That’s a big issue in times where search engines are favoring fast loading websites. It also may mean that you have to upgrade your hosting to keep up with the performance requirements of your website.

P3, Plugin Performance Profiler, is a free WordPress plugin that analyzes the performance of frontend plugins. Frontend plugins are all plugins that are executed during page loading time.

Installation

Just open Plugins > Add New in your WordPress admin dashboard and search for P3. Click on the Install Now link to install the plugin, and on Activate on the next screen to activate it. You can alternatively download it from the official WordPress Plugin repository to install it manually on your blog.

Usage

Open Tools > P3 Plugin Profiler and click the Start Scan button to run the standard scan. The program will load several posts and pages from your site to calculate individual plugin performance data. You can alternatively run a manual scan instead, which allows you to pick the pages and posts that you want to load on the site. The benefit here is that you can specify exactly which posts and pages you want to use for the sample.

Once done, results are displayed in the program interface.

You should now see the average plugin impact on the site’s load time, the number of MySQL queries that are run per visit and a runtime breakdown by plugin.

If plugin impact appears to be to high, or if you have a plugin installed that is using a lot of resources, you may want to consider replacing it or removing it completely from the site. You can deactivate plugins before you run the test again to see if the deactivation has a positive impact on the frontend page loading times. You could furthermore install an alternative to see if it is lighter on the resource side.

There is however no option to compare scans with each other, which is unfortunately. It is also not clear why the performance profiler itself is listed in the results, as it does not really make a whole lot of sense.

Still, if you are hearing complaints from readers or are noticing server peak load times and resource usage, you may want to check out the Plugin Performance Profiler plugin to see which plugin may be causing it.

Even better, new technologies have made it a lot easier to setup a local web development system on any PC. Ampps, which stands for Apache MySQL PHP Python Softalicious, is a free web development environment for the Windows and Mac OS X operating systems that can be installed with just a few clicks. Once up and running, it is up to the user to install web applications from the local admin interface. The program can install 260 web applications that include highlights such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal, and lesser known applications such as the course management system Moodle, several types of Wikipedia-like applications or feed aggregators such as Gregarius.

When you first start the program after installation you’ll get into the admin console where you can configure Apache, MySQL and PHP, and start, stop and restart the services.

Links in the form of icons open the local web administration interface or the apps that are currently up and running.

The web admin interface displays a list of application categories on the left, and links to core admin pages to the right. Here you can install and maintain databases, manage and add domains, edit general settings or access PHP and Perl information.

To install a web application, you click on the download button next to it to bring up a page with detailed information about it. You can install the script right away, or look at features and screenshots, open a demo page or access ratings and reviews.

A click on install opens the software setup page with all information filled out automatically. While it is possible to run the setup with the selected values, it is suggested to change at least the admin username or password if required.

A click on Install on the page downloads and installs the latest package automatically on the local system. You can thereafter open the new application to work with it.

What sets Ampps apart from other solutions like WordPress Portable, XAMPP or Wampserver are the applications that the program ships with. The inclusion of phpMyAdmin and SQlite Manager is also a great help in importing existing data into the local development environment.

Web Developers and users who want to run web applications locally can make use of Ampps to do so. Ampps is available for Windows and Mac OS X. Downloads are offered at the developer website.

WordPress Portable is a free program for Windows that automatically ships with everything needed to run WordPress locally. All you need to do is to extract the package contents on your system after download and start the WordPress Portable executable afterwards.

The blog is available from that moment on and you can do all the things that you can do on a self-hosted WordPress blog as well.

Just open http://localhost/wordpress/ in your web browser to open the local WordPress installation. Click on log in and enter admin as the username and password to open the administrative interface of the blog.

First thing you may want to do is to upgrade the blog to the latest version. You should see a notification at the top of the admin interface on first run. The update takes considerably longer than it would on a remotely hosted website.

Once done you can start to install new themes and plugins, modify settings, and to start writing your first posts. You basically can do everything that you can do on a self-hosted WordPress installation.

The local installation can be used for several purposes. This includes local theme and plugin development and testing, testing new WordPress versions before you upgrade your live blogs on the Internet, or to showcase blogs to clients or friends. Another option is to use the local WordPress blog to store your own personal writings, a diary for instance or important information that you need to write down or want to collect.

WordPress Portable ships with Apache, PHP and MySQL included, which means that you do not have to install those technologies prior to installing the blog. New users benefit from the simplicity of the solution, while advanced users may like the ability to put the package on a portable drive or stick, or to use it to quickly run tests locally.

The project lacks documentation which can be a issue for some users. It is for instance not clear if and how Apache, MySQL and PHP can be updated to newer versions, or if it is possible to import the database of an existing blog (the later may be possible with the help of plugins).

WordPress Portable is only available for the Microsoft Windows operating system. Interested users can download the latest version of the package, weighting in at about 10 Megabytes, from the developer website.

The second option is to buy sites to flip them later which is called site flipping. You buy low, can optionally improve the site to increase its traffic or revenue, to sell it for a profit later on.

My intention with the site that I bought for $23,000 last year was to stabilize its earnings, reap in the rewards for a year to sell it for a profit after 12 months. I’d like to post an update on what happened to that site and where it stands now.

Here is the revenue that the site generated in the last months:

• July: $3471.80
• August: $3384.60
• September: $1957.62
• October: $1774.65
• November: $1804.44
• December: $2209.74

The total is $14602.87 for the last six months of operation. Not all of it is profit though, more about that later. You may have noticed that the revenue dropped considerable in September, this can be attributed to the fact that it is a seasonal product that is more popular in spring and early summer.

You need to subtract your expenses from the revenue. With site hosting and the domain name at about $10 per month, and a monthly SEO campaign for $399, total expenses came down to $2454 in that time. The net revenue therefor was $12148.87 in the last six months.

Since I have paid $23,000 for the site, I made more than half of my investment back at the six month mark. If thinks pick up in the coming months, I may make all the money back in the next five months. Everything is profit afterwards.

The site earns 10% from those sales.

My main intention then is to sell the website again for a higher price than I paid. Why a higher price? Because revenue history pays an important role. Buyers pay more for sites with a larger revenue history. If a site’s earnings have been steady for a year, it is more worth than a site who earned money for just one month. It is a risk factor that needs to be part of any calculation.

My intention is to sell the site for 24 times its monthly profit which would be around $50,000 which would all be profit. I may have to use a website broker for that who usually charge you between 10% and 15% for their service. This leaves me with $42,5000 to $45,000 in profit which is not bad for a year and an initial investment of $23,000.

Risks

Investments always come with certain risks, a stock may tank, a bank may file for bankruptcy, a house may be destroyed by an act of god. You face two core risks when it comes to web investments.

• 1. The seller may have not revealed all the information to you. Let me give you a basic example. A seller not mentioning that part of the site’s traffic was paid for, which for obvious reasons should have been included in the site’s evaluation. You may be able to settle this with the seller directly, but more often than not in court.
• 2. Acts of god, or more precisely Google or other traffic sources the site depends on. Algorithm changes, blackhat attacks against the web property or issues with a script the site depends on can turn revenue from normal levels to zero. While you could try to get those issues resolves, it would mean that you had to spend additional money to do so (Unless you are a do-it-yourself webmaster. Even then you’d have to spend your time fixing the site instead of using it for other projects of yours).

Check out 8 Essential Tips For Web Investors for additional tips and information.

Closing Words

Site flipping can be highly profitable, only comparable in revenue to high risk stock market investments. Most of the risks can be mitigated on the other hand with a careful evaluation.

I plan to re-invest the money into one or two web properties after the purchase.

You may also be wondering why I do not keep the site instead and let it earn the $2000 for me every month. The reason is simple: It would have to earn that amount of money for two years to even the sales price. In those two years, I could try and quadruple the money with two new investment cycles instead, provided I find the right web properties to invest in. Instead of having one site earn $2000, I’d end up with sites earning $8000 per month. after two years.

It is as usually possible to update the blog right away from within the admin dashboard if it has been configured for that, or via file transfer clients if the former option is not available.

The blog post that announces the new version of WordPress mentions 15 maintenance related fixes and one security related fix that have been applied to the new version. It fails to go into detail but links to the bug tracker listing which details every fix except for the security issue.

At least one of the issues that have been fixed in WordPress 3.3.1 seem to have affected this site. I was recently noticing issues with the author biographies not being displayed anymore on article pages, and it took a whole day to find a working workaround. It appears now that this was a bug that got fixed with this new WordPress release.

The security vulnerability is only briefly mentioned in the blog post where it is described as a cross-site scripting vulnerability that is affecting WordPress version 3.3.

The WordPress Codex lists all files that have been revised in the new version. It is theoretically possible to only upload those files to the site to save time and bandwidth.

I have already updated several WordPress sites to version 3.3.1 and did not notice any odd behavior or issues with the updating or site operation.

WordPress admins are encouraged to update their blogs as soon as possible to protect it from the security vulnerability and to resolve the stability issues that have been fixed with the update.

The What’s New page at the WordPress Codex highlights the – many – changes of the new version. WordPress admins will instantly notice several changes to the applications admin interface. A new toolbar is displayed on top of the dashboard that combines the features of the admin bar and the admin header.

The new bar links directly to plugin and theme updates, comments awaiting moderation and the New menu with options to create new content on the blog. (There is a function to remove some of the elements that are shown in the admin bar. Credits to Sergej Müller)

Another change are “fly-out” menus in the admin interface. All submenus of a menu are displayed when you hoover the mouse over the menu. This saves a click and improves the admin’s workflow.

WordPress editors will notice a new file uploader. The developers have done away with the four upload buttons for specific type of media, and replaced it with a single button. The new uploader supports drag and drop operations and file browsing to select files to upload. Support for rar and 7z files have been added to the file uploader.

WordPress admins who switch between themes regularly will notice that widgets are not lost anymore when they do that.

A video has been created that highlights several of the new features.

The WordPress backend has been updated as well with hundreds of bug fixes and performance improvements. It is to early to tell if the improvements will have a significant impact on the blog’s server resource usage or loading times.

Have you updated your blog to WordPress 3.3 yet? If so, what do you think of the new version?

Microsoft has recently released Excel Mashup, a web based service to create rich and interactive data mashups. A SkyDrive account is required, as it is used to store the workbooks. Web developers can then make use of the JavaScript Api to create the mashups and embed them on their web sites.

Microsoft has made available several demo applications that demonstrate the functionality of Excel Mashup.

Destination Explorer for instance displays weather or visitor information for a city or park in regions of the world. The data is visualized both with charts and on Bing Maps.

How healthy was your meal today on the other hand displays a persons meal’s calorie intake in detail. Adjustments can be made and the data entered is compared to the recommended intake for male or female adults with a sedentary or active lifestyle.

The basic idea behind Excel Mashup is to give developers the ability to publish rich interactive applications using Excel data on the web.

The whole process has been divided into three steps. First the sign up, then the embedding of the workbook on a self-hosted web page and finally the creation of rich data mashups using the Excel Services JavaScript library.

Development examples are available on the website. One of the examples walks developers through the creation of the Destination Explorer application. JavaScript and HTML skills are required to follow the guide.

Developers find links to all three APIs on the web page as well.

The majority of methods use JavaScript to trigger the functionality. The issue here is that external scripts increase the page loading time. If you load to many scripts, your website could be punished for this by the search engines by reducing the page’s position in the rankings. Depending on the number of social media buttons that you embed, you could be loading multiple external JavaScript files.

But JavaScript can also be used for tracking purposes. Visitors who load a web page with external JavaScript will always at least pop up in the external service’s access logs.

The only positive effect for the webmaster is that users can vote for their articles on the linked social networking sites. But this is also achievable without JavaScript. The benefit of that solution? Faster page loading times and guaranteed no user tracking.

The following solution has been created by Daniel Pataki. It is a solution for WordPress, if you use a different script or software you may need to modify the code accordingly.

The code consists of two parts. First CSS code that you need to add to your blog’s stylesheet, and then the code that displays the links to the social networking sites on the website.

CSS Code:

You need the following sprite image that contains all four icons. This speeds up the loading time as only one image needs to be loaded instead of four separate ones. Place it in the /img/ directory of your theme folder or alter the background:url code to place it somewhere else.

.social_icon {
background:url("img/sprite.png");
display:block;
width:33px;
float:left;
margin:0 3px 0 0;
height:32px;
opacity:0.8;
filter:alpha(opacity=80);
}
.social_icon:hover {
opacity:1;
filter:alpha(opacity=100)
}
.social_icon.twitter {
background-position:-33px 0;
}
.social_icon.googleplus {
background-position:-99px 0;
}
.social_icon.print {
background-position:-66px 0;
}

WordPress single.php code

You need to add the following code to WordPress’ single.php file.

<div class='social'>
<a href='http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=<?php the_permalink() ?>' class='social_icon facebook' rel="nofollow"></a>
<a href='https://twitter.com/share?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>' class='social_icon twitter' rel="nofollow"></a>
<a class='social_icon googleplus' href="https://plusone.google.com/_/+1/confirm?hl=en&url=<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="nofollow" ></a>
<a href='javascript:window.print()' class='social_icon print'></a>
<div style='clear:both'></div>
</div>

The functionality should be available immediately. Users who click on a social networking icon are taken to the selected site where they can post about the web page that they have originated from. The page url is automatically included in the post.

I hope this helps some of you out there who want to offer functional social networking buttons without the JavaScript.

Update: Have added rel=”nofollow” to all external links.

You usually do not need to know PHP or MySQL if you download and install an application like WordPress. But if you want to start developing your own applications, or modifying existing ones, then you need to know the ins and outs of SQL database commands.

Head first SQL: Hands On is a free service by O’Reilly that can be used to learn and execute MySQL queries online. when you open the Head First Labs site for the first time you see a form near the top that you can use to run MySQL commands.

The service provides access to several tables that are listed above the form. All you need to do is to enter a SQL query in the form to execute it. The core benefit of testing SQL commands here is that you do not have to create your own database first and fill it with data. Plus, you cannot really damage the database or tables this way.

The results are displayed right beneath the for.  But the site offers more than just an option to run your own MySQL queries, which is especially useful for users who are just getting started and do not know anything about SQL.

The Get Started section of the page lists 33 MySQL lessons. The majority of lessons teach a specific command or command sets. This ranges from basic queries such as SELECT or INSERT to more complex operations. Not all lessons make sense, which can be attributed that some require that you have read the Head First SQL: Hands On book.

Some on the other hand can be used without having the book in reach. MySQL beginners will probably like the form on the start page the most, as it allows them to run custom SQL queries on sample database tables.

Why is it bad? Because search engines rank content in their search results. If they believe you are the creator you are usually ranked higher than a site that has copied the content, if such a site is ranked at all.

The reality is this. Sites that scrape contents are easy to setup (using RSS feed mostly), require barely any maintenance and earn the creator money. These sites publish copied contents shortly after they have been published on the original website. As long as people can make money from this method, they will use it to do just that.

Fat Pings are one way to resolve the situation. The idea is simple. When you publish an article you ping a trusted source to confirm that you site is the original location of that article. It does not really matter if you do it 10 seconds before the scraper does the same or one hour, it is only important that you do it before the scraper does. This obviously has consequences for original content creators who do not make use of Fat Pings, as it is quite possible that scraper sites may make use of Fat Pings for an extra advantage.

How do you cope with that situation? You configure all of your sites to support Fat Pings. Here is how that is done.

If your blog is hosted on WordPress.com or Blogger, then you do not need to do anything. Fat Pings are automatically sent out. If you are running a self hosted WordPress blog, you can install the free PubSubHubbub extension to inform search engines when they blog has been updated.

The suggestion to use Fat Pings comes directly from Google. You can read up more about it on Search Engine Journal and Labnol.

I also noticed that articles with hundreds of comments were loading significantly slower than pages with less comments. This made me reduce the number of comments per page to 50 root comments (plus their answers).

Today I noticed that WordPress added another JavaScript to ever page. The script in wp-inlcudes/l10n.js that is related to the admin bar that the WordPress developers added to one of the recent versions of the blogging platform.

While it is a small file with a size of 233 bytes it is still a script that is loaded by anyone, not just the admin of the blog. This somehow does not make a lot of sense. The important thing here is that the blog needs to make the request to load the element, not the time it takes to load the 223 bytes.

WordPress administrators may want to remove the JavaScript element from being loaded by every blog visitor to speed up the blog’s page loading times. The easiest way to remove the l10n.js from being loaded with WordPress is to unload it in the functions.php file in the WordPress theme folder.

All you need to do for that is to add the following line of code to the end of the functions.php file.

wp_deregister_script('l10n');

Please note that this may disable part of the admin bars toolbar functionality. Users over at Stack Exchange have found a way to keep the JavaScript loaded for administrators of the blog.

if ( !is_admin() ) {
function my_init_method() {
wp_deregister_script( ‘l10n’ );
}
add_action(‘init’, ‘my_init_method’);
}

Just add this code instead to the functions.php file.

MobiTest is a free online service that webmasters can use to test the performance of websites on mobile devices. The service is completely free and requires no registration.

Webmasters find the options of the screenshot above on the frontpage of the service. All that it takes to run a test is to enter a website url into the form on the start page. The remaining options are completely optional. They include a menu to select a specific mobile device for the test (several iPhone and Android models mostly from Canada but also the Netherlands and United States), the number of runs, video capturing of the loading and whether the results should be made public or private.

Tests are then started with a click on the Run Performance Test button. The service will add the speed test to the end of the queue. Information about the test’s status are always displayed on the screen.

The developers suggest to bookmark the unique page address to come back later if a lot of websites are listed in the queue.

Each test result highlights several important information. Among them a screenshot of the website and how it is displayed on the selected mobile device, the page loading time and the total size of the page in Kilobytes. MobiTest grades each tested web page and displays a waterfall chart that highlights all connections that were made during the test.

Especially the ability to create a video snapshot of the page loading time on the selected mobile device is handy. As are the different locations and devices that webmasters can choose from. An option to run tests with all supported devices would have been handy.

Webmasters who want to test their website’s mobile performance can head over to the Blaze MobiTest website to do so.

One of the issues that businesses and webmasters who take care of the listing for businesses experience from time to time is the dreaded “We currently do not support the location”.

This basically returns a blank page with the error message instead of the businesses listing on Google Places. I actually experienced this message twice in the last three months for a client.

It can be a serious blow to the businesses operations if it is not found on Google Places anymore. One might now assume that this message appears on purposes because something’s wrong with the listing, or maybe even the Google account in question.

This is however often not the case. The We currently do not support the location seems to be a bug in Google Places that a lot of local businesses have experienced in the last time.

I do suggest you check the email account linked to your Google Account and your Google Webmaster Tools account first to see if you got any emails or warnings from Google. The next thing that you need to do is to open your Places listing in your Google Account to check for changes or messages there.

If everything appears all right, you can try the following solution to bring your local business listing back on Maps.

The fix that worked in my client’s case both times was to make a change to the Google Places listing. The easiest way to do that is to post an update. You find the “Share an update on your place page” on the right side of the Places listing.

Just enter an update into the form and hit the Share button afterwards. Write about a new product or special offer for instance. I had to wait about 15 minutes before the local business appeared again on Google Places. The We currently do not support the location message was gone.

You can also make other changes, like adding or removing text from the site’s description, business hours or categories. Make sure you do not change the businesses location or other information related to that.

I hope this helps some local businesses who are fighting with the same bug on Google Places.

One would assume that search engines like Google or Bing had the tools to distinguish between original and copy and act accordingly. This unfortunately though is not always the case.

These sites often rank for long tail keywords which drive some traffic from the search engines to the sites. And since the majority of them runs Adsense ads, they make a pretty penny from that.

It is bad enough that those sites can copy and paste contents automatically on their blogs and earn money from it. Even worse is the fact that the process of setting up a new scraper site does not take more than ten minutes tops, and with automation even less.

So called auto blogs have been a trend in recent years in the Black Hat communities.

Some legit webmasters even experience something that they should not: A scraper site outranking the site where the article was published originally.

The search engines leave webmasters who experience the issue more or less alone. They basically ask the webmaster to fill out DCMA requests and send them to the scraper sites. Problem here is that many use proxy hosting or other forms of obfuscation so that it is not possible to contact the webmaster directly. Plus, webmasters usually deal with multiple scraper sites which leads to a never ending cat and mouse game, especially if you take the easy set up of new sites into account.

Webmasters have criticized Google in particular for this in the past, considering that Google could identify the majority of domain owners easily through their Adsense program as the majority of scraper sites uses Adsense for monetization.

Google recently asked webmasters to report scraper pages to them. The data will be used to test and improve algorithms that target those scraper sites.

Webmasters can submit scraper sites on this web form.

It is about time that Google puts an end to this practice, especially since the company’s recent drive to promoting “quality” sites in their search engines.

Here are several good resources for webmasters who want to do more than just reporting.

How to deal with content thieves
How to deal with content scrapers
Report Spam To Google

If you are a webmaster, what’s your experience with scraper sites?

It is thankfully not super complicated to configure your site to be compatible with the new author photo snippets that show up on Google Search. It is at this point in time however not guaranteed that your photo, or a photo of one of your authors, will appear in Google Search. It is rumored that Google has enabled that feature only for selected blogs and sites.

Nevertheless, it does not hurt to add the code to your site and Google Profile. And if your site gets picked by Google, you can expect a higher CTR (click-through rate) than sites without an author profile photo in Google.

Lets take a look at how it looks like in the search engine if it is configured correctly and enabled by Google:

Here are the steps that you need to undertake:

Creating An About Author page

You first need to create an about author page on your website. You then need to link to that page from all posts that this author writes. The link needs to use the rel=”author” parameter. How it is added depends largely on how the author information are posted on the post pages.

Here on Ghacks, the code looks like this:

<p class=”tags”>Author: <a href=”http://www.ghacks.net/author/martin/” title=”Posts by Martin Brinkmann” rel=”author”>Martin Brinkmann</a>

Adding the code can be an easy task on single author blogs, but a bit more complicated on multi-author blogs. The best way to add support on those blogs and sites is to install a plugin like Allow REL= and HTML in Author Bios that adds the support.

You are not yet finished though. The about author page needs to exist for every author on the site. The actual page can contain any kind of information. One important part though is that it needs to link to the Google profile of that author. The link to the Google profile needs to contain the parameter rel=”me”.

<a rel=”me” href=”http://profiles.google.com/ID”> Author Name </a>

Linking Back from Google Profile

In the last step, we need to link back from the Google profile to the about page on the website. Open your Google Profile, click the Profile icon at the top and then the Edit Profile button at the top. Locate links on the right side and select the Add custom link option.

You need to link to the author page on the website, and enable the “this page is especially about me”. You also need to make sure that a photo is added to the profile.

Testing the rich snippet

Open the rich snippet testing tool and enter an url from your website that is linked to a single author (a blog post for instance).

If you see the author photo next to the listing, you have configured the author profile photo support on your site correctly.

To summarize:

• Create an about author page on your site. Link from that page to the Google Profile of that author with the rel=”me” tag. Link the author’s blog posts on the website with the rel=”author” tags to the about author page on the blog.
• Add a photo and a link to the author’s about page on the Google Profile of that author. Make sure the “this page is especially about me” box is ticked.
• Check for correct implementation with the help of the Rich Snippet Tool.

Google today announced that they have modified site links. When you now search for Ghacks in the Google search engine, you will notice that the site links use up a lot of space. On my 1920×1200 resolution and a maximized window, that’s about two thirds of the screen.

Here is a screenshot of Google’s old sitelinks layout for comparison.

Why has Google made the decision to change the sitelinks layout? The Webmaster Central blog lists four reasons: Visibility, Flexibility, Clarity and Quality.

• Visibility: The font size of the link text has been increased. Both the url and the first free words of the description added.
• Flexibility: Sitelinks are now query dependent, and the maximum number of sitelinks has been increased from eight to twelve.
• Clarity: Sitelinks and standard search results are now separated, which means that a sitelink entry will not appear in the general search results and vice verse.
• Quality: Google with the update has “combined the signals” used for “site links and ranking”.

I personally think that Google went a bit overboard with the new sitelinks design. It takes an extreme amount of space. Both the description and url information are more or less useless, considering that you won’t usually see the full url or more than the first five or six words of the description on the search results page.

I’d rather like to see options to customize the layout. For my site, I’d remove the descriptions completely and start the urls after the domain name, as it should be clear that results come from the same domain (with the exception if a subdomain is listed of course).

Another thing that I think is missing is the ability to pick your own links for the sitelinks. Google picks them automatically, and your only option of influencing the listing is by demoting urls in the Webmaster Tools. First, that is no guarantee that the link won’t show up as a sitelink anymore, and second it does not guarantee that a better link is picked by Google’s algorithm.

For my site, I’d really like to add more categories and get rid of the articles that are displayed. That’s however not really possible.

You find more information about Google’s new sitelinks at the Google Webmaster Central blog. Have you encountered the new sitelinks in Google’s search engine yet? If so, what’s your opinion?

More recent updates made some sites recover while others still would not return to their previous rankings. The core problem with Panda was that Google did not release a definition of quality. And if you ask one hundred Internet users about their definition of a quality website, you will likely get one hundred different answers.

Google first rolled out Panda to websites in the United States, and there only to English sites and queries. A later update launched Panda for all English speaking websites regardless of their location in the world. Today’s announcement at the Google Webmaster Central Blog marks the next step of the “high-quality sites algorithm” as Google likes to call it. Panda is now used on non-English versions of Google Search as well, with the exception of the Chinese, Japanese and Korean language versions.

According to the information posted, Panda will affect between 6 to 9 per cent of all queries “to a degree that a user might notice”. That’s lower than the initial 12% of affected sites of English queries, but still a considerable amount.

With Panda out in the open almost everywhere: What is your personal impression of Google’s search engine quality as of late? Has Panda improved the results significantly by pushing down lower quality sites? Or did you experience a decrease a value, something that might even have made you use another search engine?

Let me know in the comments.

They basically allow you to create variations of an existing web page in a drag and drop like manner. For that, you do not need any coding experience whatsoever. Here is what you do. You create a new experiment first by entering a web page address that you want to A-B Test.

The web page is then rendered in the interface. A click on any element on the page displays a context menu with options to move, resize, hide or remove the element, change an image, edit the HTML directly, edit the link destination, track clicks or use custom JavaScript for advanced functionality.

You can make fonts bigger, move images around, exchange contents and manipulate the page in any other imaginable way. You can create one or multiple variations of a page.

Once done you get a single line of JavaScript code that you need to add right below the head tag of the web page that you want to A-B test. And that’s it. No manual creation of pages on your web server, no code editing.

A click on Start Experiment starts the monitoring. You can from that moment on access the stats for that experiment to compare conversion rates, improvements and the performance of specific links on the page that you have chose to monitor.

Here is a video that outlines the whole process.

A-B Testing Video:

What I personally really like about Optimizely is the ease of use. You don’t have to create multiple pages on your web server to test their performance, which speeds up the process significantly. The downside is the price of the service. Users get a 30-day free trial after which they pay $79.99 for up to 20,000 visitors or $399,99 for up to 200,000 visitors, both with an unlimited number of experiments.

Optimizely has more to offer, including multi-browser testing of pages, automatic goal tracking or multiple page testings which is very helpful if you want to make changes to an element that is displayed on several pages of the website.

Optimizely is an A-B Testing service that I can recommend to web developers, Internet marketers and enthusiasts regardless of their technical background.

Sometimes though you wait and wonder why the darn page is not in the index right now. This can also be a problem for an established site, for instance if you have changed content on a popular post or on your site in general. You’d like to see the new contents indexed in the search engines which usually does not happen right after you have hit the save button.

Google has now announced that they have added an option for webmasters to submit their urls to the search engine in Google Webmaster Tools.

The existing Fetch as Googlebot feature in Webmaster Tools has been improved with a submit to index option which basically allows you to submit the fetched url to Google for evaluation and inclusion in the index.

Here is how this works. Open Google Webmaster Tools and follow the Diagnostics > Fetch As Googlebot option in the left sidebar. You have to select the right domain first, of course. You need to add it if it is not already listed in Webmaster Tools.

You need to enter the url that you want to crawl. This can be a website’s homepage, a subpage or any other page that is publicly accessible on the Internet. Click Fetch to retrieve the site as Googlebot. This process may take between a few seconds to a few minutes. Once done you get a status report on the same page and an option to submit to index.

You get a prompt first where you can select to submit only the single url or the url and all pages that it links to.

Google currently has a limit of 50 individual page submissions per week, and 10 page with all linked pages submissions per week. The numbers are shown on the Fetch as Googlebot page.

Google has revamped the public Crawl URL form as well. The core difference besides the captcha is that webmasters and users do not have to verify ownership of the page or site to submit it to the index.

The new Submit to Index feature is handy for webmasters who have troubles getting their website or a specific part of that website indexed in Google. (via)

The biggest issue that keeps people from investing in websites is knowledge. How do you determine the worth of a website? Do you only look at the money it earns per month? Or are there other factors that can play a role? Should you hire a broker or do all the evaluating and bidding yourself?

Here are eight tips that can make the difference between making a great investment and buying a site that is not worth a single cent.

1. Start Low

Yes, that $50,000 Dollar website looks tempting. It might be a good investment. But what you need at the very beginning is experience. Look at websites that are sold at a lower price range. So what’s a good starting point? This depends largely on your budget. My suggestion would be to start with a website for less than $1,000 Dollars. You will get valuable experience out of this first deal. You make your first negotiation, understand how payments are made, how websites and domains are transferred to you and how to setup the website on your server or web hosting account.

Delays or downtimes, which may happen during the process, do not hurt you that much as well. Imagine a 24 hour downtime because of an error in the site’s DNS configuration. Would you prefer that to be your 50,000 Dollar site, or your 1,000 Dollar site?

Verdict: Start with a low site or two before you dive head first in your first four, five or six K investment.

2. The Price

A website is worth as much as the buyer is willing to pay for it. It is difficulty to determine the price, especially in the beginning. A good rule of thumb for PPC kind of sites (like Adsense) is to multiple the average monthly earnings of the last six months by the factor twelve. Make sure to adjust extreme values accordingly. Those are usually one-time peaks that should not be part of the calculation.

Adjust the price if you have analyzed the website in question and came to the conclusion that you can make changes to it to earn more than that average. This can be the case if the site uses bad ad placements for instance or if ads are missing on some of the site’s pages.

Verdict: Pay up to twelve times the average earnings of the last six months. Adjust that by the website’s optimization potential.

3. The Traffic

Some webmasters might say that there is no bad traffic. I’d have to disagree with that when it comes to buying websites. There are basically four types of traffic:

• Direct Traffic, that is visitors who enter the site url directly or open the site from their bookmarks.
• Search Engine Traffic, traffic from organic search engine rankings
• Referrals, traffic from third party sites that link to the site in question
• Paid traffic, traffic that has been paid for.

In my experience, it is best if the majority of traffic comes from organic search engine rankings, unless otherwise noted in the sales letter. Some websites use paid traffic to generate revenue. Why are referrals and direct traffic worse from a buyers point of view? Because they can be easily manipulated. Think of a webmaster who owns a high traffic website and the site that you want to buy. The webmaster might have added a link on his high traffic site to the other site to increase the site’s traffic. Chance is, that link will not be there anymore once the site has been sold, unless part of the agreement.

Another aspect to look after are the keywords that the site ranks for. A site that sells TVs via Amazon’s affiliate system will earn less per visitor if the main keywords are not TV related.

Verdict: Go for sites with organic traffic of 60%+, the more the better.

4. The Payment

When in doubt use Escrow or a comparable service. It is always alarming if a seller does not offer Escrow, especially if you are prepared to pay all of the fees (try negotiating to split the fees). What’s Escrow? It is basically a service that acts as a middle-men for both parties. You send the money to Escrow who park it until you have received the services or goods that you ordered from the other party, in this case the domain name, website and all other assets that are part of the agreement.

Verdict: Use Escrow to make sure you get the website and data after making the payment.

5. The Revenue

As with traffic, there are good and bad revenue streams in terms of verification. Good revenue streams are not easily faked, like Adsense or Affiliate earnings. Bad revenue streams are private ad sales or one-time deals. Would you buy a website for $1,000 Dollars because the seller claimed to have received $100 per month for the last twelve months for placing a link on the website?

Another aspect that gets often overlooked is the availability of the services used. Amazon for instance blocks people from several US states from becoming an affiliate. It would be pretty bad if the website you bought made use of Amazon affiliate links.

Unless you already have an account, you should check the requirements for opening an account prior to bidding for a website.

Verdict: PPC or affiliate based offers are the most reliable revenue types. Do not bid for sites with shady or unprovable revenue streams.

6. Verification

The first thing that web investors need to do when they spot a potential investment is to verify the claims of the seller. How is that done? Start with a simple whois to see the website owner and administrative contacts. It is a good sign if they match the seller’s profile. Some website selling business sites like Flippa run their own verification system to verify a seller’s phone number and other data including Google Analytics data.

You can also look up the seller on the Internet, or use a reverse IP lookup script like ewhois to find out more about the seller’s other businesses.

Two key areas are left for you to verify: Revenue and Traffic. Traffic can be easily verified if Google Analytics is used. Ask the seller to add you to the account to get a first hand look at the site’s traffic. For revenue, it is not nearly as easy. Screenshots are fine but they are easily faked. Ask for video proof or a screencast session to see the earnings in realtime.

Verdict: Verification is very important and one of the first steps in validating a seller’s claims.

7. Niches

The best website niche is one that you have expertise in. While it is nice to sell high tech TVs on an affiliate website, it may be better to operate a site that you are familiar with. Why? Because you may get comments or questions by potential buyers. Should I get an LCD or Plasma TV, or a 3D TV? You may end up losing credibility if you cannot communicate with your buyers. Even worse, they may buy somewhere else and leave comments about your mediocre service on the Internet.

It is not really a necessity to buy a website in a niche that you are proficient in, but it can help you in the long run. Being proficient is also interesting when you add new content to the site you have just bought. New TVs coming out? Pick the best and add them to your store or site.

Verdict: Pick a niche that you are proficient in if possible.

8. Time

Would you rather buy a website for $900 that earns you $80 per month but requires you to spend one hour working per day, or a site for $500 that earns you $40 that runs on its own. The first site may look like the better deal, as it earns more per Dollar that you invest. But it also takes away 7 hours per week or 28 hours per month. And that makes it a very bad deal. First, your time is limited. If you only buy websites that require your attention, you will end up with a handful at most.

So called passive websites require almost no attention. It usually pays of to monitor the earnings and traffic, and to publish new contents a few times a month, but that’s done in less than an hour per week. That leaves ample room for many more websites.

Verdict: The less time it takes to maintain a website the better, unless you can outsource.

Anything that I left out that needs to be mentioned? Let me know in the comments.