While Google has basically been working to hide, dismiss, and destroy a drink across the Internet in hopes of protecting its own business. The problem is that in doing so, they have been hiding the value from potential advertising customers. If an advertiser cannot see the value of the mythical metric like page rank, then they can make buying decisions based on page rank.

So all the metrics have been built up over the last decade or so surrounding the concept of page rank, are rapidly going out the window.

That’s the bad news, it’s the type of change that we all have to deal with. The good news is that it doesn’t really matter anymore. Essentially we’ve all been forced to evolve past the concept of page rank, and start to focus on results.

It doesn’t matter what page rank value might be assigned to a site, but it does matter what that particular site can do, can achieve, and how it can be done. We’ll have to dig into all those important metrics behind particular websites performance, and stop paying attention to some generic assignment of value from a third party like Google.

It’s no coincidence that this is all happening while Google is working to increase its monopoly over search engines and advertising related to search engines. Google is rapidly marching towards a point where we’ll be under severe scrutiny and review and probably lawsuits from the US Justice Department as well as European Union. Google seems to think that they can get out of these lawsuits and reviews by simply explaining things better to people. That’s an egotistical way of building a strategy, and it’s not likely to work. The same strategy never work for Microsoft in the 90s, and is not likely to work for Google now. This opens the door for people to actually come in and do business on the Internet and start to find ways to ignore and bypass Google. If we are no longer to pendant on their fictional metric of page rank, and are tied up in the embattled legal quagmire with the US Justice Department and the European Union, this will open the door for more competition for companies that can provide metrics, and answer the questions, “how is my website performing today?”

Google used to provide a short answer for that question, but they are rapidly moving out of the business even though they don’t seem to think so. They are hoping to keep control over everyone and over the Internet. If regulators and government step up and stop the monopolistic actions of Google, they will lose that control and we will all then be free to do business on the Internet without them.

So the next time you search for MP3 players, or Sarah Palin, or Britney Spears or whatever on the internet, you might actually be taking one step towards a future that does not include a Google Monopoly.

As I was playing a few games with my son I was looking at his old PlayStation device in looking at the memory cards plugged into the device that used to hold all of his user data. I started thinking that there were probably come a time, when gamers would have to hold us in an amount of information online in that posting this information would become more of an issue.

Nintendo actually provides the service for free. I have to wonder however of someday this will become more of a hosted option is not free. Could there ever be a situation where a person would want to self host their gaming information?

It could become a useful scenario when people need to ensure that their information is secure or when they need more personal control over their information. It’s probably that last item that would make this somewhat useful if a person needs to do some hands-on programming to a character or avatar. It could be akin to keeping your information in a bank account except for the hosting plan would be your bank account. That safe place where you control the voluble information you need to store.

For games today it is really isn’t much of an issue because games are just games. But as gaming platforms gets more intense and become more realistic I suspect it will definitely start to translate into real world situations where their importance is significantly higher and the need to retain control over the information will also be higher. Years ago, many people used to use free accounts hosted by large corporations to do things online. Since then many people have started to gravitate away from those free environments and pay for hosting themselves because it makes practical sense. But they could come in the same transition takes place for gamers.

It is not here today, but someday in the future, you might buy an Xbox 360 or an Xbox 900 maybe, that comes with a free 1 year hosting plan for your user information…

It takes time to get a site indexed, the links and traffic built up, and more and if your site is not up now (june before Christmas), then you will behind the eight ball going into the holiday season.

Consider that to get the site going you need all of the following items running at full strength by October 1:

• Site Built
• Site Designed
• Site Indexed
• Heavy deep links built up in SERPs
• PPC campaigns running and tuning taking place
• Affiliate Campaigns running to build track record for primary campaigns in October
• Viral Campaigns running and tuned (Videos Don’t just happen by themselves in the wink of an eye!)
• Blogger Buzz Building campaigns Should be Planned now and Organized for launch in August at the latest

and much much more!

Keep in mind that Christmas is not the only thing that needs to sell in the fall.  The fall is also one of the prime vacation seasons for areas including Monterey, South Florida, the Caribbean and even Hilton Head rentals so if you are planning a site for this type of seasonal event, then my short tip to you is “Launch Now!”  Sites do not grow over night and sites definitely do not grow in a test environment either.  You can perfect a site on a test box, and launch to a miserable failure if you do not pay attention to all the other things that make a site successful.  Get it out there and impress people with your improvements if you like. 

Why do you think Google rolls so many things out in beta????

They like many companies realize that you have to be out there, even if its in a crappy beta form or else your perfect website will be dead before it launches.

Why do Search Engines Offer Toolbars?

First you have to understand why search engines offer free toolbars in the first place.  They do it for 2 reasons:

1. To help you use their search engines more often
2. To gain information about what you are looking at on the internet even when you are not searching

Now, that second one is the item that can bring you more traffic!

Search engines gain information from a number of areas including things such as analytics code that sit on websites.  Absent analytics code they often rely on free toolbars. 

If a search engine can not see the activity that is taking place on your website because their analytics code is installed on your site, then they can not give you credit for the traffic you receive.  Running your browser with their free toolbar installed however can give them the ability to see what is going on when you view your sites and when your readers view your sites when they have the toolbar installed.

You do not even have to have the Toolbar turned on all the time.  I run toolbars from Google, Yahoo!, Alexa, MSN and 10 other companies.  I usually only have 3-4 running at most at a time.

So give it a try, encourage your readers and visitors to try the toolbar as well.  Let Yahoo! see how popular your site is and this will help you increase your ranking within their search listings. 

Example:  Maybe you run a small business and have a website and a blog where you sell TV stands and tv wall mount fittings.  Offer your visitors and customers a free toolbar or contact us and we can help you set up an unrelated landing page to offer them a free toolbar.  Then when they visit your site or your blog, the search engines will be able to see the traffic successfully landing on your website from the Toolbar gathering metrics.

If your sites importance is invisible to Yahoo! or any search engine, odds are it is not going to rank well at all.  That means fewer referrals from natural search, fewer visitors and readers and less business in general.

So try the tool bar out today and start helping yourself get some more traffic.

He seems to have found more success with GoDaddy as compared to HostGator, which is probably not terribly surprising given the size of GoDaddy.

Dan mentions his efforts to fight off blogspot splogs which were not successful. 

I personally have found that it is possible to report Blogspot splogs directly to Google, but Google does seem to work at their own speed and sense of urgency.  On a lighting website that I worked as a copywriter, I found that several of my articles were getting splogged all the time.  One article that covered Seagull lighting of all topics, seemed to get picked up and spread around about 23 different sites.  Now, initially, I didn’t mind as the site owner was looking to spread the word about their products, but soon the splogs started to get the facts completely mixed up, backwards and false and so we ended up going after the batch of them with mixed results.

The normal path for people to address these issues is through the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) at http://www.copyright.gov/.

Andrew Ian Dodge is preparing to write a new book.  Andrew has recently battled colon cancer and he is preparing to write a book about his experiences being recently diagnosed, undergoing surgery and soon he will travel through the process of chemotherapy.

I look forward to his book and perspective and wish him the best and a successful survival against cancer.

Through all of this, Andrew has maintained his sense of humor.  He has a long way to go not only with his effort to survive the cancer but also in dealing with the challenges of life with chemotherapy and the very very large medical bills that come with the entire process.  When you undergo these types of procedures, it is rare for a person to be allowed the luxury to sit back and focus entirely on getting better.  They often times have to find a new life balance between their personal life, their work requirements, and their new medical needs.  Andrew may not be purchasing horse riding apparel anytime soon, but he is getting back in the saddle as a writer and seizing the day.

Dodgeblogium » Blog Archive » Writing the cancer…

An example of this is the travel nurse industry that has grown up to search for nurses are willing to take temporary or long-term assignments away from their normal home, traveling to assignments and working as a nurse in a different state for weeks or months at a time.

The area of travel nursing is not a new concept.  Nursing history shows us that nurses have been traveling with their patients for years if not centuries.  However the way it’s being recruited and the salaries that this area of the industry pays, can be very exceptional.

More and more we live in a mobile society, where people pick up and move and relocate on average about every seven years.  Some discipline such as nursing might actually be seeing an increase in this phenomena in a way that speeds up the process of moving from years to potentially months.  Many consultants have been living this lifestyle for quite some time taking jobs were two or three months at a time.  We don’t normally think of professional job such as nursing in a similar fashion.  But short-term nursing contracts may be a staple in the future.