After Google’s recent Farmer or Panda update, where untold thousands of webmasters, including myself to a lesser degree, perceive themselves as collateral damage in Google’s attempt to police the quality of online content. See my other post on Panda and solutions here.

Admittedly, things were pretty out of control. LOL.  The economics of outsourcing content creation, , then monetizing called Content Farming, are, hehe or were, compelling.    Freelancers overseas will produce blog posts for $1 or $2, a web page created, with advertising, ranked on the search engines, which earns back the ‘investment’ within days. Multiply by millions and a huge industry prospers.  And what fun it was!  But all good things come to an end.

Google spanked everyone’s butt with a new rule – if you have one page of poor content, that will drag down the whole site.  Whereas previously, low quality content was merely ignored, which created no or a very low incentive to raise the bar.  Now, however there is – low quality content is being deleted on a vast scale, in the hopes of raising search engine rank.    SearchEngineLand estimates over 1 Billion pages removed since March.

The idea of removing low quality content to reclaim rank is open to differences of opinion, my own experience with sites that have fully recovered from Panda, and the logic that G is applying, gives a clear and obvious incentive to do so.  Deleting poor quality content is a good start but that’s not all though.

Manually reviewing close to a thousand blog posts on numerous of my sites, it really does seem G has figured out a very tricky way of detecting good content from bad.  Which may not really be so tricky, just applying massive processing power to the information G already has about a website, which is substantial.

At this point, Google knows who 70-75% (my guess) the users are and what they are doing on any given query, and can guess accurately at another 15-25% based on browser/software/system profiles (even if your ip changes and you are not logged in, Google can match all the above metrics to a profile on you)….

Finally, after all that data, the user probably types in a query: (if the search didn’t come from off site).

Also while reviewing and evaluation blog posts, I have pondered the information hierarchy -

Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom.

Or as T.S. Eliot Put it,

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

This speaks to the heart of what G is trying to do, and various economic incentives have really messed things up.   Most blogs are just data, divided up into little bits, without enough connecting threads that establishes the context either to the blog and website or to the larger Web.  Most often blogs are ‘sensory stimuli.’   Try making your Blog into a book.    Simply assembling your blog posts together into a book doesn’t really work- it can be done, but be prepared for a huge amount of editing and writing transitions.

Something falls through the cracks – the part of life that is lost in the living.   That is the editing and transitions.  Scientifically assembling blogs for search results misses out.    It worked splendidly in monetary terms for quite a while, but no more.  And, surprise, surprise, some of the high brow advice on blogging, actually turns out to be true!  Imagine that!

And indeed – it turns out that blogging requires more than installing Open Source software, downloading keyword lists and hiring freelance writers overseas.   Blogging requires a higher order of skills that are more academic and research oriented, like a librarian or University professor.

Google Panda continues to be-devil webmasters – the original stated intention was to kill content farms, but the collateral damage has been huge. Google claims on 12% of searches were effected, which sounds pretty low, but when you consider there are 100′s of millions of searches every day, the actual number is huge.

Some of the best solutions I have seen are Jim Boykin here.

The logic behind the update is very clever.

From Google Webmaster:

One other specific piece of guidance we’ve offered is that low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content.

This forces sites to review and clean out old content, which previously was not a problem – now it is and it has to be dealt with. Otherwise sites build up more and more of mediocre content. Some have suggested that simply cutting and cleaning out pages isn’t going to help. I disagree – the logic of G’s move is so clearly focused to provide an incentive to do just that, I can’t believe it isn’t going to help.

And going through hundreds of blog pages on several different sites, I do indeed find that G has somehow managed to identify low quality filler pages and other pages which I think are well written and informative, G has indeed identified as well. So cleaning out content isn’t going to hurt.

The other interesting thing many have pointed out is that no one has come out saying “my traffic is back.” That shouldn’t be too surprising – one of the last Google wrath of God updates several years ago, G penalized link selling and turned up the dials so to speak. There wasn’t another page rank (the key metric for selling links) for some months as G starved out the link sellers.

Manually reviewing hundreds of pages of blog posts using 3 or 4 different metrics, which unfortunately can’t all be seen on the same screen, takes a huge amount of time. G knows this and is waiting.

Should be a few months yet before we see any changes.

Google is joining Citigroup and Mastercard to set up a mobile payment system that will turn Android phones into a kind of electronic wallet, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.

The new technology, which is in its early stages, will allow consumers to wave their Android phones in front of a small reader at the checkout counter to make payments, the Journal reported.

Sounds exciting! Oh, there is more…

The planned payment system would allow Google to offer retailers more data about their customers and help them target advertisements and discount offers to mobile device users near their stores, the sources told the WSJ.

Maybe some people would find that ‘not exciting.’

Key Take-Aways:

1. Fully 50% of purchases across the whole economy has an Internet component – meaning research and/or purchase online.

2. Mobile is taking off faster than the original Internet.

I have been feeling rather smug lately with a nice 20% jump in traffic from Google since the start of November. Conversions were down, but a nice boost in traffic. Now it has dropped back down Seems that Google’s new feature, Previews is double counting. What a surprisingly bad and embarrassing error from Google!

Google Previews is pretty interesting new feature that Google rolled out early this month. An interesting post on where Google is going (which isn’t far) see SEOBook. I was going to write up Google Preview but fellow Canadians Search Engine People did a great job so I thought I would just link to them. Here is the complete Google Preview FAQ.

Here is the announcement from Google Analytics Blog blandly saying they have ‘fixed’ the problem, although they are not re-processing back data.

And a great run down on how to use Advanced Segmentation to view traffic without the Preview double-counting from WebShare.

http://www.seobook.com/seos-should-focus-where-google-heading

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Recently I purchased an 80 gallon aquarium and have been setting it up. Amazing the difference in prices between local pet shops and sourcing online or from Ebay. In the course of my online research and shopping, as a consumer, not as a SEO web guy, I found an interesting site which is an excellent example of how to sell online.

My first searches were for “aquarium layout design” which brought me to this page – http://www.adana-usa.com/index.php?main_page=afa_portfolio which is a gallery of world champion aquarium layouts. If you are an aquarium hobbyist, particularly with a large budget, this is a great resource.

Exploring the site further, clicking on ‘About Planted Aquariums’ brings you to a page with 7 downloadable PDFs with detailed and surprisingly high-level technical information on CO2 supplementation, lighting, filtration and others. All of the PDFs, of course reference items which are conveniently for sale in the online store.

The online store is nicely designed and carries a wide range of high quality specialty products at reasonable prices. One nice feature is the addition of text articles with detailed explanations. (see CO2 Distribution).

All in all, a nice site – draw people in with free information, show that you know what you are talking about, retail related products and you’ll have happy customers.

Found these 2 this morning –

Escape from Cubicle Nation looks very good – All kinds of pretty sound advice. Plus books and consulting.
http://www.escapefromcubiclenation.com/

This one I am not sure about – no overall theme jumps out – Really fun graphics though and some great ideas. My first thought was that no overall theme jumps out, so they won’t be able to sell anything – websites have to be clear and concise and the theme has to jump out unmistakably in order to sell anything. Browsers that don’t know what a site is about will never buy from you. The site above is very clear right away what it is about.

BUT – this site isn’t selling anything anyway! So it’s no problem and an interesting site!
http://headrush.typepad.com/

WASHINGTON — When Bob Bernstein, 60, was laid off from his job as a real estate broker at the height of the recession in 2008, he says he had a feeling it would be a really long time before he found a job in his field again.

“Like everyone else, I asked myself, what do I do now?” Bernstein said. “The real estate market was going down, so I was not going to find another broker position.”

Since there were no jobs in his field, Bernstein decided he was going to have to create a job for himself. He had owned some retail clothing stores for about fifteen years, but he no longer had the energy to deal with landlords, bring in inventory, hire employees and maintain hours. So he decided to take all his entrepreneurial ideas to the web.

“I thought that with the right domain name, whatever creative concept I could come up with could generate some income and maybe even compete against the big guys,” Bernstein told HuffPost.

There really is more opportunity than time – See here for more Start Up Ideas.

Start off small and build every day, as per Brett Tabke’s advice from 2002 – It really does work! Takes a year or 2, but you can be enjoying an above average income and lots of time off.

Not testing? Time to get on it! Everything is in full swing and you are definitely late for the party.

According to a new report by Forrester Research, only 26% of online marketers are taking advantage of testing technologies.

Seems hard to believe when you can quicly and easily replace a picture and increase your conversion by 150%! That is an awful lot of money left on the table.

And if you think Google isn’t paying attention to high conversion websites? Think again! Google loves high conversion sites.

Perhaps the missing element in the latest Caffine update?