Savvy Affiliate

Google Continues To Lay The SmackDown on Yahoo & MSN

Recent reports show that Google has just acquired over a 55.2% market share in search during the month of April 2007.  That is up from 53.7% during the month of march.

That is an astonishing growth rate for a maturing company.  Climbing from 53.7% to 55.2% in a single month is a huge success for Google.  If they could keep that rate up, they would end the year with over 65% of all the searches.   Of course that is unlikely, but it still shows that Google keep grabbing a bigger and bigger piece of an ever growing pie.

What does this mean to you?  What it means to the average blogger is that Yahoo and MSN are becoming more and more irrelevant in terms of driving traffic to your sites.   They take in only 21.9% and 9% of the market respectively.

It means that it is better to rank well in Google than to rank in all of the other search engines combined!  As you work at your SEO, it is increasingly important to tailor your attack to optimize your Google results.  You can really just consider the other search engines along for the ride.   What that means is if you here news like Yahoo releasing a new tag, you can more or less ignore it.  If Google were to do the same, you would need to pay attention and wonder what you should do to use that to your advantage.

Can Google be stopped?  It does seem that Google is on a role.  I don’t think that either Yahoo or MSN have too much of a chance of taking market share away from it separately.  If they merge and create a searching synergy it might be a different story, but I can’t predict if it would help or not.

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Industry Consolidation Continues, Is this Good or Bad for The Average Blogger

In a deal announce Friday, Microsoft has signed up to buy Aquantive for $6 Billion - an 85% premium over their share price at the time.  This deal comes in wake of other consolidation in the online advertising industry, with Google buying Doubleclick and Microsoft in talk to buy Yahoo

So with all the industry consolidation, will it help the average webmaster or hurt them?   I maintain that the consolodation of the advertising industry is a net positive for bloggers for several reasons. 

1. More Money Flowing Into Programs Bloggers Use - Many many bloggers advertise with Adsense and Yahoo partner network.   As the industry consolidates, more and more money will flow into these large programs.  That is a good thing for bloggers.  Instead of signing up for only two networks, and missing out on 1/2 of the advertising available, you will be able to get a much greater percentage of the advertising dollars.
2. Easier to combat click fraud - The biggest danger to Adsense, and the ability of bloggers to make money from it, is advertisers being fearful that they are getting scammed, and deciding to withdraw their advertising dollars.  If there are many smaller advertising networks it is more likely that some scamming will be going on.  However companies such as Google and Microsoft are better equipped to crack down on that than their newly acquired partners were before.   The net result is that less money will go to scammers, and more money will go to you.  (Unless of course you commit click fraud.  Then you’re sort of just out of luck)

However too much consolidation could be a bad thing.  If there was a monopoly on online advertising the company could just screw over its affiliates, and they would have no alternative.   But given the nature of the internet, we are still a long way from having a monopoly.  If Microsoft were to buy Google, that might be a bad thing.  Until then I’ll cheer on the industry consolidation.

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Google Claims Click Fraud Hovers Around 2%, The Reality Could Be Much Higher

Click fraud is a recurring problem for Yahoo and Google.  They have been taken to court over it, they have proactively banned partners who were abusing their system, and they have maintained that they keep click fraud down to an acceptable level of around 2%.  However a new studysuggest that click fraud is much more prevalent, and accounts for 10-15% of all advertising dollars spent online!

Adsense partners accounted for approximately $4.2 billion dollars in earnings for Google over the last year.  If click fraud is actually as prevalent as that study suggests, it means that click fraud is a 500-750 Million Dollar industry!    

The study was sponsored by Fair Isaac, a publicly traded company under the ticker symbol FIC.   And there are several reasons why you might trust Fair Isaac’s review of the click fraud problem.

• They are a third party - Unlike Google or Yahoo, they don’t have an interest in whether or not click fraud is high or low.  Although this does not necessarily mean they are accurate, it does mean that they are not likely to be intentionally misleading the public
• They Know Fraud - Fair Isaac has been a respected name in the fraud industry for years.  Although they have only recently moved online, it makes you think that they know what they are talking about

So what does this mean to you?  As a webmaster, what does it mean to you that click fraud may be more common than thought?   Well if you advertise via PPC it means you have to be extra vigilant in monitoring your stats.  Double check to make sure that all your keywords are making you money.  Click fraud doesn’t mean you should give up PPC advertising… as long as you are still making money on the clicks as a whole.   If you have a profit margin on all of your PPC ads then you should maintain them.  Although click fraud is eating into that profit margin they is little that a single webmaster can do about it.  However you can check if most of your profit comes from search ads, or contextual ads.  Click fraud is more likely on ads appearing on websites - contextual ads.  If you have a positive profit margin on ads on Google’s page, search ads, and a negative profit margin on contextual ads, you should consider disabling contextual advertising, and focusing solely on search ads.

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Firefox is known for its A-La-Carte Form of Browsing. Well this is one you have to have

 I have recently been made aware of the Firebugextension for Firefox.  What firebug is an extension that allows you to easily put a ton of web development tools at your fingertips while you are browsing the internet.  It allows you to easily edit and debug your code, you can monitor CSS, Javascript and HTML.

Here are some of Firebugs features.  If you would use any of these, you sould definitely consider downloading it.

• Inspect HTML and Edit it - Firebug allows you to view the HTML of any webpage.  It allows you to drill down the HTML and find tricky hidden elements.  Once you have found what you are looking for, you can edit the html live.
• Perfect Your CSS - You can easily tweak the CSS on your page live and see the results as you work
• Webpage Load Time - Is your webpage taking too long to load?  Firebug allows you to break down each aspect of your webpage and see if that is causing the slow loading.  Great for finding errors like uncompressed images or third party services that are bandwidth heavy.
• Java On The Fly - Firebug gives you a command line that allows you to run your java on the fly.  Allowing you to quickly catch your bugs.

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New Google Feature Hits Overseas

A friend of mine pointed out a new feature that Google has in some of its overseas webpages.  Specifically he went to Google Taiwan and noticed that when you type in a search option, Google pops up suggestions along with the number of results before you search. Although similar intellitext options have been available for awhile on the Google Toolbar, this is the first I’ve seen from the Google Webpage.

This is a fun new feature, which makes me wonder when it will be debuting on Google.com?

As a webmaster you can use this to

• Scope out the competition - quickly find out how many sites are competing for a keyword
• Get Keyword Suggestions - Look for common topics that pop up, if people are searching for them maybe you should market in that direction

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Using Google docs and spreadsheets can allow for great leaps for your productivity. Here are some of the top uses for them, and how you can implement the tool to improve your site

• Keep Track Of Ideas - You never know when an idea will strike you, or when you will be at a loss for an idea.  Using an online document to keep track of your ideas will allow you to never lose any of your best post ideas.  Additionally you can flesh out a post over time on the Documents and then copy and paste it easily into your blog
• Collaborate With Other Bloggers- If more than one person works on your blog.  Docs and spreadsheet can be a great central place to post ideas, comments, and concerns.  Everyone can go on to view and edit the documents
• Keep track of affiliate links -Many long time bloggers have a problem that they are signed up for dozens of different affiliate programs.  Throw in the fact that many of these programs are two tiered, and many have several different URLs to send traffic to under different circumstances, it can quickly become overwhelming trying to keep track of them all.  Using an online Google Spreadsheet can help you keep all your affiliate links in one place, saving you time
• Accept Submissions - Google documents has a handy feature that it can take an e-mail and turn it into a word document automatically.  So say that you are a site which posts reader submissions.  Instead of having to monitor your e-mail, simply set up an e-mail address, forward that to Docs and Spreadsheets and monitor that.   When you want to post the submission it is easy to edit and all the submissions are in one place.

Google has a site detailing what is New at Docs and Spreadsheets

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I use many Google features all the time.  I wasn’t aware of this site until I stumbled on it at Life hack

Simply Google on one page - Combine all your commonly used Google functions onto one page.  Save yourself some time

Thanks Lifehack

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The Blog Herald recently put up a quite solid post about Passwords

I thought that some of the most interesting facts in it are that

1. Studies suggest that over 40% of all passwords are quickly guessable by computer programs
2. 1% of passwords contained the word “password”
3. 17% of passwords are 6 characters or less.   ( Which given 26 letters, 10 numbers, case insensitive is only ~ 2 * 10^9 combinations.   Still a lot in computer terms, but it is getting less and less)

All those facts makes me think of this Myspace Girl who had her house trashed by someone who threw a “Lets trash this house party”

Although I believe that she planned the party and then made up a story about her myspace password being stolen to try to stay out of trouble, judging from the above statistics is it perfectly possible that the made her password “password1″ and did indeed have it stolen.

What’s the moral of this story?   No moral really, just a friendly reminder that you might not be quite as secure as you think you are.  After all, they make you change your passwords every now and then at work for a reason….   At least they do at my work.

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Here is a handy little site if you want to find out how fast an internet connection you have.

 Speed Test

I found I have a 8 Mps Connection download and a 3 Mps connection for uploading when I am using the closest server.  This is through Comcast cable.

How fast is your connection?

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