Hello,
I’ve added you to my jbquy group at Yahoo! Groups, a free, easy-to-use service. Yahoo! Groups makes it easy to send and receive group messages, coordinate events, share photos and files, and more.

Description of the group:
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hu84c3725lgu

You’ve got the be careful about weird email that you get. Email spammers try all kinds of different things to get through to you.

This email looks like it really did come from Yahoo Groups. But here’s the red flags:

1) It’s something I don’t recognize, expect or know about

2) The “Description” of the group isn’t a description. It’s a random looking string of numbers & letters

3) A google search for related info comes up with nothing.

I deleted this spam email for jbquy group at Yahoo! Groups. You should too.

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Subject: Your Google AdWords Campaign!

Your Google AdWords Campaign has successfully been integrated in AdWords Top Accounts. You can now reach your customers with targeted, relevant advertising through this new method as described below.

If you want to take advange of this incredible new Campaign Tool, activate it here: https://www.google.com/adwords/topaccounts/en-US/

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords Team

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This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message. If you have any questions after following the steps above, please visit the Google AdWords Help Center at http://adwords.google.com/ support/aw/?hl=en_US to find answers to frequently asked questions and a ‘contact us’ link near the bottom of the page.

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Normally, I don’t click the embedded links unless I’m 100% positive that it’s authentic. Today, I was lazy & clicked it. Fortunately, the anti-phishing tools in Firefox stopped me from connecting to the phishing site. The link takes you to www.allaseminarier.nu

It’s just another reminder to be vigilant & watch out for the bad guys.

Short answer: You can’t. You’ve got a business to run. Find a web partner that understands that your website should be producing maximum revenue for you.

2 the Top has been helping small businesses make money on the web since 2001. The web moves fast. Hop on board with us & we’ll get you 2 the Top.

Give us a call at 615.874.1455 to get started today!

First, Google has really improved the ease of editing a business listing. It’s easier both for business owners to claim their listing and for others to make community edits to a listing. At the top right, there’s now an obvious checkmark & “Owner-verified listing” if the business is verified.

Non-verified listings replace this with 2 simple links: “Edit this place – Business owner?” Previously, the link to claim a business listing on Google was buried several clicks away. Nice improvement.

The second and third changes escalate the prominence of consumer reviews. At the top of the page, Google now displays selected review snippets just below the business description.

Google has also added a “What people are saying about” section. It looks like they’re automatically slicing & dicing phrases from the consumer reviews to come up with scores for each category. On Salon Disegno in Lawrenceville, the categories are staff, prices, atmosphere, service and customer service. Notice that each category shows a single snippet but I clicked to view all of the “Staff” related comments.

Mike Blumenthal points out that these categories only display on listings with at least 11 reviews. It also appears that Google needs to recognize/classify at least 3 comments for a category to show up.

It’s interesting to note that the original reviews are still there. Google has effectively tripled the prominence of consumer reviews on the Place Pages with these changes.

Based on these changes, it’s pretty clear that Google values consumer reviews. If you don’t already have a plan in place to monitor and manage consumer reviews on the review sites that Google trusts, now’s the time.

There was a good discussion on this at Mike Blumenthal’s blog. General consensus was that Google removed them while trying to fix how they were improperly applying Authoritative One Boxes for some searches.

Today, I’m seeing the 7 pack back but only when the search contains a word like “in” or “near” within the search phrase. So you get a 7 pack on “web design in Nashville TN” but no 7 pack on “web design Nashville TN”

2 possibilities:
1) Google is slowly rolling out the 7 pack on these searches & it’s just not fully implemented.
2) Google decided that some searches should not have geo specific results ie. web designers and ad agencies are much less dependent on their local area vs someone like a salon or a bathroom remodeling contractor.

I’d say the the 2nd option is much more likely. While we may see it change again in the future, searchers looking for services like websites, advertising & marketing are more likely to consider an out of town provider. OTOH, I think most businesses are more comfortable working with a provider in their area so maybe we’ll see some additional boost to local businesses.

The official Google blog has a great post about managing your online reputation in search results. There’s some good details if you’re a do-it-your-selfer.

But if  you have a business to run and don’t want to spend countless hours managing your online reputation, just contact 2 the Top. We can create a custom plan to help protect and enhance your reputation on the Internet.

There’s a TON of info on the web about how to get higher Search Engine (SE) rankings. Unfortunately, much of it is incorrect, conflicting or out of date. But a more basic question is how can we know that anything we do will actually work?

First, research & reading.

Google is the big brand name in SE’s right now. The main reason is becasue they were the 1st SE that really did a good job of serving relevant results in response to a search, without a lot of “noise” cluttering up the page. Google got started as a college research project  (read the whole Google history here) by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The reason this is important to you and me is that Larry & Sergey published a lot of papers about how to build a search engine.

Think about it. 2 guys spend months, years trying to figure out how to build a search engine, writing college papers about it all along the way. So when they finally create a search engine, you think they might have incorporated some of the things that were in those papers? Yep.

The big momma of all those papers is ” The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine“. Among other things, PageRank (Google’s version of link popularity) is introduced in this paper & explained in detail. Many, many other papers exist from Larry, Sergey and alot of the people who are now employed at Google.

These papers are required reading for people who are heavily into SEO (Search Engine Optimization). But it’s not something I recommend most webmasters do. They’re pretty technical and take a pretty big investment in time to make much sense out of them. So trust me, there’s a reason when I say something like: Links coming from websites at a different host are probably better than links coming from websites at the same host you use. That’s a bit oversimplified but it’s easier for most people to understand that than discussing octets in IP addresses. But if you’re interested, check out 2.1 in this paper for a technical discussion. The author is now a Google employee.

Testing & Observation

Google will tell you that they take into account hundreds of different factors when ranking pages in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). So how can you test to see if 1 thing works or not when so many variables are in play?

Many people who do SEO maintain test sites or even large networks of test sites to attempt to isolate the factors that Google uses in their ranking algorithms. I went through a very simple example of isolating 1 factor of the Google algo in a post about Meta Keyword Tags.

Basically, you try to change 1 thing and see what happens. If there’s an improvement or decline in your results, that’s a clue. If there’s no change, that’s a clue. The problem is that it’s almost impossible to isolate a lot of the factors and you have to repeat the test many times to get a pretty definitive answer. So alot of people who practice SEO rely on their past experience and the experience of others to form an educated guess at what works & what doesn’t work.

Networking

As I just mentioned, getting input on what works for others can be very valuable. I network with a lot of people who are experts at SEO. Some I trust, some I don’t & most I have an open mind to their opinions. But even among the ones I trust the most, there is room for a lot of disagreements on what works best.

Fortunately for us, almost all the people who do SEO agree on the basics of SEO. That’s the 80% of SEO and 80% is usually plenty to beat the competition. The disagreements are usually about advanced techniques or about splitting hairs. The remaining 20% is beyond the scope of what most business owners want to hear. If you really want to discuss advanced techniques, buy my lunch & we’ll chat.

But in the vast majority of situations, you’ll be able to improve the performance of your website by following the basics of SEO. That’s what we’ll be getting into as we try to get your website 2 the Top of the search engines.