One of the most used analytics tool amongst the webmasters is the free Google Analytics tool, it’s free, its powerful and its easy to use. The even better part is that Google Analytics is constantly improving and adding new features to help you know little more about your website and how your site is engaging with visitors, performing in search engines and which of your campaigns is performing best.

Today I received an email from Google Analytics letting me know about 7 new features which are in beta testing so I decided to blog about it (sometimes I just check what I need and never pay attention to the new things, unless someone explicitly lets me know about that, perhaps these features were there longer then what I think).

The 7 New Google Analytics Features

• Analytics Intelligence with Custom Alerts
• Expand Goals and New Engagement Goals
• Expand Mobile Reporting
• Unique Visitors Metric
• Advanced Analytics Features
• Share Advanced Segments and Custom Report Templates
• Multiple Custom Variables

All of the features are really interesting and give an excellent report of data-analysis for your site which can really help you understand what parts of your site are doing well, which ones needs to be improved and how you can push your site further more and engage better with your visitors. My preferred new features are the Analytics Intelligence with Custom Alerts and Expanded Goals and New Engagement Goals, but lately I am also eager to know how my website is performing on mobile devices and how many visitors visit my site through iPhone, Android or any other phone that supports web browsing.

Analytics Intelligence with Custom Alerts and Setting it up

Whenever I build a new site I do set targets I want to meet. Would that be traffic determined target, conversion or rankings doesn’t matter, but I need targets to determine my success with the new site (or with an existing site which I want to improve). So instead of viewing my weekly or monthly analytics for this new site and see on which days I reach this goal, with the new analytics intelligence with custom alerts setup I can receive emails whenever I reach my goal.

Setting up with the custom alerts is easy and can be done with just few clicks, in addition you can set up different goals, could for visits, visitors, pageviews, bounce rate, average time on site, percentage of new visitors to your site, goal conversions, revenue etc.. in addition you can define if you want this report to function for determined keyword, for a referral path, a campaign, city or region or country/territory etc. All data which have a great value, but lets see a simple example on how to setup an alert.

• Chose your website profile for which you want to setup an alert. On the left sidebar you will notice the Ingelligence Beta link labeled under the My Customizations panel.
• Setup the alert name and chose a period (daily, weekly or month) for your new goal
• Setup the goal conditions and to what you want it to apply. Chose keyword (if you want to track how your keyword is performing), chose the condition as matches exactly and as value add the keyword which you want to track.
• Setup the alert options. In this example I want to track whenever my site reaches a total of 50 visits a day for that keyword. So i chose Visits in the Alert me when option, as condition I add Is greater then and value is set to 50.
• Then just simply click on Save Alert after making sure that you have setup your alert correctly

In five simple steps I have create an alert for my new goal, every day my site will receive 50 visitors for that keyword I will be alerted via email. Of course once i reach my goal for a week regularly and I still won’t be ranking #1 for that keyword I will setup a new goal with a greater value, this way I can analyze how much work I involve into reaching my goals and can determine the success of my SEO Optimization. But that’s not just that, as you did saw there are much more alerts that can be set up.

Google Analytics Custom Alerts Video Tutorial
In the bellow video (made by Google Analytics team) you can learn how to setup your custom alerts step by step and learn some new options too.

I bet that every time you have crossed over a similar discussion you have put your own knowledge in question too, Does it really affect rankings? What if he is right, he seems so convinced. Well this kind of discussion can really get you confused, waste time and money by trying to hunt out those magic high PR sites and try to grab a link from them.

The reason why I decided to blog about this topic is the recent case that happened to me during this weekend. A client of mine from my wordpress development site for which I had build a site has been constantly asking me questions regarding seo, a topic which I love discussing often. Weeks later I had build his site I decided to check out if he has done anything to improve his sites ranking or his questions were just out of curiosity. Well i found out he had worked out pretty hard, and very wrong too. He had spend so much time to find high pagerank sites and grab a link from those sites even tho the content of those sites had nothing to do with his site. WRONG. Later the same day, i ended up in one of those threads that do spread disinformation’s and thought…hell, my client must have read one of these threads and that most have convinced him that he was doing the wrong thing.

See what happened to my client by reading those threads that concentrate only on nonsense discussions and spreading partial information’s (that often happen to turn into disinformation’s) with the sole purpose of protecting their business model? Well that is the reason why I am blogging about that subject now, I want to try and explain you in the best way I can how and when PageRank will affect your website rankings.

What is PageRank

PageRank is a metric, a numeric value representing votes casted for your site. All the links that are pointing to your site are giving a vote in eyes of Google, and with PageRank as tool Google can determine how trustworthy your site is and how many votes it has.

Explained that we have to go one step backward to better understand, how search engine spider bots work. Its pretty simple to explain for the part that we need, search engine spider bots crawl a site by following links that they find on a site that they are currently crawling. So again, those votes (i.e. links) pointing to your site do play an important role, the more links you have pointing to your site the more often your search engine spider bot will be crawling your site and yet the higher your page rank becomes as the number of incoming links increase.

PageRank Doesn’t Affect Rankings, Links DO

Just in case someone didn’t got the point while reading this post. PageRank is a metric that calculates votes/links caste to your site, nothing more nothing less, as such it can’t affect rankings at all. What actually does affect the rankings are the incoming links that have your specific keywords as anchor text.

From other point of view, incoming links from higher PR sites that are content related with your site do give a better boost to your rankings, but that is not because of the PageRank it is because the site is trustworthy enough (i.e. site’s vote weights more because of its status/credibility/trustworthiness).

Say yours

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In fact, Google search engine is coming with a brand new version, more then just a new algorithm it looks like a new platform. Google search states that the goal for the new version is to improve indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness. You can find the new version of Google search engine at www2.sandbox.google.com if you want to confront the differences.

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.
Quoted from Google Webmasters Blog

From the results of my query search for keywords seo optimization and other keywords as well I do see quiet a difference in results (not only for my website) except the fact that wikipedia still dominates as it used to.

What do you think about the new version of Google search engine ?

Have you checked the new version? What do you think of the search results, do the results seem more accurate to you ?

This is not a April Fools joke, so you can go and check by yourself but your site is ready mate, it’s pagerank is going to update. You struggled for 3 months now in building links and the only thing you are actually waiting big time is pagerank. Right?

As pagerank update’s the value of links are supposed to be growing..no? Well I don’t care how you did with your pagerank, if it increased or it was wiped…what I want to hear from you folks is…

Have your search engine rankings improved since three months ago until today? Let me know by leaving a comment bellow.

P.S. Tomorrow is coming a SEO advise for those that are starting a new site, so make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed to follow me.

I do not know if this is something new or old actually, but today when I logged on my adsense account I did notice a link that was telling me that now I can link (integrate) my AdSense account with my Analytics account. In either case this is a great feature as it would give more space to webmasters to optimize their content, learn more about their users how did they found their website and how do the visitors actually interact with webmaster’s content, it also can help you optimize your website design and even optimize the position of your AdSense ad blocks.

That does sound cool doesn’t it? Actually it sounds incredible you would say, but hold on a second, we are talking about Google here, the master of “gathering data” and turning those data into cold cash for them.

It kinda turns out that this great feature you have dreamed about has a bad side too no? Well for sure it can help you learn more about your website, your visitors, your content, your design and even helps you to make more money online by optimizing all possible aspects of your site, but it also…in a legal way you give access to Google to actually share, compare AND use your traffic stats data and possibly classify AdWords advertisers on how much they are actually bidding on a keyword and on which sites would they get displayed too (The higher bidders on more traffic sites?!). Does it make sense to you? For me its crystal clear and personally I do not have anything against all that as it can’t turn worst, but it could definitively turn into better if your site grows.

However, lets leave the “presumptions” aside, for those that are interested to integrate their Google AdSense with their Google Analytics account, as always, Google has already thought about making a video tutorial for that (even tho it is too simple to be guided by a video).

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What you will see in this video might not look something new to you, indeed I have already blogged about it in the past like here, here, here and here. But however, watching this video will not only refresh your memory but you will also be able to see some new functions for which I haven’t blogged.

The nature of this post is not much related to SEO directly, but rather to user education and help others understand how they can perform a more precise search and to obtain better results during the search. From the other side, the video (and the linked articles) can help you understand pretty much on your optimization process (many people will perform precise search queries, optimizing your site the right way will definitively bring you traffic even from exact/specific search queries too).

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Whats the new find? Microsoft’s new find is GetSearchPerks. So practically in short words, with GetSearchPerks people can earn credits if they perform a search in one of the three search engines that Microsoft does actually own, and with those credits then you can buy yourself gifts or give them to a charity.

Just few words on how to apply, in case you are interested. If you have an MSN/Hotmail/Live email account all you have to do is sign in, install the plugin for your IE browser (it only works with IE browser) and then perform your search through one of the three mentioned search engines. With every search query you perform you receive 1 credit and you can obtain up to 25 credits a day (i.e. up to 25 search queries a day can be performed to gain credits). But lets leave the fun aside and try to see what actually is behind this.

It has been years now that Microsoft’s search engines have been classified on the third and sometimes popping on the second place as the biggest search engines, and its been much more time that Microsoft is trying to achieve it’s first place. Innovating technologies and improving search experience has not helped Microsoft enough, empowering their search engine through Windows Live Messenger didn’t helped that much either..and now, with GetSearchPerks it looks like they have came to their extremes.

It is apparent enough that Microsoft’s adCenter is lacking in advertisers, and they are willing to do anything that it takes to increase that number, but it doesn’t really seem like they are aiming quality but rather quantity (if they do really rely on GetSearchPerks).

Whats your say on all this?

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The reason for Google to take action against those that do sell textual links without the nofollow tag was (as publicly announced) that selling or acquiring links without the nofollow tag purpose is to trick the search engines algorithm and obtain better search engine rankings. The search engines algorithm is made so that websites are being ranked based on votes (links pointing to a website with their main keywords in anchor text).

From link selling/buying business many would profit, one would be the link buyer who with the help of the acquired links would rank higher in the SERPs for his/her targeted keyword. The second person that would profit is the link seller who would earn money from the text links he would sell (or from the blog reviews that the webmaster is going to sell).

Apparently Google did not liked that their algorithm was being tricked, or didn’t liked that webmasters could make profits out of their algorithm by selling textual links, how ever it is Google decided that those webmasters (sites) that do sell textual links deserve to be punished and penalized. This took act with decrease in PageRank for websites that was mainly using the next marketplaces

• Text Link Ads
• Review Me
• PayPerPost
• SponsoredReviews

Webmasters that had their websites listed in the marketplace of one of those websites got their pagerank practically wiped, white..

Did this penalization stopped webmasters from selling textual links? Well I can tell you that it didn’t, as I mentioned in the previous post on around the web and back, Paul had highlighted pretty well that the link sales business is not over yet and he is right. Not only that the link selling business didn’t stopped, but actually prices increased since the risk was higher which was not bad at all for the webmasters that were making a living out of this business.

Those tho that got penalized, what were they doing? Well just a small amount of them did actually stopped writing reviews or selling text links after the penalization. The big amount tho continued and what they did was changing the methods to measure the quality of their site from previously based on PageRank to

• Traffic stats (finally they started publishing stats)
• Alexa Ranking
• RSS Feed readers number

In addition they started to even include testimonials to enforce their advertising page and to give more credibility to their site.

Breathing PageRank

Now as you see there was a PageRank update just yesterday, and the results are definitively what people wouldn’t expect. Many of the previously penalized websites started breathing PageRank again and can see their PR bar go green, even for just a few points but at least it is not white.

You might thinking that Google gave up on all this? Well you might be even right, or maybe I am just paranoid thinking that this is just a tactic to get in surface more webmasters that do this type of business. Or maybe it is just that Google has came up with another algorithm that won’t hurt your pagerank but definitively cuts out the value of the links that are going out from your site…? i don’t know…if you have an idea comment bellow.

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Anyway I just checked the homepage of this SEO Blog today as I was willing to modify some stuff and was trying to figure out some things and did notice that the Google toolbar was reporting PageRank 4 again for this blog. On the previous Page Rank update the blog went from PR4 to PR3 and now back to PR4.

Has your website PageRank changed? How did it go?

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I guess soon we will have to stop claiming that Google SERPs are not case sensitive. Rather your title is SEO or seo used to be the same, rather your anchor text would be seo or SEO used to be same thing for Google, they would not care if you use capitalization or no, but not anymore…seems like.

The other day I just paid some attention on the SERPs of Google for a very popular keyword in this niche, yeah I am referring to the keyword SEO (or should I rather refer to seo now?) and I did notice a drastic change for both keywords in the SERP results. It is not like 1 page had moved up or down, it was like three or more sites have different positions if searched on capitlized SEO or smallcaps seo.

I took a screenshot of both results and highlighted one drastic change, Aaron Walls SEOBook site. Where seobook.com ranks as 3rd listing for keyword seo, while for SEO it is listed as 7th result. Here is a screenshot (click to enlarge, the original file is 1374px wide, so you will have to scroll horizontal)

Well guess what? I had my Personalized Web Search enabled (disabling the personalized search seobook.com ranks 7th always). The fact is I did not had my coffee finished as of yet, mhr (lesson to all, drink your coffee before you login to your blog or do something heh :/).

In either case it was not really the fault of the coffee as I performed a search and found other websites reporting the same. After a chit chat via email with Aaron (thanks for reminding me about the Personalized Web Search that was on lol) i realized I was late in this news, and it was discussed in his seo training program forums like a month ago or so.

Here are some other resources that have spiked the case sensitive SERPs

• Travel Searches, Local & More Searches Turning Case-Sensitive in Google SERPs

Looks like no one can capitalize the answer NO to the question Is Google SERPs Case Sensitive?. Is this an attempt to make seo work harder? Will it really improve the search experience of the users? After all we all ask questions, and we all make presumptions since the one who has the answers will never really give an answer. What are your thoughts?

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