Buying Text Links: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Posted by reviews on Aug 17, 2007
Buying Text Links; Good or Bad?
There are many questions and at least as many answers to buying text links. Will it help your search engine rankings? Will you be banned by Google? Will it increase your PageRank? Will you receive targeted traffic from these links? These are the questions on search optimizers’ and search marketers’ minds lately.
There is nothing wrong with advertising on a website that links back to your website. Advertising your site is a good thing. Advertising on major sites where your market hangs out is even better. After all, the idea is to bring targetted traffic to your site. Just any visitor won’t help if they are not the ones that are buying your products or clicking on your ads (Adsense or others). Your advertisements on other sites are really none ofGoogle’s business and should not get your site banned or penalized.
So what’s the problem?
Well, many of ads that are bought on websites are not necessarily purchased for the targeted traffic they may bring, but instead is an attempt to influence the link popularity of your site via the backlinks.
Google has made it clear that they do not like the practice of purchasing links. They want good, well-liked content to attract visitors. They also want webmasters and advertisers to by their form of text link known as Adsense.
To the various search engines, a link is supposed to mean that someone thinks the site or a specific page is useful or interesting and wants others to be aware of it. In and of itself this is very true, however Google (and Yahoo at one point with WebRank) made it obvious to webmasters and marketers that, if they want to be found via an organic web search, they may need to increase their PageRank. One big way to do this is via backlinks, which is a link back to your site.
Unfortunately, a link could mean many things in this day and age. It could be that the webmaster wants to advertise, link to something interesting, trade links with another website, or even point out something negative about another site. How is Google going to know why someone links to something? They really cannot. They can tailor and improve their algorithm and what the spiders follow, but they still are relying on people to investigate and report “violators”, in other words, those who buy or trade links or other “schemes”, as they put it.
The good news for Google and the like (and perhaps the bad news for test link brokers) is that most text link ads and the sites that sell them can tend to leave a noticeable identifiers behind in the code. It would not be any trouble for a search engine to look into the latest identifiers are, find all pages with them, and not allow them to pass any link popularity. This is not a penalty necessarily. This would be a way for the search engines to count only “votes” and not ads or purchased links. The ads would still be worth your effort for the traffic they bring, but not for providing you any link popularity. With that your rankings could drop if it was heavily dependent upon the link popularity of the purchased links or advertising.
It’s not a matter of ‘if’ this will happen with paid text link ads, but ‘when’. For now, if you’re buying text link ads, keep in mind that when the time comes that Google no longer allows these links to pass “link juice”, your rank could be negatively effected. The biggest losers will likely be those that sell text link advertising. If you just focus on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and not on the PageRank, you will be fine.
Rel=”nofollow” and Its Effect on a Website
Posted by reviews on Aug 7, 2007
What is the rel=”nofollow” html tag?
The rel=”nofollow” html tag that was incorporated by Google in late 2004 or early 2005 is and was meant to discourage spamming, particularly for bloggers. From Google’s official blog posted on 1/18/2005 “From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.”
It is used as <a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Visit my super cool porn site</a>
Adding the nofollow attribute to hyperlinks will not pass any “link juice” to the receiving site. Unfortunately, By removing the PageRank value of links that Google pioneered, people have far less incentive to contribute. The concern is that with less incentive to contribute comes a more stagnent website and therefore world wide web in general. This perception may or may not have merit, but the growing response has been toward “dofollow”, which is not an attribute, but the name of a movement toward allowing the link juice or link love to be passed along.
The method of preventing spamming of the comment fields has been leaning toward such things as the Akismet plugin for blogging software, such as Wordpress.
The following shows the value placed on this attribute by the major search engines.
| rel=”nofollow” Action | Yahoo! | MSNSearch | Ask.com | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Follows the link | Yes | Yes | Not proven | Yes |
| Indexes the “linked to” page | No | Yes | No | Yes |
| Shows the existence of the link | Only for a previously indexed page | Yes | No | Yes |
| In SERPs for anchor text | Only for a previously indexed page | Yes | No | Yes |
You may have noticed Google, Yahoo, and MSN showing different links to your site, known as backlinks. The above would explain why there is a difference as to what is indexed. Google does not index sites coming from a nofollow link, but Yahoo does.
What are the best methods to show if a link uses the rel=”nofollow” attribute?
Use the Firefox browser and install the SEO Quake plugin. It will highlight every nofollow link in a pink color. There are many other valuable tools available for Firefox. You can find them on Firefox’s plugin page by typing in ‘SEO’ or ‘pagerank’.
In conclusion
I do not believe that the nofollow attribute is the answer and only stifles the growth of the internet, particularly blogs. The best answer is to use Capcha Turing, blacklists, and approval of comments.
Search Engine Optimization
Posted by reviews on Aug 7, 2007
SEO experts dedicate much of their time doing their search engine optimization for Google and, to a degree, one or two of the other main search engines. There is not anything against it and it is very logical, believing that being at the top of Google’s SERP is the lion’s share in Web popularity but quite often, no matter how you proceed, being toward the top of Google does not happen. Or sometimes, the price you need to pay (not only literally, but in terms of effort and time) to be at the top of Google SERP’s and stay there is too high. Perhaps we should state here the biggest SEO horror - being banned by Google, in which you simply cannot use Google and no matter whether you like it or not, you have to have a look at other possible alternatives.
What are Google Alternatives?
The first alternative to Google is quite obvious - optimize for the remaining main search engines, if you have not done so already. Yahoo! and MSN can bring you enough new visitors, although sometimes it is virtually impossible to optimize for the three of them at the same time because of the differences in their spider algorithms. You could also optimize your website for (or at least submit to) some of the other search engines (Lycos, Excite, Netscape, etc.) but keeping in mind that they barely have over 3-5% of the Web search traffic, so do not expect much. They may not provide much value to SEO
Another alternative to increase your SEO results is to submit to search directories (often known as Web Directories) and/or specialized search engines. Submitting to the optimal directories might prove better than optimizing for Live (MSN), for example. Specialized search engines and portals have the advantage that the audience they attract often consists of people who are interested in a particular topic and if this is your topic, you can get to your target audience directly. It is true that specialized search engines will not bring you nearly as many visitors, as if you were at the top of Google SERP’s, but the quality of these website visitors will be extremely high.
We cannot forget other SEO options like posting to blogs and forums or paid advertisements.
Web Directories
What is a Web Directory?
Web directories (or as they are sometimes known - search directories) existed before the search engines, especially Google, became popular. As the name implies, web directories are simply directories in which different resources are gathered. An example of this would be Yahoo in its early days, although Yahoo and Google both have their own directories. Another would be the DMOZ, although it can be quite a challenge getting listed. Web directories are just huge collections of links to web sites, arranged into different categories. The web sites in a Web directory are listed in some specific order (most often alphabetically) and users browse through the categories. Some are based upon a bid process or for paying for featured listings for a period of time. Although many Web directories offer a way to search , search directories are fundamentally different from general search engines in the two specific ways - most directories are edited by humans and URLs are not gathered automatically by spiders but submitted by the site webmasters. The main advantage of Web directories is that no matter how smart spiders may become, when there is a human toreview and check the websites, and there is less of a chance that pages will be listed in the wrong categories. The problems with the first difference are that the listings in web directories are sometimes out of date, if no person was available to do the editing and checking for some time and that sometimes you may have to wait as long as a half a year before being listed in a search directory.
The second difference - there are often no spiders - meaning that you must go and submit your URL to the search directory, rather than wait for the spider to come to your site. Fortunately, this is done only once for each directory, so it is not that bad. Also, there are programs and tools to automate the entering of data into the forms on these web directories.
Once you are included in a particular directory, in most cases you can stay there as long as you wish to and wait for people (and search engines) to find you. The fact that a link to your site appears in a respectable Web directory is good because first, it is a backlink and second, you increase your visibility for spiders, which in turn raises your chance to be indexed by them.
Examples of Web Directories
There are hundreds and thousands of search directories but undoubtedly the most popular one is DMOZ. It is a general purpose search directory and it accepts links to all kinds of sites. The Best of the Web is one of the oldest Web directories around and it still keeps to high standards in selecting sites. There is a fee to being listed in many of these well established web directories.
Specialized Search Engines
What is a Specialized Search Engine?
Specialized search engines are another tool to include in your SEO tool bag. Unlike genera search engines, specialized search engines index the pages for specific topics only and very often there are many, many pages that cannot be found in the genera search engines but only in the specialized ones. Some of the specialized search engines are huge sites that actually host the resources they link to, or used to be search directories but have evolved to include links not only to sites that were submitted to them. There are many specialized search engines for practically every topic and it is always good to be aware of the various specialized search engines for your genre.
Starting an internet based business
Posted by reviews on Aug 6, 2007
Being an unmarried mother with kids could be really difficult. The battle to gain some income to back your tiny kids could be really taxing on you that you may not truly get a better character of living. If you have been having then more problem balancing your moment between your career and you kids, you might need to regard starting an internet job so that you can remain at house and go maintenance of your kids while earning some income to back your household. The better issue about getting a net work is that you have a danger to be a lot of income while staying household with your kids. Starting a net work and staying at household is a good alternative especially if you are the unmarried earning income to support the house. If you do non get adequate savings to support you house while you are getting a net work, you might require to go keeping your job for the second being. It will non have you and your kids any better if you go out of work. Besides, relying on the welfare organisation is really a truly terrible issue
Now, if you are truly discriminating on starting an internet online job, you will require the cooperation of your kids. If your kids are already older enough to realize what you are doing, you should ask them to an encounter and let them into your program. Explain to your kids that you would care to consume much moment with them but since you will require to gain some income to repay the bills and purchase nutrient, you will require their assistance. Tell them that you will require to get some moment to make at house and would not need to be disturbed on sure times of the day or night. Since most kids would truly enjoy to get their mothers at house then you will not truly get more problem convincing your kids to collaborate.
Now, in lawsuit you have really tiny kids who yet could not realize what you are doing, it would be a better thought to place the tiny kids to sleep early at night so that you can get much moment to make o your plan. You can begin working on your online job at night while the kids are sleeping. Although this establish upward may need a plenty of sacrifices on your region, this may be the alone manner for you to be capable to consume much moment with your kids subsequently on. Spending some moment every night to have your online job upward and running will shortly repay away, then be really diligent. More and much women are leaving the joint reality behind to seek their hand at conventional homemaking.
Many women select to make outside of the house to supplement their husbands income and experience private fulfilment through success in their chosen community. The two income household is now the norm. This can ensue in guilt and depression in the over burdened woman. It may not be a happenstance that divorce has get more rife and kids more overdue since the hike of two income families.
Women are often finding themselves drained emotionally and physically from the dysfunctional patterns of behavior that are imposed on them by today’s society. Many women are fighting back by starting a home based business.
By working from home, women can now set their own hours, save time and income and spend more time with their kids. With a little help, home based businesses can bring in a decent supplemental income with less hassles than the corporate world offers. Mothers can hire part time nannies instead of full time sitters and can arrange for childcare to be done in their own homes.
This allows peace of mind for the mother and a chance to squeeze in quality time with the kids during breaks, have picnic lunches on the lawn and never miss another chance to kiss away a fresh boo boo. Hiring some childcare help during busy seasons in your business can help you keep your sanity. On slower days, the kids can so quite well if they are kept in a structured environment and on a schedule.
By working from house, women can now establish their own hours, rescue moment and income and consume much moment with their kids. With a less assistance, house based businesses can take in a respectable supplementary income with little hassles than the joint reality offers. Mothers can employ region moment nannies instead of complete moment sitters and can organize for childcare to be done in their own homes. This allows peace of psyche for the mother and an opportunity to pinch in character moment with the kids during breaks, have outing lunches on the lawn and never miss another opportunity to kiss off a sweet hoot hoot. Hiring some childcare assistance during active seasons in your job can assist you hold your sanity. On slower days, the kids can then rather easily if they are kept in an organized surroundings and on an agenda.
Backlink Builder
Posted by reviews on Aug 4, 2007
Here’s a clever tool from Webconfs.com . It’s called the Backlink Builder and searches for sites that may backlink with you.
“This tools searches for websites of the theme you specify that contain keyphrases like “Add link”, “Add site”, “Add URL”, “Add URL”, “Submit URL”, “Add Article” etc. Most of the results could be quality potential backlinks.“
Feel free to use it as much as you like.
5 Tips To Boost Your Adsense Revenue
Posted by reviews on Aug 2, 2007
Google AdSense program has made it easier for webmasters to make money through a website. Webmasters who run an AdSense campaign will display Google’s contextual Ads relevant to the content of their sites and thus encouraging visitors to click the ads and earn money for each ad click.
However you will earn very little AdSense revenue if you don’t know how to optimize your AdSense ads on your website. Here are some tips to increase your AdSense earning:
1. Focus on one Adsense ad format. The Large Rectangle (336X280) ad format seems to work better than other ad formats because this format tends to result in higher click through rates (CTR). Another reason is that the ads will look like normal web links that visitors use to click on them. It doesn’t matter whether the visitors know that they are clicking AdSense ads or not, as long as there are clicking, you earn AdSense commission.
2. Create a custom palette for your ads. Select a color that matches your website’s background. If your site’s background is white both, the color of ad border and background should set to be white too. Also the color of the ad title should be similar to coloe of the links in your website. This is to make your AdSense ads look like it is part of the web pages. Again, this will boost AdSense CTR.
3. Don’t place your AdSense ads at the bottom of your webpages because it is proven to be less effective. Displaying your AdSense ads at the bottom is like hiding your AdSense and thus leads to low CTR and AdSense revenue. Try to put them in the place where people can see them quickly. You will be amazed how the difference between AdSense locations can make when you see your earnings.
4. Try to place your AdSense ads near rich content as visitors main focus usually are your content. There are several ways to insert AdSense ads into your content and one of the ways is place your AdSense just after the end of your content.
5. Try to automate the insertion of your AdSense code into the webpages using SSI (or server side included). Ask your web administrator if your server supports SSI or not. How do you do it? Just save your AdSense code in a text file, name it as “AdSense text”, and upload it to the root directory of the web server. Then use SSI, call the code on other pages. This tip is a time saver especially for those who are using automatic page generators to generate pages on their website.
These are some of the tips that have worked well for some who want to generate hundreds and even thousands on their websites. There are other ways to optimize your AdSense that produce high CTR also. You can learn more tricks by reading in AdSense and webmaster forums.
Article Source: http://freewebcontent.org
Alan Liew is a full-time Internet marketer. He currently owns and operates http://www.online4income.com< a>> and http://moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com< a>>. Both of the websites contain guide and tips to help people start making money online.
6 Awesome Thoughts on Good Blogging
Posted by reviews on Aug 1, 2007
1. Write Eye Catching Headlines
Headlines are the most important aspect of blogging and writing articles both from an SEO standpoint but also from a reader standpoint . Make taking the time that it took you to write the article worth it by coming up with a headline that will pop
2. Write Fun Articles or Blog Entries
Take the time to write good, interesting posts in your blogs and articles. Short, 200 word posts will not garner much attention or interest from readers. Content is king!
3. Visual Content
Visual display of the article or blog is to blogging like curb-appeal is to real estate. Make sure your theme and general layout of your blog or site will keep the person looking around and wanting to come back. Use imagery and videos too! It also helps to attract links to your site.
4. Converting a New Visitors to your Blog or website into Regular Readers
Getting new visitors is not enough. You need your visitors to stick around. Give them a reason to come back and, even better, tell their friends about your site.
5. Linkbaiting, good or bad?
Linkbaiting is an art in itself. It may be considered blackhat by some, but it is the reason people backlink in the first place. Who would want to link to something if there is nothing worthwhile to link to. Write catchy news articles, sensational thoughts, list jokes or images that will give the reader a reason to link to you.
6. Keep Blogging and Writing on Your Site
There’s nothing worse than old, no longer up to date content. Keep writing, find someone else to write or find another hobby or business.