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Google Bullshit aka Penguin Debacle on the 24 April 2012

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"penguinizied" SERPS 28 Apr 12

Due to the fun of time zones mostly when its the 24th April in the US its the 25th April in New Zealand. In New Zealand and Australia the 25th April is ANZAC day. ANZAC Day is the day Australasians respect our war dead – so I personally think its pretty fucking ironic that’s also the day that Google decided to DISrespect the right of small business to exist on the Internet.  By the 26th there were an awful lot casualties including askthebuilder.com – apparently being the poster child for the Adsense team and providing huge amounts of unique and original content is no guarantee that Google might rank you in the search engines. So much for the content is King argument. The winners, fairly universally, appear to be large corporations as domain authority and, quite possibly, large Adwords budgets, trump everything else.  Full disclosure: my niche sites got slaughtered. As in every ranking gone from the top 100. My larger sites are generally OK with some oddities like losing the ranking for “passive income” for this one.  However I do not think this is a result of the deindexing of Build My Rank, I saw the drop of a few pages [...] Read more »

Build My Rank Alternatives

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Bamboo builds strong buildings; links build strong websites; Khao Sak, Thailand

I originally published this post in November 2011 pointing out that people really didn’t understand how to use link networks. I’ve now updated it = UPDATED: March 2012 after Google de-indexed Build My Rank  OK guys apparently the world changed and some of you didn’t notice. Ironic really, I’ve heard plenty of people whinging about not being able to get good backlinks. Or asking for alternatives to Build My Rank because the BMR blogs didn’t look “real” and weren’t niche specific. There are two really obvious things that are apparently from Google’s swipe at backlink networks. First obviously backlinks from these networks were effective (otherwise Google would have just ignored them) and, in future you are going to have to play smarter.  Build My Rank was not the only network to get deindexed and devalued, it was probably just the highest profile one amongst the make money crowd. SEO Nitro, SEO Linkvine. The sites that have not got hit are generally keeping a VERY low profile.  This is quite specific – Google isn’t targeting spammy backlinks from forums, automated bookmarking or the other stuff you can buy for $5 at fiverr.  People who have spammed the hell out of their own [...] Read more »

Build My Rank Is Dead – Long Live Links

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I'd call Google the elephant in the room - but I like placyderms

Build My Rank has been good to me. They’ve ranked my sites for years. It was easy, it was hands-off (I used an outsourcer), it worked. Until some time last night, my time.  I woke to find this:  Unfortunately, this morning, our scripts and manual checks have determined that the overwhelming majority of our network has been de-indexed (by Google), as of March 19, 2012. Read more here I wasn’t having a good day yesterday – seriously questioning what I was doing online and trying to figure out a new direction. Wizzley wasn’t living up to expectations, I was stuck in a funk of self-doubt and analysis paralysis.  When I read the post above I expected myself to freak out. Oddly I didn’t. I know this means I’ve probably lost two sites which I’ve aggressively used BMR on – the same two sites which I’d just received the dreaded “notice of detected unnatural links” message in Google Webmaster Tools.  Or maybe not.  The more I think about this the more I see the opportunities. I finally know what I’m going to be doing over the next few months.  First I’m not going to be doing anything Google would like me to do [...] Read more »

Pinterest For Backlinks, Affiliate Sales, and Recipes

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pinterest-pricing

I am liking Pinterest! SY gave me a heads up about why I should use Pinterest ages ago, and sent me an invite. I ignored it. Then she told me I REALLY needed to have a look, and finally I did. I figured it would be a distraction, it was, but what may well be a useful one.  First off the site scared the bejeesus out of me – it is very “pretty” – I am graphically challenged and easily scared by people who can do pretty! Apparently a lot of the users are female – I’m not surprised.  But even for the non-visual amongst us, and, dare I say it, those of us who don’t have any clues as to “our style”, and no desire to plan a wedding, its kinda cool, and useful.  Cool Stuff You Can Do On Printerest  Its good for collecting stuff together – I did a bit of baking around Christmas I was forever googling “how to make marizpan” and similar stuff – I found some good recipes – this would have been a good place to keep them all together (maybe next year).  You can upload your photos. Its as close to a good place [...] Read more »

Right Keywords + Right Platform = Cash!

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Gum Digger with His Tools - (Kauri gum made some people a lot of money in 19th century NZ - if they looked in the riight place) Dargaville

Who needs new keywords then?  Well any of us who want to make money online in my experience. As I mentioned recently, I’m using Wizzley to make some fast cash - though this approach will make you money regardless of the platform – so long as the website is in Google’s good graces.  So does it work? Let’s see – I was aiming for 7 articles/day on Wizzley – hmm not quite – I’m up to 17 articles on my main account on wizzley – so what have I have I earned?  As as of 13 Jan – I’ve made $46 from Amazon and  as of 15 Jan $30 from Adsense, that’s not bad given the age of most of my articles and how few of them I have.   I’m also getting a 10% order rate ie from around 450 clicks – I had 45 orders – I don’t have a huge amount of Amazon data to judge this by – but to this looks like a pretty darn good conversion rate.  What I am doing with Wizzley is a slightly new approach to me. As some of you will know most of us have been continuously frustrated with Google’s [...] Read more »

Wizzley Review: The Answer to the Hubpages Scam?

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wizzley

Are Lissie and her scams right? Well its hardly my fault that scam is a the word Google likes to give this blog authority on. Well OK maybe it is my fault! And so yes I can use it to my own benefit as in HubPages Scam, SEO Scribe Scam, Keyword Academy Scam, and of course the one that started it all SiteSell Scam.  What is Wizzley? Wizzley is a place to write articles and get paid via affiliate programs plus get backlinks to your sites. It has a nice set of tools which are drag drop to build your “wizzes” (yeah really that’s what an article is called, where I come from is what a little boy does when he stands up to go to the loo – but whatever!). You have to have at least 400 words, the usual topics (porn, guns, drugs) are banned as are some other rather commonly over-used topics including acne, credit card debt, forex and weight loss.  What does Wizzley offer?  revenue share starts at 50% – goes to 55% after 50 articles and 60% after 100 articles;  revenue is from Adsense, Amazon, Zazzle and AllPosters – and you are paid direct by [...] Read more »

Travel Bloggers Selling Links and Making Money – Should You To?

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Google is Part of the Competitive Environment - Not a Moral Authority - or Your Friend

For fucks sake – I am over this whole  -”Google hates me”, “I must please Google”, “is this OK with Google” shite going down in certain circles. Google is a company. Google is a search engine that using a superbly complex algorithm. Google doesn’t give a shite about you – because you are not Google’s customer. I think a lot of people need to get over this unhealthy relationship with Google. Because as it is now Google appears to be winning the war – which war? The propaganda war. You know spreading mis-information and fear – the oldest propaganda trick in the book. And its working.  Take for example the bullshite about buying and selling links. Google hates it. Of course Google hates it – links are what their search engine algorithms are still (mainly) based on. The reality is though, its pretty darn difficult for Google to know when a link is – well just a link – and when a link is a paid endorsement. So often times you can get away with lots of paid links. But even more importantly: If you are not ranking in the search rankings anyway why the hell wouldn’t you sell links – it [...] Read more »

Hubpages Money Making Update

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Traffic still dropping on HubPages.com - from Quantcast.com

OK about a month ago I asked if you could still make money with Hubpages in 2011. You might want to read that again quickly but here are the results of my two case studies: Case Study 1 Adsense Niche Starting positions previously top ranking hub #4 niche vacation site #7 All links were built using BMR (Build My Rank review here). All dates in proper format! 16/5 Adsense  hub  is back to #1 on scroogle.org  42 articles live on BMR 31/5 after sitting at #1 consistently for a week, today is back to #2 – 60 articles live on BMR 16/5 niche site dot info – #8 on scroogle.org – 32 articles live on BMR 31/5 after sitting consistently at #2 and #3 for the last week – has now dropped to #6/#7 – 60 articles live on BMR Conclusion – a hub will rank again if you build links to it – whether you have to keep building links to it remains to be seen.  For the amount of work you have to do – you might as well just build your own site. Hubpages.com will continue to drop traffic because most of the writers there believe passionately [...] Read more »

Hubpages – Can You Still Make Money in 2011?

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Traffic drop on Hubpages.com as measured by Quantcast

I started on Hubpages.com – because of Hubpages I made my first $100 online and got paid out by Google’s Adsense program. In fact the precursor of this blog was built to support my hubpages – not the other way around! Until recently I highlighted my pages explaining how I made money on Hubpages – the posts were genuine – but I also made money from those writers who signed up using my affiliate ID – personally I’d moved on from Hubpages, Hubpages is no scam, but I prefer  to put time into my own sites – but my hubpages were still making me hundreds a month – until recently. Panda Update and Hubpages I’ve already written about how the Panda updated failed to deliver quality to the searcher – and still my niche sites are  ranking pretty much where they were before the so-called update. But Panda was originally nicknamed “Farmer Update” by SEO’s – because the update seemed to particularly focus on large content sites – sites like HubPages. The official figures – as provided by Quantcast – seems to support this: Looking at my own analytics for the same period – its the same but different : My point [...] Read more »

Build My Rank and Backlinking Profiles

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Rottnest Island, Western Australia

Build My Rank really has been a business changer for me.  Well not by itself obviously – in fact if you don’t have a plan to start of with then – you don’t need this post you need the Keyword Academy instead! Back about a month ago I signed up  to BuildMyRank: review and  rankings were on my mind, then I was pretty excited about it. Well now I am ecstatic about it! Why? I’m seeing rankings jump and jump significantly and with them income. Will the rankings hold? Who knows – but meanwhile I’ll take the money thanks. Have I a got detailed results to prove this? Nope – these were sites that I was previously supporting using Postrunner -  so maybe  I could have waited a month and seen the results jumping on the Postrunner submissions- I don’t know – frankly it takes a lot of time to document that type of detail and I don’t have duplicate sites: same niche, same age similar content etc to do  proper split testing. Instead  I swapped my writer over from writing for Postrunner to BMR and sat back to see what happened. What I do know is that BMR plus [...] Read more »

Missing Your Google Alerts? Read This!

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Waterfront, Wellington, New Zealand

Google can be more than annoying sometime – I mean, as Leo asks, what would you do if you woke up one day and all your rankings had disappeared? But that’s not what happened to me today. Instead I was talking to Dave – who runs the awesome travel blog GoBackpacking which allows old backpackers to guest post about Google Alerts – and I noticed something had changed… But first rewind: you do use Google alerts don’t you? Its the fastest way to keep an eye on what the great web is saying about you. I have alerts on my name e.g. “lis sowerbutts” my blog’s names e.g.  lissowerbutts.com. But I also have some more subtle alerts: site:mydomain.com – tells me every time Google indexes a url on my site; link:mydomain.com – tells me every time Google counts a link to my site.  NOT Yahoo – Google Now most of you know probably all know that and have had the alerts for years. But today I noticed there is a new column  in the Manage my Alerts screen. As well as “type” and “how often” there is a new column “Volume” – the default of which is “only the best results” [...] Read more »