Ben Tremblay

Google's 10th birthday

Today is Google’s 10th birthday. If you googled a little something you probably noticed this new Google artwork: to celebrate the event, Google used its original Google logo from 1998. It’s impressive really how they managed to establish their brand in such a short period of time. Everybody knows the name ‘Google’ and most people use their services everyday. They control something like 50-60% of internet searches and all that happened in only a couple of years. As Internet Marketers or webmasters we often bash big G, but we all have to admit they changed the way we used the web and…They give to some of us an impressive amount of money through AdSense for running websites!

So, happy 10th anniversary Google and thanks for giving me money even on your own bday!

When asked what they would like to for their birthday, Google answered on their blog that they’d appreciate a nice new server rack. Where do you want me to ship it, big G?

What a day. I’m running a website with one of my friend and the project is going very very well.  Within three months, we managed to get a steady 500+ uniques everyday and it’s going up everyday. We almost reached 1,000 uniques today and we are quite happy about the results we are getting for not too much work! We recently (2 days ago) switched to a hostgator reseller account at 25$ a month for this project because the database is so big (100,000+ entries), performance and server load is now an issue. So we switched without any major issues and the awesome tech support team at hostgator helped us resolve some minor problems, but today, it went completely crazy!

Google Crawl rate

If you run a website updated very often, you will notice a new option in Google webmaster tools: you will be offered to accelerate the Google Bot crawl speed for your site! This is the exact option:

We’ve detected that Googlebot is limiting the rate at which it crawls pages on your site to ensure it doesn’t use too much of your server’s resources. If your server can handle additional Googlebot traffic, we recommend that you choose Faster below.

Faster A faster crawl will enable us to crawl your site quickly, but may put more load on your server.

How tempting is that? Being indexed faster, the dream of every webmaster! With that fresh new reseller account I decided to turn the faster crawl rate on.

What a bad idea

What a bad idea that was to turn the faster crawl rate on. Note that the website we run is very very heavy on resources, so what happened to my website may not happen to your website if you enable the option. It took a couple of hours before the Google Bot decided to crawl my site at top speed, but when it did, boom! No more website!

I checked my statcounter account around 5pm to notice no new visitors came to the website within the last 30 minutes. That’s really unusual when you get 500-1000 uniques a day, so I typed my domain name to see if there was anything wrong. The result:

500 – Internal server error

The evil 500 internal error! The error that tells you something bad has happened, but we don’t tell you what it is and there’s no way to find out! So I emailed HostGator and received an answer within a couple of minutes. The problem was that all 25 allowed processes were used, so no more request could come in. The rep killed the processes and guess what? 5 minutes later, same thing! Eventually, it went back up and I made sure to check the normal crawl rate.

Be careful

So be careful if you check that option. Make sure your server can handle the evil Google bot!

Technorati released the first part of their annual “state of the blogosphere” report. Technorati describe this report as follows:

Since 2004, our annual study has unearthed and analyzed the trends and themes of blogging, but for the 2008 study, we resolved to go beyond the numbers of the Technorati Index to deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind. For the first time, we surveyed bloggers directly about the role of blogging in their lives, the tools, time, and resources used to produce their blogs, and how blogging has impacted them personally, professionally, and financially.

We can learn some really interesting things from that report and I strongly suggest you take a quick look. The report shows that two-third of bloggers are male, 50% are between 18-34 years old and they are more affluent and educated than the general population. If you’ve been in the blogging world for more than three months, you’ve probably noticed that in a way or another.

Your tiny blog in the blogosphere

One thing I want to stress on is how many blogs are considered to be active by Technorati and why blogging is a long term investment. First, let’s take a look at this chart from Technorati:

Chart Technorati authority

It shows the number of blogs per technorati authority segments. The Technorati authority is the number of blogs linking to your blog in the past 6 months. As we can see, most blogs are very isolated from the blogosphere and never receive love from other bloggers. The situation changes when it gets to 20+ authority, but we can see that the number of blogs achieving some sort of success is really small. Only 75,000 out of 5 million bloggers have an authority of 50 or more!

The lesson is that so many people will abandon blogging within the first months or year. If you can keep a good posting rate for more than a year, there’s no reason for your blog not to reach at least the 50 authority mark. With that mark, you can at least claim you are in the top 50,000 bloggers in America. Sounds good heh?

Next part tomorrow

Technorati will release the second part of this report tomorrow so stay tuned. For today, I really just wanted to show how most people don’t succeed blogging and will stop very fast. Take this as an opportunity and see blogging as a long term investment.

Google monopoly

The recent deal between Google and Yahoo means that Google ads will now be displayed on the whole Yahoo network. Some say it’s good news, some say it’s bad news and some really don’t care. The biggest issue with that deal is concerning the monopoly Google would get in the Internet ads market. You know, they already owned a huge part of internet advertising and on top of that this year they aquired DoubleClick and signed a deal with Yahoo. It’s as close as it can get to a monopoly I agree.

The Google monopoly

People fear that a too strong presence of Google on the market will make the prices of advertising go higher for advertisers and down for publishers. That’s what having no competition usually does: you try to cash in the maximum you can before some other company come and take some of your market share. Google made sure to confirm the prices won’t go up because buying advertisements with Google is based on an auction system. I agree, I agree…But big G…You wrote that auction system, you can do whatever you want! Anyway…At least they tried.

It’s not Google’s fault

I’m really neutral when it comes to Google, I both love and hate the company. I’m just sick of people bashing Google on the monopoly issue because of that new Yahoo deal. We have to understand the core reason why Google is in a monopoly situation: there are no decent competitors! Google dominate the market simply because they are the best at what they do! I wouldn’t mind using another CPC system on my websites, but they aren’t as good as Google! I tried some other CPC programs, but none of them even come close to Google’s Adsense/Adwords system. I would put the pressure on companies to come with a decent system that can beat Google Adsense/Adwords. But for now, as a publisher, I only want Google to loose its monopoly if there’s a better alternative out there. Otherwise, they give me too much money for me to hate them and say go away!

I would do the same

We would probably be doing the exact same thing Google is doing right now. Let’s say you develop an advertising system that is so damn good it beats every other system out there. It’s also so good that publishers can put little code on their website to earn money easily. Nobody is able to beat your system, what would you do? Spread the damn thing! That’s what Google is doing my friend.

Come with a decent alternative

I put the pressure on other companies, not Google. Come up with a decent system able to beat Google’s system and we’ll open the monopoly debate again. Until then, they just do what every corporation would do.

I just visited DigitalPoint and was shocked to see this post:

Adsense clickers group.

messege me for info

Hurting the business

Less money

We can’t deny the fact that a good social network strategy is almost essential in today’s world. Being part of social networks is all about reaching more people and getting more traffic. You might or might not have a social strategy, but one way or another, I’m sure you’re involved in the community. Are social networks worth it and are you using them effectively?

Chose your battles

You can’t be everywhere at the same time. Are you subscribed to all possible social network and not generating a single visitor a day from these social networks? I used to be subscribed everywhere, but the reality is that it’s impossible while living a normal life to be active in every social network. That’s why it’s important to hand pick one, two or three social networks and build something around them. You will get a lot more by getting involved a lot in a single social network that getting involved a little in 25. I tried a lot of them before finding one that I felt I could use efficiently to drive traffic. You have to remember that to get traffic from a SN, it’s important to know how to exploit every little aspect of it. With million of social network members, not all of them are driving a thousands of visitors each day to their website. Why is that? Because they don’t know how to properly use them to drive traffic.

Do your homework

Analyze how the gurus do it. By joining a social network you can spot the big names out there and learn from what they do. I personally enjoy Blog Catalog and I think it’s a great Social Network. I use it to drive traffic and it’s working very well. I learned by analyzing how the big names out there were driving traffic from it. Some prefer Twitter, Facebook, My Blog Log or whatever other social network. It’s not about what’s the best SN out there or what is your favorite SN, it’s about how you can suck everything out of it.

Share

Don’t hesitate to share you Social Network strategy and your fabourite Social Networks, we can all learn!

You guys are all aware of the mistake Google made with their license agreement for Chrome. Everybody blogged about it and I’m no exception, I also wrote an article last week about it. So, it was a big mistake and kind of a stupid one for a big company such as Google. Some might argue it was done on purpose just for the thing to go viral, but I’m not sure Google would do such a thing. We all agree that from the legal team, just doing a plain copy paste from the traditional license agreement template was really dumb, but everybody still downloaded Chrome without asking too much questions, so I guess it didn’t turn out to be a big mistake for end users in the end. The real problem is with corporations and It’s a mistake that will take time to fix.

Google Chrome banned

I work for a quite big consulting/software company (7,000+ employees) and we are strictly forbidden to download and install Google Chrome on our computers to protect the company’s intellectual property. I know, Google isn’t claiming rights to what you do with Chrome, they fixed the EULA, so why ban the browser? Well, the day Chrome was released, you can imagine that in a software consulting company everybody went totally mad and downloaded the new browser from Google just to test it. Somebody noticed the quite disturbing EULA mentioning Google was getting the rights to almost anything done with the browser and forwarded this to the legal department. Of course, it’s a big problem for a company when you transfer confidential and copyrighted material over a browser that automatically gets the copyrights. The legal department answered within a couple of minutes and of course they advised not to install the browser to protect the company’s intellectual property. We then received a confirmation from higher management not to install Google Chrome.

Businesses are important

You see how easy companies are on the trigger. Even if Google changed the license agreement, we didn’t receive anything mentioning it was OK to install Google Chrome from now on. The company simply don’t care: the browser was a threat, that threat is eliminated, now let’s move on. It will take some time before things get fixed and we are allowed to download the browser. Now, why is it such a big mistake? Where Microsoft succeeded and where Firefox failed is in the business market. Almost every business use Internet Explorer as the standard and every intranet/company portal/web application within these businesses has to be compatible with Internet Explorer for that reason. Firefox is extremely popular with end users/computer geeks, but failed to establish itself as a business browser and this is a problem. For a browser to completely dominate the market, it has to be popular with end users and also with companies. A lot of users use Internet Explorer at home because that’s what they use at work, it’s as simple as that. This is one thing I noticed, I like to test new software and download new stuff, but for most users it’s a pain!

So that’s it, I’m pretty sure Google Chrome is forbidden in a lot of businesses because of that first day license agreement. This is kind of bad and will take some time to fix. Google Chrome had an OK start with techies, but already has a bad reputation within businesses and that might turn out to be a problem in the future.

I tested a new concept recently and it turns out to be working very well. My goal was to get a lot of content indexed in Google, with not that many backlinks and check what would happen. Usually, with blogs, we focus on quality content and not quantity and that’s always what I’ve been doing, so I had to change my mindset a little bit. We’ll go trough generating a lot of content for a website and how this can drive traffic.

There’s of course a balance

You can’t just generate a million pages and wait for the traffic, it’s like anything else, you have to find a balance between quality and quantity. I’m sure you’ve figured by now that when I say I generated a lot of content, I didn’t generate that content manually. Not generating the content manually means getting the content automatically from rss feeds or similar sources. That being said, it’s easy to just get yourself a million of articles through RSS feeds and get them indexed in Google, but the truth is that like anything else, you have to be smart. Remember that you still need backlinks to get a good ranking in Google, and those backlinks are extremely hard to get with a crappy website. It’s where playing smart comes into play, because you have to find a way to generate thousands of pages, without your website looking too much automated.

How to generate content from feeds

The most popular method to generate content is to get your content from RSS feeds. I won’t go exactly into details as everybody use a different platform for their website. You can generate content automatically for a wordpress blog, a drupal CMS or a pligg site for example. You can do a little search for your platform and I’m sure you will find some interesting plugin. If you are into WordPress, you might want to have a look at an interesting WP plugin called wp-o-matic. It let’s you generate content automatically from RSS feeds for your WordPress blog and it’s pretty good for a free plugin.

Isn’t it bad?

I know, I know, you like quality. I do also like quality. I just think part of making money online is trying a lot of things and getting some money from everywhere you can. I’m not building my future on automated websites, it’s just a nice addition to my collection of websites and it’s bringing in some money. You can make your site totally useless by generating content automatically, so that’s why I’m saying you have to be smart when doing it. If you are going to automate a website, make it look good and still useful to people. That’s what I did and after 2 months, it’s driving around 500 uniques daily and it’s going up every week. I think it’s great for a 2 months old website and it is 100% passive income.

Don’t be evil

Remember, don’t be evil! I know you guys will look around for an automated website possibility. I don’t usually talk about these things because I don’t like it, but I found out that if done correctly, it can be useful for you and your users. Don’t think about starting a finance blog and just generating posts without doing nothing, you have to think a little further than that to have a platform that can drive good traffic. The lesson is that automated websites work if you’re not too evil!

It’s been two busy days in the blogosphere with the launch of Google Chrome. I’ve read it all: “Chrome is the best thing since sliced bread”, “Chrome is good, but doesn’t beat my Firefox”, “Crap, it’s not available for MAC/Linux”, “Another browser to support for us, web developer, what a pain!”, “Google wants rights to things I do online with Chrome”.

Delivering Breaking news

There’s no way I could deliver breaking news, I would feel like bringing potential lies to people. That’s what happened in the last two days with Google Chrome and that’s why I waited a before writing a little something about it. We’ll have a look at the common myths together.

Google want rights to things you do using Chrome

This little thing from the Google Chrome’s EULA was raised today:

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

This is scary isn’t it? Google is getting the rights to everything I post through their browser. What a luck I’m writing this post in Firefox! Instead of believing it without double checking this information, I visited Matt Cutts’ blog (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/). Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam team so he really knows what he’s talking about and here’s what he posted today:

I knew that Google didn’t want to assert rights on what people did using Google Chrome, so I asked the Chrome team and Google lawyers for their reaction or to clarify (probably several other people pinged them too). Here’s what I heard back from Rebecca Ward, the Senior Product Counsel for Google Chrome:

“In order to keep things simple for our users, we try to use the same set of legal terms (our Universal Terms of Service) for many of our products. Sometimes, as in the case of Google Chrome, this means that the legal terms for a specific product may include terms that don’t apply well to the use of that product. We are working quickly to remove language from Section 11 of the current Google Chrome terms of service. This change will apply retroactively to all users who have downloaded Google Chrome.”

Ok, and l checked the EULA tonight and it looks like this now:

11. Content license from you

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

A lot less scary isn’t it? Issue resolved, next!

Another browser to support!

Again, Matt Cutts the Google hero answered this:

Q: Another browser? Geez, I’m a webmaster/search engine optimizer/front-end programmer and I don’t want to worry about another browser.
A: Google did not add another rendering engine. Google Chrome uses WebKit for rendering, which is the same rendering engine as Apple’s Safari browser, so if your site is compatible with Safari it should work great in Chrome. Personally, I do think creating clean code that validates and works on many different browsers will be an important skill for webmasters and web designers. These days a smart site owner thinks about how their web site looks to all browsers, from Internet Explorer to Safari to Opera to an iPhone.

So, just ensure your website looks fine on Safari and you should be fine!

Other general issues

For other general issues about Google Chrome, visit the following two posts on Matt’s blog:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/common-google-chrome-objections/

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-communication/

My general appreciation of Chrome

I personally love it. OK, there’s a lack of features, but the thing is lightning fast. I’m a big fan of Opera and I’m pretty sure this little thing is faster. I hate the fact that there’s no status bar, no rss icon in the URL bar and no extension support, but that will come for sure. I will still continue to use Firefox because it offers so much to web developers: toolbars, firebug, etc, but I will also use Chrome because it feels lighter and is much faster.

First of all, I know it’s a shame, I last posted 4 days ago. That being said, I want to let you know about a tool I use a lot when designing websites. That little tool is called browsershot and what it does is taking screenshots of your website in a lot of different browsers. You know how hard it can be to test your design on IE6, IE7, Firefox 2, firefox 3, opera, konqueror, etc. This will make your life so much easier and you won’t have to run 30 different browsers on 3 different machines or call your friends to ask them how your website looks on their machine!

How it works

First, head to Browsershots website obviously.

Then, it’s pretty straight forward, you enter the URL you want to test and the OS/Browsers you’d like to test with.

Then, you just have to wait for the system to take the screenshots. The time to take them can vary, but it’s usually pretty fast. I selected a dozen of browsers for seohorror.com and the estimated time was between 3 and 12 minutes.

Refresh, see the results and back to work

You should get something like this in the end:

You can click on the screenshots to see real life size images and it is a great way to identify problems with other browsers.

Perfection isn’t possible

You will usually notice some glitch with some browsers, but don’t try to be compatible with all of them. I usually concentrate on being compatible with IE 6.0 & 7.0, Firefox 2.0 & 3.0, and Safari 2.0 & 3.0. These are the main browsers and it’s important to be compatible with all of them. You could also analyse your traffic and see what browser most of your users use, this might help you identify important browsers to be compatible with.