On excessive advertising that is.
I’ve long been annoyed by the number of pages from the top of Google’s results which seemed to show nothing but ads instead of the content I searched for. It always made me wonder what sort of SEO was used to get the pages so high up the SERPS, cause it sure as hell wasn’t on-page optimisation.
But at long last, in my opinion, Google have taken note and on the 19th January released their latest update, the ‘Page Layout Algorithm’ , designed to penalise sites where any of the page have too many ads ‘above the fold’. As is so often the case, there’s no definition of ‘too many’, simply stating that webmasters should aim to keep ads to a ‘normal degree’. The preference it to leave the individual to decide what that means, but recommending that they check each page in the Browser Size Tool from Google Labs, to ensure that users aren’t forced to scroll down to read a reasonable amount of the content.
As implied above, personally I’m really pleased to hear about this change – tough Matt Cutts understated reason for the update (‘we’ve heard complaints from users’) tickled me. He also surprised me by claiming this will only impact on about 1% of all search results – it always felt like a much larger problem to me.
According to Matt Cutt’s blog post, if a page is penalised for too many ads, it will be checked again and the penalty relaxed if the layout has been improved, though that can take several weeks for the bots to revisit and complete;y check thesite. From my experience of such sites, however, I doubt, for two reasons, that the majority will ever be updated. FIrst, the sites are there for the ads and the owners have no genuine content to place on the pages. And secondly, I suspect those types of sites are thrown together with an automatic ad feed (such as google’s own adsense), set live, and then never looked at again.
Netfirms Simple Scripts
It’s been a couple of weeks since I wrote about my problems with Netfirms and their help-desk, but it hasn’t been a smooth time. Their control panel looks nicer than Cpanel, but it’s nowhere near as friendly or intuitve to use, and their on-line help seems to have been written for a different system.
During this time I did have to contact Netfirms support again, as I couldn’t suss out how to install WordPress. But this time I have to admin it was my stupidity. Read the rest of this entry »
Well, it’s two days since I signed up with Netfirms and resolved my initial problems with their service. Unfortunately, it transpires that that was just the beginning, as the domain still wasn’t working. Read the rest of this entry »
Yesteday, as part of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend I spotted the Netfirms offer for cheap, $4.95, domain names. I needed one, so thought I’d go for it. And, surprisingly, during the process I was offered the chance to add a years hosting for just $1. How could I say no?
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Backlinks for SEO
As the title says, I’ve continued investigating backlinking techniques while adding some good backlinks to my own sites, and, up to now at least, haven’t found anyone offering exactly the same techniques I’m looking at.
I have, however, started work on creating a plugin to do the job. I haven’t settled on exactly what to include – either the interface or the feature set – but don’t think I’ll automate the actual backlinking process. My aim is to make it easy to find and add high quality backlinks, not to add automatically vast numbers of backlinks, so I’d rather just present opportunities and let the user decide which to add.
All that said, I have started work on my backlinks plugin and have a version sufficiently advanced to already grab a number of good backlinks from page 6, 5 and 4 pages, much as I implied at the start. And I can also see them using google’s site command, so I’m guessing they do have value.
Part of the reason I don’t have the plugin ready is that I feel I should include a couple of features beyond just backlinks – namely indexing (basically the first thing you want to do with a new site so as google knows the site exists) and pinging. The idea is to automate pinging any added backlinks once they’ve been created – again to let google know they exist.
Since I’m not automating the backlinking, I need to dream up a nice and easy way for the user to add the backlinks url to the plugin. I think the most basic approach is probably more than enough, but I’ll tinker with it a bit more before I finally decide.
I’ve spent what time I had free over the last few days researching easy backlinking, partly as I have a wordpress plugin in mind and I want to see if it already exists or if I should write one.
Wait30days : The Review Site We All Need
Anyhow, in my internet travels I hit upon something I’d long wished for, a great review blog, Wait30days, by a young South African lady called Jovana. It’s dedicated to reviewing software, and in particular WSOs (Warrior Special Offers), but unlike other so-called review sites, wait30days contains real reviews, where Jovana actually buys and tests the product.
And that’s where the site name, wait30days, comes from – Jovana is suggesting you wait30days while she buys and tests a product your’re interested in, after which she’ll let’s you know if it’s worth the money. Impressively, she also claims she never asks for a refund, on the basis that she is ”a firm believer that if I fell for the hype they were selling, it was my own fault.”
Some, if not most, of the wait30days reviews include a personal video and Jovana doesn’t hold back. She’s not actually rude, but she’s plenty happy to refer to a bad product as crap, but follows this by explaining why she’s come to that opinion.
It looks like the site has only been going for about 8 months, but in that time she’s reviewed at least 11 products, and has conveniently categorised the results, classifying 3 as “Do Not Buy”, and 8 as “Approved Products”. There are a few other sections to wait30days, with the main one being called “Testing Phase”, which is where I found an interesting and detailed conversation between Jovana and Arron, the writer of a product called “SMS Mindfreak”, starting from where Arron “blacklisted” Jovana from his products!
Go read!
Hard to believe it, but it’s almost a month since I started with Project 100 (as described here) and also since I last posted. Like most people, work commitments really get in the way, especially when you want to concentrate on Empire Building.
Still, I did manage to squeeze in some time and actually completed setting up one site and almost finished a second, both using the Project 100 techniques. It took longer to choose the niches than I expected, but in retrospect I think that was me being too picky and trying to stick rigidly to the criteria. Eventually I realised that these were just guidelines and relaxed them and quickly(ish) discovered the niches.
Writing the blog content has definitely been the hardest part to date, as I’m no writer, and didn’t want to fork out for outsourcing. After reading site after site covering the niches I managed to pull together sufficient information to do the writing and completed one site. Unfortunately, I’m still struggling a little on the second one, hence the fact it’s not yet complete.
Regardless, I went ahead to day 4 and started the Project 100 site indexation process. The procedure was all new to me and involves some sites I never previously heard of, and others where I’d never seen any value and so had avoided. More fool me! And it didn’t actually take too long, I think it was a couple of hours to get both sites done, and should be considerably quicker next time round.
Well, it’s not actually sold as a 2 hours system, but that’s how quickly the Project 100 author, Gavin Hartwell, can create a site from scratch. The real project description is “the fastest and easiest way to pull in easy money”. It’s a bit of a bold claim, but after working through it, I believe it is true!
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I forgot to mention but I finally joined the Simple Niche Strategies forum (set up by Jason R. Cunningham and Gavin Hartwell, 2 of the most prolific members of the ENE forums) when the ENE forums disappeared at the end of August.
It’s clearly a new forum at the moment, with a limited number of members, but it’s grown noticeably in the few days I’ve been a member. And it looks promising, as it’s free for anyone to join and is definitely backed by a couple of solid people.
Yep, you read that right – free training. And lots of it!
The Challenge, previously known as The 30 Day Challenge, is run by Ed Dale and has now been going for 6 years, changing and improving its format slightly each time.
The Challenge
Take the Challenge and learn how to make your first $1 online.
Personally, I first heard of it 2 years ago when starting my IM tinkering, but since then have had a good look over the course for both years and have to admin I’ve been amazed at how much they’ve covered for free. Not only do they provide a phenomenal amount of training, both in video and PDF format, but they have also negotiated free access (or extended trials) to many great tools, most noticeably Market Samurai.
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