This is a copy of the confirmation letter from Froogle, a shopping search engine that Google is testing. The inclusion is completely free, for the time being. Froogle is available at www.froogle.com.
Thank you for submitting a feed to Froogle.
Your feed has been approved and your products should appear on Froogle within the next few business days. Please be sure to use the same feed file name every time you upload a new feed, otherwise, due to technical constraints, your update will not be processed.
You can upload new feeds daily, weekly, or monthly. However, it's best to upload a new feed at least once a week, or whenever you change prices, add or discontinue products. Please note that you must upload a new feed at least once a month because we will automatically expire your old data after that time and your products will not appear on Froogle until you have submitted new data.
If you have any questions, email us at feeds-support@google.com
The Google Team
The following tool looks at over twenty different major search engines and lets you know were you list for a particular key word:
http://www.webworldindex.com/cgi-bin/rank/seranker.cgi
We recently covered comparison search engine DealTime in one of our studies. They have just signed a deal to acquire consumer review site Epinions, which will no doubt make them an even stronger player in the comparison shopping arena.
Here are a few articles that cover the acquisition:
SearchDay: DealTime to Acquire Epinions
Wedding Bells for DealTime, Epinions
DealTime Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Epinions
We're finding several indications that Pagerank is falling out of favor due to various factors like the "rich getting richer" effect. While Google remains a huge potential source of traffic, services like Looksmart are beginning to offer alternate methods that are growing in popularity. It's extremely important that people realize that Pagerank is nowhere NEAR the end-all even in it's current state. If trends continue to a more fair system, focusing on it too much may prove to be detrimental in a long-range sense.
However, the following items should be kept in mind when working with Google Pagerank:
Things to do on your end:
- Ensure your website is not deeper than 3 tiers deep.
- Linking your 1st tier to your 2nd tier, your 2nd tier to your 1st and 3rd, and your 3rd only to what it must, will help maximize internal Pagerank.
- Create a page of links. Include any sites you intend to request reciprocal links from, but try and keep it neat, and the links themselves descriptive. Ensure that you only link to pages that are relevant, have a decent Pagerank, and are not in trouble with Google. Also ensure that all links work.
- Do NOT participate in link farms or link exchange programs. These are highly frowned upon and may get your site removed from Google.
- Acquire the Googlebar from http://toolbar.google.com/. This tool will help you locate good prospects for linking. It will also tell you if a page may be in trouble with Google (bar grayed out).
- Offer content on various pages and allow deep linking. This will spread around value more evenly to the entire site.
Things to do with other sites:
- Determine where you want to be listed. Find appropriate niche engines, manufacturer and supplier sites, complimentary sites, and similar but non-competing sites.
- Personally write individual sites, requesting a link. If you haven't linked to them already, offer (recommended) to link to them in exchange for a link. Do NOT form email them, most will delete the mail and block you as spam.
- Submit your site to each search engine and relevant directory. Google places importance on Yahoo! and the Open Directory Project (http://dmoz.org). Avoid anything that doesn't appear to be professional or where the googlebar is grayed out.
- On relevant sites, if they have a forum, post there and make sure to include your URL in your signature. If they have a guestbook, sign it with your URL. (These are both forms of advertisement in and of themselves. Try to make each post relevant, coherentm and useful.)
- Submit testimonials for products and services of other sites. Make sure you sign it with your name and website. Many websites love to post great reviews, and will view your website as just adding to the authenticity of the review.
- Make sure that any links to your site are descriptive rather than just a plain URL. While this won't affect Pagerank, Google DOES consider inbound link descriptions in relevancy. It is, in effect, remote SEO.
- Utilize link popularity tools like http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/ to monitor inbound links and to run comparative surveys of competitors. You can also use this to hunt down your competitors' listings and make sure you're listed in all of the same places whenever possible.
Maintenance:
- Constantly keep an eye out for potential link partners. Compile a list of any new, potential sites.
- Do not maintain unreciprocated links on your site unless you feel it absolutely necessary. Outbound links affect Pagerank by spreading around the outgoing vote. This directly hurts your site by reducing the vote each page makes for the rest it is linked to, including internal links. It also hurts you by reducing the value of acquiring a link from you.
- Check all links. Make sure pages aren't suddenly in trouble with Google or have gone down. Google won't penalize you for inbound links (normally) but outgoing links are carefully monitored.
- Pagerank building requires constant monitoring and patience. Google only updates once a month, but everyone is constantly making additions.
- Google Pagerank is not a replacement for a good SEO. Amazon.com has over 50 million inbound links and still won't show up if you search for irrelevant keywords. Make sure your site always contains good content and is keyword-rich without being breaking search engine guidelines
ProLinkz is useful for tracking all 3 steps in an opt-in email campaign:
1. Opens/Reads - If you are sending HTML email, you can imbed a one-pixel GIF image into the email that uses a ProLinkz URL as a reference. This is accomplished by replacing the image "SRC" URL with the ProLinkz URL, then pointing that link to the image itself within the ProLinkz admin interface. Every time the image is loaded it will count one open/read.
2. Click-Throughs - Tracking click-throughs with ProLinkz is easy. It is, after all, what the software was designed for.
3. Orders - You can also track orders by imbedding a one-pixel GIF on the order confirmation page and using ProLinkz to track it.
By tracking these three steps, you will be able to test and improve your subject lines, time of mailing, email copy, landing page copy, and more.
For more on ProLinkz, see our review of it here.