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 they made this announcement, I received an email (and alot of others did too) from the Adsense team, telling me that my Germany tourism site should show MORE ads, even though most of my internal pages currently display a large rectangle ad that pushes most of the content down quite a bit. So there is a little hypocrisy there, but they’re famous for that. Check out the ad placement recommendations they made in the image below:

While they’re not recommending that I ad all 14 ad units shown in this image, as they allow no more than three ad units on any one page, their recommendation is still out of line with the Search team’s new above the fold ad guidelines.

For example, what if I decided to take their advice and add the three ads in that diagram that appear above the content. That would push my content about halfway down the page, which is exactly what the google search team is telling us they will PENALIZE our site for! And if that weren’t enough, Chris Richardson of WebProNews points out that the google search team is even guilty of breaking their own guidelines (see the screenshot toward the bottom of this article.) But it is what it is … we’re used to this kind of thing from google.

In reality it’s a smart update and it will improve the quality of their search results. What it all comes down to is the user experience and while even I may lose money from this update, as I own sites that are solely monetized by Adsense and I also place a large rectangle adsense unit directly below the titles, we should all try our best to maintain the mindset that it’s about the user, not the income!

As Zig Ziglar once said: “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want” and that applies to our online business as well. If we are constantly trying to help people, whether it’s by showing only the most user friendly pages in search results or doing something much greater, just having that mindset will make you much more money in the long run and more importantly, you will be able to help more people in the long run.

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 may be. You might start a new site and do the things you’ve always done, but it just never gains traction in Google.

As you may know, I run a very unique Performance Based SEO Service (take a look at our partner program if you have seo clients,) an offline internet business and I also have my own sites, many of which I like to optimize to get as much free search traffic as possible. So it’s important for me to understand and keep up with SEO.

Lets go over what I’ve learned and/or experienced over the past few months…

1. “Thin” sites get no love. If your site has only a handful of pages, start writing. For many years, you could create a small, five page content site, stick some adsense ads on each page, do a little seo to get those pages ranked for their respective long-tail keyword and you could easily be making money from that site every day. You can still do that, but you need to have more than 5 pages. For my “thin” sites I’ve increased the minimum to 10 and rankings have come back for many, but the more the better.

2. The longer the article the better. This goes hand-in-hand with the first point. You don’t only need to add more pages, you need to ensure that each content page has alot of content. I went from a minimum word count of 300 to 400, but the more the better. Some people are even recommending 500 or more words.

3. Frequent updates are more important now than ever. People have been saying you need to frequently update your site to get good SE rankings for years and years. But in many cases it just wasn’t true. One good example is my Germany site. It went YEARS without a single update and it always held top rankings for some very competitive phrases. But when Panda came around traffic to the site tanked by over 50%. I added some new articles, updated some old articles, updated the entire site template and the traffic has been steadily coming back. So although this was not true for years when people were saying it was, it IS true now.

4. Your site needs to LOOK credible and useful. If your site holds any top rankings now or in the future, human reviewers from Google will probably see your site at some point. Design, structure and ad saturation are the major factors they look at. Do you have huge ads commanding the main parts of your site or do you use the opportunity to present your most valuable content? Does your site look like something from the 1980′s or is it clean and professional? Is the layout of your site good? Does it make sense? Is it easy for your viewers to find the content they need to find? These are all questions you should ask yourself.

5. Consider your entire site, not just “money” pages. From the examples I’ve seen, the Panda update targets entire sites, not just single pages. So when considering all of the points on this page, be sure to think about ALL pages on your site. Do you have pages that are indexed in google that really shouldn’t be? Pages that people really don’t need to see? Pages that serve no value to the searcher? If so you may want to delete them completely or at least add a META nofollow tag to those pages… you could also restrict them in robots.txt.

6. Be careful with affiliate links. Google never has been a fan of affiliate marketing, so this one really isn’t a change, but it’s as important as ever to cloak any affiliate links in some way, whether with some kind of link cloaker software or by simply redirecting a page on your site to the affiliate link, then using the rel=”nofollow” attribute on that link. So, for example, if my affiliate link is affiliatesite.com/?affid=34 I would create a redirect on my server that would redirect a page like mysite.com/bestsite to affiliatesite.com/?affid=34 then I would actually link to mysite.com/bestsite and in that href/linking code, add the nofollow attribute, which tells google to ignore it. Whether that is 100% effective in eliminating the chances of google finding out it’s an affiliate link, I don’t know. But it’s better than nothing.

7. Understand what the searcher is looking for. This is another thing that isn’t new, but more important than ever to realize. Both Google and Bing have one ultimate goal: to return pages to their search users that provide exactly what they are looking for. If your sites do not do that, then you are in for a long, uphill battle when it comes to SEO.

8. Article Marketing has changed. One of the big site types that the Panda update targeted where HUGE content sites including article directories. That does NOT mean that article marketing is “dead.” But it does mean that many article directory sites that previously provided good or decent backlinks to our sites via the articles we submit to them, now do not. So stop submitting to hundreds of article sites and concentrate on only the top few article sites. I actually limit my article submissions to ONE site these days. Sometimes that site is ezinearticles, sometimes it’s a LinkVana blog and sometimes it’s another site, but I don’t syndicate articles anymore, just to stay on the safe side.

These are what I’ve found to be the most important points, but I’m sure there are other SEO’s out there that would add to it. The most important thing to remember is that SEO is always changing and the ultimate goal of the major search engines, as I explained in point #7, is to provide the best possible page to the searcher… a page that provdies the EXACT information they are looking for and gets that info to them in the quickest and easiest way possible. If you always keep that in mind, you’ll be good to go!

(If you’re not already subscribed, remember that if you would like a free SEO tip from me sent directly to your cell phone once per week, free of charge (aside from standard text messaging rates associated with your cell company) and you’re in the U.S. just text “seo” (without quotes) to this number: 50464. This is a service provided by FunnelPro, an SMS Marketing Company that also has a great affiliate program.)

So about a month ago when I was in a meeting with a business partner and he brought up a service called Backlink Booster… it must have been the 10th time I had heard someone talk about it over the past few months, I knew it was time to look into this and see what all of the hype was all about. So I created an account and started using it to see what it could do for some of our client’s sites that had not seen much improvement lately.

A week and a half later the first site, which had been stuck on page 2 for several months, had risen to the #5 spot! The second site, which had been stuck on page 3 for quite a while had risen to the top of page 2 and not much later it was also on page one! Those were the “test” sites and they past with flying colors!

Since I ran that little test I’ve added many more sites to the backlink booster system and there has been a significant increase in rankings for most of these sites. As someone who has been doing SEO for nearly 8 years, I can honestly say that for one very cheap service to make this much of an impact is nothing short of amazing!

I don’t do many product reviews here on the blog, but when I see these kinds of results I use any means necessary to spread the word.

What Backlink Booster Does

So you have a site, or multiple sites, that you want to get ranked in Google so you can leverage all of that free traffic. So you go submit articles to ezinearticles, submit your site(s) to web directories, social bookmarking sites, forum profiles etc. And it works… your site starts to rise in Google. The only problem is many of those backlinks are never even found by the google bot. So basically, you reap the rewards of your backlinking efforts, but only a small percentage of them!

Believe it or not, even ezinearticles doesn’t have a 100% indexing rate. Thousands of articles on their site never get indexed! And article marketing is one of the most popular forms of manual link building. The indexing rate just gets lower and lower as you go to different techniques like social bookmarking, web directories, forum profiles etc.

What backlink booster does, is it actually builds backlinks TO your backlinks and it works very well! So all of those backlinks that google didn’t find, are now found by google. But that’s not all. Not only do all of these hidden backlinks count as a result of “boosting” them with backlink booster, the authority they all possess is multiplied, which flows through to your website! So the result is more, stronger backlinks!

What I Don’t Like

This thing works… it does what it’s supposed to do, so I don’t complain! But if I were to bring up one thing with the Backlnk Booster guys, it would be to make it more user friendly. However, it’s a complex system in the backend, I can only imagine, and having alot of experience myself with web app. development, I know how it can be difficult to take something so powerful and complex, and simplify it for the users. So what I’ve done is I’ve made a video that should help clear up the confusion that I faced when I created my account, so you can get started with Backlink Booster and benefit from it ASAP.

I’ve been in touch with them over the past several weeks. They are very responsive and eager to improve the system even more, so it seems to me that this is a legitimate, long-term SEO solution that will be around for a long time to come.

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I am obviously an affiliate for Backlink Booster, but if you know me you know that I don’t do product reviews to simply make money. I want to give back too. So if you order through my link above, and you have any questions about it, I would be happy to personally help you with it. Just shoot me an email to joshspaulding1 at gmail dot com and I’ll get back with you ASAP.

Case Study Results! (Update)

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Aside from the same ol hassles like setting up redirects etc. I came across one thing that if not taken care of could cause a big problem. The problem is in the internal linking structure my WordPress theme (and most others) has. There is no problem if you have a small site with maybe 50 pages or less, but I plan on adding alot of content and will end up having several hundred posts.

So why is that such a problem? That’s a good question. I’m glad you asked It’s a problem because the more posts you publish, the further down your older posts go. First they drop off the front page, which reduces the amount of authority that is pointing to them. Then they roll off the second page… even less authority and so on.

But we also have categories and they are crucial in authority distribution. However, the category pages pose the same threat, only on a smaller scale. The more posts that are published in a particular category, the more posts fall off the first category page.

So having an even authority distribution among all of your posts is difficult. You could just link to the second, third fourth etc. category pages, but that’s not really user friendly (most will wonder what the heck these links are) and even if it was it’s still not ideal since it is all duplicate content.

So, the best solution I’ve come up with so far is to do three things:

1. Get a good related posts plugin to show related posts under every post.
2. Show a list of your more important posts in the sidebar.
3. Show only post summaries to reduce duplicate content and increase the number of posts shown on each category page.

That’s what I’ve done so far and I think I’m getting pretty close to the optimum internal linking structure, but I don’t’ feel like I’m there yet.

And a word on sitemaps since I know everyone is going to jump on that… sitemaps are good for getting large sites indexed, but they don’t increase the authority of any page. So while it might not be a bad idea to have one figuring out a good internal linking structure is an overall solution, while sitemaps are only a solution to one particular issue.

So what do you think? Have you come across this issue? How did you resolve it?

There are 4 different levels of SEO:

Level 1: This is the lowest level. The level where simple on-page edits can improve your rankings. Typically. level one SEO will not result in significant rank increases unless the keyword you are targeting has a very small number of competitors… the longest of the long tail.

Level 2: This is the level where easy link building, like directory submission, social bookmarking, profile backlinks etc. will drastically improve your rankings. This is typically the level required to get top rankings for long-tail and local phrases that have moderate competition, but not very strong competitors.

Level 3: When you use level 2 SEO techniques, but your site peaks (gets to a certain ranking and doesn’t seem to go any higher) then it’s time to move on to level 3 SEO, which is taking level 2 SEO and adding in some stronger links like those from article directories, blog networks and related sites that publish your site in exchange for a link in the content. If you’ve been doing level 2 SEO for a few months with no improvement, it’s time to move on to level 3.

Level 4: And finally, the most powerful kind of SEO, level 4. This is what is required if you want to rank for extremely competitive keywords that are typically dominated by million dollar companies. This requires creative thinking in order to produce content that has viral potential with the ultimate goal of obtaining the elusive “natural” links that Google and Bing love so much. If you have the money to invest, you can bend the rules a little and just go out and buy links from authoritative sites, but if you don’t you need to start thinking of creative ways to produce content that will invite links from other sites.

With every new site that I start to promote I start from number 1 and work my way down until I get the #1 spot. Level 1 is obvious and should be done for all sites, but you can rarely stop there. Level 2 will almost always get you in the top 10 pages no matter how competitive and in many cases it’s enough to get you to the front page. If level two doesn’t get me to the top 5 results after a few months then I go on to level 3 and if that doesn’t do it after a month or two then I move on to level 4.

So next time you see the argument over what works and what doesn’t, refer them to this article or just tell them, it all depends on the competition!

So Google recently make a big change to the algorithm they use to rank websites. This change negatively impacted thousands (probably closer to millions) of websites that Google thinks are “content farms.” A content farm is basically a site full of content that was created for the sole reason to make advertising money. In the IM industry the most common of this type of site is referred to as an “Adsense Site.”

If you’ve read my popular ebook Article Marketing Domination, and you put into place my article marketing strategies you probably haven’t seen any drop in rankings =)

This new update CONFIRMS the Article Marketing Domination techniques of:

- Only submitting your articles to the top few directories (not hundreds or thousands.)
- Not submitting your articles to your website AND article directories.
- Not pointing all of your links to the root (homepage) of your site… deep link when possible.
- Always producing good, quality content.

Many top article directories took a hit from this new update as well, because of all of the people who submit the same article (often low quality) to hundreds of article directories. The big ones like EzineArticles will gain their trust back because they are tightening their standards. For example, the minimum word for is now 400 words for EzineArticles and review times will be longer now, as they are being more strict with grammar and overall quality.

Just like always, it comes down to quality and moderation, as I teach in Article Marketing Domination. You can outsource article writing… you can even using a good spinner, but ALWAYS go over the articles before publishing them and make appropriate changes. You can submit your articles to a handful of article directories, but never overdo it and only submit to the highest quality directories.

For more on this update and some very good, detailed info and theories, check out Jonathan Leger’s “Google vs. Content Farms” blog post. Jonathan is a great guy who I’ve known for years now and he is one of the few people I trust in regards to SEO advice.

Exactly 6 years ago (Nov. 2004) I started my first website. It was a site on Germany Tourism that still, to this day, earns me several hundred dollars every month in Adsense and several thousand dollars a year in direct advertising. I have done very little to the site for years now, but it holds its top 10 rankings and constantly delivers for me!

This is one of many examples that shows the true power of basic seo. I also had a site ranked #4 overall in Google for the ultra-competitive phrase “make money online” (without quotes) at one time. Back then I didn’t know any advanced SEO strategies. All I knew was that I needed to get the keywords that I wanted to rank for in the title tag and get backlinks! So I did alot of article marketing, directory submitting and a few other basic link building techniques consistently and it worked!

As a matter of fact, I did the same basic SEO for LOTS of sites over several years and many of them still make me money every month to this day!

But after a while I started getting into other things. I wrote ebooks showing others how to find similar successes. I worked on building my list etc. etc. etc. And while I definitely wasn’t wasting my time (just diversifying my business) I started to get away from basic SEO.

Several months ago I created a few sites that I wanted to get ranked and quickly remembered they don’t get ranked on their own! So I went back to the basics and those sites are soaring in the SERPS.

So, the moral of the story… the purpose of this post, is hopefully only a reminder to you, rather than a wake-up call, that there are no secrets. If you want SEO results just stick to the basics and be consistent! If you can do that you will watch your sites and pages rise in the SERPS time after time!

So, instead of explaining something that has already been explained in details, I’ll just send you over to her blog to read the long, technical explanation and I’ll give you a very quick explanation for “dummies” like myself.

So here’s Jennifer’s very detailed and thorough explanation “Google Caffeine – What it Means To YOU”

And here is my explanation for “Dummies” like myself.

Google Caffeine is what Google has named the new index for their search engine. Basically, pages will be indexed MUCH quicker once Caffeine is fully implemented. That is a good thing for those of us who create alot of content. I remember years ago waiting a few MONTHS was typical for a site to be indexed. I remember very clearly my Germany Travel site took almost 3 months to be indexed by Google and I was building links to it daily. These days even before Caffeine it’s not uncommon to get a site indexed within a few hours, but apparently Caffeine will be even faster! So that’s cool, right?

But you also have to think about how the search results will be affected by this, specifically trendy topics.

I believe Google Caffeine is a result of Google’s desire to show news and social media pages more frequently whenever possible, because news, blogs and social media pages tend to have the most updated and current content.

Let’s say you have a page that holds a top ranking for “hair regrowth.” Now let’s say some miracle drug comes out that regrows hair 100%. The second that product hits the media, news sites and social media is going to BLOW UP with fresh content about it. Before Caffeine Google wouldn’t even know about these news, blogs and social media stories so your page would get alot of attention until that time. But with Caffeine Google will know about them almost instantly. Now, which do you think Google wants to show in those top positions? Your old, static page or all of those news and social media pages? I’m betting on the latter.

So to put it in layman’s terms, from what I understand, Google Caffeine isn’t going to affect the average Webmaster until there is a hot trend in your niche or if your niche is extremely active (a great deal of social media and/or news activity.)

As always, just keep doing what you know you need to be doing (helping people, building links etc.) and in most cases I believe you’ll be just fine.

That’s a good thing… we should always continue to work on that. But… in many cases these same individuals completely ignore one of the easiest ways to boost the traffic from the sources they already have. It’s called “optimizing.”

When you think of “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) you probably think of building links, creating a good internal linking structure and posting relevant content. But when it comes down to it, SEO consists of more than that. It consists of ANYTHING that you can do in order to leverage the Search Engines to drive more traffic to your pages.

One of those overlooked techniques is also “common sense.” It’s about giving the viewer exactly what he or she is looking for. Here is a good example. Last week I was checking the traffic stats of my Germany Tourism site and I noticed that one of the top keywords that Google was sending traffic through was “German Christmas Food.” I was getting a few thousand visitors just from that phrase, awesome!

Then I clicked over to see what page was getting the traffic. It was my “Germany Christmas” page, which talks very briefly about German Christmas Food, but is more about Christmas in Germany in general.

Then I went back and dug into the keywords people are using to find my site again. I found 13 other keywords related to German Christmas food that people were coming to my German Christmas page through. Most of them had smaller search numbers, but combine they accounted for more traffic than the thousands that the Germany Christmas Food keyword was driving. So always look at those keywords with small search numbers too because in many cases there will be several that are closely related!

You know exactly what needs to be done after hearing that info, right? Yep, it’s time to create a page TARGETING German Christmas Food. Now that page is going to turn around and drive twice the traffic and the Germany Christmas page will probably still hold it’s ranking as a double listing. It’s still too early to give you concrete numbers, but it’s just one of those things that I KNOW will happen… I’ve been doing it for years.

This is one of many examples of the same exact situation I have come across in the past. It happens ALOT!

Sometimes I’ll notice that a page I’m using to target “little blue widgets” is getting more traffic from the phrase “little blueish widgets” so I’ll change the title tag and within a week that page will rise in the SERPS, which means the traffic will rise along with it.

Sometimes the smallest things can make the biggest difference! If you’re not looking at your traffic stats and thinking of things like this I highly recommend you start doing so today. Don’t try to come up with ways to trick the SE’s. Just look for patterns and think “What can I do to give these users exactly what they’re looking for.” Do that and you’ll start seeing increased traffic right away!

img credit: kevinzhengli

It’s one of the biggest misconception in Internet Marketing. The simple fact is that Google does not rank any site over any other based on the platform in which it is run on. To understand why Google would never do this, we have to think about the goal of Google the Company. Google has one main goal, to make money. They make their money through advertising and the heart and soul of their advertising is their search engine.

So when it comes down to it, the more relevant and useful the top 10 results are when a user does a search, the more money they’re going to make (indirectly) as a result of more and more people using their search engine because it’s the best available.

So, with that being said, if site A is a WordPress blog and site B is a static site and site B is more relevant and useful to the user, why would Google rank site A over site B? They WOULDN’T!

It all comes down to authority and the platform in which your site is being run does NOT increase authority! That’s all there is to it!

BUT WordPress Blogs do have certain Advantages over Static Sites

Now don’t get me wrong, WordPress blogs are awesome and very useful. There are a few characteristics of blogs that make them very powerful.

With RSS you have an additional Means of Visitor Retention – In addition to building a list of prospects via email marketing, which you SHOULD be doing no matter what platform you use, blogs allow you to send updates to anyone who wants them via an RSS reader or directly to their email. This is done via RSS and it is something you don’t have with a static site.

WordPress blogs provide a platform for users to Interact – Every blog post you publish can be discussed between your visitors. Conversation is very powerful! It allows your users voice their opinion (you’re going to voice yours on this post aren’t you?) it allows you to get to know your regular readers and it also creates returning traffic because people want to know what others are saying in response to their comments etc. There are multiple benefits to user interactivity!

WordPress blogs get indexed quicker – It’s not because Google sees that it’s a WordPress blog, and for no reason likes it immediately. Google WANTS to index every single legitimate page on the Internet. The reason blogs tend to get indexed quicker is because they have the ability to ping. Every time you publish a post with WordPress the software pings a list of services. These services include Google Blog Search, Technorati and other authoritative, established sites. Google sees this and comes running to you in order to index your new post.

WordPress has thousands of plugins – When you run a static site, you don’t have all kinds of developers creating cool plugins to tweak out your site. With WordPress you DO. You can get a plugin that will do just about anything imaginable and the best part is most of them are free.

There are also a few cons, but the pros definitely outweigh the cons. WordPress requires quite a bit of server space compared to a light, static site script especially when you have multiple blogs. With WordPress you have to update the software fairly regularly to keep up with security risks etc.

Overall, when comes down to it, WordPress is an awesome Content Management System and I highly recommend using it. But I wanted to clear up that very common misconception with more than just “because I said so.” So the next time someone tells you Google loves blogs, remember what I said today and say “Why? I would love to know your logic” There response might be somthing like “because everyone says so”