A little less than a month ago I posted an article describing how the new Google algorithm had filled the results page for a search of my name "Troy Philis" with irrelevant results . Here is a screenshot of what I was talking about:

The first listing is of my portfolio site. So far, so good. The second, however, is entitiled "Troy Philips Photography." This result is completely irrelevant because the word "Philis" is nowhere on the website. In addition, the page contains pictures of half-naked men in thong bathing suits. Not something I want to be associated with (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Take another search I entered today - for C & T Recycling. In Google, the term C & T Recycling does not appear on page one of the SERP:

I really wanted to find information on C & T Recycling though, so I decided to try Yahoo. The term shows up near the top of page 1:

Search Yahoo for my name, and it's all me:

So why would the biggest search engine serve up bad, irrelevant search results, when they are in the business of serving up good, relevant search results. To answer that question, I'll need to define the two most important variables in ordering search results: 1) Keyword Relevance and 2) Link Authority - or PageRank.

Keyword relevance is what we've been talking about, and is what Google is now lacking in its searches. How closely do the search results displayed match the search terms you typed in to the search box? How many times do those terms appear on different parts of the page? Do links pointing to that page include the search terms?

Link authority is determined by counting the links pointing to a particular page. Huge corporations have websites with many, many pages, all linked together through the navigation. Their websites are generally linked to by many other individuals, associates and companies. A small company's website may have relatively few pages, and even fewer pages from other websites linked to it. Link authority tells the seach engine if your website is a big fish or a little fish. 

It is possible to roughly check link authority, or PageRank, as Google calls it, using the Google Toolbar. In checking the examples of irrelevant search results described above, I found that the intruding irrelevant result always had a higher link authority than the relevant results that it pushed down the results page. 

Conclusion: Google appears to have made a decision to let link authority trump relevance under certain circumstances. If you are like me, and would like to see results related to the search terms you typed in the box, rather than results Google is telling you are more important, than you will switch to Yahoo for your search needs too!

What does this mean to a small business trying to get some free advertising on Google? It's going to b e more difficult - get your website established as early as possible, work consistently on search engine promotion and optimization, and don't count on quick and easy results.

Choosing a hosting package for your Website.

One of the most critical tasks in planning your new Website is choosing the correct hosting package. It is also one of the trickiest. Is it important that your Website load fast on a consistant basis? Do you plan on having many visitors right off the bat? Do you have a lot of large items to download, such as images or video? Do you have programming that requires a lot of server resources? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions then you might want to consider a dedicated server.

What is a dedicated server? As the name implies, a dedicated server is a web server that holds your Website, and your Website alone. Shared servers, which are the most common type of hosting available, hold many different Websites. These Websites are competing for server resources. This can lead to problems, such as:

1. A Website on your server gets a lot of traffic on a given day, and hogs the bandwidth. That can cause your Website to load slowly or become unavailable to your users.

2. YOUR Website gets a lot of traffic on a given day. This can even be traffic from a Web spider or a spammer. The hosting administrator will clamp down on your bandwidth, limiting your resources, which will also cause your Website to load slowly or become unavailable.

3. The web hosting company puts too many websites on your shared server. Everything can load well at first, but as the server fills up and there is more competition for resources, your website, that looked so good during development and at launch, now loads so slowly that you loose visitors.

There are other problems with shared hosting, but these are the main ones. Shared hosting can be as much as 10 times cheaper than dedicated hosting, but if a fast loading Website is critical to your business, the extra cost will definitely be worth the stability and performance you gain.

Last month I noticed that Google updated the pagerank number that displays in the toolbar for some of my clients' websites. Although I didn't see changes for my own websites, my clients' websites, particularly the newer ones, showed an increase as they claw their way out of the sandbox, and their promotion efforts work to increase their link authority.

Of course, this toolbar pagerank display is just a snapshot, and may or may not reflect the pagerank that Google is actually using in their algorithm.

Another thing I noticed, which was troubling to me, was that when I typed my own name in, I only received the number one listing. From number two down were "mispellings" of my name. My name, Troy Philis, is a pretty long-tail term, and normally I would get at least two pages of results. Now, listing number two is a completely irrelevant result. This seems to me to indicate a big potential problem with this new algorithm.

 The advantage of Google used to be that you could find anything easily, compared to the other search engines. Now it appears they may be losing that advantage. This one example is certainly not definitive, but it does indicate something is awry. I will be monitoring this issue and post my findings as I make them.

The first thing you should do before starting your Adwords campaign is to read the Google Adwords Help section. There are a number of concepts that it's good to understand before throwing money at Google. This can shorten a potentially expensive learning curve.

Having said that, here are some quick tips to get you started:

1. Set up a campaign. If you're just starting out, promoting to the content network will be over your head, so don't include that in your campaign.

2. Set up an ad group targeted to the content of one page on your website. That page should obviously be optimized for a set of keywords. Use those keywords in the adgroup, as well as in the wording of your ad. Link the ad to that page. Don't link to your hompage.

3. Set up ad groups within the campaign for each page you want to point traffic to. I'd recommend starting off with phrase match keywords, which is your keyword or phrase enclosed in quotes. If you use broad match (no quotes), your ad could show up in non-relevent SERPS because one word of the phrase could take it out of context.