Google recently revealed that Automatic Message Translation is becoming a full-fledged feature in Gmail. For internet marketers that may have international clients who don’t speak English at all (or who do not speak English as a first language) this feature allows for easier communication.
It’s not 100% foolproof, but it sure beats copy & pasting into Google Translate (or busting out the dictionaries).

You can watch this video below to see Automatic Message Translation in action.

Ah! No one ever likes to see their sites drop in search rankings! If this has happened to you recently – and assuming you haven’t done anything extraordinary or new with your SEO strategy – it’s not because of the over-optimization penalty that Google is going to unveil later this year.

Your site might have gone down in the rankings if Google mistook it to be a parked domain. Parked domains are websites that generally have no content but are filled up with ads, and Google has been vocal in the past about how they were going to change their ranking system so that parked domains would be much lower in the search rankings.

The problem? Many websites that are legitimate and dynamic were marked as parked domains. While spam should be confined to the bottom of the rankings, honest websites should not be punished. To wake up one morning and see that your formerly ranked #1 page is now languishing at #65 would make for a terrible day…and for internet marketers, it could have resulted in a potentially huge loss of income.

This is exactly what happened though, much to the chagrin of thousands of internet marketers. So Google messed up, but even more shockingly, Google fessed up to their mistake! Apparently Google’s classifier was “reading from a couple files that were mistakingly empty” and legitimate websites were accidentally penalized.

Google says that the issue is fixed now and that they’re working hard to ensure this doesn’t happen again. Some kind of “fix” for the websites that were wrongfully penalized are presumed to be in the works…although how and if Google will actually restore the affected websites to their previous search ranking is yet to be seen.

We were wondering: If your website plummeted in rankings due to this mistake, is your website now back to its former position?

I woke up this morning and thought: A-ha! It’s April 1^st! That means Google is going to be up to more shenanigans (than usual) because in America it is “April Fools’ Day”. I quickly got online and went hunting for tricks…

This following prank is by far my favorite, probably because I wish it were real:

Google says they are introducing a “Click-to-Teleport” extension for Google Chrome, and even though it’s still in beta, the user feedback is overwhelming  positive thus far (only one person has been irretrievably lost in the space-time continuum. Not too shabby!)

I don’t know about you, but I SO wish this was real! The teleporting part, that is,  not the ‘forever lost in space-time continuum’ part…eeek!

In one of their “testimonials”, a business owner from a guitar store in Manila says, “CTR (Click-Through-Rate) is so 2011. The only metric I care about now is Teleport-Through-Rate!”  BRILLIANT.

Google is touting their new Click-to-Teleport feature (abbreviated as CTT for short) as a new and innovative way to drive in-store sales, a solution to the constraints of location targeting, and the fastest way to get from point A to point B.  Here’s their description of the benefits of their new Click-to-Teleport extension:

The part about this extension being in beta means there is no “return teleporting feature” made me literally laugh out loud. Could you imagine the chaos that would ensue….?!?!

Until Google get’s their space-time continuum bugs sorted out, I think I’ll abstain from teleporting in the forseeable future.

Have you found any Google pranks today? If so, which is your favorite?

Thought you all would be interested in this piece of news: Google’s Matt Cutts has announced they are working on a search penalty for sites that are “over-optimized”. Google doesn’t always preemptively announce upcoming changes so when it happens it’s worth paying attention to…and behind the scenes Google has been trying to make its Googlebots smarter so that websites that are too SEO are knocked down a peg; Google says it is making these changes in order to “level the playing field”.

I highly suggest you read the article and listen to the transcription. Apparently we can expect to see changes in search results in the next few weeks and months.

Does this mean you shouldn’t optimize your website? No! You absolutely should still use SEO. You’d be crazy not to. However, you will definitely fare better with these changes if you can contribute unique, relevant, and thoughtful content on your website(s), blog(s), etc. If the content is great, SEO is not going to hurt the page ranking. If the content is only mediocre but the SEO is top-notch, this upcoming change may force these kinds of websites to fall in the search rankings in favor of websites with better content.

So take a good, hard look at your websites: are they optimized? Excellent (if not, definitely optimize it, you will get more traffic)! Do your websites contribute meaningful content (a good thing), or is every single sentence optimized to the hilt (not such a good thing)? If you answered yes to the second part of that last question, it’s time to rewrite some of your content before these Google changes kick in!

This Wednesday, February 22^nd at 7:00 pm EST, we are hosting a FREE webinar called “From Rags to $23,612 per month — with four keywords!” with Aidan Booth. We think you’re really going appreciate the content of this webinar and if you’re unfamiliar with Aidan we think you’ll like him. In case you were wondering, Aidan has been internet marketing for several years now and he is living the life many dream about because of his internet marketing prowess…and luckily for webinar attendees, Aidan is quite literally going to share ALL of his knowledge and methods.

You see, when some people attain great success they withhold their strategy from others; Aidan is open, honest, and WANTS to help others succeed. To achieve this end, Aidan has created a new training course that will definitely appeal to many of you.

This training is based on the actual five-part method Aidan uses to build a “new breed” of high quality website Google genuinely loves. In fact, one of his students went up 100 slots AFTER Panda (yes, the very same Panda that threw internet marketing into a tailspin). It’s REALLY effective!

The essential details are as follows:
Date: Wednesday, February 22^nd 2012
Time: 7:00 pm EST
Sign Up Page: http://www.snip2.com/re/4kbl
System Requirements: For PC-based attendees: Windows® 2000, XP Home, XP Pro, 2003 Server, Vista. For Macintosh®-based attendees: Mac OS® X 10.4 (Tiger®) or newer.

You can use this system right away to start increasing your income. If you miss this webinar, and don’t use the system, you could be missing out on a game-changer for your business.

Register here:  http://www.snip2.com/re/4kbl

P.S – If you need a time converter to determine what time this webinar starts in your local time, use http://www.snip2.com/re/timezone

You may (or may not) have been seen strange numbers in Micro Niche Finder after Google’s most recent update. Granted, for many people this has not been a problem, but if you have seen anything such as getting only one keyword as a search result or seeing off the wall Ad Cost numbers, these following (and VERY simple) instructions will get sorted out in no time.

We have updated our program, so all you need to do is:

1.) Restart your Micro Niche Finder
2.) Clear any of the strange searches you may have received (you can do this using the ‘Manage Searches’ tab)

Everything should work fine after this. If not, please submit a support ticket so we can analyze your unique situation and fix it.

Thanks!

I found an article that I thought almost all of you would find relevant– it’s an interview with a Quality Rater! Basically, Google employs via independent contractors thousands of people to rate websites in relation to searches and they are called “Search Engine Evalulators”, “Quality Raters”, etc. They technically rate how well Google retrieves results, but as you can already imagine, their job is extremely important. It’s also a field shrouded in secrecy so when reports come in from the “other” side it’s really fascinating and insightful.

One thing that interested me was the stark admission that the raters actually have to visit and explore the webpage they are assigned to rate.  There’s a common misconception that raters don’t always visit the pages they rate but due to their software configurations that is apparently impossible to do.

It’s also more important that page is useful to a potential surfer rather than how well a page fits a query. For example, a Wikipedia entry titled “Women’s Nike Shoes”, though it may fit a search query perfectly, probably isn’t useful to the person who searched that exact term; they would probably find a website like nike.com or sportsauthority.com to be infinitely more useful.

Head on over to Search Engine Land right now to read the article yourself – it’s a good and interesting article!

Yet again, Micro Niche Finder is the first keyword tool up and running after a Google change.

Thank you all for your patience. Our fearless and sleepless programmer worked tirelessly for 22 hours and he posted the update to Micro Niche Finder search window. To get the fix, please restart your Micro Niche Finder to update the search window and let us know if you have any problems with the new update by submitting a support ticket.

**NOTE** This update does require user to use English as the default IE language.

You can make sure these settings are correct here:

For IE 7 and 8:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Change-your-Internet-Explorer-language-settings

For IE 9:

http://browsers.about.com/od/internetexplorertutorials/ss/Change-The-Default-Languages-In-Ie9.htm

Thank you!

We often get the question “Why doesn’t Micro Niche Finder results match Google’s results?” (or some variation thereof). It’s important to take into account that there are many variables when you go to www.google.com and do a search; some of these variables include being logged in, search settings, having instant search enabled, what browser you are using, etc. can all affect your default Google results. That is why we match our results with Google’s Keyword Tool.

Since we get our local/global search counts straight from Google’s Keyword Tool, if you see a discrepancy it’s usually due to Micro Niche Finder having different search settings.

For example, Google’s default for searches is “Broad Match, United States, English”.

Micro Niche Finder’s default for searches is “Exact Match, All Countries and Territories, English”.

You can read this nifty article to learn why we believe Exact Match is more useful for keyword analysis versus the standard Broad Match.

If you change your Micro Niche Finder search settings to match those of Google, the results will be the same.

Watch this video on our YouTube channel to learn how to synch your Micro Niche Finder searches with Google’s Keyword Tool!

Google Chrome is the world’s second most favorite browser and Google just released a new version of Google Chrome (albeit in beta version) for you to try out and enjoy.

This new beta version (properly called 17.0 .963.26 beta-m) enhances security. In this version, Google Chrome has been made “smarter” via expanded functionality so that’s possible for it to more quickly and accurately analyze .exe and .msi files that people wittingly (or unwittingly) download; this will help keep malicious software off of your computer.

This new Google Chrome version also loads pages faster. This additional speed comes from loading some webpages in the background before the user is even done typing the web url in the omnibox. So for example, if you were to start typing “www.yah”  this new version of Google Chrome would guess that you’re going to “www.yahoo.com” (especially if you’ve been to that website before) and would preemptively start downloading that page in the background. By the time you finished typing “yahoo” into the box, the page would be ready to go. As soon as you hit “enter” the already rendered page would appear VERY quickly. This would make web browsing seem instantaneous.

You can try out the new beta release for free. This is also one of those rare occasions where you can give Google feedback, so if you use it and like or dislike something about the beta release, you can let Google know your thoughts.