Google is a very good search engine. It supports thousands of struggling webmasters with Google Adsense. It’s much more responsive to webmasters than Yahoo or MSN.

However, I propose that its influence on the internet is not entirely benign. Webmasters are victims of its great success. How? Read on, and find out.

1. Google Knows Your Business (Better Than You Do).

- You use Google Search: Google knows roughly where you live. It knows what you like.
- You use the Google Toolbar, unmodified: Google knows all the sites you visit.
- You use Google Adwords: Google knows what niches you’re targeting. And which ad copy works.
- You use Google Adsense: Google knows which of your pages are most successful in getting clicks.
- You use Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools: Why not _give_ them your business while you’re at it?

Use two or more of the above and Google knows more about your business than you do. Would you be happy if a competitor had access to that data? Or your government? But you trust Google. Because it’s a _nice_ company.

2. Google PageRank Defeats Its Purpose.

Google PageRank (PR) has led to sites linking out to unrelated and substandard sites, for money. Why is this a problem? Well, Google itself rates a site according to the ‘link popularity’ of the sites linking to it. If your site has links from high PR sites, your site appears higher in Google searches.

Thus, Google created a problem for itself. Webmasters take payments to link out to sites that are unrelated and/or mediocre. This skews Google’s own rating system. It can also screw the site selling links, as linking out to ‘bad neighbourhoods’ can earn it a penalty.

Sites selling or abusing PR may retain the magic green bar, but cannot pass it on to sites they link to; another penalty. Naive webmasters then buy expensive links which don’t work as they wished.

More perverse still is that a whole industry has sprung up around selling and manipulating links based on PR. This distracts webmasters away from what should be their true goal; making great sites that can thrive purely by ‘word of mouth’.

I used to wonder why some webmasters would fret in forums, asking when the next PR update would occur. Now I realise that for some it was because they could charge more for their links.

3. Google Is Stuck In An Adsense-Spam Loop.

Google Adsense A.K.A ‘The Webmaster’s Dole’. This is a major source of income for semi-pro webmasters.

It’s given rise to the phenomenon of MFA (Made For Adsense) websites. Previously webmasters did it for the love (mostly). Now they’re putting up pages about subjects they’re not interested in, purely to get clicks on these ads. Result: low-quality websites which disappoint naive surfers.

The irony is, Google Search is constantly having to tweak its algorithm, to filter out sites like these. The ‘black hat’ webmaster’s response? Churn out a hundred more. Not so much fun for the ‘white hat’ webmaster ‘though; he may find that his one-and-only website, the labour of years, falls foul of a Google penalty. Why? Because it accidentally matches the ‘footprint’ of a spammy site.

Thus, Google is stuck in a recursive loop of its own making:

- Google Adsense encourages spam, which …
- Google Search tries to filter out, which …
- Collaterally penalises legit webmasters, who …
- Buy more links from high-PageRank sites to boost their perceived popularity and/or
- Make more sub-substandard web pages to keep their revenues up, which …
- Google Search tries to filter out.

Prior to Adsense, a webmaster had to sell his own stuff, establish good affiliate relations with other companies, or get three million visitors so _some_ would click on his crude ‘pay-per-click’ banners.

Now all he has to do is insert Adsense and make money immediately. Even if it’s not enough to live on, it encourages him to make more websites, plus more pages, equalling more money.

4. Google Penalties Cause Webmaster Neurosis.

No one, including the ‘black hat’ webmaster, is too bothered when a penalty happens to a spam site. However, they can easily happen to a ‘white hat’ site too. A webmaster reads the latest tricks on a webmaster forum, goes a little too far with ’search engine optimisation’ then BAM! He wakes up one morning, checks his stats, and gets a nasty surprise. Or he does nothing at all, and still gets a penalty; his site inadvertently ‘fits the profile’.

Result: Many profitless hours spent researching the cause, and fixing it. If he has employees, he may have to ‘let them go’: “Happy Christmas, don’t come back in the New Year”.

5. If You Ain’t Ranking On Google, You’re Invisible.

Google has a near-monopoly on search. Because Google is a benevolent company, unlike the ‘Beast of Redmond’, webmasters don’t mind this. In fact, many _love_ Google. Visit any webmaster forum, and see how often Google features in them as a topic.

The problem for the webmaster is when his site doesn’t appear on Google. Not too bad if he’s just starting out, but catastrophic if he has one website he’s monetised nicely, and it drops out of the index.

6. Conclusion.

- Spam goes up;
- Quality content goes down;
- Google techs run ever-finer tweaks on their algorithm;
- More borderline websites get booted;
- Webmasters are driven cracked in pursuit of Adsense gold, PageRank or avoiding penalties;
- Google amasses huge amounts of extremely valuable consumer data.

The average surfer never sees this. He may wonder why the same search a day later doesn’t throw up the same sites. But he won’t change search engines; there’s no real competition.

Lest you think I’m a Google-hater, I’m not. I like Google, a lot. I’ve used Adwords and Adsense, and Search, of course. I’ve put up pages spurred by thoughts of Adsense riches. I know what Google has to fight to clear the cr*p out of its index.

I just wish fewer webmasters were Google-twitchers, and that Google Search had more competition. Webmaster discussions are dominated by one search engine. Yahoo and MSN are a very poor second and third. Naive webmasters will find that a near-monopoly is never good for business, even with a company whose laudable motto is ‘Do No Evil’.

About the author: T. O’ Donnell runs sites offering free Wordpress templates, loan calculator software and free chat rooms in London, UK.

Here’s a list of tips and tricks to consult at two a.m. when you’re trying to put your site to bed and that d*mn script just won’t work.

1. Make a note of the error message, and type it in Google. Remove your unique paths and file names. Someone else has had the same problem, and some nice person will have posted a solution.

2. If it’s a server error, repeat what caused the error. Go quickly to the error log on your web hosting control panel. Any clues there?

3. Read the README file. Have it open on-screen when you’re setting up the script.

4. Use a text editor like Wordpad or Notepad to edit scripts. Simply put, your editor should not change anything beyond the bare text that you type on screen. Microsoft Word will alter your formatting, with unhappy consequences.

5. Avoid wrapping lines. Check that your editor is not set to do this.

6. Avoid putting characters like ” , ‘ ; in if you don’t know what you’re doing.

The server may read these as programming code. Apostrophes and other non-alphabet characters can be ‘escaped’ out of a script by putting a backward slash in front of them.

7. Get the paths to required files correct in the script itself and in the html files involved. Telnet to your site, and use the pwd command: ‘pwd somename’ (without the apostrophes) to find where directories and programs are on your server.

8. Windows (MS-DOS) may insert carriage returns which cause errors in Unix. In Perl, You need to have a line break after #!/usr/bin/perl. It appears to be there, but you may have to insert it manually via Telnet. Otherwise you may get an error.

9. Permissions: Set permissions of scripts to 705 (e.g. ‘CHMOD 705 yourscript.cgi’ in a telnet session). CHMOD 606 for text files the script may need to read or write to. CHMOD 707 any file or sub-directory the script author asks you to. The rest can usually be left at the default 644.

(The use of 0 here in permissions is to stop people in the same ‘group’ as you peeking at your files).

10. Upload scripts in ASCII mode only, or you’ll get errors in them (the text will be shifted around if you upload in Binary).

FTP files with the extensions .tar.gz, .zip, and image files, in BINARY mode only.

11. Check whether you’ve put a trailing forward-slash where you’re not supposed to, or not inserted one when you’re supposed to!

12. Email addresses in a script may need a backward-slash before the @ to work.

13. Don’t change too many things at once. Do the absolute minimum to get the script working, then change one thing at a time.

14. If you are changing the HTML code of a form page that posts to the script: Clear your browser’s cache. You may still be loading an old version of your page, with tags that your script now won’t recognise.

Your ISP may also be using its cache of your web page. Try connecting via another ISP, or use a proxy service like http://www.Anonymouse.ws to view your page.

15. The error ‘document contains no data’ in your browser usually means a path or a file name is wrong. It can also mean the file you’re calling is 0 bytes in size.

16. Don’t try setting scripts up when you’re tired. If you’ve been working for hours, take a break, or go to bed!

17. It’s a fact that, after all this, your script might have a bug. Check any discussion boards at the vendor’s website, or general webmaster forums, to see if this is a common problem. Report exactly what problems you’re having, and your server set-up, to the programmers. It’s unlikely you’re the first person to have it.

T. O Donnell http://www.tigertom.net is an ecommerce consultant currently developing a free dating service and meta search engine in London, UK.

It all began in the late 90’s. I wanted to put some news on my website. A diary. A list of forthcoming events. I started with simple HTML. One page, with sections for every post. Simple.

Then I heard about ‘blogs’ and ‘blogging’. Being smart, I picked Wordpress, the most popular software. How clever, I thought. If you get the WYSIWYG editor going, anyone can put up a web site. Very democratic.

This encouraged my to post my outermost thoughts; on politics, London, and personal gripes. As a webmaster, I watched to see Google index them. “Here we go”, I thought, “soon, my jewels of extrospection will belong to the ages”.

Except Google didn’t like my blog. It wouldn’t index much beyond the front page. Why, why, why?

Duplicate content? I set it to put only one post per page.

No improvement.

I looked at what Google was indexing. Then I looked at the blog HTML. Soon, all became clear.

In sum:

- Wordpress was still duplicating my content, and
- It had no proper META tags, and
- There was a lot irrelevant HTML, and
- The layout obscured the content.

I had a quick search on Google to find search engine optimisation tips. There is a plugin ‘head META description’ ( http://guff.szub.net/plugins/ ). But I didn’t use that, oh no.

For some reason, I got the notion that a complete theme would be the ticket. I tried modifying an existing one myself. Better, but not perfect. Google was starting to index more pages, but they all had the same title. My missives to an uncaring world were being ignored.

So I got someone else to do one, based on my criteria, which were:

- Grab a META ‘title’ from the blog post ‘title’;
- Grab a META ‘description’ from the blog ‘excerpts’;
- Put a ROBOTS ‘noindex’ tag in non-content pages.

But that wasn’t enough. For best SEO results you need to configure Wordpress brutally. You have to be _mean_ to it. You have to _man_ enough.

I did a bit of research and came up with to following tips.

WARNING: They are extreme. If you already have good rankings, making radical changes to your URLs may affect them. In my case:

- Moving my blog http://www.ttblog.co.uk to the root web directory,
- MOD_REWRITING its URLs, and
- Removing a 301 redirect,

… caused my PageRank to go to 0. BUT, page indexing was unaffected.

This was temporary, as Google saw it as ’suspect’ behaviour. I had radically changed my site.

Here are the tips, for real _men_, who can look in the face of internet death and laugh:

1. Activate permalinks by going to ‘Options/Permalinks’. You may have to enable Apache MOD_REWRITE on your web account.

1a. Shorten the permalinks code to just the %postname% variable. Don’t bother with the date codes. This keeps your URLs short.

2. Point your blog in the uppermost directory possible. http://www.ttblog.co.uk is better than http://www.ttblog.co.uk/wordpress/

So a typical post would look like
http://www.ttblog.co.uk/Im-hard-as-nails-me/
rather than
http://www.ttblog.co.uk/wordpress/2006/08/03/Im-hard-as-nails-me/

3. Then install an SEO’d theme.

My blog posts are now being indexed beautifully. The Google ’site:’ command returns all my posts, and little else.

For my next challenge, I take on Windows XP, and turn it into an operating system.

T. O’ Donnell is an personal development author running sites about things like Wordpress templates in London UK.