After all the posts I read this week about the page rank update I told myself I wasn’t going to post anything about the topic. I thought it had all been said enough (and that is still probably true), until I noticed my page rank actually went up. [A little disclaimer here, before last week I had a PR0 and now I have a PR2. So, I had no place to go but up.]
There are other examples surfacing now that also show increases in PR’s like, PageRank update in process, this time for real, where AdesBlog talks about a few of his sites that have increased their page rank. Another recent post from ProBlogger also touches on several of these current topics in, The Google Page Rank Pendulum Swings…. Again, and if you are still interested, there are hundreds (if not more) of posts on the Page Rank update.
Some PR’s Are Going Up, Some Down
In a recent post I did on the goals of this blog, Reaching a Set Goal and Working on Others, a the Page Rank was not even listed as one of the top ten because I thought it was pretty much out of the question for the age of my domain, and the fact that I was still trying to build quality content on the site. Little did I know, all I needed was an update to Google’s Page Rank system.
Here it is only one week later and I have gone from a PR0 to a PR2 this weekend. I started looking at some of the other sites I own, and it was a mixed bag. Most of these domains are either new (mostly content based), or developed storefront pages (non-content based), and they are sites I either own or work extremely close with on a daily basis.
- chipseo.com – PR0 to PR2 [content / blog based] | NET +2
- islandzephyr.com – PR0 to PR1 [mixed info / content] | NET +1
- ki4wlr.com – PR0 to PR2 [content / blog based] | NET +2
- site 4 – PR0 to PR2 [content / blog based] | NET +2
- site 5 – PR4 to PR3 [storefront / sales based] | NET -1
- site 6 – PR3 to PR1 [storefront / sales based] | NET -2
- site 6 – PR2 to PR1 [storefront / sales based] | NET -1
Have You Checked Your Storefront Pages?
I checked a few eCommerce / storefront sites and pages I am familiar with and it also seems to be a mixed bag. Two high traffic storefronts in the craft industry, Artbeads.com and Fire Mountain Gems, both had PR4′s and both maintained their PR4, at least to this point.
Both of these eCommerce stores are very established online businesses, and both have a good combination a product catalog sku’s and content for their customers in the way of guides and reviews. Both stores also have almost no online advertising to speak of since they are selling their own products (they probably wouldn’t promote someone else’s on their store), and one uses the Yahoo Store shopping cart system and one is independent. If you have your own online storefront, check your PR and see what the results look like. Do you have a good combination of content to help your customers, and a SKU based catalog / shopping cart system? If you sell on multiple sales channels like many businesses, has one been effected over the other?
Is There Anything To Conclude From This
If you look at the list above you will notice a few things. One, none of these sites I mention are super high traffic ranking sites. Two, it is a mix of non-content informational, content based, and storefront based sites. Three, all of the content based site rankings went up, all of the storefront selling sites went down. I don’t really think there is anything to conclude from this information. I have seen just as many high quality, high ranking sites go down over the weekend as well. I am not going to touch on the link selling issue to much, there are enough blogs posting on that already, but I will say that none of the examples listed above are real high text link selling sites (most none at all), and I have tried as much as possible to maintain the Webmaster Guidelines that Google has put forth on their Webmaster Tools site.
Because buying and selling links is not to much of an issue among the examples put forth above, and some went up and some went down, you could say that Google is placing a higher emphasis on content, but all you have to do is read a few posts from the high traffic blogs to discount that, so, I just offer the information for what it is, a mixed bag of ups and downs.
Another Goal Reached Anyway
One of the milestone goals for this blog was to reach a PR1 in a certain amount of time and instead it reached a PR2 in less than 4 weeks. It does looks like there has just been a complete rearrangement of the PR system, so I am not sure what to think of my new found PR2, but it was one of the goals I had set for this site and I am glad to have reached it so quickly. Have you had any sites move up in rank this weekend? If so, are they content, informational, or storefront based sites?
Update to Google Page Rank [September 2008]
Google updates their page rank system every so often, almost like a software update. It will often be announced on Matt Cutts blog. When the update is going to happen he will often say, there is a page rank update happening this weekend. When you find this out, just make note of where you were and where you ended up. It may tell you something about your traffic and how Google sees this traffic and its importance and you can improve your blog accordingly.
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In my last post, Reasons to Keep Running Google Adsense Ads, I looked at some good reasons to keep running Google Adsense ads, or to consider using them on your blog or eCommerce website. Here I will take a look at some of the other marketing options available, examine some of the less desirable effects of the Adsense program, and make some conclusions about the points made from these two articles.
This is not a bash Adsense article, obviously I use them myself, but what all business owners should do, look at as many options as they can and decided which one fits the best according to their business needs. On a side note, I have an upcoming set of articles that examines both sides of Google Adwords too, so stay tuned.
Marketing is Not One Size Fits All
All you have to do it run a search for Adsense and you will see so many different responses for and against using these type of ads, and it might be hard to tell what really works. I think the real answer to that questions is what works for you may not work for me and vice-versa. Each site is so different, has different goals and objectives, but sooner or later, if your store or site keeps growing you will need to look at some online marketing, either to buy some ads (which would be Google Adwords) or to sell them (Adsense), but the growing opportunities available with smaller companies continues to grow each day.
More and more businesses are becoming very specialized. It is important for these niche markets businesses to look at different options that will benefit your company, not just right now, but options that will enhance what will be your long term marketing plan. In the same manner that eCommerce shopping companies have become a collection of niche markets, so are the options available in the online marketing field itself. Look for companies that specialize in your niche market or are at least familiar with your companies specific needs.
Adsense is a great one size fits all ad program, and you can even get very specific with their affiliate ads but there are so many other good online marketing companies today that it is only prudent to not limit your business to one particular company or ad program.
You are Advertising for Your Competition
I generally write from the perspective of the company or store site selling a product, so talking about Adsense is really the opposite of what companies should look at when they are trying to sell a product, right? After all, you are selling your products, not someone else’s, so looking at selling ads on your site might be counterproductive. For this example I think Blog About Crafts put it best on a recent post called, Adsense Kills Business, where she talks about the difference between running a business and a hobby. Treat your business like a hobby and that is what it is, treat your hobby like a business and chances are, you are in business. You do generally have to act and look like a professional to be a professional.
There is a big difference from a personal site like Blog About Crafts and a professional services or product selling site
Look at the screen shot below. I grabbed the header from the online store page that sells crystals and beads. At the top, the ad shown will take people away from the store you are looking at and at bare minimum will show other options to your own store or site. The Adsense links at the top are taken right off the content of the store selling the same products. Now sometimes this is what you want to do. You might be networking between several different companies and some reciprocal links may be called for, but Adsense is not a reciprocal link program.
Does it Add Value to Your Company
Marketing should not only add value to the company you are advertising for, but it should also add value to your company. This may sound strange but there has to be an exchange of value for it to be worth doing. This is the whole concept of business and what you are doing by selling your products or services. Someone else finds a value in what you are selling and gives you something of value in exchange.
This is going to be different depending on what your company goals ultimately are for your business. Usually the value added to your company is going to be money paid to you for advertising. If your main market is to sell advertising to pay for the production and maintenance of your site (much like Google itself), then it may very well add value to your site, but you still need to look at how much value it adds.
Adsense may pay, eventually (see previous article), but I haven’t found returns that would be considered great by any means, at least not something that could be called “revenue” to me. The value exchange should be as close to equal as possible. I.e. a highly valued area of your site should produce an expected return, so be sure that you have some way to measure if you are giving a whole lot more to your advertiser than you are receiving in return. This doesn’t have to be exact, but it shouldn’t be totally unequal. Many times I think the Adsense program has been so successful for Google because they get so much coverage on so many sites with very little payment in return.
One key to this is testing. There is a good article on Blogging Experiment, How to Find AdSense Alternatives for Your Site, lists several alternative companies and options, but also makes a good point when he says testing is a very important part of finding good alternatives. Many companies offer a 30 day trial if it is a paid monthly service, others will give you some kind of credit that should give you an idea of how well it will work. One problem with this is it might not be a long enough period of time to see an actual return if you ran it continuously.
Don’t Keep All Your Marketing Eggs in One Basket
This is a simple point but one worth mentioning. You can continue to develop your site or store, increase your traffic, sales, subscriptions, and use just one marketing company but if something ever happens you have to just start over again. If you build up high enough revenues (a good thing, yes), but with only one company, if and when that revenue is ever lost your company will suffer much more so than if you spread the marketing revenue around to a few different sources.
You can do a quick search and find many examples of people that have been banned from using Google’s Adsense program for one reason or another. From my experience on eBay, it seems to work the same way with Google, once you are gone, you are gone, no questions or appeal needed, and it doesn’t always seem to be that hard to do.
SEO Refugee wrote a rather nerve racking article, Get ANY Adsense Account Banned, which explained in some detail how easy it is to get an account banned. After reading that you really hope the competition people who might not care all that much for your company doesn’t get a hold of that information. Granted it does require the other party to really do some work, but some don’t care how the get rid of the competition, just that they do. This unethical practice is terrible to say the very least, but I have to assume it exists and Google should have something in place to prevent this type of fraud from happening.
Complexity and Unknowns
This is not referring to the complexity of implementing the program, I actually stated the opposite on my previous post, but the complexity that is Google and the unknown that goes along with their programs and services. As with any company of Google’s size it is very hard to know what their internal checks and balances are and how they effect their own customers. Google, for good reason, keeps their proprietary data and development information very secret so it is hard to know what might effect your marketing campaign and what might not.
One issue that has come up recently is the paid link topic and how or if Google will penalize a site for using paid links. Google has actually provided some good information about this topic lately, see my article, Matt Cutts Updates Google’s nofollow Use, and it has been very helpful, but it has taken a while to get to that point of knowing what to do and what not to do. From Google’s perspective it is about stopping spam, not necessarily paid links, but if use paid links as part of your marketing campaign you should know what effect it might have on your Google indexing and your marketing campaign.
It isn’t really what you know, but what you don’t. The issues that Google faces are not going to be the same as your company, and they are going to do what is in the best interest of their company, just like everyone in business. Google is in business to make a profit, not to make sure your company has enough ad revenue. Once identified, those interests may be contrary to your business efforts. They may not be, but the point is you don’t know. Good business practice says to minimizing the risks as much as possible, and that is very fluid, sometimes you don’t know what those will be from one moment to the other.
Affiliates Can Offer a Good Value
Google Adsense is one of these, yes, but there are many different affiliate companies (Commission Junction being of the biggest) and there are some very good programs to look at, even with smaller company’s websites. Many companies now offer their own affiliate program where you can earn a return or you can pay others to be affiliates for you to send traffic to your site. This post won’t be detailed enough to get into all the different platforms that affiliates offer but they are very extensive.
A new project I found this weekend looks to be very promising, called the Rubicon Project, it allows you to control all your different affiliate programs in one place. They are just in Beta testing right now but the feedback so far has been very positive, according to one of the founders of the project. I will post a full review of their company in an upcoming post and go into more detail about affiliate programs in that article.
Conclusion
Marketing your products or services takes a lot of work, research, testing, and perseverance. There are many online options available for just about any niche market company or blog, look around, do your homework, see what else might fit your business needs in addition to Google Adsense (or Adwords for that matter). Remember that results won’t happen overnight, but using alternative ad companies will minimize your risk and should continue to add value to your company.
Try to use a balanced and well planned out approach. Re-read your marketing plans and goals and see if what you are doing will meet those goals. Online marketing, no matter who you use or what method you employ, should offer at least an equal return for your exchange of time, money, or space on your website. If not, you might want to look for another option. If you want to keep running the same ads for no return, that is fine too, just let me know, I would love to place an ad on your site for free… any takers?
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When considering an advertising company for your blog or website Google is probably going to be high on the list, but shouldn’t be the only one. I opened a Google Adsense account on April of 2004. The screen shot shown here was take a few days ago that shows we have now reached the payout amount minimum of $100 for Google Adsense.
Obviously we were not publishing ads on big PR7 sites, we just used it here and there on a few different store pages, but, for those counting, 3 1/2 years is a long time. Comparing different revenue rates for different people is impossible because of all the variables involved, but that isn’t really the point here, so instead I will just give you my $.02, don’t spend it all in one place.
Sometimes Time Spent is a Little Money Earned
It may be a cliche, but does that make it any less true? Once we opened this account we threw it up on a few different sites and quickly forgot about it. It wasn’t until I started trying to add a few Google ads recently that I realized what ads I had run and on what websites. It was really nice to log on and see a balance of around $80 when I had forgotten about it, but at the same time, it was only $80, after 3 years and a few months. That comes to approximately $1.90 per month for the time period stated, not a great return, but you have to look at the time that was spent to receive that as well, and it was probably about an hour.
Once I actually started working with the ad program again, started putting some time into placing the ads on pages with higher traffic rankings and most of the normal things you would do to increase your ad revenue, it started moving a little faster. It took 3+ years to go from $0 to $80, and only a few weeks for it to move from $80 to $100 with just a few changes to where the ads ran and on what sites.
No matter if you are running an eCommerce site, a blog, or an informational static pages, the more quality time you spend placing ads in the proper locations, producing well written content, creating a good design, and proper SEO, among other things, the more your traffic will increase, and the better your ad revenue will be. This is not something special with the Adsense program, it works with just about everything.
It is not always at the return rate you would like though. Sometimes we can spend a lot of time for a lot of revenue and other times we can spend a lot of time without much return at all. The key is of course to try to minimize our risks and to look for places that will provide a good return verses our time spent. That was the question I asked myself when I started looking more closely at my Adsense account.
There are some good reasons to keep running Adsense ads on your blog or website. You can do a quick search and find people that love it and hate it, but lets look at some solid reasons for keeping at least some Adsense ads running, and some reasons we should look elsewhere. In this post we will look at some Reasons to Keep Running Google Adsense Ads and in the next post we will look at Reasons to Look at Options Other Than Google Adsense Ads.
Reasons To Keep Running Google Adsense Ads
Listed below are some positive points for starting, or continuing to use the Adsense program. This is not a pros and cons look at the program, that I will save for another article so keep that in mind when looking over the below items.
Google is Google
Google’s complete presence on the Internet is unmatched. Sure there are countless good companies on the Internet, but few have permeated and infiltrated companies and personal pages from the biggest to the smallest little site out there like Google. Biggest doesn’t always mean the best, but it does have its advantages. Google is Google may not be a great reason but… it’s Google. Everyone knows who they are and users know the ads most likely won’t contain any malicious links.
Ease of Use
There are so many different options within Adsense it takes some time just to explore all the opportunities available. You can do everything from link ads to affiliate ads and everything in between. You can customize the layout, integrate colors that match your website, choose from many different sizes and shapes that will fit just about any ad block, and choose from a list of affiliate ads so large that it would be hard not to find something that goes well with your site and matches your target audience.
Information Availability
Google has so much information about the Adsense program available on the Internet that if you can’t find what you are looking for from Google chances are you will find it somewhere. Google has a blog devoted to Adsense and updates it frequently. This goes right in line with number 5 but is a little different. You don’t just want to see the polished view that a company gives out, you want to know what the real issues are. These can be both positive and negative items, but with some newer companies it isn’t as easy to find out the real information you are looking for, and with Google there is just tons of it.
Coming up soon I will be reviewing several different marketing options for your eCommerce store site, and a few of these companies are brand new. One of the newest companies I am looking at is only about 30 days old and they are charging quite a bit for their services, but when you go to look for information outside of the company you can find very little other than what the company has put out for us to see.
Continued Advancements
Google continues to add to the program and probably will always do so. The most recent highlight for the Adsense program would be the addition of Google Ads for video units. This is something that has been rumored about for a while and has now been implemented. Right now it is only available in the United States but it is sure to be added to the U.K. soon.
There is a lot of information posted about this new advancement and it looks to be very promising. Search Engine Roundtable posted an article on how to setup video units (see article), and there are bound to be new advances in how and where the ad program will be used in the future. After all, Google is all about ad revenue, that is what built this company so it will continue to focus on this for some time to come.
Another recent topic has been that Google added new payment options for people in Malaysia where they can get paid through Western Union. In a recent article from Adesblog, How to withdraw your AdSense earnings through WesternUnion, he takes a good look at how this new option functions, and although I basically run from payments via Western Union I am sure it is something those in other parts of the world are glad it has been added as an option.
Support Network
The sheer number of people that must work on, and with, the Adsense program must be huge, so it should count for something. The network of support pages and content to help new users is extensive and most of it very helpful. In a recent article on their blog, Getting more quality inventory for publishers, Google talks about improving the validity of their links and several other important issues facing its users.
Our goal with this change is to ensure the long-term effectiveness of the referrals program for both publishers and advertisers. By increasing the value and quality of the referral network, we believe we’ll attract more advertisers and provide more opportunities for you to earn.
Like most things Google, they also have an extensive Google Adsense Group that helps with current issues and questions you might have, and with so many people using the Adsense program you are sure to find some good help in this particular group.
Availability To Have Your Ad Seen Worldwide
Availability is something that not all ad programs can offer. Google will run your ads worldwide and not even Yahoo’s ad program is as easy to use when you want a worldwide marketing program put in place. It is as easy as choosing that option and they continue to add the program to new areas of the world all the time. Google recently announced (see announcement) the Adsense program would start in Vietnam and Indonesia and it isn’t likely to stop there.
Reporting, Tracking, and User Interface
I put this in there because when I compare it to other ad opportunities, most do not compare to the reporting and tracking functionality that Google Adsense presents to its users. You can track your ad programs by many different options like adding new channels for specific pages or sites you want to track. It shows you where your ads are most effective and where you should improve or move ads if they are not getting the proper visibility. The reporting functions are pretty standard but the detail you can get goes back years if you have that much data and you can customize reports to meet the needs of your company.
As I mentioned at the top of this article, coming up, I will post an article about the many other options that companies can choose when looking at their online marketing strategies. To me, these are probably more interesting since everyone knows about Google, but may not know about many of the other opportunities available to all of us. Google is certainly a viable option for those wishing to advertise on their website in an easy to use manner, results may vary.
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This is probably the last update I will post about this issue since I have covered the topic in two previous posts, What is With the rel=nofollow Penalty and Update: What is With the rel=nofollow, but it is worth an additional follow up here with Matt Cutts latest post, Quick comment on nofollow. Matt has updated Google’s interpretation of the use of nofollow and answered some questions that had been flying around lately.
I did learn some new information about the issue from reading the lastest posts, and when you should consider using the rel=nofollow code with your links. Matt also answered some of the questions posed by seomoz.org in his post, Matt Cutts on Nofollow, Links-Per-Page and the Value of Directories, where he asked several unanswered questions about the nofollow issue. Most of his remarks come from a post to the Google Group, Google Webmaster, where he says that webmasters are free to use the nofollow how they see fit of course but something else I had been wondering and just didn’t ask yet, was if I have my robots.txt file modified where the entire directory is disallowed, will that work too? Apparently so.
Matt states in the Google group post, Appropriate uses of nofollow tag — popular pick , where he says just that. Thanks for answering my question without me asking.
The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow’ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don’t even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.
Some of the information I took from all these posts is that the nofollow issue and its use is far more broad than just for the paid links you might have on your site, and it is used to keep spam off your site, or at least from being indexed through your site, lowering the possible usefulness and ranking of your site. To be moderately educated on this issue will certainly not hurt your abilities as a webmaster or to help market other clients sites and ecommerce stores. Things to remember for me would be:
You can use your robots.txt file instead
Using your robots.txt file will generate the same good results, and might be easier than worrying about each individual link.
You can use a meta tag
Placing a nofollow meta tag at the top of your page will keep the index from taking place on a page level
Use it on pages that won’t convert well
Using a nofollow tag on a sign-in link or an account link is a good idea too. These links will not produce any positive effect on your traffic or ranking, it doesn’t have to just be a paid link, any link that doesn’t become an asset to your site.
Most of the focus on the nofollow topic has been geared towards blogs with comments being posted but I will write an article coming up that shows how using this in combination with your ecommerce stores can be a good thing as well, it is not just for the bloggers. Any advantage you can gain over your competition on your ecommerce platform is good, and I would expect few of the very small ecommerce companies recognizes this as an issue.
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Now I know I am not the most seasoned engineer, programmer, or any type of SEO professional (as I am none of those), but I can read.
I have spent quite a bit of time reading and re-reading the information on the issue regarding rel=nofollow and paid links, so follow me through this logic if you can. After all this reading I came to only one conclusion. I don’t have a clue as to what is considered to be good standard practice all the way down to what is considered black hat operations done by well meaning individuals that didn’t even know there was such a term, or knew about the whole payola issue, or that this guys great link contest had screwed up his rankings royally (or his royal rankings). Didn’t blogging use to be about saying what you think? Not when it comes to making a living I guess, and I understand that.
From an outsider thought, it is bordering on paranoia, but I know it has its merits. At this point I am not sure if I should even link to the posts I am going to refer to, but I will anyway as my traffic rankings are unimpressive right now anyway. My background and work is not in SEO but in small online businesses, so SEO is important for many reasons of course, but the companies I work with want to see a steady increases in their sales from day to day, but they could care less about some href relationship code, if they can even get that far.
What is important to them is sales. I know that SEO can have a direct impact on sales, but it is of less importance to the small business owners, the ones I know anyway, than seeing an actual product move off the shelves. I do think it is important to know all I can know about current issues, so as I said in the beginning, I started reading. There is the Forbes article, Google Purges the Payola, where they talk about the downfall of linking and selling links:
Search engines hate this kind of paid-for popularity. Google’s Webmaster guidelines ban buying links just to pump search rankings. Other search engines including Ask (nasdaq: IACI – news – people ), MSN, and Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO – news – people ), which mimic Google’s link-based search rankings, also discourage buying and selling links.
Among many other points the article made, it went on to talk about how much money some of these questionable sites are making, some charging more than $600,000 a year for link farms. At those fees it would be hard to keep people who don’t care about what color the hat is, away.
Then you have the Matt Cutts blog on How to Report Paid Links. Matt seems to be the authoritative view on the subject since his job at Google has to do with making sure the search listings yield relevant results. His post is very interesting and does shed some light on the issue but I still walk away confused, and I guess some others do as well as he states some Q&A’s:
Q: Now when you say “paid links,†what exactly do you mean by that? Do you view all paid links as potential violations of Google’s quality guidelines?
A: Good question. As someone working on quality and relevance at Google, my bottom-line concern is clean and relevant search results on Google. As such, I care about paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings. I’m not worried about links that are paid but don’t affect search engines. So when I say “paid links†it’s pretty safe to add in your head “paid links that flow PageRank and attempt to game Google’s rankings.â€
From that, it tells me that Google is really more trying to get rid of those attempting to game Google (a verb I guess). Those of use who are just trying to make back a few dollars (or more like pennies) to off-set the cost of running the site, hosting, and so on, shouldn’t be penalized for that, but I don’t guess those this low on the totem pole really are?
After-all, Google’s main revenue source is ad-revenue, right? Shouldn’t we be allowed the same benefit, or is it only through Adsense that it is acceptable? Don’t get me wrong, I love Google and all it does, so I guess what I should be asking is what is taking them so long to just buy Text-Link Ads (TLA) already.
Then I came across David Airey’s blog and read his great post on How I Reversed My Google Rank Penalty and left glad he fixed it and confused as to how a seemingly well meaning person ended up on the Google hit list (better than being on eBay’s hit list). He did have some great points, and Matt seemed to be able to help him out, so all is well that ends well I guess. A few pointers from that post:
Why I actually got penalised by Google
First, however, and according to Matt Cutts himself (head of the Google spam team), my Google penalty was imposed for two main reasons:
- Having paid links to bad neighbourhoods
- Trying to game my search engine rankings with black hat SEO
steps to avoid a Google penalty
- Don’t participate in any form of black hat SEO
- Add the rel=â€nofollow†tag to any paid links on your website
- Be careful not to link to bad neighbourhoods
Did I forget to mention the bad neighborhoods? Sorry, you can check that out too, it is worth a look. I live out in the boon docks now thank goodness, perhaps I don’t have to worry about the neighbors too much.
So, after all this, I was wondering about my own site’s future and those I work with. I did setup another blog with a Text-Link Ad widget that sold two links. Uhhh ohh. The death blow for my $6.28 earned last month. 
Our traffic is still climbing nicely for now, but what’s the old saying, “something from nothing is something”.
Well, why not take a more direct approach. I decided to just contact TLA directly and ask them how and where I could add the appropriate nofollow links into the widget code I was using. I really didn’t expect much of a response anyway, but you can see from the email screen shot above, it was brief and to the point.
You may not add nofollow to the links
Well, that clears it all up. I suddenly realized what their stand on the issue was, no surprise, they want to sell more links, which means Google and the paid link companies have decided to put a bullseye on… us… either way you go it seems you are in the wrong. If I was a better programmer I could just add them in the widget somewhere, but there is only time for so much.
So, I emailed them back again and asked them for a further explanation. The very prompt and kind response was a link to a blog post for further reading. Oh great I thought, like I haven’t read enough. It was a SEOmoz post, The “Google Payola” Issue Isn’t Going Away Anytime Soon, which I actually hadn’t read, probably because it was published about 30 minutes before I emailed TLA.
Although the article did get some flack from SEO Refuge on their post, Rand & SEOmoz: Unprofessional and Irresponsible Actions, it did have some good points, but it wasn’t really all that pro-TLA, never-the-less, they sent me the link? Well, I think I hit everything (oh, I forgot to mention something about John Chow, oh well, sorry), and I probably broke and kept every rule of blog posting all at the same time. Where does one go from here. I am sure from all the SEO errors in this post it will never be seen, so, I think I will go back and look at one of my own posts, Simple Steps to Increase Blog Traffic and Pagerank, and read step number 10.
Have fun and be positive – if you get as far as a top ten list, number ten for me is always have fun. No one likes to read or hear negatives all the time, it gets tiring, so try something new, have a contest, give something away, do something fun.
I didn’t make it as far as number 10 in a list of anything here, but I think it is needed at this point. Is there a Google penalty for going to sleep? Maybe that is why the Yankee’s can’t seem to beat the Indians, oh, and I still don’t think that kid from Michigan hasn’t made that field goal yet but no one at The Big House cares about that now. I am sure Google had something to do with it.
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That is the big question for most of us of course, but notice I said immediate future traffic, these are not quick and easy steps, but simple ones I think will make a difference for future traffic. One thing I have learned over the years is that nothing comes overnight, and it is generally the methodical approach that works the best in the long run.
Although I have been writing on websites and blogs now for several years, starting over on a newer topic, for me, got me thinking about some of the basic steps for increasing your blog traffic, and eventually your pagerank.
I have a few blogs and sites I started that have a PR4 (Google Pagerank 4), and several that have a PR3. Not super high I know, but these were very niche market sites and blogs so I didn’t really expect them to go much over a PR4, and I really felt anything around a PR3 or PR4 was still good for the subject matter.
Of course this topic has been blogged to death on so much I am sure you might be thinking there isn’t really anything new that can be said on the subject, and that may be true, but sometimes it just helps to write it down again to keep it fresh in our minds. What I am posting on here are simple steps that I can take when I create a new blog or site, nothing complicated.
I do find that as we become comfortable in a specific area, I can become complacent and I know when that happens I just forget about the little things. So… in no particular order:
- Write like you have an audience – when anything is new, you are basically talking to yourself and a few others you can con to view your site, but as soon as you think, no one is ever going to see this, you start writing that way. Funny thing about the Internet is success on one particular post or subject can go boom overnight if something weird happens, and you certainly don’t want to look at something you wrote and go, opps, didn’t think anyone would ever read that. So, write like your RSS feed subscription has 10,000 members and when it does you will be ready.
- Be professional – if you want people to treat your blog, business, products, customer service, employees, or you, like a professional you have to act like one yourself. You may operate out of your garage (nothing wrong with that) and you can earn the respect of your customers very quickly when you talk, write, and act like a professional. In the same way, you can work in an expensive office and have the opposite effect. When you are writing or corresponding with someone on your website or blog, be a professional.
- Be courteous
- Use good grammar
- If you are a terrible speller like me, use spell check (2 or 3 times)
- Don’t use offensive language of any kind
- If you use images, use good looking images
- Know your target market – When you don’t have any traffic, knowing your target audience might be more difficult, but you know who you are intending on reaching at some point, so write what will interest your target market. Stay on topic, unless you specifically state otherwise, and don’t insult the market you are trying to reach.
- Don’t worry about your competition – at least not yet. If you are just getting started you should already have a good idea about how your topic, subject, products, etc., fare in the marketplace. Focus on what you do best to get things moving, there will be plenty of time to try to get that number one spot later. To start, be your own best competition. One of my most favorite single quotes is from Nehemiah who said “I consulted with myself and contended”. Consult with yourself, don’t worry about what everyone else is doing.
- Read and comment on other blogs – this is important. If you want to know what others are interested in within your topic, you need to read, a lot. This is good for several reasons. You don’t want to just post the same thing everyone else is posting, and you also want to be current and educated in your field. When commenting on others blogs or sites, be sure to do step number 2, be professional, don’t just post a comment for the sake of posting the comment, make it sincere and meaningful.
- Post – and often. I think I read only 20% of content sites have fresh, current content. Be one of the them if you want to increase your traffic.
- Interact with others on your blog – this includes responding to comments posted on your blog. Others want to know a real live person is over there behind the keyboard.
- Know your topic or subject matter – Be accurate. You don’t want to talk over the head of your readers, but you certainly don’t want to look like an idiot either. Know what you are talking about. If you don’t, people will know, and especially on the internet, you will be called on it. If you aren’t sure about a subject there is plenty of information on the Internet, just take the time to do your research. This isn’t always easy, and it isn’t an exact science. There will always be someone who knows more about a subject than you, and hopefully someone who knows less, but you don’t have to make it obvious. There are many many more people who know more about SEO and marketing than I do, but I always try to be as accurate as possible.
- Quote your sources – do not just paste text and show your readers where you got your information. You don’t have to disclose everything, just make sure you give credit where credit is due, it gives credit to you (kind of catchy too).
- Have fun and be positive – if you get as far as a top ten list, number ten for me is always have fun. No one likes to read or hear negatives all the time, it gets tiring, so try something new, have a contest, give something away, do something fun.
You may be thinking, we these aren’t really “blog” things and what do they have to do with increasing my traffic. Well, your traffic will come eventually, but taking some simple steps now will probably help more later than you think. The better your traffic, the higher your pagerank, alexa ranking, compete rank will be, the higher your ad rates will become. There are certainly other things that will help, steps that are not so simple, good SEO, design, and all that, but that is for another post, because one of them is also, be brief, which I can rarely seem to follow.
If you have read this far, you can see by now that you can also take off the part of the title that says Blog Traffic and Pagerank and replace it with business or customers and it should work the same. Good business sometimes starts with simple steps.
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WOW, that was quick super fast. Well, there is the answer to my test to see how long it would take Google to index my new site, completely new url and domain name for this blog. It took less than 6 hours. Now being in the business we are in, I totally understand that indexing it totally different than a Google pagerank or Alexa ranking (which I would expect to show no data yet) of course, but you have to admit that was pretty fast.
The total time elapse from registering the new domain name to indexing was less than 12 hours total. In fact, the cashed page that Google has is one that was taken before I added my theme to the site, and that was the first thing I did. The three screen shots posted below are taken of the indexing that Google did at 17:50 on October 2nd, 2007.
The registration information for the domain:
Domain Name: CHIPSEO.COM
Created on: 02-Oct-07
Expires on: 02-Oct-08
Last Updated on: 02-Oct-07
I would like to hear from others that may have tried this and would like to know what their results were as well. Post your comments and let me know. I will update this post later with some of the information I used to create the data.
So far there is no other search engine that I can find that has indexed this site as of this writing, Google seems to be the only one so far. Now I just need to see how long it will take to get a PR7, I am guessing a year or more (probably more), but a PR2 or PR3 would be nice in a few months time. We will see.
