How NOT to contact Google..

So – I received a call today from a woman who was upset about google charging her checking account.

She said she found me by going to the Arizona yellow pages online and typing in ‘Google’. She said I was number 1. I looked and couldn’t find what term she typed (Google didn’t bring up my listing).

Anyway, I thought it was funny :) I googled Google to get the contact number and here is what I found:

How to Contact Google

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
phone: (650) 253-0000
fax: (650) 253-0001

In the core functions.php file of your theme, add this right before the last ?>

remove_action(‘wp_head’, ‘wp_generator’);

This will remove the wp version header information that hackers can use to determine what weaknesses you have.   By adding that line, the fingerprint they search for is not present in your wordpress install.

Submit your website, service or web applcation to the following sites. You’ll get backlinks, and traffic.

• MOMB Museum of Modern Betas is a web site for listing web-based apps in beta status.
• DemoGirl Molly McDonald is the editor-in-chief of this VPOP Technologies Inc. blog. If she thinks your service is good enough, she’ll create screencasts and feature your site for free.
• Dzine Blog is a design blog. Find inspirational designs and some good tips in logo, graphics and web designs. Tell the owner about your website if you have a great looking website or a service that will help the design community.
• eHub is Emily Chang’s lists of web startups. Submit a site, service, or news
• FeedMyApp is another web applications listing site but with no voting system. Suggest a Site link and fill out the form.
• Go2web20 is a Flash directory of Web 2.0 applications. You can send them an email by clicking on Suggest.
• Launchfeed.com Fill out the form under the "Submit" link. You need an English-language site.
• Listio is a user-driven directory for web 2.0 applications. Others rank and comment on your apps. When you submit a new app, it will get a pending status until an editor reviews and publishes it. Listio is a Digg for web applications.
• Lo-fi-Librarian A blog created by a Master student in Library and Info Studies in the UK. Contact him/her by email to have your website listed on his/her site.
• Rev2 profiles new Web 2.0 startups and technologies, as well as providing analysis on the state of this industry. Send an email with your announcement to one of the editors on the About page.
• Simplespark finds or shares a new web applications. Your website/service/application can be listed here, too.
• Sociableblog is a social networking and social media blog offering the latest news, video & articles about social networking, media, community, and software. Register and then let them know about your service or product.
• WebDev 2.0 profiles a variety of sites which are useful for their readers.
• Ziipa.com is a visual search engine. Go to Suggest > fill out the form.

What is the Supplemental Index?

The Google Supplemental index is like a black hole. If your site is listed in it – you won’t be getting traffic. Google had originally intended this to help reduce spam, but we are seeing many good pages get dropped. The SI (Supplemental Index) tag seems to affect mostly startups and low PR pages, or pages with odd link patterns. These commands will also help you debug spidering issues – let’s hope Google doesn’t remove the Supplemental Index command!

Can this information be used immorally?

Yes: A “shady” person might just search for text and keyword rich supplemental results that simply lack links, copy the content, throw some links at their own copy and outrank the original page. I believe this is Google’s reasoning for removing this tag – it allows people to get an unfair advantage.

Is Your Site is In the Google Supplemental Index?

Note that google may pull this feature at any time!

• site:yoursite.com/&

Old Supplemental Index Codes:

I couldn’t get these to work anymore:

• site:yoursite.com *-abcde
• site:yoursite.com ***-slktf
• site:yoursite.com *-12345
• site:yoursite.com *-asd
• site:yoursite.com *-ao
• site:yoursite.com *-aq
• site:yoursite.com *-ak
• site:yoursite.com *-ax
• site:yoursite.com *-az
• site:yoursite.com *-ay

This information was posted in a different format here:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3403921.htm

Update on Google Supplemental Indexing

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/07/supplemental-goes-mainstream.html

So – you think you know a bit about keyword research eh?

If you are selling kids meals – should you call it:

meals for kids
kids meals
happy meals
happy meal
meal happy
….

Exactly what do your customers search for?

Typically you do research like this

Open the https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, paste a few words that are similar to what you sell, then sort through the large list that the tool spews out.

Almost all Internet Marketers know this step.

Lets pretend that SEO and keyword research is easy

Open the https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, again, and make sure that you have the main words by using the “use synonyms” and “Suggested Terms” features of the Adwords Keyword Tool.

Lets assume that the following list is our possible words:

Redo the search again, this time without synonyms and focus on the following settings

SEO & Keyword Research is Easy, Right?

All you have to do now is go Generate a Domain that matches one of the phrases with the most traffic: happymeal.com, happy-meal.com, or mealhappy.com, meal-happy.com

Right?

Wrong! Change the Match type to “Exact” and watch what happens

:

Holy gross error in calculations Batman!

If you buy “meal happy” variant of a domain name, you won’t get any traffic – end of discussion.

Conclusion:

The google keywords tool tracks searches from all forms of a phrase, in both forward and reverse and lumps them into one “volume” count.

However, if you check the rankings on the variations of the keyword, you know that proper keyword order is important. “meal happy” and “happy meal” return different search results.

This is why you should Hire an Expert Marketer – you will be prevented from making gross errors in judgement with common tools that “everyone else” uses (beware of anyone that claims SEO is easy)!