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Google Bullshit aka Penguin Debacle on the 24 April 2012

Written by Lis on April 28, 2012 · 15 Comments

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 »

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

Written by Lis on October 29, 2011 · 10 Comments

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 »

Passive Income – There Is Such a Thing – Who Want’s a Business?

Written by Lis on March 8, 2011 · 29 Comments

Had to engage in the conversation here – Leo – says there is no such thing as passive income he argues that we all should be developing businesses not just relying on SEO to climb to the top of the rankings. Funny how my name has got associated with passive income – as friends pointed out to Leo (and not saying Leo isn’t a friend - merely wrong ) I would be in for the argument. Not Passive Income OK so lets step back. In the dark times pre-passive income – I used to be a highly overpaid IT consultant – I was paid a nice hourly rate by companies who wanted to upgrade or replace software. I used to work on a salary – a “safe” job right. Yup, it was – I never got fired from a permanent job – but it was huge, huge millstone around my neck. You see turning up 40 hours a week – even if the hours were somewhat flexible – meant that I could only travel in the holidays- I only got 4 weeks annual leave so even with creative use of leave without pay, public holidays and anticipated leave – I could only [...] Read more »

What is a Content Farm and Why Does Google Hate Them?

Written by Lis on March 1, 2011 · 18 Comments

Matt Cutts has the best job in the world. He writes one little blog post and puts the whole of the Internet Marketing community into a tail spin – and his latest is a good one – in fact when googling “what is a content farm” the first result was a news result – indicating that the term is hot, hot, hot at the moment. But WTF is Google doing? Are they trying to destroy all of us who want to make a few dollars of passive income a month? Is the era of making a living online gone forever? Google search is failing – and what Google is doing is a public relations exercise in order to recover some credibility – and the evidence is in the results of the above search. So what is a content farm I thought? I asked Mr Google (using US results via the nifty Chrome Google Extension tool) – and Google told me - News results: according to joisic.com: The term “content farm” is commonly used to describe these sites that add pages and pages of unoriginal, useless information to the search engines database. and gigaom.com thinks that: Companies that do this have [...] Read more »

Build My Rank and Backlinking Profiles

Written by Lis on November 3, 2010 · 33 Comments

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!

Written by Lis on October 27, 2010 · 25 Comments

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 »

Shake Rattle and Roll

Written by Lis on September 8, 2010 · 7 Comments

Christchurch Wordsworth Colombo Streets (c) NZ Herald

Drizzle with a chance of earthquakes in the afternoon… On Saturday morning I was asleep – I usually am, but I was late getting up and getting online. I noticed that Skype was flashing a message – it was SY from Hospitalera Blogs asking if I was OK. Hmm I thought yes – why? I turned the radio on – it was talking about the big quake – obviously not the long awaited Wellington earthquake, and was in fact a huge quake of 7.1 in Christchurch. Its been an interesting few days – and I don’t just mean the minor earthquakes that we have had in Wellington (and yes quakes do come in swarms, and no I didn’t even notice them). Two things came out of this: trends blogging and business continuity and communications in the Twitter world. Christchurch Wordsworth Colombo Streets (c) NZ Herald Trends Blogging OK in my defence I knew no one was dead – but my second thought was – hmmm wonder what happens if I Google “earthquake insurance New Zealand” -ah I find my own Earthquake Insurance hubpage (which was written almost a year ago after Hubpages did a disaster hubmob) ranking just below the [...] Read more »

Free On-Page SEO Tutorial – Using Your Keywords In Your Site

Written by Lis on July 31, 2010 · 19 Comments

Perth from Rottnest - Passive Income Rewards!

OK so this is part 2 of my free on-page SEO tutorial last time we talking about what is a keyword – today I’m going to tell you what to do with that keyword – now you’ve found it. So let’s say -your site is about – oh I dunno – websites for small business maybe? Ideally – if I wanted a site completely focussed on websites for small business I would do the following: I would try to get the exact domain name match e.g. websitesforsmallbusiness.com (or net or org) – there is definitely a bias from Google in favour of exact match domains (this does not extend to .info, .ws. .biz .co or any other extension). In this case those domains are unavailable and I wanted to focus the site on a particular country, so I went with the .co.nz extension. I would include the keywords I was targetting in the blog’s title – sometimes you can’t get, didn’t get, didn’t think before you established a website – so end up with a stupid domain name e.g. lissowerbutts.com – but you can still target a totally different keyword by using the title tag. Ideally though I’d have had an exact match domain [...] Read more »

Free On-Page SEO Tutorial – Part 1 What Are My Keywords

Written by Lis on July 26, 2010 · 21 Comments

Wildflower display, spring, Kings Park, Perth, WA

A few months ago I wrote a Scribe SEO review which created a lesson in online reputation management in the comments – which was interesting - but hardly the point. My point was that there is nothing difficult or technical about “optimizing your blog for SEO” – and I promised that I would write more about on page SEO. A promised and then I promptly forgot about. But I have had more than one person contact me about a free alternative to a tool like Scribe SEO – so here is my version of it. Its free – its here, you don’t even need to subscribe for the e-book – frankly there is not enough to write to fill an e-book – well not the important stuff anyway. I am NOT an SEO Expert I can do SEO, I know what I need to know to rank sites in Google. I am not an innovator, and I don’t do a lot of testing. This seems to appeal to the inner Geek – I am a part-Geek but not with SEO. I do practical SEO which works for my sites. SEO Changes SEO=search engine optimization - but what we all really mean is Google optimization [...] Read more »

What is a Long Tail Keyword? Keyword Identification for the New and Clueless

Written by Lis on March 12, 2010 · 52 Comments

What is a keyword – or more specifically what is a long tail keyword phrase - caused me endless confusion when I first began. I totally didn’t get it – that’s why products like Scribe SEO exist – to prey on beginner’s confusion. That’s unacceptable in my view – so here is the information that you need about keywords. Its here for free, you don’t have to sign up for any membership site or even a one off payment. There are heaps of erudite SEO expert posts on keywords out there – this isn’t one of them. Instead this is an attempt to take it back down to basics – stick with me because I want to start to with a real world business example – and then we will move onto niche sites and blogs. Keywords For a Service Business I’m going to tell you how to do it for free. Lets assume you offer house washing services – purely because I am in the market for the same at the moment. Now I may search for “house washing” now this gives me a mixture of results including DIY articles on how to wash my house down and news [...] Read more »