If you haven’t checked out Google Answers, you should try it out. Google Answers has more than 500 carefully screened Researchers to answer your question for as little as $2.50 and usually within 24 hours. So if you need some research done on a specific question, its a great resource. It is also a great resource for seeing answers that OTHER people paid for, as all questions and answers are publicly displayed. One last idea for using Google Answers– using it to see what information people are looking for in respect to your industry or niche. Knowing what people are looking for is an important step to determining what services and products are in demand.
Check it out: http://answers.google.com

Update 12/3/2006:  Google Answers is being retired by Google.  They are keeping their database of questions available, but no new questions are being accepted.

Keep an eye out for mail from Yahoo giving away $50 in Yahoo Search Marketing credits for new accounts.

Yahoo Search Marketing is Yahoo’s pay per click and sponsored search advertising venue for web site owners. As Yahoo is currently the number 1 search engine used on the internet, your advertisement can potentially reach millions and be seen on sites like Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, and CNN.

So if you are thinking about trying out this advertisement method, starting with an extra $50 ad budget is a great place to start. If you do not receive a mailer from Yahoo (or you simply see this entry well past its post date), you can still Sign up and get a $25 credit.

If you have a web presence and any sort of advertising budget, I highly suggest you at least test the waters with Pay Per Click.  If you need help setting up a campaign to increase your chances of success, give me a call – I can help.

Google’s latest update is causing a stir in the webmaster circles. Many web developers have reported that all of their web pages except for their index page have been moved to something called the supplemental index.

“What is the Supplemental Index?”

Google’s Supplemental Index is an alternate index that is normally only used when Google index cannot find relevant results in their standard index. Being in the Supplemental Index generally means that your web pages won’t be found for most searches.

You can check to see if a web page is in the Supplemental Index by performing a Google search for site:mydomain.com (replace mydomain.com with your own domain name). If you see “supplemental result” next to the results then those pages are supplemental.

“How Can Google Do this to me?”

It appears that this is just a bug in the transition to the new Google data centers. Since one of the main reasons for the Big Daddy update is that Google wanted to solve problems with redirects and canonical URLs, they may be isolating web pages in order to test new algorithms on these types of URLs.

“Will This Affect Me?”

If you have spam free web pages with good content and a good number of incoming links, the Big Daddy update should have a positive effect on your Google rankings. However, if you use spam techniques to try to improve your rankings, you may find your web sites suffering at the hands of Big Daddy.

Google has a new major update started that will affect the ranking of many web pages in Google’s index. This update is reported to be?much bigger -?so big that Google has given the update the name “Big Daddy”.

What is the Big Daddy Update?

Google uses?multiple data centers in various parts of the world to respond to search queries. These decentralized servers balance the workload of indexing web sites.

The upcoming Big Daddy update?changes?this network infrastructure so Google can?handle potential spam problems; index different content types such as images, JavaScripts or Flash files; and allow them to develop more advanced algorithms and a larger index.

According to Google engineers, Big Daddy will be live in February or March.? As more reports come in, I’ll post information about how this may affect web site rankings.

My husband pointed this site out to me.

http://www.googlefight.com

Mostly just for fun, let two search terms duke it out to find out which one rules Google results. Of course, you could use this for serious reasons- checking out the amount of competition for two keywords You’re considering for you site and your search engine optimization. Googlefight losers can be winners for your business…

Well, it seems news of Google Analytics broke this morning and that broke Google Analytics.
Google has a note posted stating:

Google Analytics has experienced extremely strong demand, and as a result, we have temporarily limited the number of new signups as we increase capacity. In the meantime, please submit your name and email address and we will notify you as soon as we are ready to add new accounts. Thank you for your patience.

I guess that just goes to show you that even Google can be caught a little unprepared.
Right now I’m curious about their beta strategies. Some things Google works on- like Google Local – seem to be in beta forever (Google Local just recently stopped showing “beta”). GMail is still in beta after more than a year, but I never found Google Analytics in beta. Interesting.
Something new in beta that I forgot to mention in yesterday’s post is Google Base. Watch for some future posts from me on Google Base.

I never intended to have so much news about Google that it would need its own section, but days after my latest Google-related entry, there are two new pieces of news.
First, I come across “Google Analytics” while working on a Google Adwords campaign for a customer. They announced “New Google Analytics tells you how visitors found your site and how they interact with it. ” Now, tracking visitors who come to your site is nothing new. Savvy webmasters have analyzed server logs for years, to find out what pages on their site were popular, where visitors come from, etc. Most web hosts give you access to these logs, but only some give you access to software that breaks it down into charts and graphs.
With Google Analytics, Google takes it one step further and gives you the ability to customize these reports with filters and tracking for specific ads and referral sources.
And of course, with Google, the best part is that its Free.
Check it out at http://www.google.com/analytics/index.html

I’ll write more on this later once I have a chance to play around with it. I’m sure there are more uses and possible repercussions to be found.