Google Panda – Further Thoughts…
Hopefully you watched the video in my last blog post regarding the recent Google Panda updates? If not, you can take a look here. // Like many of you I’m sure, I have been considering how Panda has and will continue to affect my sites and it is clear that the way we all look at SEO in the future has changed dramatically. Before Panda it was enough to have pages of good quality, unique content and a few inbound links to your site in order to rank well in Google. Now, as the search engine becomes smarter, it is clear that this method of SEO is not going to be enough. Instead, Google are fine-tuning their methods of assessing the whole user experience on our websites. In other words, if the user isn’t having a good experience then why should your site be ranked highly in Google’s results? So how are Google able to assess user experience? Well although the algorithms etc that Google will be using are, no doubt, massively complex, the basics of how they can assess user experience is actually quite simple. Google has access to an absolute ton of data gained from both the way
How will Google Panda affect your business?
Many of you will have heard of Google’s ‘Panda’ update which was released earlier in the year and affected the search engine rankings of many, many websites. // Hot on the heels of Panda comes Panda 2.2 launched last week. Google is getting smarter at kicking poor quality websites out of their index and the days when you could throw up a bunch of domains with poorly written/researched articles and expect a boatload of visitors for free are long gone. Even well designed sites with ‘unique’ content are being affected and it is only going to get tougher as Google fine-tunes their new systems. Of course, Panda should be great news for Google’s users and should ultimately mean that their search results are more accurate and provide searchers with a better all round experience but if Google decide that your site is not what people should be looking for, how will it affect your business? The video below from SEOMOZ will help to explain the changes and things you might want to be doing from an SEO point of view – the rules have changed forever! If you own a website business, you really need to watch it… if(!navigator.mimeTypes['application/x-shockwave-flash'] ||
Google Adsense Revisited…
// I can’t believe it is nearly a year since I last updated this blog! Where does the time go? I was only reminded because an old subscriber of mine dropped me an email to see if I was still working online! The answer to this question is yes, most definitely however these days the majority of my online businesses have absolutely nothing to do with Internet marketing or showing other people how to earn a living online hence the fact that this site has become a little neglected. However I was prompted to add this quick post following the above email and also because of a promotional card I received through the post from those lovely people over at Google. The card was promoting Google Adsense (which I have been using since it was first launched) and was customized around one of my sites to inform me that I wasn’t using the maximum number of Adsense advertising blocks on some pages. This was true, I wasn’t! To be honest, the site in question is one which I haven’t done a thing with for years and just sits there kicking in a bit of Adsense revenue every month but it
Google Adsense Section Targeting
In my last post, I touched upon something which I had learned from John Chow’s book, Make Money Online and that is, section targeting. Section targeting is relevant to anyone who uses Google Adsense to earn money and that includes me! In fact, I have been making money from Adsense pretty much from the day they launched the service which was way back in 2003 (I started using it in July,I think they launched in June). I therefore thought that I knew everything there was to know about Adsense but it turns out that not only was I wrong but I was not aware of a fairly major feature! I don’t know when they brought section targeting in but I bet not using it has cost me moolah! In simple terms, when you put Adsense ads on your web pages, Google crawls the pages to see what the content is about and then displays adverts which are relevant to this content. For example, if you have a page about weight loss, chances are the ads Google displays will be for weight loss products/supplements and so on. The thing is though that Google isn’t always that good at knowing which information on
Make Money Online by John Chow
‘Make Money Online’ is a ‘real’ (ie. not ebook) book by Internet marketer, John Chow. John is probably most well known for his blog which generates tens of thousands of dollars a month and his book is designed to help individuals to make money from blogging. So is it any good? The first thing I should say is that I am certainly no beginner when it comes to Internet marketing having been working online since 1998 so I am possibly not in the intended target market for this book but I do like to keep up to date with what other Internet marketers are writing about and actually, I am pretty new to blogging. I work on the basis that if I can find one or two gems of information in a product such as this then it will be a worthwhile investment of both my time and money. If you are a complete beginner to blogging then John’s book is a great place to start. It sets out the basics very clearly and will give any newbie a pretty much step by step action plan to work from. I did find that many of the points had already been
