Its a long way to come to Australia for a 3 day round trip – so kudos to Brian for putting in such a long day after a long flight.

Tomorrow is Google Australia’s 3rd birthday – shame Brian couldn’t stay for the party!

Thanks for sending Brian out to Australia Matt.

Two scenarios come to mind. One is a situation like that described in an earlier post, where domains need to change because of changes in the business, or in how the business wants to feature products.

The other scenario is just when a site grows and the original structure no longer makes sense either from a site management or a visitor perspective. The site may be too big for visitors to easily find what they want, and it therefore makes sense to spin off smaller, more targetted niche sites. (Say, you started with MyPets.com and after a few years, you had thousands of pages about cats, dogs, gerbils, etc. So you want to spin off a Mycats.com, MyPets.com, etc. How could you do that effectively?

I am considering paying the money to come to the conference just so I can ask you when the next PR update will be. I know Big Daddy is slowing it down, but I would love to know a ballpark time frame so I don’t drive myself crazy checking every day. What should I do, Matt?

For example, right now, due to Google’s current implementation of Smart Pricing, people are starting to advocate removing Google ads from under-performing / non-targeted pages because they reduce the amount the webmaster gets per click. I can understand that you want to pay more for relevant targeted clicks and less on general interest clicks, but you need to be careful how you implement it. Right now it seems to be on a site-by-site or account-by-account basis instead of a page-by-page basis. That means a smart webmaster will remove Google Ads from non-targeted / under-performing pages and replace them with, well, some competitor of yours that doesn’t have Smart Pricing. If you made your Smart Pricing on a page-by-page basis similar to PageRank, this would not be an issue since targeted pages would be paid the higher targeted content amount and non-targeted pages would get paid the lower general click amount. Of course, even then, smart webmasters would be wise to replace Google Ads on under-performing pages with something without Smart Pricing that pays more, but at least, even if they don’t remove the under-performing ads, they won’t get penalized for a couple pages that bring down the Smart Pricing average for the whole website.

After finding out this information, I am now going to have to go through some of my high traffic websites and see what ads I should remove. There are certain pages that, by their nature, don’t get many click thrus or are not targeted in nature, or for some reason are not performing well. Since all Google Ads are inserted into many of my websites via include files, I will now have to figure out a way to show Google ads on some pages but not others, which is a big pain. Plus then I also lose the benefit of Google Ads reporting to me the number of page views for the entire website and each section (by using the channels feature). That allows me to see what’s hot and what’s not, and develop content and articles and posts related to what people are actually interested in.

Also, ironically, a website with good content and a lot of it will have a LOWER click-thru rate than a junk website where the only place to go is to click on the ads. If you are not careful, you are actually penalizing content sites where people stick around and read a lot of pages and rewarding websites that encourage people to go away by clicking on an ad.

It’s things like these that Google needs to be careful of and needs to talk with webmasters about. Many of your policies often have unintended consequences on legit webmasters even though those policies are targeted at spammers. So more feedback and dialog between legit webmasters and the Google Engineering team would be great.

I agree with Alex that there is really no need to push the whole “bus test” much further. This has dangerous inklings of a subject/thread that gets pushed around for a long time…

As for improving webmaster communication… I haven’t seen that Google is throwing a party for SES NY. Considering the quality of parties that you guys throw, when armed with a city like NYC, why would you back off? Any chance that you can rally those party-throwing-AdWords-folks to make something happen??

Keep up the good work.

Will

When it comes to communication, I think my personal biggest gripe is that the method for reporting blatant / obvious spam issues is the same as reporting any other “don’t like the results” issue, and often leads to a slow response or worse. If there was a more direct and effective way (potentially with some feedback) to handle the most obvious blatant spam (like third level .info domains packed full of unlilnked URLs and repeated words & massive cross links), I am sure that we all could help to keep the worst spammers from infesting Google.

It is a common complaint I see in most webmaster forums I visit.

On the plus side, blogs like this and other less than official communications are certainly helping to keep the webmaster community feeling a little more part of the game, and that too is a good thing.

Thanks for having this blog and keeping us up to date, and let’s hope 2006 and beyond come good for all of us.

It would really be great if webmasters could have a hint as to why their sites have dropped out of the serps months ago, for no apparent reason. A lot better than tearing our hair out daily.

How about letting us know what it is that Google doesn’t like about our sites, and what we can do to get back in the serps again.