Left: Before the fade. Right: After the fade.

I love how Google is working to improve user’s feeling about it. Have it ever occurred to you that they are loosing a lot of money by having “I’m Feeling lucky” button on their homepage? If even 1% of users click on that, that means they lose 1% of their revenue from AdWords, and this could be up to 100 million bucks.

P.S. I’m sorry for Apple reference, it just really feels like it.

New Google Search Index Changes

The front page changes are really just to make a new, fancier feel. But if we will look at SERP:

Google's New Search Result Example

When you look at the SERP, you see the change. Real reason (as I see it), is that google thinks that not enough people are aware of their amazing features (Maps, News, Product search etc.) so they moved links to those search services in the hotter place according to heatmap, so that more people will notice and use those services.

How to try the new google search(after the jump):

• Go to google’s homepage, if you have iGoogle then change it to default G’s homepage.
• When you are on the page enter this code in your browser address field (this will stuff cookie with code which will make google think you are the beta tester).

javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com”);

• No http:// or else needed, just that line.
• Refresh the page and from now on you will have new google search interface!
• Doesn’t work in Google Chrome (atleast for me, firefox OK)

If you want to get back to they way things were before, then you should remove the cookie, there are basically three ways of doing it:

1. Delete all cookies (easy to execute but not convenient afterwards)
2. Search for google’s cookies and delete just those.
3. Search just for the cookie you stuffed above and you’re good to go.

You can really avoid being slapped by Google in the near future and even make your campaigns more profitable in the long term with this tricky technique.

This works very good on pre-sell landing pages, like review blogs. You simply have to remove all the affiliate links to that product, since google doesn’t like them anymore, and put a small opt-in form, like the aweber one, to grab visitor’s name and email, and after they click “Submit” or whatever, page redirects to the offer- Brilliant. Here is the example form:

Actually a lot of people used that before the slap, since they found it more profitable, and their campaigns were not slapped.

How is this more profitable? First of all, you can offer your prospects who didn’t like the product you were selling, then you can follow up with related products.

When I am promoting the same product with different landing pages, I had to face the fact that position plays a great role of conversion. Sure I’m talking about SERP AdWords Ad position, and diffence of page is not in layout ot presales letter, but in concept.

Surprisingly for me, I found that no matter what page it is, #1 position is never the best-converting one, this ofcourse depends on the niche, but to me tha fact remains. For a simple pitch page the best position is #2, and for the review landing page it’s #4, or sometimes #3. When doing a review landing page, I usually search for the hottest products, review them (usually I rewrite it from someone else ) well you sure get the idea if you didn’t know the obvious already…

So what’s the point in having #1 position if it converts a little worse, and the spot itself is much more expensive, well traffic, it’s all about scaling for the person who is at the top.

involving your site in schemes where your content is artificially promoted to the top of these services.

Well, Google’s loosing their theory of what’s appreciated by the crowd should be genuine? Because there are now plenty of paid and exchange-based digg (just example!) voting programs, and they are getting smarter and smarter.

Since there are no faultless way to find out if the Page made it to big social media exposure by paying for it. Google is no longer value Social Media links? I think they have smarter approach to that.
I can only assume that if they see a Page that appears to be on every major social media website, and it has:

• Commercial matter of a Page
• Little links from major directories
• Small PageRank compared to other pages in the same category
• Social Media exposure (all at once or randomly over time)
• The domain was yet given major exposure @ The Internet (backlinks)

Then they slap those websites. So the best way to get most out of social media links – is to act smooth. Expose your Site/Page on different Social Media services with a time delay.