Lorna Li | Green Marketing 2.0

On October 9th, Steve Miller, Product Manager Google Earth, gave a presentation for Net Tuesday on Google Earth Outreach - a program that enables nonprofits and NGOs to use Google Earth and other geo-spatial applications to tell their stories.

Steve highlighted a number of organizations that leveraged Google Earth to tell their stories in effective, compelling ways, starting with the organization that inspired the creation of the Google Earth Outreach program.

Google Earth Outreach got started because Steve’s friend Rebecca Moore, a passionate environmentalist, was involved with Neighbors Against Irresponsible Logging, a community group that was fighting to protect the from the San Jose Water Company’s proposed logging operations with Big Creek Lumber.

Residents were mailed a legal notice and vague black and white map of the area affected by the “proposed timber harvest.” Rebecca decided to create an alternative map on Google Earth to outline areas that the logging concession would affect and school districts that would be impacted by logging.

Google Earth Outreach is particular useful to NGOs and nonprofits that have multiple program locations as it enables them to organize information about each program and keep track of them geographically.

For example, the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum created Crisis in Darfur an interactive map of the genocide conflict in Western Sudan.

Damaged and destroyed villages are indicated with clickable orange and red flame icons that pop up a description of the village, and additional information like photos and testimonials. Top-line presentation is simple, but additional resources are available for those who want to learn more. Each window links back to the US Holocaust Memorial Museaum website.

Appalachian Voices, partnered with Google Earth to raise awareness about about mountaintop removal coal mining in the Appalachian mountains. By creating compelling presence and providing valuable information, Appalachian Voices succeeded in driving a large volume of traffic to their site and generating public awareness about their projects.

Some Google Earth best practices they employed included:

• A User’s Guide, which they placed front and center, which gives a site content overview and explains the meaning of different colors and icons

• Historical overlays of the region, combined with imagery - which presents a very compelling picture of the environmental damage caused by mountaintop removal coal mining

• Consistently placed icons to show where you can download additional data

• A Call to Action - which was to sign a petition

The results?

Within the first 10 days Appalachian voices received 10,000 signatures from all 50 states

Other product features that Steve highlighted were:

• Customization of placemark descriptions

• Photo uploads and video embedding

• Time span documentation, such as this graphical representation of world population growth.

Google provides extensive tutorials on how to use Google Earth’s powerful features. In addition, they offer a grant program which provides qualifying organization access to use Google Earth Pro, valued at $400 a license, which includes:

• Higher resolution printing

• Video-making capability - record videos

• The ability to import more data

For more information about Google Earth, visit, the Google Earth Blog. For more information about Net2 and Web 2.0 technologies that empower social change, visit the Net2 blog.

[google, google earth, google earth outreach, u.s. memorial holocaust museum, crisis in darfur, nail, Neighbors Against Irresponsible Logging, Appalachian Voices environmental activism, social activism, Rebecca Moore, Steve Miller, net tuesday, netsquared, net2, lorna li[/tags]

Simplified for Small Business, Green Enterprise, and Nonprofits

Google PageRank (PR) is a link analysis algorithm developed by Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the late 1990s. Google PageRank contributes to your search engine ranking on Google search engine results pages (SERPs).

Google PageRank is one benchmark for understanding the popularity of your web site based on the number and quality of sites that link to you. A high PR page that links to your web page will confer more PageRank to your page than an inbound link from low PR page.

According to Matt Cutts, Google’s spokesperson on SEO, PageRank values are published approximately once every 3 months. Therefore, Google PR is not an accurate metric for site popularity, as it is a cached value that is usually out of date.

What’s my Google PageRank?

If you want to view your Google PageRank, you can download the Google Toolbar or try the nifty SearchStatus plugin for FireFox.

The Google Toolbar’s PageRank feature displays as a green bar on the bottom right of your browser window. Scroll over and you will see a visited page’s PageRank as a whole number between 0 and 10, with PR 10 web site being the most popular.

If you don’t want to download the Google Toolbar, you can submit your site url to a number of free Google PageRank tools on the Web, such as the Google PageRank Lookup Report which will check the PR of up to 10 web sites.

PageRank Values for Popular Green & Environmental Web Sites

National Geographic - 8
An Inconvenient Truth - 7
The Discovery Channel - 7
The Nature Conservancy - 7
World Wildlife Fund - 7
TreeHugger - 6
Change.org - 5

Top PR sites include:

Google (of course) - 10
Yahoo - 10
Wikipedia - 9
MySpace - 8

How important is Google PageRank?

Don’t obsess over your Google PageRank - it is just one factor in the collective algorithm that Google uses to build SERPs. While having lots of relevant, inbound high PageRank links is a good thing, high PR does not guarantee high placement in SERPs.

Bear in mind that Google calculates your PR based on the page criteria and title tag of the linking page. Google can penalize a site if it detects a large number of irrelevant links. How effective Google is at determining link relevance is a subject of debate among SEOs. However, building relevant links is a good rule of thumb in order to follow if you want to increase your site’s PR.

How do I build PageRank for my site?

Andrew Gerhart’s Understanding and Building Google PageRank gives a detailed overview on how PR works and what to do to improve it. Here’s a summary:

In order to understand how to improve PageRank, you must understand how a site’s linking structure absorbs PageRank from other sites. Suppose you are TreeHugger, with a PR of 6 for your homepage.

This means a number of web sites with PR 5 and above are linking to your homepage. Your second level pages, will then have a PR of 5, and your tertiary pages have a page rank of 3, and so forth.

How Internal Linking Affects PageRank

Your internal linking structure does not have an effect in increasing PR, but sharing PR within the overall site, with decreasing powers as you go deeper into the structure of your web site.
From www.searchengineguide.com:

* Make sure that your primary page(s), the index.htm page, links to your secondary pages or secondary levels.
* Make sure that your secondary pages link to each other
* Link your secondary pages to the third level pages within their sub-directory, sub-domain, or level
* Link the third level pages within each specific sub-directory or sub-domain to each other.
* Link the third level pages back to the secondary page that it was linked from
* Make sure that the there is not heavy linking between third level pages
* Link to pages, regardless of level, that are relevant
* Link to pages, regardless of level, where the text on the page being linked from is keyword specific to the page that you are linking to
* If there are fourth level pages, follow the same linking structure that has been laid out in this checklist
* Only link pages within your site that are relevant to each other
* Use keyword specific link text when linking between pages
* Use standard HREFs in links that are easy for the search engine robots.

How External Linking Affects PageRank

External linking plays the strongest role in determining a site’s PR, but it is the factor over which you have the least control. Understand that link building campaigns can be a slow, tedious process. You can request, beg, and cajole a site owner to link to you, but they may not respond in a timely way, if at all, and will likely request a reciprocal link, which confers less link juice to you than a one-way inbound link would.

It’s not within the scope of this article to discuss link-building strategies, but to understand how external links pass PageRank to your site.

The exact algorithmic calculation that Google employs will likely never be divulged, but simply speaking, Google confers PR to you based on its evaluation of the linking sites PRs and their relevance to your page. Spammy, irrelevant links can negatively impact your PR.

If the sites linking to you all mention “Organic, fair-trade chocolate” and have above 6 PRs, and your page talks about “Organic, fair-trade chocolate”, your PR will likely be close to 6 as well.

Don’t make the mistake of randomly sending all inbound links to your homepage or the top level page of a section - the max PR you will reflect the cumulative PRs of the sites pointing to you, adjusted based on their relevance to your homepage.

Let’s say you have an e-commerce site specializing in fair trade products from around the world. The theme of your homepage is “fair trade products”, but one of your categories is “fair trade crafts”, and your subcategories are “houseware”, “jewelry”, and “stationery”. Identify high PR sites and pages for “fair trade products” and solicit links from them to your homepage. Then do the same for your “houseware” page, and then for each sub-category below that.

Tips on Boosting Google PageRank Through External Linking

* Understand the way PageRank trickles down through a site’s internal linking structure.

* To improve the PR of your site, identify the theme and market segment of each page, find relevant web pages with higher PR and ask the site owners to link to you.

* Work on the external linking for every page from the homepage to sub-pages based on each page’s topic - prioritize top level down.

Where should I seek links from to boost my Google PageRank?

Identify the keywords relevant to each page’s theme, and then Google-search these terms. The sites that show up in the top positions are the sites you want to solicit links from.

Google Directory - Science > Environment > Forests and Rainforests

Another good place to begin is the Google Directory, which lists sites by category in order of PageRank. However, a site’s willingness to link to you is directly proportional to the content of the page. If your content is not that exciting, you will have a harder time getting links.