(CNN) — Google Wave, a product that promises to revolutionize online communication, will go out to about 100,000 beta testers Wednesday.

The Web application from Google Inc. combines elements of e-mail, chat, Wiki documents, blogs and photo-sharing sites to create a form of Internet communication called a “hosted conversation,” or a “wave.”

Google demonstrated Wave at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, California, in May. The closed group of beta testers will help Google fish bugs out of the application before a public release by the end of the year, according to the Google Wave Web site.

The app was created by Jens and Lars Rasmussen, the Australian brothers who developed Google Maps. The Rasmussen brothers said they hope Google Wave will eventually replace e-mail as the main way people converse on the Internet.

“This should be something everybody uses and something everybody knows,” Jens Rasmussen said.

In Wave, e-mail-like communications can be edited by several users simultaneously. And users can chat about certain sections of Wave documents in real time, where all users see what a person is typing as it is typed. If a person comes to the conversation late, they can replay everything they’ve missed.

The Rasmussens hope these functions will make online communication more efficient and collaborative.

Jens Rasmussen said e-mail is a computer version of snail mail. Wave will be something new, a real-time communication system designed specifically for today’s faster-paced, multitasking Internet, he said.

“We really have a much too strong tendency to just take things we know and just adapt them to the digital world,” he said.

Tech bloggers have largely cheered the release of the product. But there are some concerns that the app may be too complicated for mainstream Web users.

In a video demonstration, the Rasmussens spend an hour and 20 minutes explaining Wave.

Initial reviews of Wave also noted a number of glitches in the application.

Ben Parr of the social-media blog Mashable writes that Wave still has bugs but that the product is improving over time.

“As an initial user of Wave, I have to tell you: things have gotten much more stable. It still has a slow response time in certain situations and it can still crash, but these things happen far less often than they used to,” he writes.

The blog TechCrunch wrote that Wave “drips with ambition” and will be “a new communication platform for a new Web.”

“Wave offers a very sleek and easy way to navigate and participate in communication on the Web that makes both email and instant messaging look stale,” TechCrunch’s MG Siegler wrote.

Source: cnn.com

Google bombing involves manipulating search engines’ contextual search methodologies to cause a certain search phrase to point to an unexpected page, usually for comedic or satirical purposes. A recent example of a Google bomb happened in January 2008, when the search phrase “dangerous cult” returned the Chuch of Scientology home page as the top search result.

Google bombing — also known by the more generic term “link bombing” — works with any search engine using a relevancy algorithm similar to Google’s. For example, run a search for “miserable failure” in Yahoo Search. You’ll see prominent links to President George W. Bush’s biography at whitehouse.gov at or near the top of the list.

The heart of the system is Google’s PageRank algorithm, as well as equivalent competing technologies. The PageRank system assigns a numeric score of 0-10 for each page on the web. Google derives a page’s ranking from the PageRank scores of all other pages that link to it.

The key to Google bombing is to generate outgoing links to your target from highly-ranked sites. Get enough highly-ranked sites pointing to your target using the same phrase, and you’ll push the target site to the top of the list of search results one sees when entering that mischievous phrase.

Here’s how to do it.

Step 1: Plan Your Assault

You’ll need a lot of friends who can be convinced to cooperate. The number of links you need depends on a number of factors, including the PageRank of the sites the phrase is posted on as well as the precise phraseology.

Alternatively, you can do all the linking yourself, but you would need at least a few hundred links on separate domains to get the desired result.

Typically, the victim is someone you and a bunch of other people dislike. The more high-profile the target, the better your chances of being seen and making your point.

Unlike the good old days, however, you can no longer google bomb for any phrase you like. The google update of Jan 07 (referenced below) means that it’s necessary to choose your phrase from words which already appear on the page in question. For example, the recent google bomb of the scientology site for ‘dangerous cult’ only worked because the word ‘cult’ was mentioned on the page.

Step 2: Generate a Whole Lotta Links

The more highly-ranked links search engines detect, the greater rank the chosen site will receive. Typical links include the URL of the target site, with the key phrase comprising the anchor text of the link. A link’s anchor text is the words that appear between the <a href=""> and the closing </a> tag in a link.

Tip: The more obscure the linked phrase, the better. If the phrase you choose is a popular one, you may need more links than an obscure phrase.

The total number of links depends on a lot of factors, but think in terms of hundreds or thousands, not millions. For example, the hacker radio show Off The Hook successfully Google bombed themselves with the search term “blank expressions.” They peaked as the 6th-ranked site for that phrase with a total of about 350 links.

Step 3: Tell Everyone

What’s the use of link bombing if no one notices? After the bomb takes hold, publicize it so ordinary citizens learn all about your move. Use a social networking site. That is, you could generate web traffic with Twitter.

Tips & Tricks

• In January 2007, it was announced that Google would be taking steps to limit the effectiveness of Google bombing. It’s subsequent algorithm tweak rendered most bombs ineffective. Rather than eliminate them altogether, Google directed search queries to discussion pages describing the bomb and Google’s reasons for defusing them. Furthermore, Google is known for manually altering PageRank scores for various reasons, including succumbing to political pressure. Many Google bombs have been suppressed for public relations reasons.

• Yahoo, AltaVista and other search engines have not announced any similar measures, so many older bombs that no longer work with Google still work with these other engines.

• Also, it is possible to Google bomb for commercial or self-promotional purposes. Commercial link bombing, also known as “spamdexing,” involves driving traffic to sites by the massive creation of links via bots, usually targeting the comment fields of blog posts.

Source: wired.com

Want To Make a Living on Google Money?

AdAge has a good post about how Google’s promotion of fraudulent advertising is undermining their brand…

In a world of double-digit unemployment and old-line industries in mid-collapse, here’s a sales pitch tailor-made for the times: “Get Paid by Google.”

It’s a pitch that’s compelling millions of people to visit sites such as Kevinlifeblog.com, Scottsmoneyblog.com, Maryslifeblog.com and Googlemoneytree.com, all promising some variation on one theme: Just buy our guide and we’ll teach you how to make thousands from Google, right in the privacy of your own home!

Google’s 5-Step Easy Money Process

1. Find a high paying affiliate program which sells a product about how easy it is to make money on Google.
2. Ideally the program will just charge for shipping to get the credit card details, and make most of the money through back end reverse billing fraud.
3. Create a fake blog (or fake news site) complete with fake comments about how you lost your job, this program took you from zero to here. And it makes you 6 figures a year.
4. Do keyword research to find freshly desperate and unemployed people.
5. Create ads targeting those people and market them through Google AdWords

Drug Dealers ***ARE*** Affiliated With Their Drugs

The surprising thing about this process is that Google claims no affiliation to these ads. From the above AdAge article

“As Google is not affiliated with these sites, we can’t comment on individual claims,” a [Google] spokesman said.

Nice try, but Google ***is*** affiliated with such offers, since they create the distribution channel. Just as a guy who just happens to have a boat load of cocaine he is distributing to clients ***is*** affiliated with the drugs if he is caught in possession.

Businesses Are Responsible for Their Own Business Strategy

Google gives webmasters this guideline “Your site’s reputation can be affected by who you link to.” Why shouldn’t it apply to Google as well?

As long as Google has 30%+ profit margins they are making a BUSINESS DECISION to run these fraudulent ads. They could spend 1% of revenue on cleaning up this issue (if they wanted to), but they are making a choice not to. Hal Varian has probably done the math, and the offers stay after repeated media exposure of the issue.

Google keeps running the ads because they want the revenue. And they know exactly how much revenue comes from scamming consumers with these ads:

Amoral Ad Networks Constantly Promote Fraud

Is risked mis-priced? Is an asset class overvalued due to fraud? Are consumers unaware of a new type of fraud?

It does not matter where there is a bubble in the economy – amoral ad networks will find it. As Jay Weintraub put it:

The truly complex part of the problem comes from the size of the un-branded continuity program market and just how much it is helping certain companies hit their numbers, along with what happens were it to go away. In so many respects, the current fakevertising trend is the 2008-9 equivalent of the mortgage advertising boom from 2002-2006.

Not surprising that yield based ad systems promote the biggest scams in the marketplace. Mortgage fraud was a multi-trillion dollar industry, and even as the market heads south, there is still yet another way to exploit the public with ads by targeting their dire situation and desperation.

Please Help Google Fix This Issue

Since Google has not put up consumer warnings and lots of consumers are getting ripped off, I believe it is our job as marketers to help warn consumers about this brazen looting and fraud. If you have a blog or website could you please write about this topic? Bonus points if you reference this post using keywords like “Google money” and “make money” as the anchor text such that we can try to rank a warning high up in the Google search results.

And if you write about this topic to help consumers and your site does not carry AdSense ads on it, please list it in the comments below such that anyone who comes to this page can see how big of an issue this has become.

Source: Seobook.com

What is duplicate content?

The first question you may be asking is what is duplicate content?  Well duplicate content generally refers to a substantial block of content within or across multiple domains that either completely matches or is appreciably similar.  Most of the time this is not intended to be malicious in origin but there are other times when people are trying to manipulate search engines results so they duplicate content.

So what isn’t duplicate content?

Content that is written in Spanish and also in English will not be considered as duplicate content.  As well if you have the occasional snippets (quotes and otherwise) this will not be considered as duplicate content either.

So why does Google care about duplicate content?

The reason why they care is because they want to provide to their users diverse content if possible.  They want a wide range of information so people get what they are looking for.  If people get duplicate results they will not be satisfied and neither will Google.  So Google tries to make the experience the best it can be for the users who use Google.

What does Google do about duplicate content?

Well there has been a myth for a long period of time going around that Google would completely ban your site and unindex it if you had duplicate content but this is not the case.  In reality what happens usually is the less desired result will fall in the index and not be ranked as highly as the desired results.  In rare cases some duplicate content will be removed from the index but this is the case when the content was made to manipulate Google rankings and deceive the users.  So if you aren’t trying to do this type of thing then having your content published in multiple locations on the internet is fine!

What can you do to proactively address duplicate content issue?

Well here are a few things you can try to have less duplicate content on the net:

• Block appropriately: you can block certain pages from being displayed in Googles index with a robots.txt file.  You can do this for duplicate pages such as a print version of a page that doesn’t need to be in Google’s index
• Be consistent with links: try to be consistent with your internal links. Don’t link to /page/ and /page and /page/index.htm
• Minimize repetition: For instance, instead of putting the copyright on the bottom of all your pages you could put a summary and have a link to the full copyright page
• Avoid publishing blank pages: if you are creating a page and it doesn’t have any content or does not have complete content then don’t publish it till it is finished.  This will help Google bots index only the pages it needs to
• Don’t fret: If there are people that are copying the content of your website you should be fine.  Don’t worry about them affecting the rank of your pages.  It may be annoying but will be highly unlikely to affect the rank of your site in a negative way

Have I used duplicated content?

Short answer. Yes!

I have duplicated a bunch of my content across websites.  Such as posting content in my blog and then publishing it in article directories and forums.  I usually wait a few weeks after I post it in my blog before I post it else where because I would like to get the original post indexed higher then the other pages but I think posting in more than one place is good.  It is good because it drives different types of traffic to your blog.  You do not want to rely on one type of traffic to support you website.  If you do and that one source for one reason or another disappears you will end up losing all of your traffic.

Summary

So to sum this all up.  Google will not penalize you for duplicate content as long as it is not done in a manipulative way that will deceive the users of Google.  It may lower the rank of some pages in the index compared to others but will not ban the pages completely.

Creating traffic to your blog can be a difficult task. While doing some research and looking at my Google Analytics stats I realized there is another way to generate traffic to your blog. This is something most of you probably have never thought about and I didn’t think about it myself until I started getting traffic to my website through this method. Everyone knows that getting traffic through search engines is great because it usefully converts better and you don’t need to advertise your blog all the time to get this type of traffic. Have you ever thought of the possibly of getting traffic through the Google image search feature? If you haven’t this might be something to look into. Let me explain a bit further.

When you add a image to your blog you think you are doing this mainly to create an attractive website that people will be interested in; however there are other beneficial reasons why you may want to add pictures to your website.  This other main reason is because people can find your blog through the Google image search feature.  Have you ever seen the Google Image search feature?  There is a button at the top left of Google to search images when you search for topics and in the search feature you sometimes get Image results showing at the top of the search results.  See example below:

So how can you optimize your images so they show up in the Google search feature?  If you can get in one of these top spots when people do regular Google searches you could potentially generate a lot of traffic to your blog.  So how is it done?  Here are a few steps you can take to optimize your images so you can get some better traffic to your blog through Google Image search feature.

1. Insert keywords into your Alt tags – this should be pretty self-explanatory.  If you put descriptive alt tags on your images you are more likely to come up in the search results
2. Name your Images with Descriptive titles - this as well should be pretty obvious.  If you have unique titles for your images then you are more likely to come up in the results.  If you have a very generic title for your images then the likelihood of it being the same as other images is very good and therefore giving you bad image search results
3. Use relevant text around the images – It is helpful to have relevant keywords around the images because those keywords will likely show up in bold as well and the user who searches will more likely click on the images
4. Optimize the title and meta tags of your pages – this is something you should already be doing for all of your pages.  You should especially be doing this for the pages that have the images so that they come up in the results a bit more easily
5. User anchor text keywords in links to images – what this means is if you have a hyperlink to an image and its text make sure the text is descriptive and not something generic like “Click for full size image”.  That type of thing is generic and will not help.  If you put something like “Jessica Alba Hot Picture” you are more likely to get the right results
6. Make Your image folder accessible to search engines – you need to make sure that your images folder is accessible by search engines.  If it is not then the images will not get indexed by Google and you will not get in the search image results
7. Enable Google Image Search in Webmaster Tools – this is one that I just recently found.  If you are signed up with Google Webmaster tools what you can do is login to your account and go to the Tools tab on the menu bar and find the option to enable enhanced image search on the left sidebar.  Once you do this your images will hopefully be indexed a bit more easily
8. Monitor the Number of Google Images Indexed – this is an important step because if none of your images are indexed then you are not going to get any traffic from Google image search.  You can do this by going to Images button at the top left of Google and then typing – site:www.yoursite.com or site:yoursite.com.  It really depends on how your site is indexed for if you should have the www or not.  If it brings up results then those are the images indexed by Google.  If you get no results then you have no images indexed by Google and you need to work harder on the steps above to get your images indexed.

So hopefully these tips above will help you generate some extra traffic to your blog.  I know it has worked in the past for many other people and can work for you if you just give it a try and try to follow these guidelines.  Good luck and let me know how successful you are at this technique!

The latest news from YouTube is that they have announced a deal last Monday November 10th, 2008 with MGM to host some of the studio’s content.  This new move is the latest effort by Google’s YouTube to position itself as the player to be used for commercial online video space.

The initial offers by MGM library have been pretty disappointing.  It will feature such videos as episodes of “American Gladiators” and clips from “Legally Blonde.”

Even though the initial offers aren’t great this is the step in the right direction for YouTube since it already dominates the user-generated content market.  If they can get into Hollywood and get majority of this content as well it would be a great step for Google’s YouTube.

Even though YouTube is dominating the user-generated content videos it still has stiff competition with the likes of Hulu which has had 6.3 million visitors in September (according to Nielsen) and more than 100 sponsors.  So if YouTube wants to get into this market of Hollywood they will definitely need to work at it to beat the competition.

This latest deal with MGM is just one of the many deals YouTube has made in the recent past.  YouTube has already made deals with both Lionsgate and CBS, and the independent film “The Princess of Nebraska”.  On this indepedent films website they showcased new features such as “Theater View” and “Lights Out” mode for longer films.

There however may be some issues standing in the way of YouTube and its success in Hollywood.  Google is in the middle of a $1 billion copyright lawsuit with Viacom.  Basically what Viacom is claiming is that YouTube’s business model is a criminal enterprise.

YouTube will provide services using its VideoID technology to find MGM content that may be up illegally and let the studio decide if they want to remove it or put advertising on it.

In addition, MGM still does not fully trust YouTube as a full-fledged distributor but this may change in time.

MGM co-president Jim Packer says he feels that YouTube’s platform isn’t ideal for having 30 to 40 movies up at once and feels more comfortable having a site such as Hulu have all those movies up at once. Note that Hulu currently only supports the US where YouTube supports global traffic.

Source: MGM to Post Full Films on YouTube [The New York Times]

There are many influential bloggers that I look up to and want to one day have the same level of success as they have achieved.  I strive to accomplish some of the amazing feats these bloggers have done and I thought I would share with you my Top 8 list.  I think it is important to have people to look up to so you know the direction you want to go and so that you don’t stop until you make it there.  If you have a dream I think you should go after it until you are successful at it.  So without further ado here are my Top 8 Most Influential Bloggers (note – these are in no particular order):

• Johnchow.com – He is one of the first blogs I started reading and one of the reasons why I decided to get into the business myself.  He is very successful at what he does and I strive to have some similar success.  He is also local to where I live which is interesting.  I actually when to school with a good friend of his (very small world).  I definitely recommend that you check out his blog because he has a lot of great things he talks about and he will point you in the right direction to get your blogging career started.
• Johntp.com – This is a great blog for lots of blog tips and ways on how to make money.  It looks like Johntp hasn’t updated his site since Aug 14, 08 but I still read his blog.  It has tons of content on it and is a very highly ranked site.  If you are wanting to learn more about making money online and blogging I recommend you check out his blog as well.
• Ez-onlinemoney.com/blog – This blog is run by Josh Spaulding and was recommended to me by my brother.  The first article I read on his blog was about article submission techniques.  It was very helpful and I have followed it for marketing articles of my own.  Every once in awhile I come back to check out his blog and see what new things he has written about.  He seems to know what he is talking about so I would recommend checking his blog out.
• CarlOcab.com – This kid is truly inspirational.  He started his blog at the age of 13 years old and is one of the most successful bloggers out there.  He has tons of useful blog posts and he knows what he is talking about.  I recommend you check his blog out because there is definitely a thing or two you will learn from his blog.
• DailyBlogTips.com – This blog is run by Daniel Scocco.  His blog as the URL indicates is about blog tips.  He has many very useful blog posts that are very popular such as 101 Blog Tips I learned in 2006 that can help even the most experienced bloggers learn something new.  I recommend you check it out and learn something new so you can improve your blog as well.
• QuickOnlineTips.com – The one post that drawed me to this website was the blog post 50 Best WordPress Plugins for Power Blogging.  It was very helpful because it showed me a bunch of plugins I wasn’t using with Wordpress that I really should have because it makes my blog a much better blog.  I recommend if you are wanting some new plugins to check it out and browse around the blog while you are there.
• Problogger.net – This blog is run by Darren Rowse.  It is a great blog about blogging tips and it has a ton of useful information.  It you want to learn more about blogging and get a bunch of tips on how to improve your blog I recommend you check out his blog and learn all you can from it!
• Shoemoney.com – Another great blogger out there that is run by Jeremy Schoemaker.  I heard about ShoeMoney when I was visiting JohnChow.com blog.  He mentioned his name so I had to check out his blog and I am glad I did because he is also one of the top bloggers out there.  After reading his blog he has become a very influential to myself because he is one of the few people out there who has made tons of money with Google Adsense.  One picture on his blog shows him with a Google check where he has earned $132,994.97 in 2005.  This picture is one of my motivating factors to keep my blog going and become successful.

So there you have it.  The Top 8 Most Influential Bloggers that I look up to and strive to become as successful as.  You to should have goals and people you look up to because it helps keep you motivated.  Anything is possible if you stick your mind to it.  You just need to keep at it and the sky will be the limit!

Do you use Adsense on your website?  Are you having trouble with your CTR (Click Through Rate) of your ads?  Without having relevant ads show on your page you are more likely to have a low CTR.  If it is too low there is one thing you can do to make Google show more relevant Adsense ads.

To improve the Google Adsense ads that are being displayed what you can do is suggest (or ignore) sections of a page to the Adsense bot.

To suggest a section of a page, use the following HTML tags

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
This is the page section you would like to suggest to AdSense bot
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

To ignore a page section, use the following HTML tags

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>
This is the page section you want AdSense bot to ignore
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

If you are writing a blog and have Adsense code on it you should be suggesting the title and content of the post and ignoring the sidebars and footers.

You can use this section targeting on your blog to make suggestions but it can take up to 2 weeks before you see the results of the section targeting.

Google suggests that you include a significant amount of content otherwise you will get PSAs (Public Service Ads).

So try this out for yourself and see if you can increase your CTR of your Google Adsense ads.

So after doing a lot of research and testing one technique for generating traffic that I found to work best for me is to generate traffic through forums. It is important however that the forums that you do participate in are do follow forums.  You can find a list of them here in one of my previous posts.

So how do you generate traffic with forums?

There are a couple ways you can generate traffic with forums.  The main ways you can generate traffic are through links in signatures, review links (in particular threads), and through increased rank from search engines because of the do follow links in the forum.   When trying to generate traffic with forums you need to be careful though not to get banned.  This is something that can happen easily if you do not follow the rules of the board.  This actually happened to me recently because I posted a link in the body of a forum post and they deemed it as self promotion and didn’t take to kindly to it.  So I was given a temporarily ban on that forum.  So be warned that you do need to follow the rules if you don’t want to be banned.

So what forums work for me?

After trying a few ones the two I find that I like the best are DigitalPoint and SitePoint.  The reason why I like these two in particular are because they are do follow forums and they have a lot of traffic.  The type of forums that have very little visitors are very unlikely to send you a lot of traffic to your website.  So what I do is try to be as active as possible in these blogs and as a result get traffic from the members of the forums.  Also a neat feature of DP (DigitalPoint forums) is that if you have an Google Adsense account you can also get a share of the ads shown on an thread you participate in.  Therefore if you are a very active member of the boards you have a chance to make money with your Google Adsense account on the forum as well.  Usually you don’t get a ton of earnings but it is still worth setting up.

So test this out for yourself.  Market your blog with forums.  If done right it can generate plenty of traffic to your blog and you will be on your way to a successful career as a blogger.

The title of this post might be a little confusing so let me explain. A lot of people use Google Adsense on their website to make money online. I am sure everyone who is using it has read all the policies and so forth about how many link units, ad units, etc they can place on one single page. Well one misconception a lot of people have is that more ads on the page is better. Here are a few reasons why you may want to try less ad units.

More Ad units causes clutter on the page
You do not want to clutter your website/blog too much with ads otherwise people will not want to read your website in the first place. If it all looks like one big ad that can scare many people off. It is important to make a very good impressions in the first couple seconds to a new visitor otherwise they will lose interest right away and move on. So if you have less ads on the page and you blend those ads into the page you can retain visitors. And if you can retain visitors and make them come back you can potentially earn money from them later.

Higher payout for less ads
There has been a bunch of research done by many people that show having less ads on the page will increase the amount of money you make per click. The logic is – if there are more available spots on the page then advertisers have to fight less for those spots on the page. If your website is on a very particular niche then not many sites will have information on it and if advertisers want a spot on that page they will have to pay more.

Less distraction with less ads
If you have ads in between every post on your blog and they don’t blend in well this becomes a very big distraction for a lot of readers. If they can’t read your posts without having to scroll past a huge ad then they may be inclined to go elsewhere for the information. If you have maybe two ads on your page and have them positioned above the fold (so they can be seen right away when visiting the page) they are more likely to be effective.

So test this out on your blog and see how you do. You may be surprised to see that you are making a lot more money with less ads. I have tested this out on my blog as well and have seen a big difference on my blog so far. Feel free to leave a comment on how well this has worked for yourself.