Google secretly replaced the answer.com with its own dictionary; Answer.com has more than 25 million monthly unique users. It was the source of definitions in the “definitions” link in the upper right of Google SERPs.

This will be an attention-grabbing test of Answers.com’s strength. It will undoubtedly loose considerable traffic. But according to Gil Reich VP of Product Management at Answers.com, they have grown up and have their own traffic sources and Google’s definition link was just 55 of the total traffic. Furthermore Answers.com is a public company and we’re likely to see its shares decline, I would imagine, as investors discover this change and sell.

The new Google dictionary is offering a better user experience and some nice features, such as recent searches which are tied into overall Google web search history.

Now what will happens to Answer.com is the question we are waiting to get from time?

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Google Today announced that the company was suspending Local Listing Ads, for the time being:

According to Greg Sterling at SearchEngineLand.com,

“Starting today, we will no longer accept new sign-ups for Local Listing Ads in the Local Business Center, and in mid-December, existing Local Listing Ads will stop running. This limited free trial was one of many beta tests that we develop experimentally as part of our ongoing commitment to help businesses advertise online.

We’re currently using data and feedback from the trial period to make further improvements to our online marketing offerings for small businesses, and plan to release an enhanced version more widely in the near future. In the meantime, locally-minded businesses can simply and easily promote their products and services to their local markets by using existing features within our AdWords program, such as geographic targeting and location extensions.”

Don’t forget, It’s temporary, Ads will run until mid-December and stop until 2010. when they will probably release new features, after they have analyzed all the feedback from the usage of  clicks of the ad service.

I wonder if we’re going to have to pay for the service when it’s released again. Does anyone think this will happen?

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Microsoft’s  Bing search engine suffered downtime on Thursday evening.

Visitors to Bing.com were getting a  error message when they tried to access the search page. Service was down for at least 45 minutes before being restored around 7:10 p.m. PST.

Microsoft acknowledged the issues it on its Twitter feed and said it was looking into the matter but offered no explanation.

A Microsoft representative did not immediately return an e-mail seeking comment.

The outage comes after a big week in which Microsoft announced new search abilities for Bing as well as improved mapping.

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After few months of testing and lots of debate on Google’s New Fading Home Page, Google today confirmed that it’s switching to a home page that fades in as it loads. The rest of the text and links on the home page will only appear when a user moves his/her mouse.

The Google announcement says the new home page is live now, but both new and old versions are accessible. so users check this new version and give your comments.

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Launches Sidewiki for the Google Toolbar

Google Sidewiki is a new feature of Google Toolbar that allows anyone to leave comments about pages as they surf the web. These comments can only be viewed by others who have the toolbar/sidewiki installed.

Google recommends commenter’s contribute expert insight, helpful tips, background information, and added perspective.

In the past various tools appeared which are similar in working but alas no one became popular and eventually they got disappeared. What are the chances of Google Sidewiki being used is still unknown; we can at least give it a try.

How to use Google Sidewiki

To use Google Sidewiki, you have to install the latest version of the Google Toolbar for either Internet Explorer or Firefox. And enable the enhanced version of toolbar, this means allowing the toolbar to report back to Google about all the pages you view. If Google doesn’t know the page you’re visiting, it can’t send back any Sidewiki information that’s available. It’s not new for the toolbar to send information back to Google, as to view the page rank you have to accept their advance privacy policy in which they gather the information about you.

Google Sidewiki

You’ve Got Sidewiki!

If you are Comfortable with tracking, then here’s what you see with Sidewiki enabled, when you come to a page that has Sidewiki information associated with it. In this example, view the comments on the Google home page itself:

sidewiki comments on Google

All Comments Are Not Created Equal

What comments are shown on pages, and in what order? This is Google Secret.  Read Google Official Line:-

“Using multiple signals based on the quality of the entry, what we know about the author, and user-contributed signals such as voting and flagging, we work hard to ensure that only the highest quality, most relevant entries appear in the sidebar.” Most of the engineering work for Sidewiki was dedicated to this ranking algorithm which is based on some of these factors:-

1. Use of sophisticated language: “This page sucks” isn’t sophisticated; think complex sentences and ideas. Apparently, Google has a language sophistication detector now, and one that works in the 14 different languages that Sidewiki supports.
2. User’s reputation: Are your comments being voted up or flagged down?
3. User’s history: How long have you had a Google Profile? How long have you been commenting?

ProfileRank

To comment on any page you need Google Account and your Google Profile is going to play a major role in this. Just like web pages in which Google gives PageRank, so in the same way your Google Profile page will also have its own form of rank or ProfileRank, when it comes to the Sidewiki system. Those with more ProfileRank have better chances that their comments will be appearing in top. ProfileRank alone isn’t enough, however. The content of the web page, the quality of the comment and many other factors are also taken into account.

Unfortunately, till now you have no way of knowing your ProfileRank. For example, look at Matt Cutts profile and there’s no indication about rank or reputations that I carry within the Sidewiki system. That’s something Google said they’d consider changing.

Profiles will show all the sidewiki comments a particular person has made so far.

So enjoy commenting!! and give a thought is Google Turning the Web Into an Exclusive Social Network? What are your thoughts please do share.

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Today Google Officially confirmed that they have discontinued the use of Meta keyword tag as one of the ranking factors long ago. This means now Google doesn’t use the “keywords” Meta tag in web search ranking. Google says that people are misusing that Meta Keyword Tag from initial days some are copying the top ranking website tags to their own in order to get top ranking in SERPS. Other major misuse is that Keyword Meta tags is often been stuffed with irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords so many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords Meta tag. This does not means that Google will ignore all Meta Tags.

A comprehensive list of Meta’s used by Google is

<META CONTENT=”Your website description goes here “>

<META http-equiv=”Content-Type” CONTENT=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″>

<META NAME=”google-site-verification” CONTENT=”+nxGUDJ4QpAZ5l9Bsjdi102tLVC21AIh5d1Nl23908vVuFHs34=”/>

<title> Title of your Web page</title>

<META CONTENT=”noindex, nofollow”>

<meta content=”notranslate” />

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”…;url=…” />

• Title: The text here becomes the title that is shown in search engine listings, in most cases.
• Description: The text here is text that search engines sometimes use as a description for your web page when listing it (a meta tag lesson for another time).
• Robots: This particular tag is configured to ensure that the page isn’t described using the a description that the Open Directory might have for it.

But I personally advice you all that you should still use this tag for Yahoo and Bing.

Other points to note:

• Google can read both HTML and XHTML-style meta tags, regardless of the code used on the page.
• With the exception of “verify”, case is generally not important in meta tags.

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Google today 9/09/2009 altered the Home Page of their Search Engine Google.com, by changing the size of search box and search buttons. Although it’s a very simple change and many people will not even able to found out, but Google is very excited about this change according to Google sources as quoted by top Googler “it symbolizes our focus on search and because it makes our clean, minimalist homepage even easier and more fun to use” The new, larger Google search box features larger text when you type so you can see your query more clearly. It also uses a larger text size for the suggestions below the search box, making it easier to select one of the possible refinements which is quite popular as searchers won’t have to type complete query. And those who can’t correctly figured out what they should type to get best results will find this suggestion box quite interesting.

Google's New Search Box

So enjoy Googling more !

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The problem with conventional SEO billing is that most SEO companies charge thousands even tens of thousands of dollars with ZERO answerability, these so called SEO companies do not take responsible for any result. It is very much like paying a lotto game or buying a lottery. You may win and you may not.

Performance Based SEO is a new payment model in which clients pays after seeing the results, there are some popular variations like :-

1) No upfront or monthly payments. Pay per lead, per sale or % from profit.
2) Small monthly fee. And, Pay per lead, per sale or % from profit.
3) SEO Consultant charges a one-time minimal fee for the initial SEO Optimization then only gets paid when the Top 5 positions are achieved.

I think option #3 will suits both SEO provider as well as his Clients as it creates a performance or payout tier. Now companies can be “rest assured” that the SEO companies will most likely try to get best ranking for their business as soon as possible in time as possible in order to increase their monthly allowance.

The Performance Based SEO model is lucrative for both SEO Company as well as its Clients but it won’t work for every business or Industry or Website. As what SEO Company will do if they have to optimize a website in a very difficult and competitive field? It can take 8+ months even for an established site to come anywhere close to Top 10 results on Google. Then how SEO Company will recover its cost as by the time they get any where near the goal their allowed period will expire and they will have to quit and get’s the label of non performer.

Another issue that came in front of every SEO is to not getting complete control over website; for instance one of our clients is not ready to remove the splash page, but that flash page is creating problem for Google-Bots as that splash page is not allowing bots to crawl the internal pages. There are lots of other factors along with website design issues like complex shopping cart which produces long urls string with various variables and parameters, the content management system, hosting issue, poor content and list goes on which actually affects the Rankings, if SEO Company doesn’t have control over them then they can’t produce the results that every one desired that is Number 1 spot with their favorite keyword. So no smart SEO will accept performance-based pricing model without 100% control.

Another very general issue that I think every SEO company has faced at lest once in their life is that there are lots of clients that are only interested in number one ranking for any particular keyword again take the instance of one of our client from Gemstone Beads Industry wants Top most rank read number 1 for keyword Gemstone and for this he is ready to pay anything. Trying to rank for just One Keyword is fun as well as challenge for any SEO. But how much time it will take to get that ranking and no one has so much patience to wait for 2 – 4 years. But it’s a terrible damage to Clients Company. Instead if SEO tell them the importance long tail keywords to start off the campaign in order to get search visibility first and keywords second, he’ll get better results also, rankings have become very difficult to measure these days. With the rise of personalized search results and localization, two people can see two different rankings for the same term, on the same day, in the same city. Or there is difference in rankings in Newyork city and Dallas.

So, what’s the right move?

According to my expertise and what I’ve seen one of these ways will work:

Retainer-based - Not so popular with clients, but provides the most flexibility to any company. You pay a flat fee each month. SEO’s will work and report back every week/month.  If they are not performing according to your parameters you can fire them anytime.

Percentage of revenue or pay per lead - It’s another performance approach but it’s tied directly to the company growth and not to rankings. But it can be done only with 100% control of the site and marketing.

I’ve also seen that a mix of all these above models, plus performance incentives, generally work well. For example: Pay a retainer, plus a bonus if X happens. Or pay a retainer plus a percentage of sales.

It’s all upon the SEO Company to decide on which model they want to work. But in order to get success in Performance Based SEO, They must have greater control over website and carefully analyze all the parameters so that they can provide whatever they have been asked to provide then only at lest I can proceed on performance based pricing model.

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Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. its a new personal communication and collaboration tool which is announced at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a web based service just like Gmail, Orkut etc, whose main purpose is to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking.

It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by extensions that can provide, for example, robust spelling/grammar checking, automated translation between 40 languages, and numerous other extensions. It was announced in Google’s official blog on July 20, 2009, that the preview of Google Wave will be extended to about 100,000 users on September 30, 2009. At that point, the current view of the Google Wave website (which is a preview with the keynote embedded), will be replaced with the application itself.

I think Now Google is more focused on educating the online community that’s why they are developing so many web applications related to community.

So have a quick look at wave here at Google Wave.

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Google has released a new service known as Google Voice which provides a single phone number that will represent all of your other numbers, such as your cell phone, home phone, and work phone. Currently this service is available through invitation only, remember when Google initially launched Google mail, I remember how crazy we were in order to get invitation for Gmail. And once we got invitations people request me for invitations which makes me feel proud. Google Voice is a new, free service the company will be offering the public. Currently the service is in closed beta and only available to a select few.

Some of the Features of this Service are
• Call screening – Announce and screen callers
• Listen in – Listen before taking a call
• Block calls – Keep unwanted callers at bay
• SMS – Send, receive, and store SMS
• Place calls – Call free within the continental US and to Canada
• Taking calls – Answer on any of your phones
• Phone routing – Phones ring based on who calls
• Forwarding phones – Add phones and decide which ring
• Voicemail transcripts – Read what your voicemail says
• Listen to voicemail – Check online or from your phone
• Notifications – Receive voicemails via email or SMS
• Personalize greeting – Vary greetings by caller
• Share voicemail – Forward or download voicemails
• Conference calling – Join people into a single call
• Call record – Record calls and store them online
• Call switch – Switch phones during a call
• Mobile apps – Try our apps for Blackberry and Android phones
• Mobile site – View your inbox from your mobile
• GOOG-411 – Check directory assistance
• Manage groups – Set preferences by group.

Seems to be interesting … a phone umber that you can use to redirect incoming calls to whatever phone you’re using. But Google Voice is currently available by invite only.So  Get an Invite

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