Not everyone of course lost everything, but most of us have in fact suffered from the effects of such changes, even though most SEO and Internet Marketing “gurus” will regularly go out there claiming that “THEY” were not affected. Maybe there were not, or maybe they are just NOT being “truthful”.

As far as we are concerned though, let me tell you that whilst the majority of our websites did come out of the latest big G tsunami unscathed, (we own over 400, but if you add customers sites, our portfolio of the sites we handle is a whole lot more), some of our websites were indeed affected by our furry friend (Panda) and its not so furry accomplice (Penguin).

When you lose up to 40 pc of your income on a bunch of websites, as an internet marketer with a portfolio of hundreds of sites specializing in a wide variety of (affiliate) products and services you realize the true value of not putting all “you eggs in one basket” so that all in all, whilst our overall income stream has diminished, our portfolio is wide and varied enough that the 40 pc drop in some of our sites is something we are able to deal with.

If you have witnessed a drop in your rankings, and you have largely stayed away from “black hat” techniques, over optimization may be the culprit and you will probably be looking at ways to recover the Over Optimization Penalty! To that end I encourage you to read the excellent article written by Nick Eubanks at SEOmoz which will provide you with a step by step blue print of what to do in other to recover from said over optimization penalty!

As if Google’s new policies hadn’t been enough to cause us to reach for the anti vertigo medication that all of us involved in internet marketing keep in the top draw of our desk Facebook and Google+ were at it again with the introduction of their latest feature changes!

First it was the launch of Facebook Promoted Posts a paid for new feature enabling the promotion of recent posts by extending its reach beyond the normal exposure this post might get in fans news feeds.

Or in other words, reach more people than the number of fans your organic content currently reaches.

“… promoted posts will be seen by a larger percentage of the people who like your Page than would normally see it. It will also be seen by a larger percentage of the friends of people who interact with your post.” – Facebook

Then it was the turn of Google+ to rock our world with the death of Google places which has been replaced by Google+ Local.

And finally it was Facebook turn once again in this battle of the tit for tat with the introduction of the brand new feature of “Scheduling Facebook Posts“!

This is one feature that has god Crescele (our own social media expert) all excited since she will now be able to schedule posts in advance instead of having to login daily.  Of course, there were apps already who could do just that, but now all you have to do is log into your Facebook Account, go to your page’s sharing tool, type your update, click on the little blue clock icon and schedule!  Easy as that.  Now of course, scheduling doesn’t mean that you will get away with “bad” content, since in the world of social media, your fans will determine how useful your content by way of their interaction.  And just in case, you want to increase said interaction, you can always pay for promotion which is at the end of day exactly what Facebook and Google are moving towards.

Never a dull moment in the online world.

If you liked this post, don’t forget to comment, like and share please.

No, not a guest list for your next BBQ, or even the list for your daughter or son’s forthcoming birthday, communion, bar/bat mitzvah etc… but an email list!

And due to form, every blog, every site now features these pesky “Subscribe to Our Newsletter” forms, with offers of “free” this, and “free” that just so you might be persuaded to put your name and email down in exchange for all this free stuff!

Problem is that according to a survey:

• 77% of US online consumers say they’ve become more guarded about giving their email address over the past year
• 18% say they never open email from companies

Still, in spite of these numbers, a large number of visitors will subscribe to email lists adding their names to a growing data base worth its size in gold..

And gold is the appropriate way to characterize a well built and well run email list because quite simply, this internet marketing media is highly successful.

I subscribe to a number of such lists and I can tell you from experience that email marketing DOES work! I suspect you would agree as well!

Indeed, in spite of my so called “nous” I have personally been guilty of pushing the “Buy Now” button for a number of “must have” products or services “recommended” to me in frequent emails which the owners of those pesky lists I have subscribed to send me at regular intervals. I am so guilty in fact that some of these products are still waiting to be opened in my “TO DO” folder!

So to recap here is the deal:

1. As the owner of a website, you create a must have product that you are willing to give “free” in exchange for an email.
2. Visitors to your site find your offer simply exquisite and too good to turn down and duly subscribe to your list.
3. After a confirmation process, you receive your very first email containing the product that you signed up for.
4. You read (or not) said product.
5. A few days later you receive a second email commending you for the first step you took and whilst at it, recommending that you might want to have a look at this “highly affordable, one in lifetime” offer and you decided to do… nothing!
6. A few days later, you receive a third email telling you about success stories of people just like you who bought the product your passed on and how you should really, really reconsider. Still you do… nothing! After all you are not one to be swayed so easily by a sales pitch..
7. After a few other email, you end up buying said product…
8. There then ensues a period of quiet, during which you do not receive any email
9. …
10. …
11. until…
12. You receive one! With yet another product on offer.

This whole process is called “Email Engagement”. The key to “Email Engagement” is to nurture your subscribers so that they maintain their interest and “heaven forbid” do not decide to do the unthinkable which is of course to… Unsubscribe from your list!

You can have a closer look at email engagement in an excellent info-graphic put together by the folks at litmus.com or right here.

In the Internet World, always expect…

… the unexpected.

Indeed…

A New Search Engine has been created to serve results from searches based on social media content!

Indeed, an Israeli-American company, JULPAN, recently acquired by twitter, the social networking giant is reportedly able to sort information available on social networks and transform it into useful and relevant information to users.

The goal of Julpan is to access the thousands of social activities across tweets, facebook likes and RSS feeds, sort them in order to provide relevant content.  And all this gathering of information is done live, so that what you say on twitter, whom you like on facebook and what your RSS feed includes will be immediately compiled to join others in your social network neighborhood (and theirs) to formulate search results that will reflect your own opinion and actions.

Pretty cool no?

Says Ori Allon, the founder of this project:

“By looking at what links you share, what people you communicate with publicly, and what topics you often talk about, our engine is able to tell whether you’re a foodie that loves pasta, a soccer fan that loves FC Barcelona, or a passionate musician that loves The Beatles.”

Allon is not a new comer to internet search though.  After completing a PhD, he developed a search algorithm called Orion, which Google duly purchased.

“The algorithm tried to track the most relevant pages for the search term, not by popular measures like the number of links a page has, but by its content,” Allon told Israeli websire Calcalist. “For example, by searching ’4th of July’ you get results about fireworks and concerts -  things that people say and mean in the context of the American independence day.”

After leaving the Search Engine giant, Allon founded Julpan, and his project is due to be launched in the new few months.

“Nowadays, people share so much information on social networks,” says Allon. “We do something similar to what Google has done in the search field, but in social media. For example, you can search Julpan for a restaurant, event or anything that happens today and get amazing results. The source is other users’ content, so the information available can’t be found anywhere else.”

Rather than a search engine, Allon views his product as a discovery engine.  Indeed the search may not necessarily be in the traditional form of a search string (one or more words) but can be a current location, what you did minutes ago, which program you were watching on TV, a chat with friends….

“Based on the information available on [Twitter] we can know where you are and what you and your friends wrote in the last hour,” says Allon. “The beauty of this technology is that it is based on context of your location and activities. The most important thing for us is to understand the relationship between the user activity and bringing him information that is relevant for him at that moment.”

Here is an example of what the social media search engine can do:

“A few weeks ago, Katy Perry signed albums a few blocks from our office. We knew that because many people that normally don’t mention her started mentioning her, her locations and what she’s doing now. That immediate information cannot be retrieved by any other service. It’s a great way for tourists and locals to find out about interesting things that happen right know in their area.”

According to the developer, no one has yet developed a similar product because “The information is out there but no one yet took it and tried to make it useful. Facebook and Twitter have the information but not the means. Google has the analytics abilities but not the information…”

And talking about Google, according to Allon: “if Google had Facebook’s information we would have seen amazing things. That’s the main reason they launched Google+.”

Are you frightened yet?

Part of the latest Google dance (From Panda to Penguin?) the aim of the search engine giant is to weed out the “bad” from the “good” so that when you make a search on Google, only the best websites will be shown to you.  If this means that all the “crap” content is going to be eliminated, then we can only applaud!

If you wonder how does google rank a website. then you might be interested in an article I wrote about this subject which draws on an explanation provided by Matt Cutts himself, and which makes for an interesting read, whether you are an “old hat” at online marketing, or a beginner.  To read this article, click here!

One of the things people have been doing in order to spread their message across as large an audience as possible is to write articles and post them on blog networks. There was so much garbage being posted that they brought absolutely nothing to the average reader and were just there to provide “link juice” to someone’s website.  For most of us they were more than a nuisance, so you can imagine what the folks at big G felt.  If you do not, here is an interesting article about what you should and should not do, provided by Google Webmaster Central

Spinning an article is a practice that can land you in trouble if you don’t do it well as this example provided by Google demonstrates:

… example of a site with unusual linking patterns that is also affected by this change. Notice that if you try to read the text aloud you’ll discover that the outgoing links are completely unrelated to the actual content, and in fact the page text has been “spun” beyond recognition:

Why would you spin an article?

To maximize the exposure of your content by writing quality articles and syndicate them (cross post them) throughout.  But since syndication mostly mean that the same article (actually it’s not just articles, but any content) is reproduced time and again, the element of uniqueness comes into play and the second and subsequent following iteration of the same article begins to carry less weight in terms of the old Google love.

Hence the idea of article spinning… which is based on a very simple premise:

Write an article –> Spin it –> Post it

So what is spinning an article, and what does it mean to you?

The first thing to do obviously is to avoid doing the type of spinning mentioned in the above example!

You probably know what spinning an article is but just in case you don’t here is what I mean. I will use one sentence, spin it so that it may produce numerous versions of the same sentence, designed to “trick” the search engine into thinking that each new version was sufficiently different from the other to be considered unique.

Here goes.

Every morning, I take a walk.

If I add a synonym, word, expression or sentence that means the same thing, I get this:

{Every|Just about every|Each and every|Each} {morning|working day|day|day of the week}, {I|my spouse and I|we|my partner and I} {take a walk|take a stroll|go for a walk}.

This odd looking sentence can then be spun, using a spinning software to produce the following sentences.

 

1. Just about every working day, my spouse and I take a stroll.
2. Each and every day, we go for a walk.
3. Each day of the week, my partner and I take a walk.
4. Every morning, I take a stroll.
5. Just about every working day, my spouse and I go for a walk.
6. etc….

Clever spinning experts are able to be so intricate that they can produce tens, if not hundreds of different versions of an original.

When you look at the “spun version”  of the original article, you might think, cool, there are not the same sentences, there is no way a search engine will know what I am trying to do.

But won’t it?  I am not so sure.  I am convinced that Google and other search engines are getting as close as possible to that “unattainable” goal which is Artificial Intelligence, and they already have the technology that would enable them to know the various combination of synonyms each word can represent.  Do they have the means to independently analyze each one the millions or articles that get submitted each day?  Perhaps not, but it’s getting there.

So my advice to you would be that Article Spinning can still be a very powerful means of being able to spread your message and brand around, but you need to more conscience about you go about this particular task!

How Google Ranks Content.

The video is 8 minutes long and in it, Matt goes into some details about various aspects of the methodology of the Google Search.

In this video, Matt answers a question related to the process of ranking and website evaluation, starting from the crawling stage, to the analysis of a site, to crawling frequencies…

Google main priorities in their drive to be the best search engine they be are based on 3 principal factors:

1. Crawl the web for existing and new pages
2. Index these pages
3. Rank these pages so that the most relevant are served first.

1. The crawling process

Starting at 1:15 min

In the “old” days (the year 2000), it took google 30 days to crawl, one week
to index and propagate to their data centers (another week) and this process
was called the google dance! In 2003, Google switched to a different format
and began to crawl on daily basis which is substantial departure from their
original method lasting 30 days.  This allowed them to refresh their data banks
on a daily basis, and thus be kept more up to date to changes.  Over time, they
have improved their incremental updating of their index.

2. The indexing process Starting at 3:55 minute. Here is where
it becomes interesting as it gives a very good insight into the google indexing
mindset.  Given that indexing is taking things in word order, here is how it
works. To illustrate this process, Matt Cutts give the following two words as
an example of a Google search.

Katy Perry

In the crawl, Google established in which document each word was found.  In
other words, in which document does the word Katy appear, and in which document
does the word Perry appear.  So for example:

So when someone types in Katy Perry in Google, the search engine sets upon
finding out in which document do these words appear, and it does it like this:

Document 1 has Katy and document 2 doesn’t so doc 1 is out.
Document 2 has both Katy and Perry, so that document is one of the possibilities.
Document 89 has Katy and document 73 doesn’t so doc 89 is out.

In other words, only document 2 and document 555 have both words.

So Google searches for pages and back links (anchor text pointing to that page)
where both words appear.   When this document selection is accomplished,
not the ask is to figure out a way to rank them.

3. The ranking process

Starting at 5:45 minutes

This process is tricky and Google uses Page Rank (PR) in combination of some
200 different factors to determine which page to rank highest.

If this video has shown anything, it is that

• Page Rank is a determing factor as to how well a page can be ranked
• Page Rank is dependent upon the reputation of a site, the number of back links to that site, and the reputation of those sites from which the backlinks orginate!

Did you know that 1 in 10 websites actually generate any kind of income for their owners simply because they are not being found by the search engine for their pertinent keywords? Are you the one whose site is generating income? Or part of the 90 percent of owners who are not?

Did you know that the best way to generate tons of qualified traffic to any website is to deliver high quality, highly contextual anchor text back linking from quality sites from all corners of this earth of ours?

Did you know that the easiest part of bringing traffic to a site is search engine optimization?

Did you also know that SEO, can only be responsible for a tiny fraction of the traffic you site could get? And that Back Linking is responsible for providing the bulk of all traffic?

Back Linking is the most powerful means of driving qualified traffic to your site, and remains as such in spite of the latest de-indexing policies recently imposed by Google on a plethora of blog network. In fact, not only is it still the most potent method of bringing visitors to a site, the very fact that Google has gone after (and deindexed) “bad neighborhood” blog networks is the clearest indication that quality back links, from quality sites remains the best traffic generating mechanism for your site, and it is not going to change.

The easiest analogy to this is this:

If you have spent any time in your garden you will know that one of the things you will likely have to do often is to control weeds in your lawn and garden. Controlling weeds doesn’t mean that you want to eradicate your lawn, just that you want to remove what you don’t like and keep it as flush and beautiful as you can make it.

The lawn is to a garden what millions of websites are to Google. Just as you endeavor to make your lawn weed free, so does Google try to remove from its index countless websites that bring no value to you and I who happen to be Google customers!

If you want to outrank your competitor, then you need to get more backlinks to your site than your competitor. Simple as that.  Of course there are certain conditions that have to be met, such as the quality of your content, basic seo etc…

If Back Linking is so powerful, how can it be done?

Let’s put it this way.  Back linking is one the toughest things to do in internet marketing and is the main reason why so many websites don’t rank very well at all for any of their relevant keywords.

Backlinking is also a tricky strategy since it is important that a person who uses that vital method to bring quality traffic to a site does so without breaking any of the rules imposed by the search engines.  Use a bad strategy and your site could end up being discarded.  Use the right strategy and there is no limit to what you can achieve for your site.

We have seen the rise and fall of countless search engines, and the launch of the “Grand Daddy” of all, Google.  Since its inception, we learned that the Phd’s behind this soon to be giant had insights into the virtual world that few of us even imagined.

Google quickly became the norm in internet searches and it wasn’t long when it even became part of day to day vocabulary!  “Google this, Google that” is something most of us hear or say on a daily basis and everybody knows what we mean!

I was thinking about this the other day, as I was revising the seo strategies of our company, what with Google de-indexing a bunch of article networks and introducing their now famous over-optimization penalty.  After all, it wasn’t even a month ago, but it might as well have been a whole lot longer, when you think about the effect it has had on some internet marketers and online home businesses.

So what’s really happening now and have we even begun to understand the true intent of the search engine giant?  Not exactly and it is open to question whether Google themselves know how their new policies are going to affect the world wide web.

Content is king, long live content?

I have always advised my customers to concentrate on writing content for “human” readers, rather than for the search engines, and if this advice was true then, it certainly is true today!

In theory, this is good news for most folks who conduct their home businesses online. Quality hand written articles which attract “organic” readers naturally, without the use of techniques that infringe upon Google rules.

Let us consider a mom and pop and their online home based business!

First they begin writing articles for their new website.  They spend a lot time writing as good a content as possible and patiently wait for the traffic to hit their site!

For the overwhelming majority of such sites, it is not uncommon to realize that even though they have an increasing number of good articles, the traffic that was expected never comes.

When mom and pop realize that in spite of their best efforts the traffic that they were hoping for never materialized one of the first thing most do is to purchase one of the  numerous online marketing courses that can be found nowadays which amongst other things tell them to:

• Go to related blogs and leave comments
• Use Web 2.0 linking strategies
• Make use of Social Media
• Maximize the spread of their articles by posting them newly spun in article and blog networks.

I will talk about the four option in my next article:

In past articles I have been talking about Google’s Over Optimization Penalty and the effect it has had (and is still having!) on anyone who has been using Search Engine Optimization to garner “favor” with the search engines, and in particular with Google.

As the dusts is starting to settle, and internet marketers slowly get up from their recent slumber, yet again a new reality has just hit the fan, and this one could have even more serious implications as to any future strategy.

After all, over optimization (which Google has recently decided to tackle) is a “lesser culprit” so to speak since it is easy to remedy.  But the steady building of backlinks to improve the relevance of a page which had been part and parcel of any SEO strategy is yet another area in which the search engine giant has turned its attention to, in an effort to regain control of its search engine.

It all started when the measure by which a search engine would rank a website (based on keywords density and online seo) was altered when Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google founders) expanded on the concept of keyword density and introduced the concept of Page Rank.

The idea was that important pages or websites would be those with the most important number of links leading to them.  In other words, if your site had 5 incoming links coming to it, and your competitor only 4, then your site would more likely feature higher in the search engine (all things considered) than your competitor’s because each incoming link would be considered to be like a vote from one site to another.  The beauty of this concept was that the determination of search engine relevance would be made by websites, which themselves were leaders in their own industry.

In terms of internet marketing, it was a Eureka moment because for once, internet marketers felt that the ranking of their own sites no longer depended solely on Google, but on other websites, if only they could find a way to get as many sites to link back to their own.

A monster was created.  First we had farm links where links could be purchased and this method worked for a while until the folks sitting at their google desks wised up to this and introduced methods to combat just that.

Then eZines were introduced where a webmaster was able to post an article pointing to his/her own site, and provided this article did not infringe on the terms of that particular ezine, said article, after manual review would then be made public and bingo yet another incoming link. This worked too, until of course people started to abuse the system and posted thousands of articles with the sole purpose of linking back to their own site.

The Panda upgrade took care of that one, as a number of eZines, including the biggest one (EzineArticle) had hundreds to their pages de-indexed overnight.

Around the same time, blog networks were created with the sole purpose of allowing internet marketers to automatically post articles (spun articles) in an ever increasing number of blogs becoming part of the networks everyday. Some of these blogs became a repository of poorly written and badly spun articles with little to no value to any reader.

These blog networks made it it possible for enterprising webmaster to write an article, spin it to dozens (sometimes hundreds) of other articles, all with keywords linking to their own websites.  In a few days, a new site (sometimes just a few pages deep) could receive hundreds (if not thousands) of incoming links, making that site relevant in a short period of time, a feast which then made it possible for this small and new site to “dominate” the search engines!

This practice allowed many people to make lots of money on the back of the back linking theory, often times at the expense of webmaster who had been trying to increase the relevance of their own website by writing quality articles offering unique and interesting content to their readers.

Google just recently put an end to that and blog networks have been de-indexed throughout. Once such network is Built My Rank which has one of the most popular network and which, through the abuse of some of its members, became yet another repository of bad content.

The good news is that if you are one of those responsible and conscientious webmasters, always trying to provide good content to your readers by writing unique and quality articles, then all of a sudden you are no longer competing with volume link builders who were once able to out rank anyone in a matter of days, but with equally conscientious webmasters who also try to only provide quality articles to their own readers.

The bad news, is that this concept of volume linking has (in my mind) put to rest the theory that it was not possible for an unscrupulous competitor to put your site out of business by adopting an “untoward” attitude and say get your own site penalized by creating poor articles with links to your site and posting these articles in bad neighborhoods.   In my opinion, this debate is now over, and I can quite imagine circumstances where your might one day become the subject of the google de-indexing chop just because some idiot (I am being kind) has decided to do to you the very things that Google wants to weed out!

It’s my opinion, and of course, I welcome yours!

How can we protect our Facebook account?

This is a question of such concern to so many different people that I thought I’d respond (or at least try) in a separate article.

First the bad news.  When it comes to Social Media Network Privacy, frankly, there isn’t any.  When we join Facebook, Twitter or any other Social Platforms, we inevitably end up trading our concerns for privacy protection with the realities that are part and parcel of joining such networks.

What does this mean?  When it comes to Online Privacy on Facebook, Google Plus and others, the hard truth is that there isn’t.

It is a fact that not everyone recognizes. Indeed many people remain blissfully unaware that what they write on their walls, the photos they upload, the comments they make in response to other posts, all these things become public property!  Again, have a look at the article I wrote about Facebook responses to an official subpoena and you will be amazed at the information Facebook gathers about everyone.

This should cause additional concern to any parent of kids with Facebook or other accounts.  I have had an ongoing battle with some of my kids friends about being more careful about what pictures of themselves they upload and I am still bemused that so many parents do not even know that once a picture is uploaded, it is still there for everyone to see, even for those who are not friends with the “uploader”.

You want proof?  Click on this link:  http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-snc4/174893_408250066356_872784538_n.jpg and what do you see?  A picture of Bill O’Reilly.  Now we know that Mr. O’Reilly is a public figure and has pictures of himself all over the internet, but the point I am making is that his picture is stored on a server which you can access easily without the need to enter a password if you know the address of the image, which is pretty easy to discover.

Want another proof?  Try this link:  https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/s720x720/555209_314476505286327_285379708196007_836772_987573098_n.jpg which is the image url of our own facebook fanpage cover image!

This one below!

It is frankly incredible that this is even allowed when you think about the children’s online protection act which supposedly was setup to protect our kids.

The other issue with social media network is that recently, spammers have been able to hack into members private wall and there are plenty of reports out there of inappropriate material posted on people’s walls without their knowledge.  If a picture appears on your wall, which you did not upload, it automatically becomes visible to your friends and theirs….

Another issue which opens users up to ‘data manipulation’ are those apps that request permission to access your account, etc….  If you have received an invitation to be reminded of your friends next birthday, then you’ll know what I mean.  My advice to you is you accept them is to do so for yourself only.

Facebook does have privacy settings that you can work on when managing your page and I would advise you to get going with these settings asap. As long as you realize that privacy and social media network do not usually go hand in hand.

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