This is Jerry West, guest blogging again from the SEO Revolution. Let’s talk about the recent PageRank update which started last Thursday and has the SEO/Webmaster community freaking out as usual. Fine. I know you have “Green Bar Addiction” but can’t seem to attend the weekly meeting to rid yourself of the control it has over you.

At least allow me to settle your nerves.

There’s a few SEOs out there who look at testing data from real websites and I’m one of them. First, let me clear up some possible misconceptions of the PageRank update.

1) Google only updates the PageRank number on their toolbar for the public to see about four times a year.

2) When the Toolbar PageRank is updated, it is based on old data, often 10-45 days old from when the update hits. Look at it as your would a stock quote online. You see the “Stock Quote Delayed 20 Minutes” message … and it is the same with PageRank. You don’t see the actual value as that would give you an unfair advantage and Google doesn’t want that, so they “delay” as well, but it is “days or weeks” instead of “minutes”.

3) Google continually calculates PageRank and ranks sites based on their complex algorithm. However, these PageRank numbers are for Google’s eyes only. We never see them (see above).

4) Google often downgrades the visible PageRank for sites who typically sell PageRank (link brokers and their partners). However, the actual PageRank is not effected. So traffic levels stay the same and rankings, but revenue from selling links obviously takes a hit.

So what do we learn from the above? Well, we know the PageRank data when it updates is old and it is often inaccurate.

So with this recent update, I was quite shocked. Of the nearly 600 domains I track, one-third of them had a PageRank 3 or better. This is how they fared in the update:

Before: PR 5.4
After: PR 3.1

That’s a 40% drop. Ouch. And what is even more concerning is the level in which drops and increases happened. Many are saying the “bar has been raised”, meaning, there are more pages, thus, Google has to shift the grades in order to account for the influx of new pages. After all, they did this last year. The problem is, Google has FEWER pages indexed today than they did last year, so reason would be that couldn’t be the issue. But I dug a little deeper…

I had quite a few sites which have 20,000+ backlinks and listed as PR5 before the update get downgraded to a PR4, yet I had a few dozen sites who went from a PR3 to a PR4 with less than 500 backlinks. Now, honestly, how is that possible? So I dug deeper…

I tracked the sites back 10 weeks and analyzed the traffic and rankings. Virtually no significant change. I also looked at the sites who experienced an increase, and again, no significant change upward in traffic or rankings.

In discussing these findings with Jason Katzenback, he said, “Looks like PageRank is about as important as Alexa ranking.” Bingo.

If PageRank was a significant factor, you would have seen changes in the sites who had their PageRank taken up a point or down a point. It’s been trackable in the past. So why not now? Either PageRank is no longer a factor or Google is getting more aggressive in penalizing sites with their Toolbar PageRank.

I’m speaking on the Organic Panel at Search Engine Strategies next month in San Jose, and you can bet I’ll be asking a lot of “why” questions to the engineers from Google.

So, to wrap this up, if your PageRank went down, but your traffic didn’t, relax. Keep marketing your business and follow trusted advice. And if you’re ready for a real big step, uninstall your Google Toolbar and ignore that “green bar” fluctuation. You might be surprised how much more you get accomplished without the “PageRank Distraction”.

Read More on the last Google PageRank Update.

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Goals are a fantastic way of helping measure success of your efforts and when used in conjunction with “Javascript Events” (I talked about this yesterday) can be very informational for affiliate marketers.

Goals are a very quick and easy way to get a good picture of your conversion rates and understanding your conversion rates is critical for being successful.

The following is how to set up a basic goal for a double opt in mailing list.

Step 1: Click on “Analytics Settings” to ensure you are on the settings page.

Step 2: Click on “Edit” under the settings for the site you want to create the goal for.

Step 3: Scroll down to “Conversion Goals and Funnel” and click on “edit” for G1 (goal 1)


Step 4: Select the “On” radio button of “Active Goal”, keep the “Match Type” and “Head Match” (click the question mark if you want an explanation of the different types of matchtypes).

In the “Goal URL” just put the file name of the page. So if your url to your opt in page that the reader goes to once they have verified their subscription is…

www.yourdomain.com/thanksforconfirming/

…then simply enter /thanksforconfirming/ as the Goal URL. Then name the “Goal URL” and just leave the rest as default.



Step 5: Scroll down and in the “Define Funnel”, in step 1 enter the URL of the initial page that the user goes to when they initially opt in. Click on the “required step” check box and then click “Save Changes”.

Step 6: Once your goal is set up, you will want to let it run for at least 48 hours before you start looking at the info but I would recommend at least 2 weeks of allowing the goal to run, to get a real sample of your opt in conversion rate.

To check your “goals” (conversions), click on “Goals” and then “Overview”

Purpose: By settings goals you are able to effectively understand the conversion rate of your opt in and this allows you to test different things, such as headlines, and track improvements. Understanding your conversions helps you to understand if your efforts are providing an effective ROI.

But COW what about Tracking Affiliates!!!

Hmmmm…. have not I given you enough… do I need to give more????

OK then.. Here goes

Goals for tracking how well an affiliate page is doing is very powerful and it is super easy to set up. Lets say for example you have a review on your site and you want to know what the conversion rate is of people landing on your page and visiting the actual affiliate product page. To do this you would first of all make sure you add the JavaScript event to the links on your pre sales page. You will want to make sure that all the links in the content that are using the affiliate link, use the same event code.

So you link might look like this…

<a href=”http://www.abc.com/yourid#” onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(’/aff_event/abc_com’);”>

What I would then do is create my goal with your goal URL being:

/aff_event/abc_com

…and then your step 1 required step would be the URL of the actual presales page.

This will now track for you the percentage of people that visit your page and actually go to the affiliate product page.

SO what do you think.. you like this tip or what?

This is the last one in this Analytics series and I am thinking I am next going to get into creating effective presales material.

Part 1: Google Analytics - Installing
Part 2: Google Analytics - Keywords
Part 3: Google Analytics - Incoming Links
Part 4: Google Analytics - Outgoing Traffic
Part 5: Google Analytics - Content
Part 6: Google Analytics - Tracking with JavaScript Events
Part 7: Google Analytics - Creating Goals

Click Here Now to Download “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” for FREE and Learn the Right Way to Make Money Online! - Copyright JohnCow.com - All Rights Reserved

Every few months I like to give people an update on where I expect to be over the next few months. I apologize in advance if I have to decline other speaking invitations, but I’m genuinely trying to travel less and speak less these days to get a better work/life balance. Here are my tentative plans:

This week: In-laws are visiting, so I will be posting less and slower on email.

August 11-15, 2008: I’m planning to attend SIGGRAPH 2008 down in Los Angeles. I haven’t been in 8-9 years, so I want to see what I’ve missed in the computer graphics field and maybe catch up with a few folks from grad school.

August 18-22, 2008: I’ll be at SES San Jose on a keynote panel about the future of search with Robert Scoble, Danny Sullivan, Tim Westergren of Pandora and others. It should be a lot of fun.

November 11-14, 2008: Gotta be PubCon in Vegas! A family member has a birthday near the beginning of the conference, but I’ll be there in time for the traditional Search Engine Super Session.

January 19-21-ish, 2009: I don’t have all the details yet, but I’m planning to be in Washington D.C. for the presidential inauguration and maybe an inaugural ball.

February 3-7, 2009: I’ll be down in Long Beach, CA for TED 2009, just to soak up what TED is like as an attendee.

I’m skipping Black Hat and DEFCON, even though I wanted to see what they’re like. It looks like I’ll probably miss WordCamp because of SIGGRAPH.

By the way, if this sounds like a lot of stuff to you, just be glad you’re not watching as many conferences as Robert Scoble does on Upcoming:

Sheesh.

SHOW DETAILS :
Format : 4 RINGS CFA LICENSED SHOW
Organizer : FELINE SOCIETY OF MALAYSIA
Date : 31st. August 2008
Venue : THE MALL. KUALA LUMPUR.

Judges:
1. ROB U’REN
2. WAYNE TREVATHAN
3. BECKY ORLANDO
4. DIANA ROTHERMEL

Entry Limit : 225 cats
Closing Date of Entries : 18th August, 2008

SHOW SCHEDULE :
Sunday 31/08/2008
Vet-In (7:30am-8:30am)
Cat Judging (8:30am-1:00pm)
LUNCH (1:00pm-2:00pm)
Cat Judging - Continue (2:00pm-6:00pm)

* all cats must be accompany by vaccination record and pass the vet-in

FOR MORE INFO. PLEASE BROWSE TO http://www.felinemalaysia.com

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In the previous post I talked about “Google Analytics - Content” and how you can use the information to understand what are popular topics on your site to create content about. Today I want to talk about another “Content” feature in Analytics but this one is a little bit of a different tactic.

Google Analytics offers the ability to create what is called “Java Script events” that are added to the html of a link on your blog. These events will treat the link like it is an actual page and by doing this you will be able to see specific details about the links that are very worthwhile to know.

There are dozens of different things you can use this strategy to track and when you tie it in with setting up goals (I talk about this tomorrow) you have an extremely powerful “one - two” punch that gives you very powerful data.

Some examples of things you can track using this strategy…

• If you have a page with multiple call to actions that link to the same page, you can track which one is getting the most action.
• If you want to track clicks on different banner ads on your site, you can know specifically which banners are getting the most clicks.
• If you want to track the amount of times someone downloads a PDF, ZIP or some other file.
• If you run PPC and you have multiple copies of the same page for specific keywords and you are promoting the same affiliate product, you can track which specific page is getting the best CTR (Click Through Rate) on the actual “Call to Action” link. This is very powerful since most affiliate products do not allow you to put conversion tracking on their thank-you page… hmmm I see another series of posts here for tracking PPC.
• and the list can go on and on…

To create an event you simple add the following code to your link…

onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(’/event/nameofevent’);

So the html of your link would appear like…

<a href=”http://www.domain.com/pagename” onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(’/event/nameofevent’);”>

the (’/event/nameofevent’) is what Analytics will use to identify the specific link. So for example, say I have a pre sales page that I want to track which call to action link on that page is getting the most amount of “Action” to the product I was promoting at abc.com, I would put with the top link in the post…

(’/aff_event/top_abc.com’)

…and with the second link you could put…

(’/aff_event/bottom_abc.com’)

…and if I had a banner ad in the post to the same product, I would put…

(’/aff_event/image_abc.com’)

This is effective for testing links in different parts of your page and also using different call to actions or images.

Another example of how you could use a Java Script event is if we were giving away a free download. For that I would use…

(’/downloadevent/pagefilename_pdf’)

If the file name is too long then just use abbreviations.

These are just two simple examples of how to use Java Script events and again when you tie them in with goals, it is very worthwhile.

How to Track the Events

Step 1: In the sidebar navigation menu, click on “Content” and then “Content Drilldown”

Step 2: Make sure to select “500″ in the display drop down and you will see all the content that Analytics has tracked being visited. Scroll down and click on /event/ (or what ever you called the first part of your file name in your event)

Note: you can name this what ever you want in the code.

Step 3: You will now get a list of all the javascript events you have created on your blog and you can start to see what links visitors are actually clicking on.

Purpose: I realize I reviewed different strategies already but for a lot of you who are just getting started and are primarily promoting other affiliate programs and this strategy is very effective for helping to understand whether a specific affiliate product is converting well or not. What you can do is add the javascript event to your links and if you see you are sending a lot of traffic to the affiliate site but not making sales, then you would want to test different affiliate offers, since you are sending lots of traffic but the sales page itself they are landing on is not converting.

If however you notice that you are sending very little traffic (getting a small amount of clicks on the affiliate links) you would want to focus on getting more visitors on your page and test a stronger “call to action”.

Often times we want to blame the affiliate program for not selling well but we are to blame because we are not even sending traffic to them… or we think we suck at affiliate marketing because we can not make sales when it is the actual affiliate product that is doing a poor job of converting sales.

Whew I hope that makes sense

So, any ideas pop up on how you can use this strategy?

Part 1: Google Analytics - Installing
Part 2: Google Analytics - Keywords
Part 3: Google Analytics - Incoming Links
Part 4: Google Analytics - Outgoing Traffic
Part 5: Google Analytics - Content
Part 6: Google Analytics - Tracking with JavaScript Events

Click Here Now to Download “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” for FREE and Learn the Right Way to Make Money Online! - Copyright JohnCow.com - All Rights Reserved

I’ve started to post more on my twitter account recently. Less than two weeks ago, Twitter bought Summize. Good for them; I like both companies. But http://search.twitter.com/search?q=wordpress+mattcutts should return this entry in Twitter’s search results. I don’t see it in Twitter’s search results:

What’s the story, Twitter/Summize folks? I can’t escape the feeling that I would have found that entry on pre-acquisition Summize. Does anyone know more about when Twitter’s search has gaps?

This was honestly one of the last things I ever started looking at when it came to using Google Analytics but I quickly realized it was one of the most important for planning out your content.

Step 1: In the left hand navigation menu click on “Content” –> “Top Landing Pages”

Step 2: Make the date range a couple months of data.

Step 3: Now you will have a list of pages on your blog that are ranked by highest to lowest for traffic.

Step 4: Click on the link and look at the data that Analytics provides for where the traffic to that page is coming from and what keywords are being used to find it.

Purpose: There are a couple different things you want to look for here…

• What content is getting lots of activity? You can not always tell by the amount of comments that a blog post gets (although it is a fantastic indicaor), sometimes the content does not really cause a reader to comment but it does cause them to share it with others. You want to highlight this content because obviously it is important to your readers and you will want to write more content on that topic. It is great to poll and ask your readers what they want but this is truly not the majority opinion because everyone does not participate… but using the Analytics data will tell you the true answers.
• Where is the Traffic Coming From? Do not assume that the traffic must be coming from the search engines… I often find very popular posts have recieved most of the traffic from sites like StumbleUpon. If this content was popular on Stumbleupon, then it is probably a good idea to create more similar content.
• What Keywords Are Being Used? Check out what keywords your page is being found with, check to see where you rank in Google for that keyword and if it can be improved… Just Do It!

So what are your thoughts on todays tip and do you have any to add?

Part 1: Google Analytics - Installing
Part 2: Google Analytics - Keywords
Part 3: Google Analytics - Incoming Links
Part 4: Google Analytics - Outgoing Traffic
Part 5: Google Analytics - Content

Click Here Now to Download “How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog” for FREE and Learn the Right Way to Make Money Online! - Copyright JohnCow.com - All Rights Reserved

On my “Matt Cutts” twitter account a few days ago I asked other folks which WordPress “Related Posts” plug-in they would recommend. It seems like “Related Posts” extensions go in and out of vogue every few years, so I wanted to hear what smart folks were using lately. The plugins that got recommended the most to me were:

• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP), by mitcho (Michael 芳貴 Erlewine).
• Similar Posts, by Rob Marsh.
• Aizattos Related Posts, by, um, Aizatto, I guess. This plugin no longer seems to be maintained officially, so that link is to an unofficial mirror.
• WordPress Related Posts, by Denis (Hua?).
• Wasabi Related entries plug-in.

I did a little digging on each of these. My criteria (in order) was: the easiest plugin to install, that appeared to be actively maintained, and ideally would give me lots of options. The first one I ended up trying was Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP), and mitcho has really done a fantastic job on it:

- It’s trivial to install.
- You don’t have to edit your WordPress template.
- The relevance is good: the suggested posts are related, and you can tweak thresholds and how things are computed if you want.

So I think I’m happy. Even the things that I might want down the road (show the date of posts, RSS feed support, and sentence-aware excerpts) are on the to-do list. But the plug-in is very usable even without any tweaking. I’ll include a screenshot of the options page in case you want to see what sort of flexibility you have:

Well done, mitcho! If you feel strongly that another Related Posts plugin is better, feel free to say so in the comments.

A friend of mine in California seeks opinion about buying new lamps for her new house. Oh well, I’m not a type of guy that are into interior design that much. But, I’m a good internet surfer. I’ve come across to this website – farreys.com which offers all types of lamps.

Farreys.com offers thousands of lamps including table lamps, floor lamps, task lamps, reading lamps, piano lamps and torchieres in a wide range of styles and at the lowest prices from dozens of top manufacturers. Buyers may shop by lamp brand, by lamp application or by style. They also offer lamp product search tool quickly helps find the perfect lamps for your application. So I guess there’s no way to complaint about the hard time of searching, since farreys.com provides it all.

Visit their website now and choose the best looking lamps and lamp shades for your home. Their superior service will assist you in finding what you need and make your home more comfortable.

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Amber Chia look so hot when holding a cat :XO:You can get this Petster Magazine for free at any Petshop nearby your place. Or you can just visit Petster Website and download.

Who is Amber Chia? For those who do not know, she is one of the hottest making money super model in Malaysia. Born in Ipoh, Perak, but grew up in Tawau, Sabah (East Malaysia).

She began her modeling career at seventeen, after being discovered in Kuala Lumpur, where she was working as an accountant. Amber Chia gained international fame after winning the 2004 Guess Watches Timeless Beauty Contest, which was a global model search for Guess Watch’s brand ambassador worldwide. Her winning also meant that Miss Amber Chia became the first Asian model ever to win a top global professional modelling contest.

Amber Chia was subsequently voted Model of the Year by the Malaysian International Fashion Awards in 2004 and 2005. One of her most defining features is her sexy lips, which are not typically found in ethnic Chinese Malaysians. She is also the creator of Malaysia’s first modeling reality competition I Wanna Be A Model (also known as Malaysia’s Next Top Model, base on CW’s hit reality TV show America’s Next Top Model which was created by supermodel Tyra Banks).

A number of well-known companies have used Amber Chia in their advertisements, including Sony, L’oreal, and Mitsubishi. On the other hand, Amber Chia drew fire by appearing in the Indonesian edition of Playboy Magazine. The photographs were non-nude, however, Amber Chia defends them as “tasteful, stylish and sensuous but not pornographic“. Her photos appeared in the “Celebrity” section of the magazine.

Amber Chia has graduated to being a well-known actress with successes in Chinese productions and serials such as The 3rd Generation, Possessed, and Trio & a Bed. She is now also a well-known actress in Taiwan and China, appearing regularly in TV host shows and sitcoms. She recently starred as co-lead in a CCTV production, currently in post-production and will be broadcast China-wide in 2008. Amber Chia is currently managed internationally by Looque Models of Singapore.

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