In 2006, some paid links market websites like Text Link Ads (TLA) started to grow. Many webmasters/bloggers received easy money by selling paid links on their blog. Me too.

Then, Google started penalizing those websites which buy/sell paid links. I quit selling paid links that time.

However, there are still many websites are buying/selling paid links. Reason because, for advertisers, it is a fast way to improve search engine rank for their selected keywords. For publishers, it is a easy money that does not require you to do anything but only putting a few links on your website.

People ask Google again and again whether the paid link consider as SPAM or not. Google has reconfirmed by replying using their Google Webmaster Twitter account that they are considering links via sites like Text-Link-Ads as SPAM.

“Since we hear this question again and again: Yes we de consider buying links via http://tinyurl.com/39epw3 and similar services as spam.”

The tinyurl URL links to Text Link Ads homepage.

[via Thats SEO]

My two cents

Regardless of you are advertiser or publisher, if you are still with Text Link Ads or similar services, you should quit it now. I believe Google will keep on working an algorithm to detect all the paid links.

Don’t let paid links buriyyour website in search engine results.

Instead of paid links, now you should work on the social media marketing. The social media is the Internet now.

Learn Facebook marketing from the book “Facebook Era” available at Amazon.com.

Over to You

Have you bought/sold paid links before? What do you think of paid links? Should search engines ban it? Do you think Google can detect all the paid links?

Michael Jensen shared his experience to get a new website indexed by Google in 1 Day, without spending any cent on AdWords. Here are the steps:

1. Create 5 pages of content.
2. Use a simple template with site-wide links. Linked from a relevant site that you owned.
3. Tagged the new site on social bookmarking sites.
4. Commented in forum, put the URL in a specific niche web directory, and submit to Digg.
5. Install Google Analytics
6. Create and submit sitemap to Google Webmaster Central. Ping Google, and put the sitemap URL in “robots.txt”.

Michael checked his new site exactly 24 hours later and it has been indexed!

Tips: For WordPress users, you can use the Google XML Sitemap plugin for the jobs in Step #6

“SEO: Search Engine Optimization Bible”

My two cents

According to my previous experience, a high PageRank link to the new site is enough to get the site be indexed on the next day. The other steps are helpful to get more pages indexed.

So, have you got what’s important to get your site be indexed?

1. Content
2. Links
3. Social bookmarking sites, Forum, Web Directory
4. Sitemap, Ping

Many beginners know the first two – content and links – are important to get indexed and good ranking.

The latter two are always missed or not known. Social websites are very helpful to spread the word out. Sitemap helps search engine spiders to read your site. Pinging send a message of “Hey! My site is updated! Come visit my site!”.

If you haven’t started doing so, do it now. You will probably be surprised by the result on the next day!

Image: paid text links on The New Straits Time Online

You text ads can have up to 5 words and link to your website. It is a direct text link. *grin* Furthermore, the text ads are shown at almost EVERY pages of the website. That is a great exposure!

The New Straits Times Online is a Malaysia news portal with Google PageRank 7 out of 10. It is a high ranking! So far, no PR8 website found in Malaysia yet.

As we know, Google dislike paid text links that will influence the search engine page results.

We don’t know whether Google will de-rank The New Straits Times Online or not, but I don’t think they will care about it. The website’s traffic does not depends on search engines.

Perhaps I should put my text ads too and see what I get.

NST, advertising

can you reconfirm our return journey rep to kul on ***
by AK***. BOOKING NO ***.

CAN YOU PL. RING *** OR MY MOBILE OUT SIDE UK*** TO NIGHT YOUR OFFICE AT SIEM REAP NO REPLY. THANK FOR THE HELP.

I didn’t ignore the message but I can’t help him, I ask him to visit AirAsia website for support. I hope he enjoy the journey!

Tip: Do some keyword researches for the keyword phrase used on your post title. It works!

airasia, airline

Matt Cutts (head of Google’s Webspam team) confirmed that the PageRank update was a penalization against links selling that pass PageRank.

Malaysian blogs are not spared

A few of Malaysia top blogs got their PageRank decreased as well, such as 5xmom(PR5 to PR3), Sabahan(PR5 to PR3), and HongKiat(PR4 to PR2). [list stolen from BytesWired]

Remember, the two PR7 blogs in Malaysia? Zeo still maintains PR7 but his donation page dropped from PR6 to PR5. Ades, on the other hand, is not as lucky. His site lost the precious PR7 and become PR5.

Oh, my LiewCF Tech Blog also lost PR6. It dropped to PR4 from PR5, then climbed up to PR6, now PR5 again.

How to rescue your PageRank?

If you are an innocent victim of PageRank update who don’t sell links, you can “request reconsideration” on Google Webmaster Tools. Google may return your PageRank if your site follows Google’s quality guidelines.

Bye-bye Paid Links, or no?

Earlier this year, I blogged that Google dislikes paid links. We have been warned. Then, I did seriously consider to remove paid links on this blog but I didn’t do so in the end.

This time, I will remove all paid links on this blog. As a result, I need to make a refund to the clients and losing hundreds bucks(USD) of extra income. There goes my dedicated server monthly hosting fee~ Well, if I still want to be in the game, I would better follows the game rules.

However, there are bloggers like Ades and 5xmom who decided to keep paid links and paid posts. They are confident that their sites can live without the Google PageRank.

Do you keep or dump paid links?

Related book: The SEO Book

google, pagerank, search engine, seo

Currently, BlogRush statistics have been disabled temporary. I think it is a good idea to hide the cruel fact (low incoming traffic) of current BlogRush and keep the existing members.

Here are the “shocking changes” (coming soon) according to BlogRush:

• 100% manual blog review — BlogRush will manually review every single new blog to filter out spam sites.
• More categories — BlogRush adds more categories to increase the relevancy of post links in widget.
• Improved reporting — Bonus credit activity will be reported. Low traffic members will get “a ton more bonus credits” than high traffic members.
• Improved network distribution — balance between building and using credit points.

Here are the implemented new features:

• Flavors — now you can change the color of your BlogRush widget from 13 “flavors”
• Post filter — do not want to show your certain posts? You can use “post filter” to filter your blog posts with matching word or phrase in post title. Filtered post will not be syndicate to BlogRush network.

My two cents

None of the new changes directly increases incoming traffic to blogs.

BlogRush will have hard job to review blogs manually because each spammer can create hundreds sites each day.

Filtering post is a good idea but Post Filter is not effective. You probably need to add custom keyword like “NSFW” to the post title. It is better if we can filter posts by category or tag.

If you want to try BlogRush, please sign up via my BlogRush referral link.

blog, blogrush, seo, traffic

What is BlogRush widget?

After sign up BlogRush, you will be asked to insert a widget code to your blog then a BlogRush widget will be shown on your blog with links to other blog posts of other BlogRush members in the same category of your blog.

The blog links will be opened in new window when clicked. They are re-direct links, therefore, no SEO benefit.

Like the BlogRush links you see, your blog post will be linked in BlogRush widget on other member’s blogs.

How to get traffic from BlogRush?

BlogRush is using a credit system, the more credits you have the higher chance your blog post be displayed on BlogRush widget on other member blogs.

How to earn credits? The higher traffic is your blog (with BlogRush widget) the more credits you will earned. The other way is your referral network. The more referrals, the more credits you will earn. You earn credits from your referrals’ blogs traffic on certain ratios.

Does BlogRush work?

No, I don’t think so. It helps to give exposure to your blog (through widget link) but not on incoming traffic. I joined BlogRush for 2 days and got 2 referrals. I had 3,127 impressions but only 1 click. That’s very very low CTR!

BlogRush widget only display your post title, a good title will increase the click-rate. Here are some tips recommended by BlogRush and I personally recommend copyblogger’s “How to write headlines that work” too.

The widget placement will greatly affect the click-rate too. The more critical placement, the higher click-rate. “Why should I promote for other blogs?” A blogger will probably put the BlogRush widget below the fold (bad placement) to leave space for other blog content, but the blogger still earning the same BlogRush credits.

For a blog reader, he/she comes to a blog to read its content and probably ignores the BlogRush widget links. Furthermore, the widget has been placed on below fold of a web page, which hardly get noticed.

Is BlogRush useless?

Not sure. I will give it a try for a couple days more and tell you the result. If you want to try BlogRush, please sign up via my referral link.

blogrush, blog

Feedthebot is a site dedicated to help you understanding the Google Webmaster Guidelines. It provides a detailed look at each guideline by defining the terms that are used, explaining the concepts and providing examples of common violations.

I highly recommend it to every webmaster and bloggers!

Related book: Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company’s Web Site

google, SEO, webmaster

With the script, you do not need to go to different search engines to check how well your (or competitor’s site) ranked for a search term. However, the script does not tell you WHY and HOW a site ranked well.

Found other useful online SEO tool? Please share with us!

SERP, SEO, shoemoney

Since my listing is still new, I don’t see any significant effect from BOTW yet. Anyway, BOTW Blogs is testing blog search by posts and tags, it definitely increases the exposure of your blogs.

Submit Now and save 25%! (promo code: SIZZLE25)

BOTW, directory

However, submission to BOTW is not free. The annual recurring review fee is $79.95 USD or $239.95 for one-time only review fee. BOTW Blog submission is cheaper, only $39.95 one-time review fee. Or, submit blog for free without time guarantee.

Good news! BOTW is running its biggest discount promotion of the year for the entire month of August 2007. You can save 25% on all new directory submission and sponsorship advertising.

Use this promo code when prompted: SIZZLE25

Submit Your Site to Best of the Web »

You can use the promo code on:

• directory submission — save 25% on annually recurring and one-time review fee.
• blog directory submission — save 25% on the one-time review fee for blogs.
• Discount the monthly rate for all new sponsorship ads.

The discount promo code can be used multiple times for multiple submissions during the month of August. It will expire on August 31, 2007.

Submit Now and save 25%! (promo code: SIZZLE25)

My two cents

I wanted to submit my blog to BOTW for a long time… This is a good chance. I just submitted my blog to BOTW blog directory and saved $9.99 USD (total: $29.96 USD).

BOTW, coupon, directory, promo

Ouch! That’s hurt! I can feel the pain because I had similar experiences. Google search is the main source of my site traffic, therefore I got hit very hard that time. Luckily, Google lifted the penalization after 2 or 3 months.

In John Chow case, dropping in Google SERP does not seems to affect his site traffic very much now. I guess he has built up a good loyal readership. However, since many online advertising programs rely on Google data as a factor of ad pricing, I am afraid it will have negative effects to John Chow’s blog income.

Why Google drops John Chow?

Fellow webmasters believe the main reason is John Chow’s review karma / link baiting / link building campaign. He asks other bloggers to review and link to his blog with certain keywords (“make money online”) then he will give a link back. It is quite evil to trick Google for higher ranking in SERP.

In Google’s webmaster guidelines, it is clearly stated that:

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”

and,

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

My two cents

So, what have you learned? Quoted from Get Found, “If you are going to game Google, keep it unnoticed.” Or, better still, NEVER try to trick Google to improve your site ranking.

You only need to do some basic white hat SEO and focus on your content quality. You will see the result in a long run. Patience is important. Think and write for your readers, not search engines.

Good luck!

[via Get Found]

google, SERP, SEO, John Chow

• Alt text — ALT text or Alternate Text, is the text to describe your image when your mouse over an image on a web page. The text should be meaningful but keep it short. You should use search keywords for ALT text. Here is sample image code with ALT text:
  <img src="filename.gif" alt="image description here" />
• File name — always use meaningful file name to your images, use image file name like “apple-iphone-cover.jpg” instead of meaningless “pic123.jpg”. Keep image file name same or similar to ALT text. Also, try to keep the path to your image theme such as:
  /images/phones/apple-iphone-covers.jpg
• Surrounding Text — always place a paragraph of descriptive text directly above and below your image, with the keywords from your ALT text and Image Name.
• Page Title — Include your keywords in your Page Title and Meta Description. It helps Google define the theme for the page which helps in Image Searches and Google Search Index.
• Page Theme — Keep the theme of each page. Do not mix the content with other topics.
• Links — Whenever you want to link to your image, use the image keywords in your link text. Example: use “Picture of Apple iPhone”, instead of “Click here to view picture”. The link text tells Googlebot that it is a link to a picture of Apple iPhone.

My two cents

The visitors bring in by Google Images Search consists of 3.8% of the total site traffic of LiewCF Tech Blog. That’s a lot for a non-photo gallery site.

Perhaps you might be lazy to do the image optimization works but they really worth your time, if you want to bring more traffic to your website. Try it!

google, search engine, SEO

Image: Google Analytics new version

Besides the new interface, here are the new improvements:

• Email reports — Personalized reports sent by email and export as PDF format
• Custom Dashboards — Create your own customed dashboard with the information you need. It can be emailed to others too.
• Trend and Date Slider — Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.
• Contextual help tips — make reports easier to read and understand.

There are also new and improved features for Google AdWords clients to track their campaign performances.

Take a video tour and feature tour of the new version of Google Analytics. It will be active on all current accounts over the next few weeks.

Not a Google Analytics member yet? Free sign up here.

P.S. Check this post out “Get the most of out your Google Analytics”

web stats, google, analytics, statistics

In fact, “incoming links” has been replaced by the “Authority” number. The higher Authority score, the better Technorati Rank. You will get same Technorati Rank as other blogs if both of you have same Technorati Authority score.

My Technorati Authority score is 810. How about yours?

[via Photo Matt]

technorati, authority, technoratiauthority, seo

Congrats! In fact, they are the very few websites in Malaysia with PageRank 7. Another Malaysian PR7 website is TheStar Online, the online version of The Star local newspaper. (Let me know if you found the 4th PR7 site in Malaysia)

What is the benefit of PR7?

Although both Zeo and Ades are high PageRank sites but they are not high traffic website.

But, high PR gives them a better rank in Google search result of their keyword. Zeo ranked #1 among 1,570,000 results. Ades ranked #6 among 2,990,000 results (#1 is one of the Ades’ project). Of course, they might not target for these keywords.

Currently, Ades has 14 paid links and Zeo has 26 paid links. Each PR7 paid link is over $100 USD per month in the market. Now, you know how much they got for doing nothing.

How to get PR7 incoming links

If you have text link budget, Zeo and Ades are offering paid text links on their blogs. Ades will place your link for $150 USD per month. Zeo is asking for MacBook donation for $5 USD and will permanently place your link on a PR6 page. You may contact Zeo for a site-wide PR7 link.

My two cents

One of the reasons people chasing for high PageRank is to be able to sell text link and ads at a higher price. It is not easy to get high PR, the webmasters deserve the higher revenue. However, please do not over do it.

I was blinded by the revenue getting from high PR link selling, I accepted any sites as long as they paid me well. But later Google punished me with by dropping my search ranking and pagerank.

Although the rankings has been recovered and getting better, I learned the lesson and became careful when selling text links.

One suggestion, do not sell text links to websites that are unrelated to your site content.

Good luck in your PageRank and links selling journey!

Update: MalaysiaKini.com is also a PR7 site (alternative local news). [thanks, Steve Yu]

blog, seo, pagerank, pr7, malaysia

Collis shared the tips that made it possible:

1. Choosing the right niche — choose a valuable (low competition and high demands) and very focussed niche topic. Read: Blogging in an Oversaturated Market is Usually a Poor Decision
2. Leveraging existing assets and knowledge — Lead existing readers to new blogs. Apply experiences learned from the past to the new blog.
3. Writing some pillar articles —
   

   “they(pillar articles) are the sort of posts that stand the test of time, that are the shining examples of what your blog is about.”

   Collis recommends the free ebook “Killer Flagship Content” by Chris Garrett.

4. Utilize Social media to its best advantage — Collis wrote a bookmarkable article “101 Essential Freelancing Resources” to get traffic from Social Medias. He also send the post to some big blogs and got listed. Collis also purchased StumbleUpon Ads to send 1000 visitors to the article URL. From there the del.icio.us bookmarks flooded in and bring in 15,000 visitors in about a day. Many visitors had become feed subscribers then.
5. Design to look like a Professional Outfit — Make a custom design for your blog to make it looks professional to new visitors.

Nice tips, right? LiewCF Tech Blog is too late to choose a very focus niche (well, what I have now was not planned). The 2nd tips is not applicable as well. I unintentionally wrote a few blog posts that got very popular.

I tried SU ads after reading the article. Spent $300, and I see increased traffic and subscribers. Thanks to the nature of StumbleUpon, I do not see traffic decrease after the ad period.

For the professional outfit, a new design is coming soon. It has been delayed for months as I planned. *shrug*

10 more ways to get subscribers

Looking for more tips to increase subscribers? Read “10 Effective Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers” by CopyBlogger.

1. Make feed subscription easy and obvious
2. Focus on a particular topic
3. Offer free gift to subscribers. It can be done by autoresponder for email subscribtions, or Feedvertising plugin for site feed.
4. Create viral ebooks and give away for free or bundled for sale with other products. Use the free ebook to promote your blog.
5. Create a dedicated subscription landing page. Read: 5 Steps to Pay Per Click Advertising That Works
6. Become a guest blogger of other blogs, require a very brief byline at the end of the post, with a link back to your site. Write original content.
7. Start a podcast on your blog topic and get it into various podcasting directories.
8. Post in forums of your niche.
9. Build up business relationship or friendship with other bloggers
10. Find bloggers with related but not competitive niche and promote each other in RSS feeds using Feedvertising.
11. Forget the previous tips if you are not writing the best content you can. Work on the content first.

That’s it for now. Hopefully you are inspired by the lists and have your blog subscribers number increased.

(image courtesy of northxeast.com)

blog, feed, list building, problogging, tips

Image: MyBlogLog Community: LiewCF Tech Blog with over 200 members

Here I share the tips I used to increase the number of MyBlogLog Community members.

• Run an competition / challenge — I ran the MyBlogLog challenge for charity and the number of community members got boosted in a week. Make something interesting that encourages your readers to join your community such as free gift giveaway. When you get the first 100 members, you will get the next 100 very soon.
• Use a better description — I updated the description of LiewCF Tech Blog Community to a more meaningful tag line, which attracts attentions.
• Use a MyBlogLog button — I stole this idea from a site with a lot of MyBlogLog members. Although MyBlogLog widget has a link to community but it is not eye-catching enough. So, I made a “Join Us at MyBlogLog” button which linked to my community and put it on above MyBlogLog widget in the sidebar.

That’s it. I hope your MyBlogLog community size will increase after applying the tips here. If you have other ideas, please tip me.

mybloglog, tips

My blog is at the 1st because it has better Alexa ranking. Other popular blogs such as Kenny Sia, Jeff Ooi, and Hemmy could beat mine if their blogs do some Alexa ranking optimizations.

The easiest tip is putting an Alexa button on every page of the site. Read: How-to Make an Alexa Traffic Rank Button

alexa, malaysia, 2007, blog

To be qualify in the list, you need to be a premium subscribers of pMetrics, a new and unique web analyzer. If you sign up now, you will get a premium account trial that entitle you to The Performancing Top 20.

Is it hard to be the Top 20? From current list, the #20 site’s Alexa rank is 146,530. If your site has a better ranking, then probably your site can hit into the Top 20 and get a free PR7 link!

Register for pMetrics Premium Trial now!

P.S. LiewCF Tech Blog is having a free, one-way PageRank 7 (PR7) link from Performancing.com.

metrics, pagerank, performancing, pmetrics, seo