Basically this webmaster tools area is a way for you to register domains you own with Google. This gives you the ability to monitor various aspects of your websites.

Now when i say websites, I’m referring to a domain you purchased and have a site running on a server. This will not work with Web 2.0 blogs( at least to my knowledge), such as Blogger, Wordpress.com, etc.

The great thing about this service is it will tell you specifically when Google has visited your website and how many pages it has indexed. It goes even further to show you what pages it was having trouble accessing.

Now this new feature I mentioned, Duplicate Content, is a HUGE issue in Google. One of the many things Google will penalize your websites for is Duplicate Content. If it sees too much of it you are delisted
from the search results until you can fix the problems.

For the longest time you had to dig through your own websites and determine what was being duplicated and what was not. Now with this new tool on the Google Webmaster Tools page you can see, from an
internal stand point, what is considered duplicate content. It tells you exactly where this duplicate content has shown up in both areas, so you can easily remove/change the content to decrease the penalization score with Google.

(hope your not bored by now)

So, now we have gotten rid of the duplicate content on our websites we can now rank higher in Google and for possibly more phrases. Higher rankings equal a better chance at gaining more prospects for your sites
and more prospects equals more money.

Hope I have explained this well enough. This is definitely not the end all explaination of Google Webmaster Tools. It should suffice for the basics.

-Ryan

The crew at Google Trends just released a Killer new feature…Website trends!

The next best thing to sitting over your competitions shoulder and being a super ninja.

The major flaw in the early stages of the system is we’re limited to only viewing stats for sites generally over 1,500 uniques a day. If this gets improved in the long haul, Google Trends will be THE tool of the internet marketing community.

-Ryan

Well I for one think so. As I have been traveling around the net for a while. I occasionally run around to a few seo/affiliate marketeers sites, I like to run over to AoJon.com and read up on his various trials through Googles new algorithm. Now not having actually looked at the algorithm I cant say for sure, but after reading Jon’s example on his site about TrustRank I have a very solid feeling his findings are 100% accurate. Just by following his trials with it on his site, you get an idea of how difficult it can be.

I have been studying link structures and MiniNets for the last few weeks. Just by his vague PR example he explains on his blog I feel I have a better understanding of how the tip of the TrustRank iceberg works. I’d rather not give away examples, but the simple matter is Jon found a way to give a semi-accurate if not completely accurate TR score for peoples websites and how to out score anyone else out there. I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on a copy of the TR algorithm just to have a look at what the work would be like deciphering it. I’ll leave that for another day. Overall though the message from Jon to every person working on SEO for their site is stop worrying about PR scores. Anyways check out his blog. Its some solid info, but dont bother him about buying his TR service, its all done now.

Link: http://www.aojon.com/

Sidenote: Even if you dont care about the TR algorithm, you should read Jon’s blog its pretty fun to read about him ripping on Ebooks and various other things.

Yes its really here! Green Operating System. HAHA You thought I was going to say Google Operating System. Someone finally decided to create an OS that engulfs the Google philosophy and adds some Google flavor to the mix. They integrated some Google goodies into the OS as a standard. This OS was built on the popular Linux Unbuntu platform, which means its a pretty well tested setup. Saying that I myself havent given this one a test yet. I might pop in an old hard drive of mine and try it out later. But for now this new OS is so well setup that the folks down at Walmart have decided to sell one of their computers with gOS installed on it.

Everyone is saying this is the Google operating system, but they would be wrong, or at least we can say for now that Google is not supporting this officially. They arent affiliated with this operating system. If you doubt me, then take a gander at the official site for gOS and their disclaimer at the bottom of the page.

Check out the gOS enabled computer:

http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=7754614

Download gOS here: http://www.thinkgos.com/files/gos-live-1.0_386.torrent

Well since everyone is the blogosphere is talking about how they are seeing the big G screw them over on their sites. I have seen quite the opposite. Most of my sites went up in PR and even moved up some more spots in the SERPs. Why would this happen to me and not everyone else? No reason in particular. I take probably the same time if not more to do all my proper SEO and go through link values and site link structures. I take at least one day a week to go over my already established sites and try to see if I can go through and improve them even more. A little love goes a long way in SEO. How were you effected?

So as I’ve grown in this industry I’ve found it really helpful to use the Adsense Competitive Ad Filter and reduce the sites that tend to not pay so well, which drops my eCPM. For a while I was maintaining this list on my own. Until recently I happened upon this blog that maintains a nice list of sites that you should have in your Ad Filter. I’ve tried it for a while now and its helped out my sites slightly. I would suggest trying it out briefly with the list in your Ad Filter, then for a while without and see what works best for you. Every niche works a little different.

Link: Not Spam

SEO for Firefox is something every webmaster shouldnt be working without. What this plugin is it will append various important stats to search results on google. Things like PR, cache, supplmental, alexa rank, etc etc. I use it on a regular basis to help me track important stats for my various sites, instead of some website that most people may goto to find this kind of similar info out. One of the more important recent additions is the supplemental indexing tracker. This has really helped me keep a close eye on the duplicate content some of my sites create, and easily get rid of it. This is definitely a plugin I cant live without now.

Download: SEO for Firefox

So recently Google decided to toss one of my bigger websites into the so called Google “Sandbox”. This has happened a few times to me for my other sites. Right now I consider myself to be a little more educated on SEO and Googles practices in general. I’ve come up with a couple theories on why I think Google has decided they dont like my sites.

1. Googles biggest problem these days is duplicated content. The CMS thats the biggest natural offender is Wordpress. I’m not knocking wordpress, because I use it on the vast majority of my sites. But, while doing some research I’ve noticed that the amount of cached pages vs the amount of supplemental pages for this particular site are 253-cached/241-supplemental. I’m sure the low ratio of cached vs supplemental pages is a cause of the site being taken out of the searches.

2. This is more of a how they put my site in the Sandbox, than a why its there. As my site went into this Sanbox the PR of the website desided to jump from its PR4 ranking to PR0. It did this for a good 5 days as it slowly settled down to its normal PR4. This is probably how google offsets a site so that its unranked for any keywords in the search engine index.

The best way to combat the duplicate content in wordpress is to make a robots.txt file that disallows things like pages,categories,feeds, and any “wp-” labeled files. This usually is a direct cause to having a ton of duplicate content in google. The next would be any static text on any page.

As in any case I’m open to some other peoples experiences with the sandbox and getting out of it.

**Update**

So after about a day of playing with the duplicate content on my site and adding some various things to my site in question, I’m back out of the Google Sandbox.  I’ve figured for this site I’m working with my problem was the duplicate content, but not only that almost all the pages google had indexed were part of the duplicate content.

I’ve come to the conclusion that my percentage of duplicate content was at about 97% compared to what its at now which is 79%. Roughly anything above the 80% mark means your site is going to get dropped off the search index. You can figure this out by dividing the amount of pages you have in the supplemental index by the number of pages cached.