Useless site

For years I do the webmaster, but I never made investments in this activity. Only costs that I have are two hosting providers and my multiple domains. I would surely have the cost of my personal computer with an Internet connection without doing this job. I never bought links, which many of you do, never invested in a SEO campaign, or a kind of promotion. But two years ago I have been offered 50 euros from Google AdWord to test their advertising program. Since it was an offer I decided to try, to broaden my horizons. Once I subscribed the program, they asked me to add my 5 euros and I made this little sacrifice.

I decided to promote my Forex site and I was following the results. Nothing! Nothing! I had a bit 'of visitors, some of them from the various sites that use AdSense and lend their space to advertising and some directly from Google search pages, but the financial result was nil. I thought I could invest, let’s say, 1000 and receive 1500 euros, have a capital with interest, but this test was entirely negative. Last year, returned from vacation I found another promotion that Google gave me 100 euros and without any additional request. Because it is totally free, it would be silly not to try again. But this time I chose a different tactic: I didn’t promote my site, but directly my sponsor. I entered my sponsor’s code directly into AdWord and I started to follow the result. Very hopeful, I must say, because the idea seemed to me very good. Why send a potential customer to my site if I can send him directly to the sponsor.

The statistics that provide my Forex sponsor are quite detailed and I can see where the traffic originates. And the visitors came, and all matched very well with the stats I had from AdWord: you know that we affiliates are a bit skeptical about the correctness of what we pay and what we pay for certain services, but in this case all were perfect. Except the main thing: 100 euros invested, which fortunately were not mine, 0 cents earned. I heard that there are people who earn in this way, but to me this didn’t happen. Because it simply does not work, at least with the services that I promote myself, or I have made mistakes in my ignorance. But I gained a new experience, sorry two.

While the campaign was underway, I had a communication from the staff of AdWord which referring to my site that was present in the account two years ago, but was inactive in the current campaign. They simply said that my site was useless, because it did not give useful information to visitors and I had only one sponsor, that the visitor did not have much choice where to register to trade with currencies. They also gave me an address with two examples of utility / futility of two similar sites.

Bad thing, supported by the fact that a month before my site is out of the first page of search results and finished on fourth. I did not know what to do, how to make "profit" from the point of view of Mr. G. Obviously the human verifier has not peeled the pages well and examined in detail the content, because there are things that cannot be found elsewhere. I needed something visible and accountable to the 'inspector" at first glance that there is something that is valid and original for a surfer. It took me some time to get there: I created a free Forex software that follows the trend of currencies and that visitors can download for free. It took me two weeks of work and I hope that this job will be paid in terms of utility. I just have to wait for future development: I will let you know my conclusion in one of the subsequent posts.

HTML elements and text

While the pagerank influents search results much lesser than few years ago, after the past post I focused my work on other important aspects for placement in search engines. The last update was done by Google at the end of Jun this year, and in that time I was in vacation, two wonderful weeks in South Africa, that I paid with the money I earned with my work on Internet. Back home, I found an electronic letter of a friend who warned me of what happened, namely that Googhi has updated toolbar pagerank. A quick browsing of my sites has given me great pleasure; the new pagerank were substantially better than previous ones. I got so far as to have 5 sites with PR5. But since the final aim is not the pagerank, I went to check my positions in search results. What a disappointment: most sites have lost many positions, in some cases going from the first to the fourth page of SERP.

Several days later I noticed that almost all the pageranks are went back to the old values. I had to say bye, bye to all of my five PR5. What the hell is going on? Perhaps those in the forum have had some light, they understand something that I can’t see. But nothing even there, only other confusion. In fact, even in the forums I found a gloomy atmosphere, cold and despair, because no one understands what happened, or do not want to reveal useful information. Hundreds of hypothesis on how to proceed, what to do, but no certainty, no confirmation on existing facts, that one approach is better than the other. At the end I was only with myself, and I have been busy comparing the first places for different keywords, trying to find out the elements, the methods to be introduced to strengthen my web. Without going to explain how and why, here are two sagacity that I am currently applying, hoping to see a positive outcome.

I remembered a conversation of some time ago with an acquaintance who insisted on the importance of the various HTML elements on the page. In fact, looking at some well-placed pages, I seem to have had some confirmation of this. So I try to introduce new html tags in my pages, such as UL, EMBED, CITE, and so on, trying to get richer the pages’ encoding. This means even more complicated for me. I personally do not like this because I believe that beauty is in simplicity, but I must try to adapt to the situation if I want to do some other nice trip, or long vacation.

Due to the content of the page, with the usual precaution to have the presence of certain keywords, I try to repeat as little as possible other words, using very much synonyms, thus having a greater linguistic diversity. I remember at school that the teacher of English always recommended to avoid repeating the same words. I made a small program in Visual Basic that does a count of words within the text and I noticed that in some cases I repeated the words that had nothing to do with my main keywords. The worst thing is that those words had the density very near to the density of my keywords. Therefore, as in finance, the diversification of coding elements, the words in the text and content of the site are very important.

I forgot! You know that the today’s date should be very lucky: there are 6 number 1 there. At least Chinese think so. Good luck to all of you.

Googleations

I'm crazy for new inventions in the language field and I was very happy when I got the idea for the title. But someone else has already had this illumination? Easy to check with the gentleman named in the heading. The fact is that have been so many before me to have this inspiring, but anyway I'll keep it because I swear it is the original product of my brain. These days we are more or less one year from the great renewal that Google has made ​​in its algorithm and we can sum up the result. There are two main aspects to consider, our point of view, webmasters who are trying to place our masterpieces on the first page and the experience of other navigators who are simply seeking to obtain information necessary for their work, or even better, for fun. Webmasters have digested the changes and have adopted the new rules. For some it went well, but many still have not been able to reach levels of success they had yesterday and unfortunately the gay that writes this columns is among them.


But for the surfer has gone even worse. An American magazine specializing in the topic of Internet searches has published a survey carried out among the common people and network users, those who do it professionally and the conclusion was catastrophic. Google is no longer the best search engine and the quality of search results provided are worse than during precaffeine, as they called the new version introduced last year. To verify this news I personally started to do some searches and I was remain really disappointed with what Google showed as the best sites. Looking for "online forex" on one national Google, from the first 10 sites listed, 4 did not give any useful information. Indeed, in the first place was a post from one forum containing only one sentence, that is without substance, and with a pagerank 0. Very surprising. Google's management have noticed what was happening and being afraid of losing customers, let’s remember that there are a lot of money from advertising, announced that they are reviewing the algorithm deeply and as quickly as possible they will try to improve it and give to the end users a good product.

For those of us who work around the world this changes promises a new, hard work, first of all to understand the modifications that will be introduced and then apply the appropriate steps to achieve the goal of being present on the first page. There will be so many sleepless nights, a lot of caffeine to keep us awake and new frustrations by seeing our sites slip 10, 20 pages back. But this is the Internet and you have to adapt. One of the ways to go out successfully, without excessive suffer this continuous changes is to make various sites in a different way, by applying a policy of diversification of contents and backlinks, so you can have different profiles and hope that one of them is already well optimized for changes to come.

SEO parameters - second part

Yes, it's been a while since I wrote my last post but during the summer I prefer to spend time in nature, walking and riding the bike, instead of hanging on the computer. Summer is already gone and it’s time to return to work. The first article was posted in April and those month something important have happened for all the webmasters. Google has introduced Cocaine. Yes, you read right, the new version isn’t called Caffeine, as they want us to believe and I have the evidence to prove all this. The ranking the new version gives, compared to previous ones, can only be produced by an entity heavily doped: you don’t understand how it works. Or at least it was so early, a shock for those involved in this sector, but now the webmaster begin slowly, slowly to understand the new rules and adapt to them. The changes are a lot and in many cases it will take a lot of time and effort to get back on earlier positions, but this is Internet, characterised by its dynamism, many changes, today you are in and tomorrow you are out. But let’s go back to our theme.

Often the second part of a movie or a book has the same title as the first but with the addition of the word "revenge." Therefore, the title could be SEO parameters, the revenge of SE. In fact, in the years to come algorithms became more and more complicated that only few were able to understand. But the turning point was the introduction of backlinks as a parameter. Replicate a site is easy, but having the same external links is much more difficult, especially if the guy we want to reproduce has its own network of sites where he links; certainly he will not give a link to his rival.

With the birth of backlink also the market for links was born. I will pay you and you will post a link to my site on your web page. The result of this was that the strong, I think of those with a solid financial base, have become even stronger and the weaker ones, but often full of enthusiasm and great content, they are almost gone from the front pages with the results. Also Google has noticed this fact and has introduced new rules but without any significant change; it is difficult to be sure that a link has been sold, that is bought. So the internet reflects today's society very well, pure capitalism – money earn money. No despair, there are many exceptions to this rule.

One of the results of back links is also the pagerank, which is widely analyzed in these pages, which lately has become less important than once, but differently of many webmasters who believe in its death (the argument in their favor is the fact that it was not updated for more than half a year), I think it's still an important parameter.

Returning to the words used to link our site, Cocaine has introduced an innovation. The sites optimized for search engines were penalized. Too much uniformity in the keyword of the ancor tag linked to us is for example considered optimizations we mentioned above. Therefore, according to the latest knowledge in the sector, it’s important to diversify the keyword. For example, if our main keyword is "ads online," it should be dilute its presence of about 70% of cases and the remaining 30% use alternative words such as "best ads online," "buy and sell ads" etc.

There are obviously also other terms of comparison, they say more than a hundred, that Google considers, from which many lesser known, but we will see them in the sequel.

SEO parameters - first part

In this and some future articles I will talk about the parameters that affect the page rankings, especially in Google. Knowing these parameters and the ability to measure them in some way gives us great advantage because it allows us to optimize the SEO work in order to get good results. For newbies, the abbreviation SEO means Search Engine Optimization. Google it, and you’ll get over twenty seven million hits – this tells you how important SEO is. But before going any further, let me talk a bit about how I started in this business and how it was done back at the stone age of internet, more then 10 years ago.

In the late 90’s, when I started to access the Internet using an ancient 48Kb/sec modem, I had already understood how important a good placement in search engines really is, to attract quality web traffic, and visitors clicking the banners and ordering goods or services offered by sponsors. Back then, together with AltaVista, the most popular search engine was Infoseek. I spent hours analyzing the sites that appeared on the first page of results, trying to discover the mechanisms that regulate which site stands at the top of the rankings and which at the bottom. In those days the SEs were not taking in consideration the backlinks and thus it was pretty easy to discover the ranking concept – all I had to do was to analyze the content of the pages. My effort was rewarded and after two weeks of hard work, I succeeded in finding the mathematical formula that assigned scores to a web page. The formula was based on the presence of keywords in the title, text and links. It was enough for me to analyze the source code of the first placed site and I could produce the page that had better score then the analyzed page. The result was that my site became placed at the top of the search list.

The first sites that I developed and the first pennies I earned came from the sponsorship of the adult industry. Being rated first in the rankings for the word "porn" translated into a few thousand dollars a month and I often succeeded to be the first. I already thought about quitting my job and becoming a full time webmaster. After all, my regular job was paying only a fraction of what I was making on the Internet, and besides, I was my own boss and was working whenever I wanted.

However, I soon realized that there are others who had the same idea and the competition was getting fierce. I needed to work day and night in order to beat the competitors and keep the rankings. I remember days when ten or more different sites would occupy the first spot – everything was changing so fast. Soon thereafter, the people at Infoseek have begun to change the search algorithms very frequently, making everything even more complicated. For instance, they introduced limits on the density of the keyword - if a keyword, let’s say, exceeded 6% of all the words on the page, the site was penalized. I had developed a word generator that repeated the keywords as many times as required, but soon realized that this is not going to work any more.
And in order to get a high ranking, the good content was becoming a necessity, the texts became longer, and the files grew larger. The game was getting really complicated.

PageRank Sculpting

Pagerank Sculpting, what is this? How one can sculpt an unmaterial thing like pagerank? In fact we don’t sculpt PageRank, but it’s distribution within a site. All of us who have one or more sites must admit that some pages are more important than others and we would like that some of them also occur between the results of research, not just our home page. I don’t know who had this idea of modeling the site, but the concept is this: there are important pages within the site that I care about and the others I care less because they have no relevance to the search engines. The idea is to pass more PageRank from those non important to the important pages: it is a redistribution of PageRank. And how we can do it?

The technical procedure is very simple and is accessible to all webmasters. The tip is the using of the tag "nofollow" (again this famous tag). The pages that you want to ignore must be linked from other pages using that tag. In this way the internal links do not pass pagerank to those less important pages, and the available Page Rank is distributed to the most important. Easy to apply and seems also to be very useful in some cases. But is this concept works, is it correct? By my opinion no and I will go to explain my point of view.

Who is familiar with the formula for the calculation of pagerank knows that the pagerank passing to other linked pages drop by a factor of damping (this is not of our interest for this reflection) and depends on the quantity of the number of links. The originators of this technique are confused and thought: putting nofollow tag fore some links, these will not be taken into account for the distribution of pagerank and here is the error. Number of links are used as the probability that one of the links on the page is clicked by a visitor. But the visitor does not see if a link has been tagged and not change anything in its intentions.

My conclusion is that this technique not only does not help the site, but it hurts: the pages linked with nofollow lose pagerank and don’t pass anything to important pages and at the end of the story, all the site is penalized because with less pages, drains less page rank from external links that point it. To those who are not convinced by my argumentation and that in any case would like to try this technique, I can say that this is recognized as legitimate procedure directly from Goolge. If your findings are different from mine, let me to know about.

How to get good placement with Search Engines

First of all, let’s say what I consider a good placement in Search Engines. It’s simply, the best thing is to be at first place on the first page of search results, but as good position normally is considered to be at the first page. If your site is present at the second or third page, you will probably have some traffic, but insufficiently to make enough money from your little business, supposing that you use the sponsors that pay you for clicks, or more usually for sell products. Let’s remember that the best clients are the visitors that come from search engines. And we want to have lot of them, so they can click our banners and buy our products.

As you can see from various articles on this blog, the tip to reach a good placement in Google and in other search engines is very simply: have a good pagerank and lot of backlinks to our site. The both of this things are reached in the same mode, submitting the site to directories, top lists and exchanging links with other webmasters that have the same scope as you. The concept is basically very natural and simply but it’s not always easy traduce it in the practice. Some of the directories and top lists, too, are specialized in some particular themes and don’t accept sites with not adequate contents. Lot of webmasters don’t want to trade link with some kind of sites, for example with adult sites, or with those that promote online games, or high yield investments.

The solution of this problem is to create a little network, better if a big one, of own sites, dedicated to the most various themes, and very different contents. From my point of view it’s better not go too far, i.e. the themes should be ours, the things that interest and excite us, that we know something about because in that mode is much more easier dedicate free time to this sites. When we create a net of about ten, twenty sites, it becomes rather hard to maintain and promote them if we haven’t passion. Part of our net can be composed of different blogs that we can freely open with some providers and less important sites can be free hosted (however, be careful to chose a good free hosting; there are on the Internet). The most important thing is differentiate arguments and subjects.

So now we can submit this, let’s call them, secondary sites to the places that our main sites wouldn’t be ever accepted and listed because out of topic. When our secondary sites one day finally reach Google’s pagerank (I forgot to say that this secondary sites must be promoted, but it seemed to me superfluous), we will put the links that point our primary sites and the game is done. Practically we obtained indirect links from the sites that wouldn’t give us direct link.

Construction of one little network with at least 10 sites, but not more then 50 if the network is managed by one person only, is an excellent solution that can greatly increase our revenues, but requires from 2 to 3 years of work. Having such a nice network, tomorrow when we will open a new site, we can give it immediately whole of links that will guarantee a fat achieve of page rank. The better thing is that the network is our, so we can do with what we want, and we can link what we need, without any dependence from other subject of Internet life.