Following on from my post about breadcrumbs in the serps, I again noticed another test Google is running in the serps. This time it is pulling information from Google Scholar such as “Author” and “Cited By” in the meta description. You can see it showing in the second result in the following example:

This was also spotted by Ray “Catfish” Comstock and Benj Arriola on their blog post PDF’s Author Metadata in Google Search Results . It certainly is an interesting time in Google with lots of tests running over the summer months!

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This isn’t exactly new, it’s been out since July but it is such an interesting new google tool I had to write about it. Google Wonder Wheel is a new visual representation tool which allows you to research related keywords using a flash interface in the serps. An example screen shot is below:

It allows you to drill down further into related keywords which is an excellent tool for performing keyword research.

How Do I Access Google Wonder Wheel

To access Wonder Wheel do the following:

1. Perform a typical search in google
2. Click on “Show Options” at the top of the page
3. Click on “Wonder Wheel” in the left side bar that has appeared

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This is a follow up to the post I created yesterday on using analytics. When optimising your site and analysing data it’s best to go after the quick wins in the short term while still having a strategy for your long term goals. The quick wins would be to optimise and link build for the keywords that your ranking on the 2nd page of google and receiving traffic.

The appeal of this technique is pretty obvious. If your receiving traffic already from the 2nd page of google, how much traffic would you receive if you ranked on the 1st page of Google? If you already rank in the Top 20 of Google for the keywords how much link building will be required to move into the Top 10 compared with optimising and link building for a new keyword?

So now we know the benefits, how do we track our 2nd page rankings?

Thanks to Will and the guys at Distilled, I’m going to show you how to set this tracking up in Google Analytics.

• Create a new Profile for the site

• Add a filter and apply it to the newly created profile

• Set the filter up as follows:

The text in the Field A –> Extract A box is (\?|&)(start)=([^&]*)

This is a regular expression which extracts the parameter called ’start’ from the referring URL. Google uses this to determine which page of results to display (page 2 is start=10, page 3 is start=20 etc. for anyone with the default settings of 10 search results / page)

Segmenting the data

Now when we go into the profile we have the above data but it’s not quite what we want, we need to segment the data just to capture the keywords from referred from Page 2 of Google. To this we do the following:

• Select Advanced Segments

• Click on the drop-down and add a new segment as shown below:

• Finally Apply this segment to the report

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John Chow the reknowned internet entrepreneur has finally decided to play nice with google. John Chow for those of you who don’t know is one of the first bloggers to succesfully make money online through his blog. He has taken his blog from earning nothing to earning hundreds of thousands a year. How did he do it? He used every medium available to him, email marketing, twitter, banner ads, text link ads and paid posts.

Now theres a lot of bitching on the internet about John Chow, some say he’d sell his grandmother for a few bucks. I don’t buy into this, in my opinion you can’t knock what he has achieved and those that do I reckon are not jealous of his income from affiliate marketing but more of his notoriety on the internet. He is basically one of the poster boys for Affiliate Marketing.

Having said that, this is probably the reason that Google decided to make an example of him in 2007 for his paid posts and text link ads. Google don’t like paid posts or text link ads, it messes with their system and they consider it spam. In 2007 Google decided to penalise JohnChow.com and pulled it’s rankings. Basically JohnChow.com couldn’t rank for anything including his own name. Google did fix it a few months later but the ranking for his internal pages never fully recovered.

So what has he done now? He has created a duplicate site to JohnChow.com at JohnChow.ca, removed all the items considered spam by Google and he has 301 redirected googlebot from JohnChow.com to this site.

Why has he done this now? Well Google seem to be cracking down on Affiliate Marketing and paid posts, there is the recent situation with Matt Cutts unfollowing Shoemoney on Twitter due to paid tweets and perhaps John is trying to smooth things over with Google to get ahead of this. The other reason I suspect is for testing purposes. After it was anounced on Shoemoney.com that John Chow had done this, there was a lot of speculation that John would be hit with a duplicate content penalty. Well a couple of weeks earlier I read an interesting post on SEOMoz that google anounced that there wouldn’t be a duplicate content penalty for using identical content when geotargeting which is exactly what John is doing. This is I suspect Johns main reasoning and he’s trying to raise his readership numbers by using geotargeting but you decide!

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Matt Cutts has an interesting post on his blog of a presentation he gave at WordCamp San Francisco 2009. It’s a good presentation for anybody interested in SEO for blogs, specifically wordpress.

In fact a good chunk of the presentation is devoted to wordpress, and if your new to blogging or affiliate marketing and are planning to use wordpress for your cms, definitely check it out above.

Now as much as I love wordpress, this is an affiliate marketing blog, so I want to discuss the slides that seem to be aimed at this area. Now what you’ll notice is that slides 42-44 seem to be aimed at the affiliate marketing industry.

Now unfortunately the video of the presentation isn’t up so I can’t see what he actually said during these slides but from the looks of the presentation he wasn’t painting it in a good light. Slide 42 & 43 seem to show two typical “Make Money Online” landing pages, albeit specifically aimed at making money from google. Like I said this is only an assumption so I’m not going to pay too much attention to them but what did catch my eye was slide 44.

Why did Slide 44 catch my eye?

Well in Slide 44 he deals with paid posts for blogs. It actually states

Avoid Paid Posts:
He recommends not to do paid posts that:
contain unethical or unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites.

Now what makes this interesting is that on June 12th Matt Cutts publicaly tweeted on twitter that he was unfollowing Jeremy “Shoemoney” Shoemaker because of a sponsored tweet he did.

Now what does all this mean? I’m not sure to be honest but I suspect Google have affiliate marketers in their sights and will be cracking down in the next few months. Let me know what your opinion is in the comments.

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