So, How Fast Does Your Website Load?

There are numerous free web tools available to test the speed of your website. Each has it’s own pros and cons, but all essentially do the same thing – they attempt to load your page and time the results. The only differences are in the presentation and a few extra bells and whistles.

Pingdom Tools

This is by far the best free load time tester.They test the time by loading the complete HTML page including all the objects found within (ie. all CSS, JS, images, Flash, and any iframes). It does this by imitating a normal browser and loading the page. They offer a visual report of the time taken by each individual object from the page, through the use of a simple bar graph.

Every test report also lists the general statistics about the page including the total number of objects, total load time, total size, and number of external objects. Here is a sample report (for insideWebmaster.com):

Try it out at Pingdom Tools – Full page test or take a look at how insideWebmaster fared.

Web Page Analyzer

Another excellent tool available from the guys at Website Optimization is the Web Page Analyzer. It is basically the same as the Pingdom tester, they both test object download times, the main difference is in the layout. This tester has stuck with html tables rather than the fancy graphics used by Pingdom.

One large advantage this tool has over its competitor are the recommendations offered at the end of the report. Using their own guidelines and trends, the report offers some tips on how to trim down the size of your website, in order to gain better load times. Here is a sample report (again, for insideWebmaster):

You can try this out at Web Page Analyzer.

How Can I Lower My Website Load Times?

So, you’ve determined that your site loads slowly and you want to know what you can do about it. If you’re like me, and you use a shared web hosting service (and don’t want to change), then you probably don’t have any access to the server. But don’t worry, there are still many things we can do to optimize our website loading times. We just need to focus on how our website loads instead. Let’s begin.

Keep Your JavaScript And CSS In Their Own Files. There are many great reasons for why you should keep your style and content separate, but here’s a great one. If your style is defined within your content, then every time you update your blog, all of your style will be downloaded as well. However, if instead you keep your style contained in a separate CSS file, then a regular reader would have no need to download this alongside your newest blog posting. They would already have this information cached in their system. The same goes for your javascript files. By keeping them separate, visitors will have them cached for future use.

Fewer, More Optimized Images. Count your images. How many are there? Now ask yourself if you REALLY need each and every one. By cutting down on your total number of images, you can save a lot of waste. Additionally, if you are still creating your image files with MSPaint, then it may be time for an upgrade. Most high-end graphics editing platforms have special algorithms designed for saving images which will be used on web pages. When I first began developing websites, I had never heard of this feature. Through the “Save For Web & Devices” (check under the “File” menu) functionality in Photoshop, I was able to cut down the size of my photos by HALF. Seriously.

Don’t Rely On Other Websites. Disqus, I’m looking at you. While it may seem nice to outsource your comments, or to host images on another server, this also means that you now depend on them. Instead of just one server to worry about, you now have 2, 3, or 4. If their servers are acting sluggish, then you’ll feel the effects too. Or worse, If any of them go down, then you’re left with missing images, or a layout that doesn’t quite look right, or maybe even no comments at all.

Easy On The Flash. Flash may look nice, but that look comes at a serious price. I don’t like looking at loading bars, especially when they last more than 3 or 4 seconds. If your flash doesn’t load in fewer than four seconds (or if you don’t offer a non-flash alternative), then you benefit by looking into some alternatives.

Kick Those Errors. Any errors a browser encounters will drastically increase the amount of time a chunk of code takes to execute, and can potentially leave nasty looking error messages lying around your site. Any time the server spends in error processing is time it’s not spending rendering your page.

Server-Side Page Caching. The idea behind this is to cache a page on the server rather than on the browser. This allows your server to save the web page in its memory so that it won’t have to access the disk as much in order to show the page (thus saving time). For instance, say your website shows a number of popular tags which may take multiple SQL queries in order to build, if you have a spike in traffic this will potentially create huge strain on the processor, which causes the access times to increase. By creating a cached (or static) HTML page, which only updates every so often, then that resource strain will be created far less often. This may just be enough to allow your server to remain active during heavy use times, and best of all, it will increase download times dramatically.

Conclusion

You may have noticed that insideWebmaster isn’t exactly the quickest loading page either (~7 seconds). And yes, I’ll admit, I’m guilty of using too many images on top of slightly extravegant javascript/AJAX code. In the end it’s ultimately a trade off. If you think you’ll lose more readers than you could bring in by changing your website, then don’t do it. If you have quality content to offer, people will wait for it. And I hope that I have content people are willing to wait 7 seconds for…

Inuit, the owner of Quicken Online, has sent a letter to the CEO of Mint.com, requesting (rather aggressively) a definition of their use of the term “users” in their advertising claims that they gain “3000 new users daily”.

They say in their letter that

“While we do not wish to suggest that Mint.com is engaging in false advertising, the substantial difference in claimed user numbers over a short period time [from 600,000 to 800,000] is of some concern. As a result, we’re requesting that you provide us with the Substantiation and evidence that you rely upon to support the above reference claims. In particular, we would like an explanation regarding Mint.com’s use of the term ‘users’.”

So again I ask, how do you know you’re doing well? You have the competition scrambling. Mint responds to this letter the way you would expect them to. By being gracious, thanking them for their interest in Mint, and explaining that they view a user as anyone who as anyone who has

“signed up for Mint.com providing an email, zip code, & password, minus any users who have explicitly closed their account”

They have obviously chosen not to include anyone who has signed up but has not yet linked a bank account (I would be included in this group) – but that is understandable and rather common. On soLinkable I includeevery created account as a user, even those who haven’t activated their accounts.

Good for Mint. They clearly came out on top of this little scuffle. Quicken did more harm than good by calling them out. Instead of catching Mint, all they did was draw more attention to their success. While Quicken spokesman Scott Gulbransen attempted damage control afterward, claiming that their letter was a “simple request to understand how they count their users” and that “businesses do this all the time”, the damage was already done. They also tried to throw in their own user numbers, but again, too little, too late.

Here is the official Quicken Online letter sent to the CEO of Mint:

mintpdf1 – Free Legal Forms

And here is the Mint.com reply:

mintpdf2 – Free Legal Forms

All 5 eBooks revolve around the blogging/article marketing theme. They are mainly aimed at beginners just getting into the business, but even seasoned veterans may enjoy the read.

Of course all 5 contain master resale rights. Feel free to modify, re-write, or leave them the way they are. Either way, these will be a great addition to your eBook library.

The file “insideWebmaster – Free Friday Giveaway for 02-20-09.zip” contains:

• 15 Of The Biggest Marketing Questions
• Advanced SEO techniques
• Bum Marketing Secrets Revealed
• Massive-Blog-Traffic-PLR
• Online Marketing Course

If you enjoy our free offers, please consider subscribing to our RSS feed to be sure to receive early notice about our weekly giveaways. Or, why not leave a comment thanking us! We would appreciate that

Download insideWebmaster – Free Friday Giveaway for 02-20-09.zip…