Happy 2008, everyone! (And happy birthday to me tomorrow!) I hope you all enjoyed your long or short vacations and are ready to start the year strong. I know I am (am I?) In case you've avoided the blogosphere while you've been in San Diego or in some foreign country enjoying the warmer weather, we have you covered. Here's what happened this week in search:
New Years
Okay, yes, captain obvious, 2008 is now here. And the search industry celebrated too, as always. In case you missed the eye candy, we have them for you. Google's logo was a combination of confetti and a celebration of TCP/IP's 25 years. Cool.
By the way, it's totally awesome for JohnMu to offer Webmaster Support during the holiday. Thanks John!
Your AdSense 2007 Earnings
Got AdSense on your website? How well did you do? Forums had polls and we held our own AdSense earnings poll. Turns out that the majority of our users make more than $5k a year in AdSense earnings. In second place, some publishers are just making $50 or less. That's a huge gap. I'm kind of in the middle, though I hope that I hit the $5k minimum for next year's poll. ;)
AdSense 101
Speaking of AdSense, Google has launched AdSense Newbie Central to get you started on monetizing with AdSense. If you still haven't done it yet, go for it.
Scuammy
As many of you know, once upon a time there was a guy named Matt Marlon who harassed SEOBook owner Aaron Wall in a lawsuit. You might remember the name: Traffic Power. This week, Marlon was accused of preying on folks who were about to lose their homes due to foreclosure.
Beware of Nigerian Scams in SEO Forums
Not many people are falling for the mail trick lately, so now they're infiltrating the forums. Barry talks about an advanced fee that he was asked to pay to help someone whose PayPal account was "limited." Don't help these people. They're probably scum too.
Susan Moskwa Talks About Content Removal on Google
We've talked about it a lot, but in case previous methods haven't worked for you to remove content from Google's index, there's now a Webmaster Central team working in Google Groups to provide more tips and tricks for removing content from the index.
Apparently, PageRank Really Doesn't Matter
We reported earlier this week that sites with lower PR still pass link juice. Either PR4 is the new PR5 as many people said, or PageRank is just a silly number.
Kiwis and Aussies Will Get Paid More Next Time
Google made an oops when paying their AdSense publishers in the land down under. Apparently, they inverted the Australian exchange rate and paid the publishers less. You'll probably get that money in your next payment.
Ask 404 Errors?
Recently, the Ask.com crawler returned 404s because it was adding spaces to the end of the URL. Today, we learned that the 404 problem is fixed. Thanks Ask!
Internet Marketing Ninjas
If you want to hear from the industry's leading experts on all things Internet Marketing, be sure to check out Jim Boykin's new Internet Marketing Ninjas video training series. He also added some cool tools to the package. That's my only gripe; now the free tools are paid (and they're very good!) Congrats to Jim though. The whole program looks awesome.
Have Competition? Do it Better
Ben Pfeiffer made an unexpected appearance on New Year's Eve by posting about the "My Competitors are Doing it" syndrome. In this industry, it's all about what others are doing. So what can you do? Zero in on their weaknesses. Do what they're doing, but better. There's a lot of flexibility in this approach.
Next Week: Wikia
Next week, the Wikia Search Engine is expected to go live. This is the open source search engine that Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia proposed six months ago. What are your thoughts about it?
