Google is now BETA testing their new service, Pay-Per-Action (BETA), where publishers are only paid for conversions that they send to an advertiser. This would be a great service for marketplace webmasters or affiliate marketers, since you choose how much each action will be worth. Since this service is still in it's BETA version, Google is only accepting AdWords advertisers in the U.S.

This is very similar to CJ.com and how they offer affiliate marketers a way to get in touch with affiliates. Google will be allowing you to choose which type of affiliate advertisements you want to use. These can range from images, text ads and even inline advertisements! These advertisements will be displayed in Google's very own content network of publishers. Publishers are given the option to choose which advertisements they would like to display as well!

They will be tracking conversions using tracking code placed on the action completed page. I think a ton of advertisers would want to use services like this instead of a CPC-based advertising solution because they only pay if they receive a sale/conversion - I know I would!

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Okay, this is not really SEO related, but it could well be the biggest marketing opportunity this year or next.

 I got new computers for our office and in doing so, found that they came with windows vista. That was all fine and dandy, I have been wanting to play with vista anyways. Now when I first started up the vista machines, I noticed that vista, by default, loads up a sidebar on the right hand side of the screen. Cool. So I click the button to add some "gadgets" to the sidebar. Vista comes with 13 gadgets by default in the gadget manager console. These are run of the mill things, so I clicked the "Get more Gadgets from the Windows Live Website" button.

I see 400+ gadgets in a variety of categories. ok cool. I click install gadget links on the ones I want. It is a super easy thing to install these things.

Then I started thinking about how many millions of people will be using vista in the next 6 months now that vista ships with all new computers….. The projected numbers after 12, 18, 24 months are staggering…. Microsoft projects 200,000,000 users in 2 years alone. 200 MILLION.

And like me, they will all go see what gadgets are out there to play with….

This started me thinking that I needed to have some gadgets for my websites up on the windows live website…

So I get a couple coders who do gadgets and are willing to do them for money. I found 2 out of over 18 gadget coders I emailed that were willing to do so. I have a new site created http://www.semtutor.com I have a gadget made for a "Daily Marketing Tip" and this gadget uses semtutor.com's rss feed to power it.

We released the gadget 4.x days ago on the windows live site and semtutor currently has 500+ readers according to feedburner stats.

The Gadget has been downloaded over 1600+ times from the windows live site in those 4.x days. (http://gallery.live.com/default.aspx?l=1)

Needless to say We quickly locked these 2 coders up into a contract partnership and thus is born: http://www.gadgetspark.com

Getcha Some!

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Many people have been using search results to find the backlinks to their website by typing in search queries like:

• link:seofox.com in Google
• linkdomain:seofox.com -site:seofox.com

Well now Google has decided to let webmasters view which websites have been indexed by Google which are providing links to your website. This new feature is located in Google Webmaster Tools .

Obviously people are going to have the concerns of security and all, but the best part is the fact that Google verifies if you are the webmaster of a website or not by asking you to upload an empty HTML file with a specified file name.

Google will list all the pages that they have indexed from your website and they provide you with a list of pages. Next to each URL you will see the number of links pointing to that page. You can choose whether you want to see internal links (links inside your domain) or external links (links from other websites).

This is definitely a great new feature from Google and it definitely assists webmasters in finding out which websites are linking to them (that Google recognizes). You can also download the data into a table format and create graphs and charts (if you're Danny Sullivan). 

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I recently discovered the concept of having a soft launch for larger sites so that Google and the other search engines wouldn't think that the site was simply auto generated. I never really gave this much thought in the sites I build because they are usually fewer than 100 pages.

My question that I've asked is what should merit a soft launch?  What is considered too large and what would fly under the radar?  I've received several responses and the most common I receive is that anything over 1,000 pages should have a soft launch just to be safe.

Personally my conclusion is to launch any website in segments. If search engines like to see that your website is fresh and frequently updated then why not plan from the beginning to include a soft launch?

If you are building a larger then life website then you will want to make sure that your SEO firm has a soft launch plan. No matter how large or small your website is, having a plan is a big step towards whatever you want to call a success.

If anyone is interested in reading the soft launch article it can be found on SEO Rockstars - Soft Launch For Better Results.

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This question is asked of me at least a few times a week, so I decided to develop a tool to check it. While I am not going to let everyone and their brother use my API key and google no longer gives out new keys for the SOAP API, I will explain how to do this task. It really is not difficult and I am sure some of you will be making your own tools to do it quickly enough after reading this anyway.

First let's find out how many pages of your website that Google knows about using the query: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.yourdomain.com

Next let's see how many pages of your website that Google has listed in it's supplemental index using this query: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.yourdomain.com+***+-view

Now simply do the math to get the percentage of your website in the supplemental index.

How did your score turn out?

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