Guest Blogger: Corey Hammond
A few months ago Google announced that it was working on a Wikipedia competitor that they were going to call Knol. Knol stands for “a unit of knowledge”. Essentially, what Knol does is allows users to publish or generate articles about specific topics. Knol resembles resemble sites like Wikipedia, Mahalo, and Squidoo and has some social features to it like commenting and ranking.

The user interface is pretty clean and easy to navigate. Here is what the publishing section looks like.

Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land wrote a Knol already about SEO pluggins for Firefox that has some comments you can see, one being from Google’s own Matt Cutts.

Twitter has also been buzzing a little bit about the launch. Some people have tried to publish their Knols and they have ended up not working. It will be interesting to see how this social site grows and if it will become as mainstream as Wikipedia. I’m not very impressed with the site thus far. I know it’s a new site so it doesn’t have a lot of content, but it seems to just be a repeat of the other large social knowledge sites.

Guest Blogger: Emily Croskey
I recently participated in a free online webinar that Google put on called ‘The Google Trifecta’, which included the three topics of Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer. The overall presentation ran smoothly, with a different presenter for each topic.

The topic of interest that I found most fascinating was the overview of the Google Website Optimizer. The purpose of this program is to actually improve your website once it has been established. The Website Optimizer is built into the Google AdWords interface and it helps you find out which content will convert best on your landing pages. Newsletter sign-ups, contact forms and purchases are all examples of conversions that can be tracked. The key aspect of this is to do A/B testing. This type of testing allows you to compare and contrast ‘page A’ and ‘page B’. This program allows you to set up an A/B test on your site and it randomly assigns users to a test. For example, it will assign users to different versions of your homepage, and from the data that is collected, decide which version is more advantageous to your users. You may also want to set up an A/B test on a site if it has a large cart abandonment rate, or long cart process in order to see which cart process works best for the users to your site.

To me, this would be an extremely important tool to use if any of our clients are experiencing some difficulty in their cart process. The best part of the Google Website Optimizer is that it is free!

Guest Blogger: Corey Hammond
Google’s Webmaster Central Blog published a video done by Matt Cutts. Matt works for Google’s Spam Team and has had a lot of interaction with SEO’s. He gives some advice for small sites and their webmasters on how to compete with the big players in their industries.

His first suggestion for webmasters is to be creative. By being creative he means to target a particular niche or longer tail keyword phrase. It doesn’t make sense for a small site to that sells widgets to go after the term widgets. The site should be creative and go after a small niche within the widget industry. They could start targeting blue round widgets and have a lot of success with it. In targeting these niches, Matt’s advice is to become the authority. Google and users trust sites that show they know what they are talking about.

A final note Matt talks about is to leverage your speed. Big sites can take a long time to get things approved and implemented. Smaller sites are able to test out new things and make the changes quicker than the big players.

Small businesses have a great opportunity online. SEO is a must and can greatly improve a site’s visability and exposure. A lot of people over look the opportunities that the longer tail keywords have. When a user does a query for a term like “ipod”, they could simply be in the research stage of the buy cycle. If a site understands that, they could target a phrase like “black 30 gig ipod” that would signal this searcher could be looking to purchase since they are looking for a particular color and memory size. Small business should use SEO to their benefit and leverage their size and speed against their bigger competitors.

7 days ago, Google was indexing 186 pages of TKG.com; this morning Google is only indexing 94!! As I’ve documented before, there have been some minor fluctuations and slow improvements over the last 12 weeks, but nothing as dramatic as this:

I’m researching now & hoping this is just a fluke…

It’s been only 4 days since my last update of Google’s index – but I wanted to document the small spike in the number of pages being seen by Google. Over the last 80 days, I’ve seen minor increases in the number of pages being indexed over several weeks; however, in the last 4 days Google has indexed 24 additional pages – so far, the largest spike and in such a short amount of time.

About a 1 month ago, Google was only indexing 115 pages of TKG.com

Today, Google is indexing 40% more pages! Google is still about 300 pages from indexing all of TKG.com, but this is trending in a positive way, so I’m not overly concerned at this point; I am getting a little anxious though…

The SEO world is buzzing about the recent news that Google, Yahoo and Adobe have teamed up to make Flash file format content easier to find, index & rank. Google’s blog states that:

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Google’s Webmaster Central Blog provides detailed Flash Indexing Q/A along with several comments that provide informative information as well.

As for Yahoo!, they will have the same capability once they update their technology…I’m hearing it should be soon.

During this whole domain change process (since April 30th), we have experienced some trying times with Google…First we found out that TKG.com was blacklisted and then our Google rankings disappeared and we had to deal with Google taking over a month to index just 25% of the pages on TKG.com – Nevertheless, Google has continually supplied the majority of Search Engine traffic to TKG.com every month this year!

Google is now indexing about 146 pages, up 16 pages from nearly 3 weeks ago. The last month has been slow and steady. It’s been 47 days since TKG.com was removed from the blacklist and being indexed by Google – I’m actually shocked that Google isn’t indexing our entire site already.
Prior to switching domains, thekarchergroup.com had 425 pages in Google’s index. Since then, we’ve probably added about 25 pages to our site…
TKG.com is still hundreds of pages away from being fully indexed by Google.

Google’s indexing timeline:

48 days after we switched our domain… TKG.com is back towards the top for some of our top referring phrases.