This means that if your business had a lot of outside reviews (from, say, Yelp), Places now does not count them.

They're still citations, however.

I understand this post may seem a little cryptic and incomplete — here's the full story about the Google Places change. If you want more in-depth info about how Google Places works and what it is, leave a comment!

(Sidenote: The changes may be the result of current anti-trust litigation that Google is in.)

First of all, the real beauty of the web is that nearly everything is measurable if you know what you're looking for. Back in the early days of the web, people counted "hits." That was the very first very rudimentary statistic that webmasters tracked. As long as "hits" went up, things were peachy.

Except they weren't.

Hits are like people going to the grocery store but not buying anything. It's "nice" to be known and to know that people are being exposed to your content on your website, but it really doesn't matter–at the end of the day–how many people hit your website if they don't buy.

HIts became so followed and watched that entire companies sprouted up that did nothing other than put a banner on your website that showed the number of hits it received. Hits became a bragging tool: "My site got 2,348 hits last month."

"Well, mine got 8,457!"

Big deal. Today, we have the capability of not only seeing the number of hits our websites receive, but so much more. More on that in part 2.

Now I mentioned that nearly everything is measurable, so long as you use a measuring device. In the old days, you had to get yourself neck-deep in "web logs." These are logs that record a ton of stuff about your site, who visits, where they come from, where they go, what they read, for how long they read it, and a myriad of other interesting and sometimes useful stuff.

It was quite burdensome to try to review all of this data yourself. So another cottage industry sprang up: Applications that could parse the data into chunks of readable material.

Today, we don't have to mess with any of that. Thanks to the almighty google, we have google "analytics." By simply telling google your website domain and placing a small snippet of code on every webpage you have, you can get a plethora of data, all parsed and pretty so that you can spend the next 23 1/3 hours looking at "bounce rates."

Seriously, folks, google has made it SO EASY to analyze your web statistics that it's not funny. Here's what you need to do today:

• Go to http://google.com/analyticshttp://google.com/analytics
• Sign up
• Get the code
• Place the code on every page you want to track (that's all of them)

Putting the code on every page can be onerous. However, it's BONUS time! If you have a WordPress blog, you don't have to put the code on every page. You merely go here:

• Google Analyticator
  

Install that plugin, place your unique google tracking code in the appropriate field (it's all very self-explanatory), and you're off.

The plugin actually–on the fly–places the Google code in each of your pages, as they're accessed, and captures an incredible amount of data.

Here's a screen shot of the google analytics dashboard. Don't worry–there's a LOT more than this on that site. It's incredible the amount of information that is at your easy disposal.

Next up: All the data you can track, what it means, and how you can use it. Maybe this series requires at least 3 more parts!

I also want to mention that you can get caught up in all the data. Another plugin that you can use that is much more streamlined is called Stat Press. It gives more of the nuts and bolts and less of the detailed data. It's a good snapshot of how your website is performing. But it's not nearly as powerful as google analytics.

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Here's how:

Why Google's Algorithm Change Is Crap on YouTube

The discussion on the Internet Marketing Muscle Facebook fanpage

My buddy Matt Wiggin's take on the Google algo change (READ the post–it's spot-on!)

I reveal no secrets here; in fact, I am really just copying and pasting what I found on Google's Webmaster Tools site. I may provide some interpretation as well as some strategy and tactical steps to take to full advantage of the information provided.

But please note: This is all based on what Google publicly says. Take that for what it's worth

According to Google, and the following is addressed to the searcher, not the online marketer:

The three key processes in delivering search results to you are:

As internet marketers, we're often focused solely on Serving, right? Kind of like putting the cart before the horse, no?

Crawling and Spidering, Oh My!

Obviously, the "googlebots" don't even know about your site until they either stumble across it or somebody tells them about it.

There are two gold nuggets in there, for the keen observer:

1. If other sites link to you and those other sites are already crawled, indexed, and ranked highly on Google, your site–even if only a few minutes old–will get spidered (another term for crawled).
2. You can speed up the process of getting crawled by–NEWSFLASH!–telling Google about your site! In the industry, it's called a sitemap. If your site is based on WordPress, you can even install a plugin that makes your sitemap for you!

So now your site has been crawled. But has it been indexed?

Indexing? This Ain't No Book!

Once your site has been crawled, the next step to turning up on Google's search results pages (SERPs in internet-marketing-speak) is to get your content indexed. There are no tricks here. Except that once your site's been indexed, it's probably easier to get new content indexed, compared to getting an entirely new website's content indexed.

Think of indexing using the following book metaphor: In a book, usually near the end, there is an index. This index lists many–but not all–words and phrases that appear in the content of the book and where in the book those terms are located.

The "book" in this case is the web. The "page number" is the URL (of the various websites) and the "term" is the keyword phrase.

Make sense?

Generally speaking, a book's index is alphabetized. The web isn't. You simply type in search terms (keyword phrases) and Google tells you where to look. Only in the case of the internet, there are literally millions of "pages" that contain the word/term you may be looking for. Google and the other Search Engines (SE) try to deliver the "most relevant site" for that keyword as the first result, the "second most relevant site" as the #2 result, and so on.

In short, you cannot speed up this indexing. "Internet gurus" will tell you that you can, but they'd be wrong. What they're really referring to is the crawling.

Google indexes all of the data they glean from the crawl on their own time. There are many factors. Probably too many to mention and it doesn't matter in any event because you cannot change it.

Suffice it to say that Google is pretty darned fast.

Rank? When Did I Join the Army?

Now that Google has crawled your site and processed your data so that it's organized, they apply a ranking algorithm that nobody fully knows or understands.

Read that again: Nobody knows Google's search engine algorithm. Not even Google.

It's top-secret stuff and the less anybody knows about it, the harder it is to "game the system." It's kind of in everybody's best interest NOT to know what that algorithm looks like, when you think about it in those terms.

Google really wants the most relevant site for any search term to pop up as #1. And so do you.

This says a lot about content, doesn't it? As search engines get smarter and begin to mimic human behavior, everything will boil down into two parts:

1. Content
2. Referring sites

It's kind of like being an expert. There are 2 components to being an expert. Both are necessary and sufficient. You need to have a ton of knowledge about the topic and your peers have to look to you as the expert.

Everybody knows that "content is king" but until recently, crap websites could rank at #1 on Google and the other SEs  just because…well, who knows why? But now, you won't find that to be the case nearly as often. And it'll keep getting better.

Although content is very important, it's the "recognition by peers" (referring sites) that gets a website to #1. Look at it this way: If your website is respected enough to get industry or niche peers to link to it (in other words, "recommend it"), then it begins to look like an "authority site" (in other words, an "expert").

To summarize, 3 things need to occur before you can rank #1 in Google:

1. Google needs to know about your site. They need to crawl it.
2. Google needs to index your keyword terms where it feels appropriate.
3. Google needs to analyze all of the data at its disposal, and–using its own proprietary algorithm–rank the results so that the "best site" for any particular keyword ranks #1.

The concepts are not difficult to understand. But getting the results you want ("I'm #1 on Google") can be tricky. In the spirit of Halloween, it will soon be "Trick or Treat" time!

Preview: I trick, you get a treat. Subscribe to my newsletter and I will give you a few very special tricks in the next few days and you'll be treated to a very worthwhile treat.

Love Google or hate Google, they make damned fine tools most of the time. And Gmail is normally rock-solid and made for the mobile internet marketer.

Today, I want to show you some real time savers when it comes to using Gmail: Keyboard shortcuts. Over the course of a day, learning and using just a few of these Gmail keyboard shortcuts could save you several minutes. That adds up over a year's time, trust me.

Now, I don't spend all day on email. I try to check email once in the morning, once around the middle of the day, and once at the end of the day (that's probably 2 times too many). Because I not only do internet marketing but also computer consulting where my customers are dependent upon me to resolve or help them with their web hosts (depending on our arrangement), I need to be a little more connected to my email.

Having said all that, I really need to be efficient when it comes to dealing with email. One of the things that enables me to be super-effective in this regard is the use of keyboard shortcuts. Without further ado, here they are. While they don't make the most intuitive sense, once you commit them to memory (hint: print out the really important ones and tape the sheet to your laptop), you will use them all the time.

Combo-keys – Use the following combinations of keys to navigate through Gmail.

Google is in the URL-shortening business. It's stripped down like most of their products, but it promises to be fast, stable, and reliable.

Hopefully, customization or "vanity" URLs become available soon.

Just one more reason google is the stickiest site on the planet.