Google no longer geo-redirecting users?

Posted by stuart as google

Anyone else noticed that since google updated to their poxy new favicon, that searchers are no longer being redirected to their local google?

Used to be that when I typed “google.com” into my address bar, I’d be redirected to “google.com.au”, this doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.

Whilst this is good for keeping an eye on my non-geotargeted niche sites, it’s a royal PITA when trying to look up my geotargeted local stuff.

Anyone else noticing this in other parts of the world?

Google doesn’t really care about spammy links

Posted by stuart as splogs, pagerank, google

First things first - if I read one more blog telling me that spammy links to my site can hurt my rankings, I’m going to knock on all my neighbours doors asking if they have a puppy. When eventually on of them responds in the affirmative, I’m going to storm their house and kill said canine.

If spammy links could hurt a site, we’d all be running around dropping links to our competitors on free-for-all links pages, and nuking them into oblivion.

Now, on to my point:

It’s no secret that the GoogleFairy has been quite busy of late wandering around the web sprinkling her green GoogleDust on sites here and there, taking GoogleDust from some sites, depositing it on others.

Whilst Google exporting PageRank to the toolbar engenders not nearly the hysteria that it once did, you just know that webmasters the world over are secretly checking all their sites, quietly patting themselves on the back for their gains, and bemoaning their losses, despite the disparaging posts they are making in their blogs about the irrelevance of PageRank.

Of course, I was one of those said webmasters. One of the things I do when there’s a toolbar pagerank update, is go through this blog, checking the posts that I know were popular at the time of their writing, and gained a few backlinks in the process.

One internal page I checked had actually gained a PR of 4, the same as the home page. The funny thing is that it was this post. In short, this post was just a list of 5,000 highly searched terms.

The post was an experiment to see how many trackback links I could get from sploggers (people searching through RSS Feeds for specific keywords, then publishing an excerpt of the post, with a link back to the originating site). Yahoo Site Explorer is showing 143 links to this post, each one spammier than the last.

If we’re to take pagerank as google’s measure of authority of a page, it would appear that Google thinks that this page is of a higher authority than some of the excellent blogs I read.

So here’s a tip - If you’re a pagerank whore, or if you’re into selling websites, don’t worry about building out a quality site with quality content and quality backlinks.

Just throw up a post with a shitload of high search volume terms on it, and watch the links roll in.

Fun with Google wildcard search

Posted by stuart as google

A little known Google feature is the wildcard search. This fun little tool allows you to enter a search term and leave part of it blank, for google to fill in the missing part.

Some examples:

• I have a giant *
• blogging is a waste of *
• You should see my *
• I can’t believe I ate a whole *

Google suggest with results numbers

Posted by stuart as seo, search engine, search, google

I came across this this morning - an experimental version of the Google suggest tool which gives you the number of results in google for the suggested keywords:

Pretty cool I reckon, now I just need to work out how to harvest the results and make some sort of use of them……

Related reading:

Google Suggest - The facts behind the results
Alternative to overture keyword suggestion tool
Keyword Reserch Tool: Google Suggest
Google suggest : pick right search keyword
Just In: Google Keyword Suggestion

Google caving on referrals? Gimme a break.

Posted by stuart as CPC advertising, adwords, google adsense, google, adsense

Interesting read over at Problogger today. Apparently Google have changed their mind on (some of) the changes that they recently announced regarding their referral program.

You know about the original changes, you’ve read about them everywhere, so I won’t go into that here, but the new changes raise some issues:

From the AdSense blog:

The changes to referrals promoting AdSense will now depend on where your users are located, regardless of your location as a publisher. You’ll earn $100 for every user you refer to AdSense who is located in North America, Latin America or Japan…. (my emphasis)

WTF???

This is a joke, right?

So a US Dollar, Yen or Peso is worth more to Google than my Australian Dollar, A Krona, Yuan, or a Rupee?

The combined populations of the USA, Latin America and Japan is around 993 million, around 15% of the world’s population, and apologies to my Latin American friends, but you’re not by any stretch of the imagination an economic or population powerhouse.

One must wonder whether these changes are the result of an oversupply of AdSense publishers and an shortage of AdWords advertisers? Remeber, for every AdSense ad you see, there’s an AdWords advertiser somewhere. Another thought is that Google is struggling for advertisers prepared to expose themselves to the low ROI clicks and outright click fraud on the content network, so they’re using changes to the referral program to slow down the number of new AdSense publisher signups.

Might I suggest that they get a bit tougher on the sites they allow to show AdSense ads as a way of evening up the balance between ad supply and demand instead of punishing genuine content publishers because of where they live?

My fear here is that this is the start of a very slippery slope. With Google being so secretive about the commissions it takes from every ad click, how do we know that publishers who don’t live in the above “Axis of AdSense” are not already being smartpriced on their clicks. Maybe Google is paying different CPC’s based on where the “clicker” is located?

We just don’t know this shit.

As so many are now saying - Don’t rely solely on AdSense for your income, especially if you live outside the Axis of AdSense. It may only take a simple change of policy on Google’s part to kill your business model.