Monthly Archives: November 2007

Intuit and Homestead get married…

26 Monday Nov 2007

Posted by in Homestead, Intuit

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I have some very exciting news to share with you all today. (Don’t worry, I’m not delusional enough to think that there are actually a lot of you in “you all”.)

Intuit and Homestead have decided to join forces to take our best shot at making small businesses around the country and around the world successful. You can see Justin’s thoughts on his blog.

It’s been picked up by a lot of the bloggers out there, and the general reaction has been fairly positive, but I never really expected it to get a lot of buzz in the blogosphere. But everyone here at Homestead is excited, and that’s what matters.

I do want a address one thing that some of the bloggers are saying: I know that it’s called an “exit” or an “exit strategy”, and as a co-founder of Homestead, I get questions all the time about “exiting”.

In reality, I’m not just blowing smoke (or brown-nosing with the new powers that be) when I say that I don’t see this as an exit, but really an opportunity to play with the big boys and try to blow out Homestead to a greater audience. It’s going to be a rough and tough ride, I’m sure, but I’m excited to jump in and take that ride. I definitely would not be this excited, and I’m sure the deal would not have gone through, if this was a “dump and run”.

One of our ex-employees Matt Franklin posted this on Justin’s blog:

I’d imagine this will definitely help get Homestead products out to more people. You guys have some really, really talented employees, so I’m super happy to see their work get more exposure.

I couldn’t agree more…

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Does Google really hate Text Link Ads?

16 Friday Nov 2007

Posted by in SEO

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The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing at Google. Or maybe it does, but it doesn’t care.

www.text-link-ads.com is doing just fine, thank you very much.  Visit their site.  Despite all the buzz lately about how text link ads will invalidate search rankings, kick your dog, and destroy the universe, the site still has a healthy Pagerank of 7.  Shouldn’t Google be penalizing them?

OK, I know what you’re thinking: the site itself isn’t doing anything wrong. It doesn’t have any text links on its own site so technically it’s not violating the rules of the road. Even though every one of their customers and every one of their clients is violating Google’s rules, they’re still technically on the right side of the law.  And Pagerank is probably a fully automated score and Google doesn’t want to tweak it by hand.

OK, fine. But search for text link ads at Google.  The first two paid results are for the company itself.  That means Text Link Ads is paying Google for that placement and the purchase was approved by an AdWords sales rep.  The marketing copy on the site even touts improved organic search engine rankings as the primary benefit of buying text link ads.

“Sorry, guys, everything you do is wrong, but feel free to buy ads from us anyway.”

If Google wants to discourage paying for/selling text links, shouldn’t they stop promoting the company that’s leading that charge?

Google resetting Pagerank?

01 Thursday Nov 2007

Posted by in SEO, Technology

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,

I was sent this yesterday.

It says that Google has plans to roll out some significant changes to their ranking and ad system.

1. Get rid of Pagerank and replace it with Visitor Rank, where users with the Google Toolbar can thumbs up/thumbs down the site they’re on.

I can definitely see them getting rid of Pagerank. They really don’t want webmasters to focus on Pagerank and they want to discourage text link vendors. Why not bury bury Pagerank altogether?

Visitor Rank also makes sense as an ingredient in the hodge-podge that makes up a sites rankings.  Could be gamed, of course, but take the data with a grain of salt and it could prove very useful.

2. Confirmation click for AdSense

In theory, the visitor would have to click on a confirmation button after their first click on AdSense.  What? Two clicks to reach an advertiser?  When the company is still contending that click fraud isn’t a real problem?  This is really, really unlikely.  Advertisers don’t want their potential customers to have any friction.  This won’t happen.

3. Stop reporting of back links

Like the hiding of Pagerank, hiding back links also makes some sense. It’s valuable for webmasters to be able to find who’s linking to them, but for the SEO savvy, it’s used to help them build links to make them more attractive to Google, not to users.  Anyway, I think it’s possible they may do this, but not a slam dunk.

4. Replace “nofollow” with “dofollow”

This would require that links be tagged with “dofollow” or the search engine won’t follow it at all.  Now, that is just plain ridiculous.  If the blog post had sketchy credibility with me before, it lost it all on that one.  Google would throw out 99.999% of the links in the world and require everyone to retag their links?  That’s just silly.

I’d bet the post is a list of possible things that Google has considered, or a wish list of the engineer the blogger is citing (if there is one), or even a wish list of the blogger himself.  I just can’t believe that it’s a list of things that Google is launching in the near future, though the discussion is interesting…