I ran across an article on the CNET News Blog about whether or not the Google duplicate content rankings drop (for lack of a better word) is actually a penalty or a filter. This got me to think about perspective. From the perspective of the search engines, it is a filter that lets the original page (first time and date-stamped page) of content enjoy higher rankings than the same content published on another page at a later date.

This makes sense because searchers don’t want the SERP’s cluttered with the same exact pages over and again. It seems only natural that one page would be at the top of the rankings and the other ones buried.

But, from the perspective of a webmaster, this may indeed be a penalty. Take for instance the webmaster who has the famous www versus non-www Google canonical issue on their website. The search engine may apply a penalty for both the www version of a web page and non-www version for having identical content. Both pages (meaning the entire website) may be buried in the rankings for up to 6 months after the fix is applied to force one version to resolve to the other.

This may technically not be a penalty according to the search engines, as it is the timeframe needed for a URL removal request. But, to any webmaster or online business owner, waiting out weeks or months with a website buried in the rankings will seem like a penalty even if technically none is at work. Functionally, it is indeed a penalty in position, rankings and money generated through the search engines.

Whether the ranking drop due to duplicate content is called a filter or a penalty matters little. Depending upon the type of duplicate content issue at work (duplicate content between separate websites, which could last only days once the offending material is removed or months for the www versus non-www issue) the consequences can be very detrimental to online business owners no matter what official terminology is used.

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After a yearlong deal to acquire DoubleClick / Performics, yesterday Google has announced the selling of the Performics Search Marketing division. On the official Google Blog, DoubleClick Director Tom Phillips states a conflict of interest as a reason for the sale.

According to Phillips, “Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission and core to the trust we ask from our users. For this reason, we plan to sell the Performics search marketing business to a third party.” This needed to be done as Google has stated many times in the past that they are not in the search marketing or optimization business.

What is interesting is that Google will be integrating the DoubleClick affiliate program into their existing advertising program. This means that there is future potential that Google AdWords may one day be based upon a pay-per-click (PPC) model and a cost-per-action (CPA) model similar to some hybrid programs that a few other online advertisers are trying out.

Just how this integration will occur is anyone’s guess right now. Also at stake is how much control both advertisers and publishers will have if this hybrid system comes to be. Stay tuned, though, as this may just up the ante on online advertising for the foreseeable future.

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Inside of Webmaster Tools, the Google Robots.txt Generator has been unveiled. The Robots.txt Generator will help webmasters travail the often misunderstood method of allowing or disallowing search engine robots from crawling files, folders and pages on a website.

Inside of the tool, webmasters are offered the Action of allowing or blocking plus another pull-down menu gives the choices of All Robots, Googlebot, Google-bot Mobile, Googlebot-Image, Mediapartners-Google, Adsbot-Google or Other robot and you can input the name of this bot in the field.

There is next a field for files or directories to fill in so use the relative path. Once adding this you’ll see a the robots.txt file displayed in a window that will look like this:

User-Agent: *
Allow: /

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /directory/file.html
Allow: /

Just upload this file to the website’s root directory and you’re done. It’s pretty simple and it gives webmasters a no-guess way to allow or block the bots at will.

Since this is April 1, hopefully the useful Google Robots.txt Generator tool is not an April Fool’s joke such as the Virgle Mars trip they are promoting today.

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Well, you can’t swing a dead cat now days without hitting an SEO that has a differing opinion when it comes to a website’s meta tags. Besides the cultural sensitivity issues surrounding swinging a dead cat, some SEO’s will argue that meta tags are dead while others will say they are very much alive.

But, many times this is an apples and oranges argument since some search engine optimizers are talking about one aspect of meta tags while another SEO is talking about another. I can’t tell you how many message boards I’ve been on where someone will state, “The search engines don’t use the meta tags.”

This is one of those revolving door issues that surrounds whether or not the search engine “display” the meta tags of a page in their search results. Over at Search Roundtable they’ve taken a look about how search engines are currently using the Description meta tag for display purposes.

But, whether or not a search engine uses the meta tags to pull from in order to display a website in the results is a different argument than do the search engines use this information in order to rank a site appropriately. Some will argue this point, but the short answer is, yes, search engines use the meta tag data to rank websites.

I’ve had customer after customer come to me with keywords stuffed into their meta tag areas and by simply removing the repeating keywords the pages were able to recover. This shows me that the search engines do give value to the words written in the meta tag areas.

Over at Search Engine Watch, Eric Enge has a slightly different take on whether meta tags are valued or not by the SE’s, saying that they have been devalued over the years because of spammers. Enge points out that trust towards webmasters to do the right thing is coming back in vogue, though, especially in regard to Yahoo.

Meta tags are clearly not one of the primary sources anymore from which search engines use to rank pages. But, they still important on a smaller scale for most websites and SEO’s need to pay attention to meta tag optimization in order to gain rankings and avoid penalties.

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In a presidential election year, with Barack and Hillary barraging each other with so-called “attack ads” and John McCain waiting in the wings to weigh in as well, Yahoo has jumped on the bandwagon to throw a punch at long time rival and larger opponent Google. Like a less influential candidate vying for votes, Yahoo has decided to go after the Google base of voters (searchers) by drawing contrast, as they say, between the two candidates.

In a radio advertisement that has just begun airing, the Yahoo voiceover says “…search engines like Google get you lost in all of the links, but not Yahoo.” There is also attention given to Yahoo’s dropdown search box and upcoming features for the world’s second most used search engine.

Yahoo (sometimes called the Avis of search) as the number two contender and subject of buyout and takeover talks recently needs to draw a distinction between its offerings and that of Google. Since people are creatures of habit, this will not be an easy task to draw searchers away from the Mountain View behemoth.

But, while Yahoo may be slapping Google with one hand, they are shaking hands with the other as both search companies and top social destination Myspace have teamed up to endorse the non-profit OpenSocial Foundation. The three are facing off with Facebook over the open source standard going forward for social networking sites.

So, like a candidate in a political debate who will sometimes face-off with the frontrunner and at other times join forces to gang up on another rival, Yahoo gives Google a slap then a tickle in the competitive world of search. But, unlike most political races, there is no election day as the quest for votes among the search engines is ongoing plus there is no end is sight for this debate.

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Several weeks ago the question of a new Google case sensitive search started appearing in a couple of message boards. I’ve noticed this phenomenon myself especially over the last two weeks when working on a particular customer’s website.

This issue impacted communication with the customer. At first, I thought it was a matter of the client and myself looking at results from two different data centers. Then I realized that the client was using capital letters in some words but not in others while searching and this impacted the results in Google.

For years, Google and the other search engines have stated that their searches are not case sensitive. But, now that seems not to be the case for some keyword phrases. You’ll have to note, however, that not all keyword phrases are impacted by the use or non-use of capital letters.

I’ve experimented somewhat with this and the results are mixed. Those who have weighed in on the message boards have also reported mixed results as well. There is a thread on the Digital Point forum that talks about this issue and the use of “Cool Time” versus “cool time” while searching Google.

Some people report seeing different results while others don’t. I can verify that I do see different results from these two searches. For me, when doing this search, the first two spots in the SERPs are the same, while the third spot on down are a bit different.

There are also threads over at Search Engine Watch and Webmaster World that are reporting the phenomenon but not the impact of the same issue. Now, the first question that pops to mind is “why?” What is the motivation for having a Google case sensitive search?

Right now, I can only speculate. Perhaps this is one attempt to thwart blog comment or message board spam? Or, perhaps this is an attempt to differentiate between a company’s official name or a product name and a generic word.

The impact of this Google case sensitive search could be large for some sites. Perhaps their company name is part of their primary homepage key phrase and they rank well when using capital letters for their company name. But, suppose most searchers type in lower case and the same website doesn’t rank as well in lower case.

This also brings to mind another question. Will link-builders now have to use anchor text with both upper and lower case letters in order to achieve optimal results in the Google SERPs? Do capital letters now affect the title and meta tag areas?

For many business owners case sensitive search will be a non-issue. But, for those that are affected knowing the answers to these questions may have a very large impact on their bottom lines.

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Rumors have been swirling about how the Google phone will take on Apple’s iPhone head to head, mano e mano. The first Google phone to take advantage of the world’s largest search engine’s Android software system will be a company called HTC (High Tech Computer).

The HTC Google phone that has been named “Dream” will use a full QWERTY keypad and touchscreen technology for accessing the Internet. But, HTC isn’t the only company developing a Google phone using the open source Android platform.

Development partners Samsung and Motorola are said to be hot on their trail to also come out with their own spin on the Google phone. The HTC Google cell phone is 3” X 5” with the keypad underneath the large screen plus navigational controls for Internet use and email.

Last summer the Wall Street Journal ran an article about Google entering the cell phone advertising market. According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, “What’s interesting about the ads in the mobile phone is that they are twice as profitable or more than the non-mobile phone ads because they’re more personal.”

Just how Google intends to integrate its ad serving system into the mobile phones is anyone’s guess at this point. Also, will this open up another avenue for search engine marketers (SEM’s) in the cell phone market, delivering highly targeted ads? Most likely the answer will be, yes. Stay tuned as the HTC Google phone is set to roll out later this year.

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Click fraud is a serious issue among most online advertisers and publishers who use Google or Yahoo to deliver ads. Historically, the search engines have kept very secretive about how they deal with click fraud in-house and downplaying reports from third party watchdogs who have reported far higher numbers than the search engines themselves.

Now, in a step towards more transparency, Yahoo has hired third party vendor Click Forensics to help them deal with PPC fraud perpetuated by both people and robots. Yahoo already has over 2,700 filters in place to detect click fraud and says that it does not pass those clicks onto its advertisers.

But, in the past advertisers have been burned, sometimes on a massive scale and have sued and settled with both Yahoo and Google. So, in order to combat this “fox watching the henhouse” phenomenon that makes advertisers and publishers nervous, Yahoo has hired Click Forensics to monitor and report fraudulent activity through its PPC network.

How much access Click Forensics will be given to the Yahoo data is anyone’s guess at this point. The search engines have been reluctant to open up their code to anyone because of two fears. First, they fear their proprietary information may end up in the hands of their competitors. Second, they fear their proprietary information will end up in the hands of hackers and others who want to game their system.

But, no matter. At least Yahoo is distinguishing itself from Google by taking a step towards transparency and employing a third party to validate click fraud statistics and perhaps even recommend ways to cut down or filter out click fraud.

In the end, this will give more advertisers and publishers trust in Yahoo for taking steps that is in everyone’s best interest. Sometimes just the perception of taking positive action will go a long way towards building better business relationships.

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Yesterday, I stumbled across a video of Matt Cutts from Google talking about a variety of topics that influence the SERPs. He told a story about two websites competing for the top spot. One site was just five pages and did not have much content. The other site that was at the top was also a small site that had a video to engage visitors, making them stay longer.

I know bounce rate and the SERPs is not a brand new topic, but its also one that hasn’t gotten a grand amount of attention either. It’s well known that link bait will help get a page to the top of the SERPs and this has been widely assumed to be because of all of the links pointing to the page.

But, there is a secondary reason as well, which is that visitors tend to stay on link bait pages longer (low bounce rate) and tend to move from this page to other pages on the same site. Google Analytics measures bounce rate to give webmasters an idea of how interested the visitors are to a particular website and the average time they spend there.

Measuring bounce rate as part of a page popularity ranking does make sense in most cases. There are a few pitfalls, however, in giving too much weight to bounce rate in the SERPs.

Using bounce rate is a way to drop spammy websites down in the SERPs while promoting authority pages to the top. But, just how do the search engines tell the difference? One would think that a typically spammy site with lots of ads and little content would have a high bounce rate as person after person would be hitting the back button quickly on this page.

But, what about another page that has simple, but quality content that give the visitor what they need immediately and they get what they need and also hit the back button on the browser quickly. For instance, a web page with a singular funny picture and short caption may give the visitor a laugh and they will then move on quickly to the next topic of interest.

There is also the issue of many visitors who like to open several windows at a time to different pages or leave there computers with a page open. This will give a page at least from one visitor a low bounce rate, but what if for some odd reason there was a trend of similar behavior by visitors on this particular page? This would artificially inflate the bounce rate.

More likely than not, bounce rate is just one small factor that search engines consider (if some of them track this information at all) when developing their ranking algorithms and positions in the SERPs. The moral of the story is that content is still king, link bait rules and by keeping visitors on your pages as long as possible, you certainly can’t go wrong.

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The Google Ad Manager beta program has just been unveiled for publishers who want another avenue in which to monetize their websites and blogs. Google Ad Manager offers publishers a free, web-based service to manage banner ads supplied by third parties or by Google.

The free Google Ad Manager is similar to other third party ad servers who charge a fee for their services or is similar to a free open source ad server such as OpenAds. But, the advantage of the Ad Manager program is that a publisher can also use Google’s vast network of inventory to fill in ad spaces that the publisher is unable to sell elsewhere.

The tour of Google Ad Manager shows there are six basic parts to the program. The first is defining the ad space on the page. The second is generating HTML or javascript code to place on the web page. The third is checking inventory availability.

The fourth is uploading the creative banners for sold ads. The fifth is running performance reports to track CTR, CPM and other data. The sixth is either signing in with an invitation in hand or applying for an invitation into the Google Ad Manager beta program.

Since the U. S. and European Union have both given the thumbs up on the Google acquisition of DoubleClick and Ad Manager will no doubt be integrated into this display ad serving technology, it remains to be seen how big of an impact this will have in the online advertising marketplace.

One thing is for sure and that is with Ad Manager, Google is trying hard to keep publishers from straying to other resources on the Internet. And, if the past is any predictor of the future, Google will be very persuasive in doing just that.

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