Google recent archive search is basically searching by date archived (indexed and crawled).  To enable this function, first do a search for anything then you will simply click the Advanced Search link next to the Google search bar.  Under the Advanced Search properties page you will see a link with a plus sign (+) next to it titled “Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more” … click the plus sign (+) to expand the tree.  Change the “Date” value to “past 24 hours” then click the Advanced Search button.

How is this useful for link building?
Let’s say you have a website which targets the keyword ‘farm animals’ so you do a recent archive date search for the keyword ‘farm animals’ in the past 24 hours, this will give you a list of recently archived (indexed and crawled) pages which relate to your target keyword.  In most cases these are fresh pages or new mentions of your target keyword. 

The great thing about this list is that you know you have pages which Google is actively indexing and crawling, so it already has some value because it has been cached in the past 24 hours — it’s active in Google.  These newly found resources are commonly available for placement of a relevant link.  

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I never before seen Google Gmail being spoofed, but today I got my first Gmail phising SPAM!  For me, it was obviously a spoof, to start the greeting read “Dear Members”, I have at least 15 accounts which are tied into Google and they are one of the largest companies in the world, are you telling me they couldn’t address me by my real name.  That was a big “red flag” for me.  The next red flag which sealed it for me was the link in the message (update account) pointed to www[DOT]server-gmail[DOT]com, being from the IT world I knew this was a phish!

The reason folks are phising for Gmail accounts (a free email service) is not so they can SPAM your email address — they already got that!  So how can they benefit?  What do they want with your Gmail username and password??  It’s Gmail for heaven’s sake!  Well, not really, because for most your Gmail username/password is also your Google Adwords and Google Adsense account, as well as a suite of other accounts, but Adwords & Adsense is the money ringer!  Imagine if someone or a team of phishers had access to thousands of accounts a day with valid Adwords accounts and the average account (credit card) shuts down in 24 hours due to card cancellation or Adwords lockout.  To recoup money they simply go to places on the web and sell paid search placement, when they use a account they first change the password to prevent immediate discontinuance by the credit card holder — then advertise the hell out of client websites until the account is inactive.  In a short time they can make large sums of money.

I reported this message to the real Gmail Team!

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Google Docs is now offering an offline solution to their document and spreadsheet processing.  Using Google Gears, their interactive browser plug-in application is what is used by Google to deliver their offline Google Docs application.

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Got a nice tip from Tech Recipes. Have you ever wanted to sort your search results by the most recent indexed pages or return only the latest search results, well now you can. Actually you always could do it via Advanced Search options, but who has the time to deal with all that and plus its not as cool as the drop down box on your search page.

Simply attach these parameters to the end of your search URL string: &as_qdr=d and voliá you’re date filter drop down box automagically appears.

In the image I use the drop down to search for the latest SEO jobs on craigslist while sorting by the pages indexed in the past 24 hours. Amazingly 429 SEO jobs have been posted on Craigslist in the past 24 hours!

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Google announced the release of their scrolling text ads technology, which allows you to page through the Google Adsense ads found on webmaster sites.

What a brilliantly STUPID idea?  Who wants to scroll or page through a bunch of third-party advertisements.  Maybe if they made any serious headway with their pay per call advertising model then that would work in this scenario, but for their contextual text ads its pretty senseless.  Plus isn’t the point of contextual advertising is that you deliver me ads relevant to the page content, I shouldn’t have to go looking for relevant information right?  Is this somewhat of an admission of a failed technology?  Maybe I am reaching a bit, but I still think scrolling text is a stupid idea with so many other things they can be working on or improving.  And for Google to state they’ve been testing this STUPID idea for months is ridiculous and hilarious to me, especially since its a small change that can probably be coded in less than a full day.

Google I can tell you what you should be working on when concerning Adsense, how about better reporting metrics for Adsense.  How about a Adsense content targeted links, where your code finds relevant words in the page content and makes a anchor text link out of it while giving publishers control on the number of links.   How about creating a mechanism to allow publishers more control over the ads on their pages?  How about Adsense interstitial (full page) ads?  There’s a million other things to worry about instead of giving visitors the ability to page through third-party ads when most are trying to block ads anyway!

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Google AdManager has quitely hit the scene and is in Google’s famous BETA mode, by invitation only.  If you sell or publish ads on your website then you probably know how invaluable this ad serving platform can be.  The basis of AdManager it will be a platform similar to OpenX formerly OpenAds and then formerly PHPAdsNew, in any event OpenX is a popular “free” ad server platform currently installed locally on your machine.  It allow webmasters to manage, host, and publish any ad format and ad types.  As being one of the most popular and most used ad server platforms it is suspectible that Google will diminish the use of OpenX or any other ad server software. 

Google AdManager has some very cool features and the best part is that it will likely stay FREE.  Another good thing is that Google more than likely make it available for an unlimited amount of websites under one account.  Additionally, more than likely you will be able to get very good ad analytical data from Google analytics.  The bus doesn’t stop there, you will be able to provide your direct advertisers in-depth reports supplied by Google pertaining to their ad campaigns on your site. 

These are definitely exciting times and Google owns the web.  Once Google has established its footing and taken its products out of BETA mode, I can’t see why anyone wouldn’t have their own website.

Google Page Creator — create your HTML web page with Google online WYSIWYG editor and get free hosting on googlepages.com
Google Analytics — track your website pages and analyze your web data
Google AdManager — manage advertisements and ad zones on your website
Google Adwords — market your website and get quality traffic
Google Adsense — sell ads on your website and get paid

The only thing Google doesn’t have which you need for your web experience is top level domain (TLD) web hosting, but I can see that changing once they release Google GDrive.

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If you haven’t heard about Google Docs then its time you get on the bandwagon.  It’s the new way of doing things.  It’s the answer to Microsoft Office products.  It’s basically an online Office application which allows you to create, share, and publish documents and spreadsheets online.  The convenience of creating documents and spreadsheets online is that you can access it anywhere without the need of having your personal laptop or computer.  If you have internet access then you are able to access your files. 

Okay, we have the explanation, so let’s get on with it.  Google Docs is the perfect solution for creating PDF files.  If you write eBooks or have a need to create PDF files then Google Docs is all you need.  I was searching for a free PDF converter that perserve anchor links but couldn’t find a free PDF converter that would do it.  Every free PDF converter I came across simply did not support the option of clickable anchor text links (i.e. Ant Onaf), they only support clickable hyperlinks (i.e. http://www.antonaf.com).  This to me is not acceptable because sometimes I use long URL’s which I can’t show the raw URL string due to the long length.  So, my quest for a PDF converter that I feel is useful led me to Google Docs.  I always knew about Google Docs, but I continued to use Microsoft Office, I guess I am use to it and I haven’t warmed up to the idea of having all my docs online yet, especially with the prying eyes of Google — cause you know they love to track user behavior and crawl content.

Creating a PDF file in Google Docs is simple, here is what you do:

1. Select NEW
2. In the drop-down choose DOCUMENT
3. Write your document
4. Click FILE
5. In the drop-down choose EXPORT as PDF

That’s it!  And with Google Docs PDF converter your anchor links and hyperlinks are perserved and clickable as they should be.  Going forward I think I will use Google Docs a lot more and it may become my default ebook creator.

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Google Adwords is a powerful marketing tool that if stroked correctly it will make your cat meow purr!  — did I just say that –

You can spend your money wisely and receive targeted traffic that convert or you can stick to using old methods that don’t work anymore.  It’s your choice!  Either way I am going to tell you what works in Adwords today!  Remember its about quality over quantity.  Google has developed a system which they refer to as Quality Score, this quality score system goes through some checks and balances to be sure your landing page meet certain standards.  The quality score was put in place to ward off Google Arbitrage.  Google Arbitrage is basically you having a Google Adwords campaign with landing pages pointing to affiliate ads and paid advertisement pages (such as Google Adsense or other third-party affiliate ads), in retrospect the affiliate ads and paid advertisements payout is enough to cover the cost of the low cost pay per click — well those days are over!  No more playing dirty, but you can still win!  You just have to play fair nowadays.  Here are a few tips that can help increase your Adwords conversions:

• Do not place Google Adsense (or other third-party ads) on landing page.  Some people can’t fight the feeling and its a must they have ads on the landing pages, in this case I suggest moderation, but having too many ads may trigger an Google Abitrage alarm and lower your quality score which means you will ultimately have to pay more per click. 
• Connect Your Keyword Bids to Relevant Landing Pages.  Match your keywords with relevant landing pages.  Your destination URL should point to a sub page, product page, features page, service page, etc. 
• Optimize Your Landing Pages.  If you can’t do anything else at least optimize your landing page.  The target keywords of the Adwords campaign should be the keywords used in your optimized pages.  Optimize your page title, meta description, meta keywords (optional), page content, alternate text, and internal link anchor text.
• It is all about the TITLE.  If you fail to capture someone attention with the TITLE then you may just fail!  I’ve found that putting prices in the title works best when you’re selling a product.  Someting like “Earn $999 in 14 Days” looks more appealing than “Earn Money Now”, plus it keeps freebie seekers away which is the plan.  Why would you want a freebie seeker to waste your money by clicking on an ad that doesn’t interest him/her.
• Add negative words to your campaigns.  Adding negative words can help you drill down into your targeted audience.  You can add words such as “free” to your negative keyword list, this will stop your ad from appearing in any searches containing the word free, this will include keyword combinations with your other targeted keywords.
• Track Your Campaigns.  I had a campaign which had a 100% bounce rate from every other country except the U.S. where the bounce rate was 12%.  I stopped targeting all countries and strictly focused on my country (USA) and my conversions went up almost instantly.  With me putting Google Analytics on my pages and tracking my data I was able to save myself quite a bit of wasted clicks and headaches. 
• Engineer Your Adwords Campaign.  You no longer need a super long list of keywords.  This is not the way to do it anymore.  No need to have 500 keywords in one single campaign with all keywords pointing to the homepage, we’ve graduated.  Iinstead separate campaigns by keywords - separate keywords by landing pages - separate landing pages by pay per click ads - etc.

If you are struggling with your current Adwords campagin then you may want to try some of the suggested advice above, it may help you recover from a failing Google Adwords campaign.  If used properly and wisely you can make your adwords campaign pay for itself by saving money with improving your quality score and increasing sales with higher conversions.  Good luck to you!

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I got my Grand Central invitation and I am partying like a rockstar!

Google Grand Central is uber-cool.  My quest for a free voicemail service has turned out to be more rewarding than I thought.  Over 24 hours ago I didn’t know anything about Google Grand Central and now today I don’t think we can ever part.  Grand Central has very impressive features and goes far beyond just being a voicemail service.

How it works
Google Grand Central gives you one phone number which you can port/forward all of your phones to.  Basically, you have the choice to choose your area code and phone number, like I chose (919) 816-2764.  Once you have your phone number you simply give a phone number to forward calls to (I gave a number, but in my case I just wanted a voicemail service so at the time I have elected to turn on the “Do Not Disturb” so by default all calls go to voicemail).  Now once all this is set up you simply start using your new phone number as your default phone number.  You can set up multiple forwarding numbers.  The Grand Central system also reocrds each call, giving you caller ID information for missed calls.  It also sends an email notification for new voicemail messages, where you can playback the phone message from a one-click link in the email.  If you ever used VoIP services like Vonage then you probably know what I am talking about.  The reason for Grand Central is to give a centralized phone number for all your phone needs.  It definitely helps with doing business and keeping track of your messages. 

The Inbox
The Inbox is simple, but robust.  It is where you will find and listen to new voicemail messages.  You also have the option of displaying the call log to see any missed calls and call history.  You have features such as forwarding the voicemail message, posting the voicemail to your website by copying the code, blocking the caller, adding the caller to your list of contacts, calling the phone number, storing notes, and mapping the caller physical address with Google Maps.

Import/Export Contacts
You have the option of creating a list of contacts which will compliment your caller ID information and will generate your address book.

Settings
Under the settings tab is where all the features are at.  As you see I have Do Not Disturb enabled, which simply mean all calls will be automatically routed to voicemail.  There are dozens of features and settings that are manageable from the settings control panel.

 Overall
Google Grand Central is a powerful solution for call forwarding, voicemail messaging, and contact management.  You can use groups to ring different phones depending on who is calling.  There are so many useful uses.   Now with that said, something I would like to see which would make this even more powerful, is a social networking functionality, something sorta like LinkedIn profiles so you can find others and contact others on a large social scale, though of course with an option to opt out of the social networking or public search.  Google should also consider importing Grand Central with Google Maps so you can easily use the data in Grand Central as your Google local search profile information.  Another great feature I would like to see is the ability to handle faxes, where the phone number (or separate number) has the ability to receive faxes to the inbox as a downloadable attachment (or at least readable with Google Docs).   Another thing missing is the voicemail options for the caller — they should be able to play their message back, erase and rerecord, etc. but instead when pressing the pound (#) button you are instantly disconnected and your message is left without any edit options — that sucks for a lot of reasons.  I think if I give Google enough time then I may see my wish list come true!

Grand Central is great for those who change phone numbers frequently and want to give people one phone number which they can hold on to for life, without having to give out your phone number to all your friends and family every time the number changes.  Also, I think it is useful for those who have friends or family in distant areas and you wish to give them a local number to call so they don’t incur long distant charges, because they haven’t gotten on the VoIP bandwagon yet.  For the self-employed like myself, Google Grand Central is all you need for call forwarding, voicemail messaging, and contact management.  For businesses and companies who employ multiple employees then this may not be the heal all solution, but it can be used as the electronic receiptionist for the company.

Since right now Google Grand Central is in beta mode and by invite only, if you are in need of a Google Grand Central invite then let me know and I will send you one.  I have seven more invites left as we speak!

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I am in need of a Google Grand Central invite.  This is something I definitely need.  If anyone have an invite then please send one to me anthonyon[AT]gmail.com

What’s been your experience with Grand Central?  Is it one of the best things ever or what?  I sure can’t wait to find out!  Send it my way…BIG THANKS!

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