Google to convert headquarters to solar power : Mail & Guardian Online

Strictly speaking this is NOT an Pay per click or even a search engine optimization article. But its nice to see that Page and Sergi over at Google are amongst the greenest of the US Corporate CEO's.

Below is a snippet from an article in which Google plans to convert their headquarters to use more solar power.

This is probably not a 100% ultruistic move as their mega server farms use an incredible amount of electricity, but the move is pretty cool nonetheless.

Google to convert headquarters to solar power : Mail & Guardian Online: "Google is converting its renowned headquarters to run partly on solar power, hoping to set an example for other businesses in the United States.

The internet search leader announced what is believed to be the largest solar project undertaken by a US company during a solar energy conference in Silicon Valley on Monday. Google believes the sun eventually can deliver as much as 30% of the power at its campus in Mountain View -- a suburb about 56km south of San Francisco."

Despite technological advances since the first photovoltaic cells were invented 50 years ago, solar power is still two to three times more expensive than fossil fuels in the US and relies on government subsidies to compete.

The solar energy industry nevertheless is expected to grow from $11-billion in 2005 to $51-billion in 2015, estimated Clean Edge, a market research firm.

Google Releases New Web Page optimizer

This is a most impressive tool in an area most often overlooked due to the complexity of attempting to figure out which 7 or 8 combinations of page factors from amongst 50 or 80 are most influential in getting the browsing public to convert real customers.

There were several tools on the market prior to this that attempted to do multivariate or taguchi testing, however with the exception of just 2 products most were fairly expensive and more than merely a little difficult to use.

Search Engine Marketing Blog by ineedhits: New: Web Page Optimizer for Google AdWords Clients: "Google has released a new tool that allows its AdWords clients to carry out sophisticated page testing and improve the conversion of landing pages - for free.

Anyone who runs a website knows how critical good conversion of you web pages is and how small changes to your page content can have a dramatic (positive or negative) influence on your conversion rate.

The challenge for most small businesses so far has been that testing various combinations of the elements on your web page and trying to determine which combination results in the highest conversion, is not easy. You have to be able to make frequent changes to your website, and also have very good analytics and reporting to determine statistically significant results. So when website owners do any testing at all, they often resort to fairly simple A/B tests - you change one single element at a time and see which version of your page performs better. Seeing real impact on conversion with this approach can take a long time, and you might also miss out on winning combinations of different page elements."

As mentioned, Google's Website Optimizer is currently in a limited beta release. If you are an AdWords advertiser, you can apply to be included in the beta test phase and find more information on Google's Website Optimizer info page.

You can find more informationon it here

Google's 8 Specific Quality Guidelines Revisited

Today, i came across an article written by Mei Rose Galang. She had 8 things which she says, Google has warned us not to do. These 8 items are concerned with the quality of your content and cover a few old & known black hat techniques.

Below is one of them

Google's 8 Specific Quality Guidelines Revisited: "
5.Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
In addition to that, don't make multiple domains that are only established to increase site traffic. Don't use pages on other domains to redirect traffic to your site, don't use mirror sites, those with exact content but different domains and too many pages in SERP that redirects to your site. These techniques gives instant results but expect to be banned when you get caught."


But a few of you out there already have a problem with this one because you own both a .net and a .com of the same name. You did this to protect yourself and perhaps since then your IT people have duplicated the data from your .com site to your .net site.

Some,seo experts would say, who cares if the .net gets penalized and gets a low ranking?

But since both sites belong to the same organization and likely sit on the same ip address, perhaps you don't want to so easily give yourself a potential black-eye.

We would advise, use a server side redirect from the .net to the .com site and don't put any content on the .net domain. If you don't know what a server side redirect is, and you dont have access to IT staff, then just use a metatag refresh to redirect your index page on the .net site to your index page on the .com site.

Here is an example that sends the user to espn.com 3 seconds after landing on your page:

[head]
[meta http-equiv="refresh" content="3; url=http://www.espn.com" /]
[/head]

pls replace the [ with < and the ] with >