Why Google Wants to be in Your Life

When I talk with people who aren’t involved with internet marketing about Google, I’m surprised by the amount of trust they put in Google and how they feel Google is making the world a better place … for truly altruistic reasons. It’s not until I point out how Google will gladly provide all the services “for free” because the data they get in exchange is worth more–a lot more–than it costs them to provide the services which are slowly eroding your privacy, both online and offline that their understanding of Google begins to change.

So why does Google want to build cars that drive you around Jetsons style, like in the video below? They want to track you and have complete access to where you are going every day.

Click here to watch the video.

Why does Google care that I go to Pomodorino Italian restaurant in Seaford? So they can sell advertising to me before I go. I hop in my car and type in the address. Before departing, the Google car navigation asks if I would like to go to Piccolo in Bellmore. It’s the same distance, and they have a 3 course, price fixed menu and $5 off coupon. This type of instant groupon style offering has the potential to make a ton of money for Google. Is this good for the user? That depends. Do you value your privacy more than a $5 off coupon? Once Google is in your car, it’s tracking your every move. And just because I don’t have anything to hide doesn’t mean I’m doing anything wrong.

Access to your personal purchasing data is the same reason Google and other vendors are building ewallets. While I used a humorous tone, I actually meant what I said on Twitter: with Google wallet, they are just inches away from crawling completely up your ass. With the potential to create frictionless commerce that could top Amazon Prime for ease of use, if Google can critical mass for adoption, we’re all in trouble. Google could use your data and sell you promotions for everything you buy. But isn’t this helpful to the average consumer? Again, the answer depends on how much value you put on your privacy. While you may not care and actually like that Google gives you offers on tomato sauce or toothpaste, does it change your opinion if Google knows you are buying from swingers websites or adult diaper stores and selling that data to advertisers … any advertiser.

As some will point out, after reading the Google Wallet FAQ, Google doesn’t have direct access to what products you buy, which I believe to be true. However, even if they don’t know exactly what you’re buying from CVS or Rite Aid–heck they don’t even know what you are buying from Adam & Eve (NSFW) and EdenFantasies.com (NSFW)–they can figure out what you spend on average every month: $322 on restaurants, $243 on clothing, and $562 on adult websites. Is that the kind of information you want Google to have on you, to sell to advertisers, to use to profile or retarget ads to you, or to match up with your browsing history and advertising profile?

Some people will question whether your bank or financial institutions like American Express already have access to this data … the answer is that yes they do. However, those industries are severely regulated with what they can or can’t do with that data. Google, on the other hand, is going where no one has gone before, isn’t subject to those same rules, and no one is big enough to stand up and tell them “no.” Are you willing to trust that kind of data to a company who says patents and IP laws are anti-competitive, cost them money, and just “get in the way”? I hope not.

So what can you do? Opt out of Google ad profiling and, every few months, check that you stay “opted out.”  When Google releases a new product, ask yourself how does it help them make money or better target advertising at you. Understand and educate your friends and family: these free services aren’t really free. When you don’t pay for something, you are the product being sold.

Google Adsense First Steps

If you're just thinking about using Adsense and get some additional revenue, or just started placing Google ads on your site, these "First Steps" may be helpful. If you're already using Adsense and want to know how to get more out of it check out the "Next Steps".

Things to consider

1 You need good content
2 SEO - Build a findable site
3 Optimize ad placement

But, while its not basic, setting up a site still needs to get done. And you need to do it the right way. You decide on the right layout, colors, font, tone of voice, use of (multi)media etc. And you need the right tech stuff. Tools that are user friendly yet secure, have SEO (search engine optimization) capabilities, ads (like Google Adsense), banners, etc.
If you get in place first time right, you'll benefit all the way. That is, if you appreciate the revenue. I for one, appreciate the Joomla CMS. Its free, stable and easy to install. Lots of templates and extensions. You can download the latest version, install it on a laptop with sample data and start implementing your design ideas. When you're ready to go online, just create a backup you restore on the net. You can do it yourself, or you can have someone else do it. Sites like Virtual Worker (former Rent-A-Coder) or Guru are good places to pay a visit. You can invite designers and coders to place a quote. Be sure to check their history.

Content 101

But this is not the article dealing with building and optimizing content to maximize revenue. Just a friendly basic reminder: without the interest of your visitors (and Google) in mind it'll be hard to get traffic and clicks.
Visitors will leave your place within a second if they don't like it. If you've joined the Adsense program, you must know that Google places ads using their indexing mechanism with the purpose to present the best ads to the user. Don't forget Adsense is based on Adwords and businesses pay Google to make the most out of their money.

If you want to do well, write your own content, make sure it stays fresh and have users come back for more. The idea is that, every so many visitors will click an ad placed on your site. The more traffic you attract, the more clicks. With more clicks comes more revenue.
Just make sure you check out Google Adsense Terms of Service. If you don't stick to the rules you may be banned from Adsense...for life.

If you got the content basics covered, check here for more in-depth hints.

SEO - Build a findable site

Now you got all this great content for the world to read. Better make sure I stumble upon it when searching, see it linked when browsing, read about it in a newsletter, etc. Remember Google is a search engine using an index. Feed the animal with the right keywords and other meta-data, maintain a logical site structure, 

Ok, now get me to the SEO section. 

Optimize your ads

What I think the most interesting part of this business: how to present an ad in a way it is actually viewed and clicked. Just a few rules of thumb on this page, more in detailled sections.
When creating the site design, think for logical places to put your ads. Your site is scanned in seconds. If you got no idea how this works, do the research first. Check Google's Adsense site on formats and ad types.

Then there's a lot of tweaking to do you can read about here.

And just one more thing: make sure you got statistics and reports in place.

Why is there a difference between Adsense and Analytics reports?

Understanding Google PageRank - SEO

If you want to turn your online efforts into money or want to increase revenue, you must know about Google’s PageRank (or PR). It is the method (according to Google named after one of Google’s founders, Larry Page) Google uses PageRank to determine how important our site is. And it’s of course a ranking system, ranging from 0 to 10, meaning something like:

PageRank meaning

0 not registered
1 very weak
2 weak
3 average
4 above average
5 good
6 very good
7 very good internationally
8 major site
9 top-competitors
10 the top

The higher the PageRank, the higher your site’s listed in search results. The higher in search results, the more traffic, the more traffic, the more clicks on your ads and this more revenue.
But back to Google: As they say themselves: Google interprets a link as a vote for the page. The higher the number of votes, the more important it is. Next, the link from an important page is considered of higher value, so your page’s importance rises and falls with the importance of the pages that link to you. Still following me?
If your online success is related to your position in Google’s search results, you’d better know the something about the logic behind it.

PageRank algorithm

The idea is, your site‘s (or maybe better: page‘s) importance is measured by the possibility it is clicked.  With a bit of humor you’d say that is 50%: either the user does, or doesn’t. But to Google it is dead-serious. The exact algorithm is believed to be the companies closest guarded secret.
Before Google was founded in 1998, its founders were doing research at Stanford University and they published “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/361/

Now other people have read it, so you don’t have to.
Simply put, if a page links to another, its PageRank is partly added to the linked page, depending on the number of pages it links to. BTW, this is called an outbound link. From the perspective of the linked page, it’s an inbound link. Both internal (within the site’s domain) and external links are a part of the calculation.
There is a possibility that a link is clicked, but the user will at some time stop clicking links on the page, but starts on another “random” page. This is known as the damping factor. 

In a small quote from the document:

We assume page A has pages T1...Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. There are more details about d in the next section. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The PageRank of a page A is given as follows:

Checking PageRank

You can access the PageRank easily if you use the Google Toolbar (toolbar link) which you can integrate into your browser. There’s also this site where you can look it up.

If your site isn’t yet where you want it, be aware your PageRank may not be re-calculated every day.  The higher a web page's PageRank, the more frequently it will be crawled and refreshed in the Google index. If you add new content, it may take a while before anyone notices. But adding new content will add to the number of links, increasing visibility.

Putting it to practice – internal structure and links

In order to maximize external exposure, you could for a start make sure the internal links to your site’s important pages are there. You can do this with a menu with links to the homepage and most important sections, displayed on every page. Likely, some pages are visited more often than others. Links to “most popular” pages will help. A third tool is a sitemap, used to presents all content in a structured way. You can upload your sitemap to Google, so they can easily index the pages you have on your site. If a page is not indexed, it can’t be found.

Putting it to practice – external links

External linking is more important for your PageRank, but you have less control over the links. You have no way to enforce another site links to yours. But that doesn’t mean you should do nothing! It will likely take more effort though. You’ll need to be asking for links to your site, preferably links from a higher ranked page. But take care which content is linked. If your site’s homepage is linked, all the internal page’s pagerank is improved, but you may do better if the “lower-level” pages are linked to. As these will likely be more specific on a certain topic, the traffic will be more targeted. This way your site will become more important on specific topics or niches. This way, your site is built up bottom-up instead of top-down. It may take more time before you see your revenue increases, but it will have a broader base.