Here’s why:

• Google implemented Personalized Search for everyone.
• Facebook directs more online users than Google as reported in San Francisco Chronicle on Feb 15, 2010.

And if you have been following this blog, you would have read about my post on Smart SEO is Not just about #1 Ranking on 29 November 2008. Ultimately, you are optimizing the conversion of your web pages.

Time to see beyond SEO for Google

Even when Facebook was in its infancy back in 2007, I urged businesses to make themselves visible on social networks in the article “Time to see beyond SEO for Google” published on ZDNet Asia.

Conversion Rules

A website’s KPI should not be measured by the number of visitors alone. More traffic doesn’t always means more money, otherwise Facebook should be making more money than Google by now.

There is a great dollar difference between general traffic and targeted traffic.

Marketers must know how to define the most wanted response on each web page and measure that number. Use Smart SEO to help you to get your most wanted response and improve your bottom line.

Does that means we will get drastically Google search results soon?

I guess so. In fact, Google introduced Personalized Search for Everyone since 2 days ago. So you should be seeing quite different results from your customers and competitors!

What is Google Caffeine?

Google Caffeine is a new algorithm to index and rank a web page. So it will affect your page ranking on Google result.

Here’s what Google trying to achieve with Caffeine Update… “a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

Google Caffeine + Personalized Search = Bad News

Together with the Personalized Search for Everyone, your web page will be ranked very differently on your customer’s computer. And if you have been doing things which Google doesn’t like then expect your web page to disappear from Google results.

If your earning depends on Google Search then bad news…

It is stated clearly in Google’s Hidden text and links – Webmaster Help Center that the use of hidden text “can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy”.

Does it mean that a PR7 site can hide text using CSS and not get penalized?

I discovered the hidden text several months ago when trying to figure out how Google generate sitelinks for some of these high PR sites.

When I searched for free keyword tool, Wordtracker was Number 1 and appeared to be “authoritative” site with a list of sitelinks.

Initially, I didn’t want to blow up the matter and waited for the PageRank update to see if Google will take action and downgrade Worktracker.com but nothing changed. Worktracker continues to be a “trusted” site.

Now that we know Google “tolerated” certain hidden text technique using CSS, you may want to try it on a MFA or throw-away site. Here’s how Wordtracker did the trick.

Hide Text with CSS Position:Absolute & Left:-999em

The hidden words to be hidden were enclosed within <em> and </em> tags.

Click Here to View Full-size Image

The <em> attribute was modified with absolute position and the words were placed way out of the viewable area.

Click Here to View Full-size Image

Warning: Use the above Hidden Text CSS technique at your own risk! You may be penalized by Google eventually.

We are not only talking about optimizing your website for search engine robots; we are talking about making better for real human visitors – your potential customers.

For the technically inclined, you will understand that the mail server is taking up valuable resources on the machine which you also use to serve Web pages. Such sharing of CPU resources may slow down your website performance.

Website Optimization

Dynamic website using content management systems and blogs will suffer in terms of performance, i.e. how quickly the page is displayed on your visitors’ computer.

Now let say you stop using the mail servers and dedicate all the computing power to your CMS and blogs, then their performance will definitely improve.

Likewise, if you are running a busy e-commerce website with shopping-cart then you definitely want to use all the computing power for a smooth check-out process and give the best customer’s experience.

Stop using your Web server for email hosting, instead use Google Apps for all your business email accounts.

Google Apps Email Features

The biggest advantage is the SPAM and virus filtering.

Can you imagine those emails with virus infected attachment sitting next to your gorgeous Web pages!?

Even with anti-virus software installed, the mail server which comes with your Web hosting account cannot compare to the level of security and the computing which Google can offer.

If you are interested to know more about the fantastic features which Google hosted email for business can offer, visit

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/security/index.html

And Google gives you 100 free email accounts with 6GB of storage each.

POP3/SMTP for Outlook and Outlook Express

You can access your business email using the familiar GMail webmail interface and/or download your email messages to Outlook or Outlook Express.

Your email address will remain the same, i.e.

yourname@yourcompany.com

And not some esoteric mynamenotavailable@gmail.com

However, in order to use the free Google Apps and your own domain name, you need to edit the DNS/MX settings. For those who have an existing Web hosting, you can get your hosting provider to enter the MX records provided by Google.

Set Up A Domain Just for Google Email Account

If you have an idling domain name or thinking of registering a new one just to take advantage of the email service of Google Apps and not to host a website, then you have to make sure your domain registrar also offers DNS hosting or DNS management.

GoDaddy and many other domain registrars do not offer this option because I guess they want you to also buy hosting from them.

Try Name.com, you can use Google Apps with their domains.

Otherwise you’ll need to register for the free DNS management service at ZoneEdit.com

Set Up SPR Record for Your Google Email Addresses

Last point, you will want to set up a SPF record. At your DNS management, add the following TXT record:

“v=spf1 include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all”

On 19 March 2008, I reported at Wassup Blog, one day after Rednano.sg was first launched that it had 1 page indexed and I captured the screenshot just 25 minutes after Google crawled the Rednano homepage.

Google Indexing is Fast

Today, 15 April 2008, less than 4 weeks after Google first indexed Rednano.sg, it has indexed more than 50,000 pages of Rednano.sg.

I have this feeling that Google engineers know more about Rednano.sg than the people at SPH Search.

Now, that we know Google can index a large Web site with ten of thousand of pages very quickly, you must be wondering…

So what did Rednano.sg do to enable fast Google Indexing?

For Google to index the page, it will to know the URL to crawl the page. For a search engine like Rednano.sg, the results will only be displayed when a user enter a query. However, Googlebot does not interact with the query box to get the result pages like a human visitor.

So Rednano.sg has to provide Googlebot the URL (permalink in blog lingo) to its result pages, URLs such as this:

http://www.rednano.sg/sfe/dir.action?querystring=YA+KUN+KAYA+TOAST

I reckon SPH Search will be happy to have Google indexed all of its directory listing and help to drive traffic to the new directory.

In order to do that, Rednano.sg has this page called Site Feature which provides the URLs to it’s inner pages:

http://www.rednano.sg/footer/sitemap.html

which has a link to

http://www.rednano.sg/sfe/dirhome.action

Search Engine Friendly Site Structure

In this way, Googlebot will crawl the following path:

-> www.rednano.sg

-> www.rednano.sg/footer/overview.html

-> www.rednano.sg/sfe/dirhome.action

-> the rest of the directory pages

As you can see, this is a site structure that works pretty well despite the fact that the rest of the pages are more than 2 levels below the homepage. If you want to build a Web site with thousand of pages listed in Google search results, make sure you design the site structure and make it “crawlable” and search engine friendly.

The last Google PR update was in late Oct 2007 after a long wait of 6 months. During that update, Google penalized many of the sites that sell or buy text links.

As for this first PR update in 2008, I think so far so good – no major “upset”.

As usual, you will see fluctuation in PR rank and SERP ranking over the next 10 days or so. If your website ranking disappeared, just sit tight and wait out these 2 weeks before you doing anything drastic to your site.

I have several of my sites’ PR drop one notch. I guess I have been lazy in adding fresh content and links to these sites. So I have to buck up before the PR ranking diminishes to 1. Or, maybe I am publishing too many sites and spread my resources too thin. Either I outsource some the content and link building jobs or focus on building a couple of bigger sites.

Let’s see what happens next time Google updates the PageRank.

thepinnacles.com is Number 1 for the keyword phrase “unethical web designers in singapore“. However, the page ranked was an alternative landing page and looked like this.

Sometime You Don’t Want To Be Ranked Number 1

You must be wondering why Google indexed and ranked a broken Web page, thepinnacles.com/alternative.htm

I checked the HTML source of the page and could not find the word “unethical” anywhere on the page including meta tags and comments. So it is not just on-page optimization that got this page to #1. I guess it was the backlink that did the trick – people link to the Web site with the word “unethical” in the anchor text!

Unlike the other Web page listed in the search result which actually talk about unethical web designers.

So, Google is Right

So there may be some truth in Google #1 ranking for the unethical Web designer in Singapore. It shows that Google put more emphasis on what other people said about your Web site than what you said.

There is another interesting finding on that search result listing – the Sponsored Links.

Why would so many people want to display their ads when people search for “unethical Web designers in Singapore”?

Meanwhile, I really need to go and will let you figure it out.

Since I am situated in Singapore accessing the internet using Singnet, Google.com.sg is my default gateway which serves results relevant to Singapore.

By clicking at “Go to Google.com”, I can force select to search at Google.com which will displayed results relevant to the USA.

Or you can go to search for results relevant Taiwan at www.google.com.tw

For the respective country codes, please visit ISO.org

To demonstrate the above observations, you can use the search term: seo at the respective google.ccTLD Web sites. I found that this blog is listed #6 in www.google.com.sg but nowhere to be found in www.google.com or any ccTLD that I am familiar with e.g. au, ca, cn, de, hk, id, in, jp, kr, my, nz, ph, ru, th, tw and vn.

Even if you insist on using Google.com as your default search engine, you can still display search results relevant to a particular country by using the variable gl and the respective country code in the search query.

For example to display UK results:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=seo&gl=uk

Most people will want to be found on Google search results of their home country and at Google.com. Many people believe that it is important to be found in Google.com because that is where you can get the most traffic. However, to compete in Google.com is more difficult than other English speaking google.ccTLD.

I am happy to be found in Google.com.sg, my home country and also the country where my target visitors come from. What about you?