They actually guarantee that my site will appear above all other sites on every search engine for my selected keywords.

I knew, of course, that it was some sort of scam, but I was curious about exactly what the scam was. They never actually say it in so many words, but apparently their “service” is a browser-based plug-in that inserts an ad for your site at the very top of the page in your web browser.

They key point that they don’t tell you is that only people with their browser plug-in installed will see your ad. Here’s a screenshot of their home page:

AdWord Express is a scam

The only way AdWord Express could be accomplishing that is with a browser plug-in. Google doesn’t sell ad space like that, and neither do any of the other major search engines.

And here’s a screenshot of their “Browser Upgrade” page:

AdWordExpress is a scam and they will install malicious plug-ins into your browser.

They very cleverly don’t tell you anywhere that their “EXCLUSIVE TOP PLACEMENT” will only appear to people who install these browser plug-ins, but that’s obviously what they’re doing.

And here’s a screenshot of the status bar for installing the “Upgrade for Internet Explorer” and the “Upgrade for Firefox”:

AdWord Express will install plug-ins to your browsers. Probably malicious malware-laden plug-ins. After all, a company that will scam you in one way is likely to scam you in other ways.

See what’s going on there? The IE “upgrade” will run a program called “Upgrade.exe,” and who knows what that will do on your computer….. The Firefox “upgrade” will run “install_tb_XPI(),” which will install something to Firefox —The name suggests a plugin that displays a toolbar, but who really knows?

AdWordExpress is found at adwordexpress.com. They have a private registration through Network Solutions. I swear that the day I received their spam, they were at adwordexpress.net, but that domain now has a GoDaddy parking page. The two domains were registered on 10/4/11 and 10/6/11, just 2 days apart, so they’re probably the same people. It appears that perhaps GoDaddy has already detected their scam and deactivated their site. The .com is still live through Network Solutions, though.

Please…… don’t anyone fall for this scam. And whatever you do, do not install their “browser upgrades.”

I gave him some basic background information on the whole paid links/nofollow debacle. I explained to him that while we don’t know for sure if Google penalizes sites that sell links, they might, and even if they don’t they might start to in the future. His site performs extremely well in all the major search engines, including Google, and I suggested that he wants to be very very careful to avoid doing something that could harm his site’s performance in Google.

I recommended that he tell the link broker that he would be happy to sell the links but that they would be nofollowed — predicting, also, that the link broker would decline such links. He did, and they did.

It still irks me that after introducing the nofollow tag under the guise of reducing blog link spam, Google then expanded its recommended usage and then further expanded that to become essentially a “requirement” that paid links be nofollowed. With Google’s focus on inbound links for ranking pages, Google almost singlehandedly created the voluminous quantities of link spam that infests the web. Now they require that webmasters and website owners help them clean up the mess.

My client is smart and savvy, and has spent years building a very high-quality site that has garnered thousands of links from major universities, public school systems, Discovery, PBS, the History Channel, Fox, and many many other large, authoritative sources. But he doesn’t live, eat and breathe SEO, and he didn’t know about paid links or the nofollow tag. He was interested in the offer he received because his AdSense income has dropped this year, and he’s looking for other sources of revenue. I’m not typically the type to cry “It’s not fair,” because I know that life is simply not fair — but in this case I’ll make an exception. It’s not fair for Google to threaten dire consequences to his site simply because he didn’t know that an offer he received would violate Google’s policy on paid links. This man focuses on building a quality site; he doesn’t spend his time practicing black-hat SEO or poring over Google’s webmaster guidelines.

I’m not a fan of NetBiz. They’re not necessarily a scam, but they do seem to be at least somewhat misleading in how they represent themselves.

What they’re doing is pay-per-click, plain and simple — where you run ads on Google, which appear in the “Sponsored Links” section, and you pay a set amount “per click” whenever someone clicks on your ad. There’s nothing wrong with pay-per-click; it can be a powerful tool to get targeted traffic to your site. And there’s nothing wrong with paying a PPC expert to manage your PPC campaigns for you. But I’m skeptical about anyone who offers a PPC campaign on a fixed budget, while attempting to conceal exactly what they’re doing.

Despite their claims about being “featured on that first page 100% of the time,” they *have* to be setting a maximum per-month budget, which would be below what they charge you — otherwise, where would their profit come from? If and when you get enough clicks that the monthly maximum is reached, your ad would not show again until the following month. Period. There’s no other way they could make these offers and stay in business. Yet they don’t seem to want to tell you outright that your ad is running on a pay-per-click basis.

I haven’t had the pleasure of receiving any calls from NetBiz myself, so I can’t speak to the truthfulness of their sales pitch. But other people who have spoken with NetBiz reps report their experiences:

• An Austin, Texas, Realtor wrote a blog post nominating NetBiz as 2007′s Most Misleading Telemarketing Call.
• A Realtor in Hawaii reports on his blog that a NetBiz telemarketer claimed to be calling “on behalf of Google.”
• The Website Publisher blog also reports phone-spam from NetBiz and deceptive claims that they’re calling “on behalf of Google”

Furthermore, if you’re going to spend money on pay-per-click advertising, I’d recommend that you either hire someone who knows what they’re doing, or learn a little bit about it yourself and manage your own campaigns. For PPC advertising to be effective, you need to focus on carefully written, tightly focused ads, with very carefully selected keywords lists to trigger the ads, and with tightly focused landing pages on your site developed specifically as landing pages for your ads.

This slap-dash kind of offer from NetBiz, with no discussion of the value of the keywords, or any focus on writing the ad itself, and no mention of targeted landing pages — I just don’t think it’s a good way to spend your advertising money. NetBiz seems more focused on getting your money than on running advertising that will work for you.

PPC advertising isn’t rocket science, but getting a decent return on your advertising dollars requires more thought than NetBiz seems to put into their offers.

As always, do your research, gather the facts, and make up your own mind. But I recommend avoiding the NetBiz approach.

Read more about AdWords advertising:

• Maximize your Pay Per Click Return
• Eight Tips Every AdWords Advertiser Should Know

But it’s also surprisingly satisfying to spend a few hours optimizing a small site for a new client, and then to see, almost immediately, improvements in that site’s performance in the search engines.

I recently spent less than a half day working a small site (about 5 pages) for a client. I didn’t build the site; it already existed when the client came to me, looking for help to get better search engine placement.

I did minor, basic, SEO 101 type things: I wrote custom title tags and description meta tags for each page. I added appropriate alt text to all the images. I cleaned up the html a little, to use proper h1 and h2 headings. None of this was rocket science, nor even high-level SEO.

Almost right away, the site started performing better in the search engines. From last September through March 10, the site had been found for a grand total of 7 different search phrases, most of which were some variation of the company’s name. I worked my “SEO magic” on March. 10. From March 11 to today, March 28, the site has been found for 46 different search phrases, many of which are excellent keyphrases for this company, and traffic has increased tenfold.

This site has only 6 pages, virtually no backlinks, and no marketing or advertising budget to speak of. The company’s service is a very small, narrow, geographically limited niche which will never draw hundreds or thousands of visitors per month. But within days of the small changes I made to the site, the site was drawing targeted organic search traffic at levels previously undreamed of.

There is a host of issues surrounding this edict from Google’s pet spam fighter, all of them ugly.

Google’s nofollow tag is a non-standard bit of code, created by Google, supposedly to help combat link-dropping spam on blogs. At least, that’s what Google said about it when they first introduced this tag.

Then they expanded its “recommended” usage to telling us that we should put a nofollow link condom on all links that we can’t personally vouch for, or that we don’t want to pass link juice to.

During all of this, Google has been vague about exactly what nofollow does. Initially, Google told us that nofollow would simply cause a link to not pass link juice. The implication was that Googlebot would still follow the link and spider the target page:

Google’s Blog

“when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.”

Then they told us that nofollow had the effect of the standard nofollow meta tag:

Google Webmaster Help Center

Meta tags can exclude all outgoing links on a page, but you can also instruct Googlebot not to crawl individual links by adding rel=”nofollow” to a hyperlink.

Then they told us again that such a link simply does not pass link juice:

Matt Cutts’ Blog

The rel=”nofollow” attribute is an easy way for a website to tell search engines that the website can’t or doesn’t want to vouch for a link…. In an ideal world, nofollow would only be for untrusted links.

Then they told us again that it acts like the nofollow meta tag:

Matt Cutts’ Blog

At a link level, you can add a nofollow tag on the granularity of individual links to prevent Googlebot from crawling individual links

Google can’t make up its mind what the nofollow tag even does — and now Google is instructing us that we are to use nofollow on all paid links — and asking us to snitch on our colleagues who might be in “violation” of Google’s “guidelines.” Mr. Cutts offered no explanation of what Google plans to do, or may do, with respect to sites selling such links, or buying such links. He offered no explanation with respect to what Google may do with the “paidlinks” reports he requested. Will Google ban the sites selling such links? Ban the sites buying such links? Devalue the link juice of the paid links? Devalue the link juice of all links on the “offending” site? How will Google itself verify whether a link is a paid link?

Further, Mr. Cutts made no distinction between links that are subject to editorial review versus free-for-all paid links that a site will sell to all comers. Google’s own webmaster guidelines recommend that we pony up the $300 yearly fee to Yahoo for a listing in Yahoo’s directory. Google says the Yahoo directory exercises editorial review and that you’re paying for the review, not the link. But what about Joe Blow’s directory, in which Joe Blow exercises editorial review before accepting a submission? What about trusted, authority sites that exercise extreme discretion in deciding what paid links to accept, only accepting those that the site deems to be worthy and of interest to the site’s readers?

Mr. Cutts offered no explanation of what Google might consider a “paid link.” A link can be “paid for” in any number of ways: An outright exchange of money for links. A trade of links for links. A trade of services for links. A link from a charitable organization in acknowledgment of a donation. A link in exchange for a discount on products or services. A link resulting from a paid review of a product. A link resulting from a free review of a product provided free to the reviewer. This list could go on endlessly.

Google is revealing an unsurpassed arrogance in expecting the world wide web to change its linking methods for all links on all sites that are paid for. To use non-standard code in order to satisfy Google’s failing method of ranking pages in search results. To use a tag that is shrouded in mystery, with no clear explanation of what it does, or what it is supposed to do, or what it might do in the future.

Google even goes so far as to “suggest” that if we don’t want to use nofollow, we should use javascript to generate these links — which would create a usability and accessibility issue that most of us would prefer to avoid.

Google’s recommendation, in fact, is completely contrary to the original intent of linkage. Here is what Tim Berners-Lee wrote about links:

The intention in the design of the web was that normal links should simply be references, with no implied meaning.

A normal hypertext link does NOT necessarily imply that

One document endorses the other;

Source: http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkLaw

I say, Google, fix your algorithm, but don’t expect — or instruct with heavy-handed arrogance — the webmasters of the world to change their standard linking practices to make it easier for you to clean up your act. For shame, that a company whose motto is “Do no evil” would commit such an evil.

• Join the YesFollow Project

First thing: You want to create multiple campaigns, with each campaign focused around a particular product, category or topic. For example, you could create Campaign A for Product A, Campaign B for Product B, and so forth. But you might also benefit by creating a campaign about Hot New Feature in Product A, in which you would target your keywords, ad text, and landing page to that particular feature, and another campaign about Great User Benefit in Product B, in which you would target that user benefit of product B.

Each campaign should be tightly focused on a single theme. Make up your keyword list for each campaign to reflect the theme of that particular campaign. Write the ad(s) for each campaign to reflect the theme of the campaign, using the keywords from the campaign. For example, if Product A’s hot new feature is something that will save users money, you might run ads with headlines like “Save Money With Hot New Feature,” “Hot New Feature Saves Money,” and so on, and the text of the ad should focus on that theme: “Product A Increases Your Bottom Line By Saving You Money”. (Please note: The sample ad text and headlines I’m using here are quick, off-the-top-of-my-head examples, not well-thought-out ways to promote Hot New Feature of Product A.)

When you’re ready to focus on your Product B Great User Benefit campaign, you’d write your ads with ad headlines and text that use those keywords: “Great User Benefit in Product B” for the headline, and ad text that refers to or describes the user benefit.

What you want is for people who search for, say, “Hot New Feature,” to get your “Hot New Feature” campaign, with an ad headline that reads “Hot New Feature” and ad text that focuses on that feature. Someone else who searches for “Great User Benefit” would get your ad headlined “Great User Benefit” and ad text that promotes the user benefit of your product. Don’t make the mistake of lumping all your keywords and ads together under one campaign — think in terms of “laser targeting” your ads to the search words that people are using.

2. Opt Out of the Content Network (At Least Initially)

Second, after you create a campaign, be sure to go into “Edit Campaign Settings” and either opt OUT of the “content network” altogether, or else check the box “Content bids” to set separate prices for content clicks. This allows you to specify much-reduced bid amounts for your ads to appear on the content network. The “content network” is when ads appear not on Google’s search results page, but on regular websites that carry Google ads. A lot of these websites are junk, and they will NOT bring you good targeted leads. You’re opted in to the content network by default, which I think is pretty scummy of Google. I recommend that you opt out initially, and after you’ve spent some time learning your way around the system, only then experiment with opting in to the content network. There are a lot of good sites in the content network that you’ll probably want your ad to appear on, so you probably should opt in at some point, in a small way, with a much-reduced bid for content network ads — but not right away. First learn how to manage campaigns and write targeted ads and set up keywords lists, and only then should you venture into the content network.

3. Exclude myspace.com

If/when you do opt in to the content network, go into the “Tools” section, the Site Exclusion link, and opt OUT of myspace.com. When myspace.com started carrying Google ads, thousands of advertisers were suddenly hit with huge advertising bills because of all the kids on myspace who click-click-click willy-nilly on everything they see, with no intention of buying anything. And even after excluding myspace, keep an eye on the sources of clicks to see if your ads are getting clicks from any other sites sending you large amounts of worthless traffic. It’s one thing to pay for good traffic; it’s something else altogether to pay large amounts of money for huge amounts of worthless traffic.

4. No Search Network

While you’re in there editing the campaign settings, I also recommend unchecking the box to opt OUT of the “Search network.” There’s good stuff that you’ll be missing — AOL’s search, for example — but Google’s so-called “search network” is mostly garbage spam sites that will not bring you good traffic. I think until Google cleans up its “search network” everyone should opt out of the search network.

5. Keep Tabs On Your Campaigns

The first few days (even the first few weeks) that you’re running PPC ads, you should spend some time every day checking on the clicks you’re getting, and the ads and keywords you’re getting them from, and conversion rates. Don’t just set up some campaigns and then ignore them — go into your account EVERY DAY and see what’s going on. Dump the ads that aren’t performing, or edit the headlines and/or text. Very minor tweaks in the wording can make a huge difference. If you have ads that are performing well, create some additional ads very similar to those, but with minor changes, and see if they perform even better. If you have ads with good click-through rates, you ultimately end up paying less per click on those ads, even while the ads themselves get shown higher up in the block of paid ads. Ads with poor click-through rates will get shown lower down, and cost you more per click. So it’s well worth spending some time to experiment and find the ads that work best.

6. Learn How Keyword Matching Options Work

When setting up your keyword list, pay particular attention to the keyword matching options — broad matching, phrase matching, and exact matching. You should probably start with phrase matching. Broad matching can result in this scenario:

I have a client who runs humpback whale watching tours on the Silver Bank in the Dominican Republic. There are sperm banks that (I’m guessing) bid on the phrase sperm bank, using broad matching. Google’s world-famous algorithm says to itself “sperm bank …. sperm whales …. humpback whales … Silver Bank ….. Humpback whales must be related to sperm banks. I know! I’ll show sperm bank ads to people searching for humpback whales on the Silver Bank!” (I think the sperm banks may have wised up after a few clicks on those ads — I’m not seeing those so much anymore.) It’s a clever algorithm, but it’s not very smart. This is what happens when you let Google’s algorithm run wild with broad matching. Stick to phrase matching and/or exact matching. You might end up with your ad appearing for searches on bull sperm if you use broad matching. If/when you decide to experiment with broad matching, keep a *real* close eye on what’s happening with your ads. You might not like the results.

7. Setting Your Daily Budget

In your campaign settings, set your daily budget fairly high initially (although not so high that you’ll go broke from paying your AdWords bill, of course). If you set it too low, your ads hardly ever get shown. Be prepared to throw some money away those first few days with a high daily budget — higher than you really want to spend on an ongoing basis — so that you get enough data to get a feel for which ads are working and which aren’t. Then after a few days lower your daily budget to a more reasonable level. I recommend lowering it in fairly small increments, so that you can see what daily budget results in how many clicks results in how many sales. Tweak as needed until you reach a level you’re comfortable with.

You set the “cost per click” that you’re willing to pay for each click separately from the daily budget, and you can edit the cost-per-click separately not only for individual campaigns, but for individual keywords within each campaign. You might find, for example, that the keyword nutritious dog food converts better than the keyword healthy dog food, so you might be willing to pay more per click for that keyword.

8. Target Your Landing Pages

And last — at least, last for today’s entry: For the most part you don’t want to send people to the home page of your site. For your Hot New Feature in Product A ads, send them to a page about the hot new feature in product A. For the Great User Benefit in Product B ads, send them to a page about the great user benefit in product B. Create some additional pages on your site to serve as landing pages for your ads, if necessary.

Remember the “laser targeting” I mentioned above? Target with your landing page, too. Lead the user down the path that he’s already looking for: Targeted keywords that trigger targeted ads that lead to targeted landing pages. Every step of the way, the user is following a path that takes him to exactly what he’s looking for. And be sure to include a clear (and targeted) call-to-action on the landing page: “Buy Product A Now” or “Start Enjoying Great User Benefit in Product B Today.”

• After you’ve explored the Google AdWords interface and set up a couple of campaigns, come back and read this again. It will all make much more sense then.
• Read more about pay-per-click advertising for real estate agents.

Pam is not navigating directly to the web site she wants. She is searching for that web site, even though she knows the exact domain. She searches, and the site appears at the top of the search results, and she clicks the link to go to the site. This happens all the time. I see the results in the logfiles, too — the logfiles show me when someone has conducted a search for a domain and then clicked the domain in the search results to get there. Every time I see it, I shake my head in amazement.

This behavior is probably a symptom of “satisficing,” a term coined to refer to something that may not be ideal, but works sufficiently well for a person that they’re not willing to learn a better way. People are used to using that ubiquitous Google Toolbar for everything, or they perceive “the Internet” as being whatever they can get to through their Yahoo homepage. They are simply not aware of any other method of navigation.

Regardless of why this behavior occurs, it means that web site owners, who go to a lot of time and effort to promote their web sites, need to make darn sure that their site comes up at the #1 spot in a search for their domain.

I just signed on a new client this week, to do a complete redevelopment of an existing web site. The current site is so badly constructed that it does not come up #1 in Google in a search for the domain. It doesn’t even turn up in the first 5 pages of Google in a search for the domain. The site is #1 in MSN and Yahoo — but not in the first 5 pages of Google! This is a site that’s been around for several years — there’s no aging delay or sandbox effect at work here. There aren’t many guarantees in the world of search engines, but I will have this site turning up at #1 in Google in a search for the domain before long.

Another site I’m currently developing, a brand-new site, brand-new domain, registered for the first time 2 months ago and not yet fully indexed in any of the big 3 search engines, turns up #1 in all 3 search engines in a search for the domain. That is as it should be. There is no excuse for anything else.

URL (pronounced you-are-ell, or sometimes “earl” as in Duke of) stands for Uniform Resource Locator. It’s the technical name for the address of a particular web page. For example, the URL of this site’s home page is http://www.tropicalwebworks.org, and the URL of this page is http://www.tropicalwebworks.org/2007/01/18/infamous-canonical-url/.

It’s common that any particular web page may be reached at multiple URLs. If this site were not configured optimally, the home page might be reachable at both http://www.tropicalwebworks.org and http://tropicalwebworks.org (notice the missing “www.”). Normal people would logically think that this would be desirable: After all, you don’t want people to get a “server not found” error if they try to get to your site without including the www part.

But Google sees these as two completely separate URLs that just happen to contain exactly the same content. There are two problems with such a situation:

1. First, the “strength” of that page, and its ability to turn up in the search engine results, is diluted. Some of the page’s strength is allotted to one version, and some to the other, and neither “page” performs as well as it would if all the strength were concentrated in one page.
2. And second, Google attempts to filter out pages containing duplicate content, based on the reasonable logic that people don’t want to see multiple results in their searches for the exact same thing. Thus, since both of these “pages” contain the exact same content, one of them will suffer in searches due to the dupe content filter.

It’s a double whammy. It’s not that your site actually has duplicate content. No, we could possibly call this situation “virtual duplicate content.” But it’s all the same to Google: It’s duplicate content, period.

And if that’s not bad enough, many people link to their home page like this: http://www.example.com/index.html. Now Google sees yet another instance of duplicate content: http://www.example.com and http://www.example.com/index.html. So ultimately what Google sees is four “duplicate content” pages:

• http://www.example.com
• http://example.com
• http://www.example.com/index.html
• http://example.com/index.html

And all this before we’ve even gotten past the home page of your site!

It’s easy-peasy to configure the server to do what’s called a “301 permanent redirect” from the non-www version to the www version of your site. This technique, which is recommended by Google, tells Google that the two are indeed the same and keeps the poor Googlebot from deciding that you have duplicate content and splitting your page’s strength among more than one version. “301″ refers to the status code that’s returned by the web server to the browser (or the spider, in this case), and it says, in effect, “Hey, the correct, permanent URL for the page you’re requesting is actually over there. Don’t index it at this URL.”

It’s likewise easy-peasy to link to your home page without the “index.html” (or other directory index name, such as home.htm or default.asp). For index pages in subdirectories, you simply link to the directory: http://www.example.com/subdirectory/, again leaving out the actual filename index.html.

I apply an appropriate 301 permanent redirect to the www version of every web site I develop. It’s not something I charge extra for, or something that I tout to my clients as being anything special. It’s about a 20-second task to set up the 301 properly. And I never link to directory index pages by filename. I don’t know why some of the big companies aren’t aware of this issue, or, if they are aware, why they don’t care enough to do it properly. It raises the question, if they’re so ignorant, or uncaring, about a thing that is so simple to do right, in how many other areas are they incompetent?

First, a word of explanation for readers scratching their heads right now and wondering what the heck a sandbox has to do with Google: Since the spring of 2004, webmasters have been noticing that many new sites may take anywhere from 3 months to a year to rank highly in Google for their preferred keyword searches. No matter how well optimized the site, no matter how relevant the content, no matter how many inbound links. The site will rank in the top 10 in MSN and Yahoo, but is nowhere to be found in Google for the same searches. Then, suddenly, as if a dam has broken, the site starts ranking in Google.

This has become known as the sandbox. Or the sandbox effect. Or the “aging delay” or “aging filter.”

What is it? Where did it come from? Why does it exist?

In late 2005, after many months of speculation by webmasters, Matt Cutts said, in response to a question from Brett Tabke of WebmasterWorld, that there isn’t a sandbox, but that “the algorithm might affect some sites, under some circumstances, in a way that a webmaster would perceive as being sandboxed.”

Later, he amplified on that response to state that the sandbox effect wasn’t implemented intentionally, but that the engineers at Google, when they investigated the complaints, liked what it was doing. In other words, the sandbox is a side effect of one or more other factors in Google’s algorithm, probably those having to do with age of domain, age of inbound links, and other time-related factors.

I don’t care to argue about whether it’s called a sandbox or an effect, a filter or a penalty. I only care that sites, good sites with good content, often simply cannot rank well in Google for a period of months, no matter what they do. For the sake of simplicity, I’m content to call it a sandbox, but you can call it Aunt Dora if you like.

The sandbox apparently does not affect all sites. Word on the SEO street is that it affects sites attempting to rank for competitive or spammy keywords, or sites in competitive or spammy industries. Hey, I’m all for sandboxing the spam. Can we box it all up and send it to Antarctica on a permanent holiday? We don’t even want it back.

But does Google really have to ‘box the good sites along with the bad? Aren’t there enough geniuses working at the ‘plex to enable them to box the spammy junk sites but let the good ones bubble up?

It used to be, for the average website owner, there was no easy, non-copyright-infringing way to display a map on a web site. Typically, the easiest solution was to link out to MapQuest or Yahoo, sending visitors away from the web site. Unauthorized use of map screenshots was rampant.

But Google Maps changed all that. On a site currently in development for an operator of whale-watching tours, I’m displaying a hybrid satellite/map of the Silver Bank of the Dominican Republic. Site visitors can pan and zoom the map themselves. Little pushpin markers show where the Silver Bank is and indicate the departure point for the tours. Google recently added an option to display the little overview map in the bottom right corner, too, so that you can have a close-up view while still giving the perspective of a larger-scale map. All this, without leaving the web site in question.

I never liked Google’s PageRank method of ranking sites based on incoming links. Google’s PageRank has been almost singlehandedly responsible for the inundation of blog spam, comment spam, forum spam, and even referer spam in every corner of the web.

Now, Google expects webmasters and bloggers to clean up the mess by lodging a vote of “no confidence” in every user-generated link.

Nope, that doesn’t work for me. I moderate comments to this blog, and spam won’t appear here because I won’t let it. I’m not part of the problem here, and it’s not my job to penalize people who engage in blog discussions by no-following their links.

Addendum: MaxPower explores and explains the NoFollow failure in more detail. I particularly like this line:

If you run a website with no comment spam, why would you discount your links? Why help Google penalize fellow bloggers?

NO No Follow has even more on the subject.

I don’t imagine that phrase will bring much (if any!) paying work my way, but still…..

Standing around the coffee machine that morning, my boss was making a big deal out of it, joking about what an enthusiastic employee this new person was. It wasn’t until later that she had the heart to explain to him that she was a native of Puerto Rico and her bumper sticker was proudly proclaiming her national heritage, not her pride in her new job.

The webmaster forums are abuzz today with word that Google is doing one of its occasional ToolBar PageRank exports/updates. There is much discussion of the difference between ToolBar PageRank (TBPR) and Google’s real, or internal, PageRank.

I constantly experience a major disconnect between the technology- and internet-oriented people I encounter on the various webmaster forums, and the people I associate with in real life, who for the most part haven’t a clue what Google’s PR means, much less the difference between TBPR and real PR.