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I’ve been hearing a lot of rumours lately that Google is changing the game. Now I have no concrete facts but those in the know say that these changes are happening now and will impact the way everyone conducts search engine optimisation. It certainly can’t hurt to stay up to date with these sorts of things so here I present a few not-quite-facts that will impact how well your website performs in Google.

Google now checks the year your domain name was first registered.

This just makes sense. Those that care about their domain and their brand will register their domain for a long time. This demonstrates commitment. Of course it’s not very hard for a spammer to do the same but the upfront costs are just that little bit higher and might help act as a deterrent. If anything a short domain registration period will be yet another flag in the Google system that will keep certain sites away from top rankings. Hopefully it will be the spammers that trigger the penalty when combined with all the other spam flags they trigger.

If you are anything like me and you like to register domains for an “idea” you have for the future there is no way you will be investing in a 10 year registration for something you may never pursue. An idea is an idea and I know half of the domains I buy amount to nothing. However buying the domain also signifies *some* commitment to the project and on many occasions is the motivational spark I need to get the website built and a new project off the ground. A one or two year registration is not a significant cost. Securing a domain for 10 years is. The easy workaround is to initially register a domain for the minimum period, if things take off then renew the domain for a longer period. Simple.

Google now places huge emphasis on links. They want to see a slow, gradual number of incoming links to your websites. These links need to have a variety of anchor text phrases. If all your anchor links are the same you could get de-listed or de-ranked.

Ahh, natural linking patterns. I’ve mentioned this before - Google in many ways destroyed what it relies on to create such a great search engine. Before Google linking patterns were very natural, organic with sites linking to each other in many different ways, with different anchor text built up over a long period of time. Sites grew in popularity slowly and incoming links increased subsequently at similar rates of growth. Google stepped in and used these patterns in a ranking algorithm to accurately value sites. It worked, almost too well. Google became so popular that people began to study what it takes to rank highly. They learnt it was all about incoming links so they started an unnatural linking process, creating link farms and chasing incoming links with a vengeance.

Google wants natural linking back and will reward those sites that appear to be popular based on natural linking. This is not an exact science of course but if you do these things you are on the right track:

• Make sure your incoming links are not all carbon copies of the same keyword phrase. Vary the incoming anchor text with different phrases.
• Make sure you get links from many sites with varied PageRank. Assess link swaps based on the site (content, relevance) asking for the exchange, not solely on the green PR bar at the top of the site.
• Chase back links naturally, slowly increasing their number over time. If you go from 10 - 5000 backlinks in one month Google is going to think you are link farming and penalise you.
• Don’t get paranoid. Stressing over why your site won’t get listed and pressuring other sites for link exchanges can drive you crazy. Take it easy and work on building a great site slowly, tell the right people about it and they will spread the word for you.

Google is telling us that they look for relevant, quality content on your websites (no surprise) and that PageRank is a good indicator of a website’s “authority” and relevancy.

The key term here is authority. Those sites that have been online for a long time with established authority in their field wield the power. One link from an authority site can boost you to the top of the rankings but take it away and you can just as easily fade to the bottom of the rankings. Again the emphasis here is on establishing links from many sites with various rankings. If you build an amazing site eventually the authority sites in your field may just link to you anyway and won’t that make you feel special!

So now you are up to date on the latest changes at Google and surprise surprise, nothing much has really changed at all.

Anyone want to exchange links with a business blog?
Yaro Starak

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In this podcast there is a quick bit of house keeping to start with followed by a discussion of affiliate marketing which I have started to test on this blog. If you are interested in making money online then affiliate marketing is definitely one strategy to familiarise yourself with because it’s one of the best ways to generate the holy grail of Internet business - passive income.

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Last year I had an office in downtown Brisbane (well almost, up a hill downtown Brisbane is more accurate). I needed an office to run an English school but after I shut that down the school in the second half of 2004 I was running a home based Internet business from an office. I was paying $1400 a month for the privilege too. I spent a lot of time scheming ways to either reduce my rent bill by inviting sub-tenants or breaking my lease early and seeing how much that hurt. I tried the first with little success and then negotiated to break my lease a few months before contract end. I left the office in 2004 after throwing a lot of money away on rent. It was a lesson learnt of course and one of the main things I reaffirmed was that I did not require an office for what I wanted to do and would not likely get one again in the near future.

A lot of small business owners worry that running a home based business can hinder their ability to convince clients to buy because of the perception that they are not professional if they do not have an office. Another possible concern is hiring new employees - will they be willing to come work at your home? Obviously the industry you work in will determine how much the “office” factor impacts you but I do not believe having an office is justifiable unless you are starting to grow into a multiple employee business.

If you are a solopreneur you do not need an office. Rent is wasted money. If you absolutely have to convey professionalism to a specific client put on your suit and arrange drinks at a classy venue. Then impress them with your personality and let your product or service do the talking. If the client sees you and what you do as valuable to them they are not going to care where exactly you go to work.

When it comes to hiring employees you simply tell them that they must be prepared to work from your home office as part of a condition of employment. A good employee will be excited to land your job and unless they are considering a lengthy commute to get to work at your place, the home office factor should not be a concern.

Sometimes the lack of a physical address for mail is a worry since you don’t want to be listing your home address publicly. I maintain a city post office box which I use for all mail, even when I had an office. I do this for two reasons - 1) I would not want to list my home address on a website and 2) if I ever move the postal box doesn’t, as long as I keep paying the rental fee (about $150 annually - it’s a tax deduction too!) I have a permanent address for mail that I can use for both business and personal purposes. Occasionally you cannot use a postal box for a particular service or delivery in which case I give out my home address.

I used to be concerned about the psychological impact of the home office. My housemate works a standard 9-5er at a big Australian company. One of the things that she really enjoys about her work is the clear definition of when she is “on” and “off” work. When she leaves the office that’s it, no more thinking about work. With a home based business I roll out of my bed and switch on my computer to be at work. This could be a considered a bad thing since whenever I am at home I am also at work. The lines are blurred. Worse still I take my laptop to cafes and restaurants so it appears that work is invading all aspects of my life.

Of course though if you are a true entrepreneur you will know the “my business is my baby” feeling. If your business is your hobby, what you love and enjoy then you would choose to be at work doing what you love anyway. My housemate wouldn’t make this choice - who would choose to be at work?!? Having the lines blurred is only a problem when you don’t know how to stop working. I for one am very good at recreational activities and have no problem finding time for them. If that’s not you and you are at your computer in your office all the time then perhaps you need to set yourself some strict time guidelines to control your working day. Discipline is a good skill to have in business and a little self imposed structure can go a long way to beat both the procrastination and overwork demons.

Adding to the benefits of having a home based business is having all your familiar amenities available to you. You are able to cook a fresh meal cheaply whenever you are hungry and listen to your music as loud as you like without worrying about disturbing anyone around you. Heck if your house is empty during the day while you are working at home you can even go to work in your underwear and walk around half naked. Okay maybe that’s not a good idea and maybe some self discipline in this area is a good thing, but I think I make my point about the freedoms available to a home based business entrepreneur.

The benefits of a home based business are significant and the drawbacks of having an office (rent, lease contracts, having to be somewhere at a certain time) are added worries that you don’t need to opt for unless you can see a clear reason why you need an office. Personally I am glad I have been there and done that regarding an office so I know what it takes to locate and contract for commercial space. One day if I ever want to start my own retail business or restaurant I will have skills to fall back on. For the time being I’m happy working from home and enjoy watching my bank balance increase rather than syphoned away to rent.

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If you are a user of Google AdWords then you would have recently received an email from Google about some changes. In a nutshell they were:

What is changing:

- Simplified account management: Your keywords will be active or inactive - instead of normal, in trial, on hold, and disabled. In addition, accounts will no longer be slowed.

- Quality-based minimum bids: Soon, each keyword will be assigned a minimum bid based on its Quality Score. Keywords with a higher Quality Score will be given lower minimum bids to stay active and trigger ads. Keywords with a lower Quality Score (including those that are currently on hold) will have the opportunity to run if your keyword or Ad Group’s maximum cost-per-click (CPC) meets the minimum bid.

1. The Quality Score is determined by your keyword’s clickthrough rate (CTR), relevance of your ad text, historical keyword performance, and other relevancy factors.

2. Ad Rank, or the position of your ad, will continue to be based on the maximum CPC and quality (now called the Quality Score).

Of course this meant that guys like Perry Marshall that specialise in AdWords had to scramble with a response. This dramatic a change will require an update to Perry’s educational materials and no doubt he is already working on an updated version. He quickly sent out a letter to his subscriber base with the following comments about the changes to AdWords and explained the implications of the changes.

Perry Marshall: Over the weekend, the AdWords folks sent out a pretty important notice: The 0.5% Click Thru Rate minimum is effectively going away.

Also going away: the Normal - In Trial - On Hold - Disabled designations. Instead, they’ll either be Active or Inactive. And Google will simply tell you how much more you have to bid to become active.

This is going to do two things:

1) The immensely frustrating experience of losing your disabled keywords ‘forever’ will change. Instead of getting disabled, the minimum bid price will just go UP. So now you’ve got more than just 1000 impressions to get that pesky thing up and running. In fact, you’ve got as long as you need, IF you’re willing to pay, as long as you’re willing to pay.

2) It means that the difference between stupid advertisers, who have money and no brains - and smart advertisers, who use brains instead of brawn - that gap will grow even wider.

This has not yet been implemented, but will be implemented in the next few weeks. So, you ask, is this good, or is it bad?

Simple answer, it’s good if you’re smart and bad if you’re dumb. It also means you can make more mistakes and get away with them, IF you’re willing to pay.

It means a few other things, too:

3) The 0.5% minimum effectively is no more. You can show your ads at 0.1% CTR, if you’re willing to bid enough.

4) The Five Cent Minimum is going away too. You can pay as little as 1 cent, IF your CTR is high enough.

5) There are some categories where you can’t get a 0.5% minimum because you’re targeting a very unique kind of high value customer, different from the guy all the other advertisers are trying to reach. You may be willing to pay a lot for that visitor. If that’s you, this could open up some new opportunities.

How this *really* affects you depends on Google’s minimum threshold formula. (They’re not saying exactly how it works.) There’s all sorts of ways they can cook this thing, and we’ll just have to wait and see how things change. I’ll be watching closely; I’ve got a lot of campaigns that run at 5 cents, and I’ll be especially interested to see how it affects those.

This does put Google in a position of being able to slowly raise the minimum bids, without ever really telling you exactly what they’re up to.

Being that they’re a public company now, none of this is very surprising, is it?

Regardless of how the exact details play out, AdWords will continue to be a game where the dumb bloke who just walked in off the street pays through the nose… And the educated guys and gals get the sweet deals. The race goes to the swift - and to those who value education.

Well there you have it. That’s a pretty clear picture about how the changes will impact AdWords campaigns straight from the mouth of one of the experts in the field. The way I see it this is a winner for Google with more cash flowing in from stupid advertisers willing to spend a lot of cash on poor click through rates and high priced keywords. For the smarter AdWords users it gives you a little more room to experiment without experiencing immediate shut-down from Google.

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Hot on the heals of the the amazing Google Earth project is the latest from Keyhole - Google Moon. For a laugh zoom right up close to the moon’s surface and you will confirm one of the oldest assumptions of human kind.

Like most people when they first use Google Maps in satellite mode and then when using Google Earth for the first time I was blown away. It’s just so much fun to be able to go anywhere on the planet and zoom in. Very neat, very cutting edge. Even my anti-geek friends appreciate the cool factor of this tool. But can it be profitable? That’s yet to be proven.

The possibilities are amazing and what Google is already doing with map directions and business localisation is outstanding, kudos to them for again breaking new ground. I’m just not so sure how they can monetize this service. I can see they already offer a paid premium service for business clientele and no doubt, terrorist jokes aside, some people some where are putting the service to very good practical use.

What I wonder though is, as an individual consumer how will I make use of this service after the fun factor wares off? Will it replace my humble referdex (street directory) which sits in the backseat of the car? Probably not today, but very likely tomorrow as the world goes fully digital. Will I use it to plan my next holiday overseas? Hmm, probably not but it might spark some inspiration on where I want to visit next if I can take a look from above first. The Pyramids do look nice…

Yaro Starak

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