Internet Marketing with Josh SpauldingMaking Money through Ethical Internet Marketing.

Getting Past Google’s Smelly Penguin Update (How Smelly Penguin Affected my Sites)

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, Google just recently did another big update to their search results. This one “Penguin” is a little more tricky, a little less “cut and dry” and I would assume the FAVORITE of all Google updates to the BOD at Bing, considering the results it produced are similar to the results Google produced 10 years ago.

The effect it had on some of my own sites are an excellent example of just how bad this update was in regards to actually improving their results.

My Germany Tourism site EverythingAboutGermany.com which has been ranking in the top 3 for several years… is nearly 8 years old and has alot of natural, authoritative backlinks, to include DMOZ listings and ORGANIC Yahoo Directory links (most links in yahoo directory are paid, my listings are NOT.) That site is now ranking #6 from my location in Google for “germany tourism,” a drop of 3 spots. That site has all original content written by me, after living in Germany for 5 years and my wife who IS German… born and raised. A good majority of the backlinks are natural and many of them are from VERY authoritative websites. Would you say that is the type of site that SHOULD be at the top of google? I would! Smelly Penguin didn’t think so.

BUT nearly ALL of my adsense sites, which target various niches that I know nothing about, acheived their rankings with web directories, social bookmarks, forum profile linkes etc. continue to enjoy top 10 rankings, some even have BETTER rankings! One good example is my split toe shoes site, splittoeshoes.org which still holds the #2 position in google. That is one of many, many examples. So Smelly Penguin says these sites are higher quality

So why did this happen? Maybe a Bing representative infiltrated Google and sabotaged it. I doubt it, but if that were to happen, the result couldn’t be any worse than the result of smelly penguin, that’s for sure.

My partner with Keyword Canine (See this video, announcing a HUGE update we just released!) and one of the most highly respected IMers out there, Jonathan Leger, explained it quite nicely here: “Ranking in Google After Penguin”

He explains it very nicely there, but what it all comes down to (if you even WANT to try to keep up with Google’s madness) is analytics… good competition analysis… seeing what is working for those in the top 10 and what isn’t working for them.

As always, I’ll continue to do what I’m doing until it no longer works. So far it all continues to work! Yes, my Germany site got hit a little, but all sites go up and down from time to time. I’m not too worried about it and I will not be doing anything drastically different. I will vary the anchor text in my backlinks a little more and continue to diversify my backlink strategy, but beyond that the same things that always have worked, continue to work. If anything, lower quality and irrelevant sites now rank higher than ever. Bravo Google and congrats to Bing.

My Take on Google’s Deindexing of Blog Networks

I know, I know, I’m late to the party. Everyone else and their brother have already told you one of the following regarding Blog/Content networks:

- The sky is falling and all blog networks are worthless.
- The sky MIGHT be falling, proceed with caution.
- The sky is NOT falling and people are overreacting.

But, as a regular user of LinkVana (LV) and 1WayLinks (1WL) and also as someone who personally knows and communicates weekly with the owners of both of those networks, which happen to be two of the most popular and effective blog networks on the market, I [...] Continue Reading…

How to Set Default Facebook Image + Optimize your Site for Facebook

Back in 2006/2007 when Facebook was just starting to get popular, I remember holding off for a looooong time. At that time, there was one new social site after another and it was difficult to keep up with which ones drove traffic, which ones didn’t… which ones were on the way up, on the way down etc. And I wasn’t alone.

But as time went by, it became pretty obvious that Facebook was here to stay. I have to admit, I didn’t think it would still be popular in 2012, let alone become the HUGE platform that it is [...] Continue Reading…

PayPal Review – My Account Limited for No Good Reason!

Yesterday I received a call from a PayPal rep. He told me that my account had come to his office for review and he just had a few questions. Knowing that I’m a long-standing merchant of PayPal who has made them plenty of money over the years, I’m thinking no big deal. I gladly gave him the info he requested and I thought everything was fine.

That is until a few minutes ago when the same person called me back telling me that after reviewing my account, which processed nearly $65,000 in revenue last year alone (see 1099 below,) did [...] Continue Reading…

Case Study: How to Easily Create & Promote a Profitable Site

Before the initial launch of Keyword Canine, Jonathan and I released the results of a few case study sites that I did. I had gotten two sites to the top of Google in a VERY short amount of time.

I believe I got the first one ranked is about 2 weeks and the second in about 3 weeks. One of the sites was splittoeshoes.org targeting “split toe shoes” (currently #1 from my location) and the other was sugaraddictiontreatment.net targeting “sugar addiction treatment” (currently #4 from my location.) In this post I’m going to go through the entire process of [...] Continue Reading…

How to Make Big Money Outsourcing Software Development

I don’t know about you, but I started learning about Internet Marketing back in 2004 for one reason: To make as much money as possible and to do it while sitting in the comfort of my own home. And I’ve been Blessed enough to be able to do that for the past 4 1/2 years since getting out of the Army in 2007.

But up until early 2010 the extent of my profits were from info products, affiliate sales, adsense revenue and ad selling. And I still make money with all of those things to this day, but in [...] Continue Reading…

New Case Study Site Coming Soon – Need Suggestions

Once you get into the Internet Marketing space, it doesn’t take long at all to realize that product “reviews” aren’t really reviews at all, they’re promotions (95% of the time anyway.) And even the Internet Marketing Review websites that come and go, which claim to have “real” user reviews, aren’t actually unsolicited, honest reviews. They’re often times bribed into leaving reviews and in many cases the users have never even used the product that they are recommending to you.

This has been a problem in IM for a very long time and I’ve wanted to get something started that would [...] Continue Reading…

New Google Algorithm Update – Ads Above the Fold

Last Thursday (1/19/12) Matt Cutts announced a new Google search algorithm update on the Google search blog. This is an update that has been rumored for a while now and it looks like it has finally happened, or begun to happen at least.

This new update looks at the above the fold content to advert ratio of pages and it is sitewide, meaning that if they find just one page on your site that they believe is pushing the page content too far down the page, they can and probably will punish the entire site!

Ironically, on the SAME DAY that [...] Continue Reading…

Why Positivity and Optimism are Crucial in your Online Business

It has now been over 7 years since I started my very first website, while stationed in Germany serving in the Army. I WISH that I had an audio clip of all of the people, especially back then, who told me that this “internet stuff” was a waste of time… people literally laughed at me back then. As I sit here crunching numbers for the upcoming tax season, I’m reminded of these people. They certainly aren’t laughing now that I’ve created a 6-figure business online!

However, there were many times when I allowed those people to get to me… I [...] Continue Reading…

Post Panda SEO – 8 Things You Need to Know

If you are associated with SEO in any way, you’ve likely seen the word “Panda” about 108,231,644 times over the past several months by everyone and their brother. PotPieGirl has been keeping up with it pretty extensively and has gotten alot of attention for it. And now, you can add one more to that number.

It can get a little confusing trying to figure out exactly what Panda is and what it means to you specifically. However, it’s important for you to know at least the basics because even if your current sites were not affected yet, future sites [...] Continue Reading…