Google plans to announce today that they are partnering with state governments to help make their public records more accessible:

J.L. Needham, who manages Google's public-sector content partnerships, said at least 70 percent of visitors to government Web sites get there by using commercial search engines. But too often, he said, Web searches do not turn up the information people are looking for simply because government computer systems aren't programmed in a way that allows commercial search engines to access their databases.

As more of this content comes online, industries such as real estate and insurance will get uglier as commercial players are forced out of the SERP and into buying AdWords. But on the upside, if you gain editorial access to one of these trusted websites it should be quite easy to rank for virtually anything.

If you are not nepotistic in your marketing some of your best content will go unnoticed, especially if you write at a level that is beyond most of your readers. Many of the people who are popular are not popular just because of content quality...there are so many nepotistic partnerships that go unspoke of that it is quite scary. Anyway, here is a brilliant post by Andy Hagans about how to sell a site for a million dollars. He is a friend, and the link may be nepotistic, but I am surprised that it got so little traction for how great it is. I guess more bloggers want to be told their blog is worth a million than want to learn how to get those million dollars in hand. To each their own.

You can tell that he is writing from his experience and learning while he is actively doing what he is talking about. That is typically where the best ideas come from...when you escape ideals and theory and talk about the trends you see right now and what is working for you right now.

If you have a site where it takes little effort to update it then the number of pages a site has is not a big factor, but if you are buying a website that is sold as an authority the number of pages is a crucial factor to consider.

Less is More:

More is better is not always true. The two most recent interesting looking sites I have seen for sale recently have been non-appealing because they have SO MUCH CONTENT for their traffic stream. A friend of mine has a 20 page website that gets 1,500 uniques a day. In the same vertical a site with 20,000 pages is getting less than double that traffic stream.

Is the 20,000 page site an authority site? If it is, it is one that has a bad content management system, duplicate content issues, and internal architecture problems. I could clean those problems up an increase traffic, but if the first thing you have to do when you buy an asset is to gut a large chunk of it then you might be just as good off starting from scratch.

Why Less is More:

I don't mind buying smaller sites that I can extend out. One friend of mine runs an AdSense site that was about 30 pages a year ago and made $600 a month. As he extended it out to a 1,000 page website (while marketing it to keep building authority along with content) the traffic went up 40 fold and the earnings went from $600 a month to $750 a day.

That 20 page website I mentioned above is being fine tuned to earn more right now. If it was extended to rank for a couple related terms that are not yet heavily targeted it could double its earnings by adding another 10 pages of content to the website.

Track Your Growth:

The last thing you want to do is add so much low value content that you spread your link authority so thin that you best earning pages no longer rank. As you add new pages make sure you consider their effect on your supplemental ratio, and how your internal link structure is flowing link authority toward your key pages.

If you are building your own site make sure you track traffic streams and earnings and base your internal architecture around maximizing those while keeping the site looking legitimate. If you test something and it does not perform suppress its roll in the site navigation while building more authority. Keep testing extending the site in other potentially profitable directions.

Getting Rid of the Garbage:

If you buy a site off someone else you are buying

• the domain name

• the brand
• the site age
• the link authority
• the content
• the traffic and revenue streams
• any upside potential you see that the market does not see (and thus does not value)

If you buy a site which has limited earnings for its size, when gutting out the bad content you need to first see what is worth keeping. The easiest way to do that is

• track conversions to see what pages are profitable

• see what pages have quality backlinks (using Yahoo! Site Explorer, or maybe sign up for Google Sitemaps)
• look for pages with surprisingly large traffic streams or other indications that they could become self reinforcing authorities that garner recurring links.

Some of the content may also be valuable, but just underperforming because the site has so much more content then authority. In that case, don't gut useful original content, just ensure that you focus more effort on building the site's authority before you bulk up the site with more content pages that won't get indexed or ranked.

Google has been progressively eating their own search results with...Google.

I hate to use Avril Lavigne as an example, but I am about to go to a sweet concert, so maybe this is ok. Looking at the following searches, notice how Google is promoting Google or sites that are editorially selected and trusted by Google.

Their music service promotes trusted resellers, their news service promotes trusted news sources, and their top ranking YouTube pages (promoted externally and internally and algorithmically favored) will eventually consist largely of trusted content providers.

This self arbitrage and backdoor partnerships as organic relevancy work on core popular search phrases:

and it scales on through to less popular phrases that are hot right now:

If you didn't understand what I was talking about in Google Closing the Window of Opportunity, the above images should do a good job of showing how search is moving away from purely algorithmic to an editorial blend approach, and how Google is making itself a leading vertical search engine in many verticals.

The easiest way for Google to be perceived as relevant is to make it easy for other authorities to want to talk about Google as being innovative and relevant. If Google is willing to send significant traffic to trusted sources how could those sources do anything but trust Google?

When you buy site targeted AdSense ads (or other CPM priced ads), there are easy ways publishers can inflate their pageviews and ad inventory. I listed a number of them here, but a few other common techniques are

• showing ads to bots (or running traffic bots against their site)

• refreshing pageviews
• framing external pages
• adding a forum to a website
• creating traffic exchanges and siphoning off credits
• creating ad units that offer no value, but cash in on naive advertisers

Here is an ad unit on a popular category leading hub site. Notice that it is literally below the page footer in the forum section of the site. It is a great site with lots of traffic, but it is hard to profit from that ad unit.

If you blindly buy site targeted ads those are the impressions you buy first...the ones that are deemed to have the least value and/or the ones that are hardest to match to a commercial intent.

If you buy site targeted ads, in many cases you will be buying some amount of junk, so if you are buying as a direct marketer it is best to try to buy the most precise and most relevant ad possible. That could involve any of the following

• contacting the webmaster directly for an ad on a specific section or page (prices can vary widely - I have seen ads of similar value in the same vertical priced from $6 to $1,000)

• creating a relevant ad and ad group targeted specifically to a site
• targeting a specific folder or specific page

Google's site targeted tool tends to aim for bulk buyers who do not care if they get a bit of remnant garbage inventory. They do not make it easy to add a specific page to a site targeted ad group unless you click the edit sites and CPMs link from a site targeted group, at which point in time you can list individual URLs or folders you want to target. Remember that if you list a home page or root folder page it will also place your ad on other pages from that site or folder.