Yahoo! Search Blog: Site Explorer Gets a Makeover

A few years ago, we launched Site Explorer with the goal of providing site owners with better visibility into how we index their websites and what data we use in our search service. Over the years we've moved beyond simply providing information to webmasters to allowing them to tell us what to do with their site, using functions such as submitting feeds, deleting URLs or reporting spam. Our most successful function among all has been Dynamic URL Rewriting. We've had thousands of site owners enter rules for their websites and webmasters auto-rewrite an average of 25,000 URLs per rule, with some sites rewriting millions of URLs in 1 shot.

Today, we launched a new look and feel for Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/new) that provides a more dynamic interface to accommodate future feature roll-outs. The new interface also includes a new Site Summary page to provide statistics for authenticated sites. On top of this, we're also increasing the number of rules for Dynamic URL Rewriting that you can enter from 3 to 10.

The new site is located at a special URL to give you some time to play around with it and update your tools that use our interface. We will make this the default experience soon, so please use this time to update your tools. And, as always, please give us feedback on your new experience. We want to hear from you!

Priyank Garg
Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! Search Blog: Site Explorer Gets a Makeover

A Bakers Dozen: Ways to Increase Link Density

A Bakers Dozen: Ways to Increase Link Density

Written by Scott Van Achte

In today’s race to the top of the Google SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages), there are a number of factors that can help you achieve those coveted spots. While certain techniques may weigh better than others based on your industry and level of competition, there is no questioning the power of links.

There are several methods, some common and some yet to be discovered, you can try out to help boost your link density and search rankings. While it would be near impossible to go into great detail on all methods (that would require a book) below I have outlined some of the more common techniques a web site owner can use to increase their site’s popularity.

Whole article here: A Bakers Dozen: Ways to Increase Link Density

Tips for affiliate beginners

By Allan Gardyne

Affiliate marketing introduction, tutorial and other useful links

First, make sure you've checked out these pages:

32 useful hints about associate/affiliate/referral programs
How affiliate/associate programs work and how to choose the good ones. "When my visitors ask me a question about associate programs I invariably send them over to Allan Gardyne's site, as it has the most information about them on the 'Net." - Joshua Reimer. Hey! That's THIS site he's talking about.

My Free Affiliate Program Tutorial
You've joined an affiliate program. Here are the 18 steps to take next.

Useful sites for beginners

Links to good, solid information for people new to creating a website and doing business on the Internet:

PC and Internet newbies
At last, here's a free ebook that's actually worth having! Get the 29 Tutorials ebook when you subscribe to the Newbie Club. Just go to the most revolutionary Newbie website on the Web and subscribe here. You can even get FREE tech support - and the Newbie Club is free.

1st Site Free
A topnotch site which covers almost everything about starting and promoting a new website.

HTML: An interactive tutorial for beginners
Part of Dave's Site. Highly recommended.

Website Designs
Steve Cartwright's site includes The Do It Yourself Zone, a place for learning the arts of web site promotion, winning web site awards, finding tips and tricks to help you out. It also has a self-help discussion page for webmasters, would be webmasters and graphic designers. The site was painfully slow-loading when I visited.

A Webmaster's Toolkit and Tricks
For do-it-yourselfers, here's a good introduction to useful tools for creating, building, coding and running websites.

Building and Promoting Your Own Website
David Herron's site is a free tutorial in designing, building, and promoting small web sites. He writes in a style that's easy to understand.

The Affiliate Marketing Primer
Are you wondering where to begin? Have you found it all too bewildering and don't know where to start? Are you just too busy to track down the information you need to get started? Well, Sherry Gordon has a heap of free information which is aimed at people like you.

Promotion World
A useful site which includes a 40-page, easy to understand tutorial designed to teach beginners the basics of website promotion with a little bit of humor thrown in for good measure.

How To Internet Your Business
Rod Aries has a series of useful articles such as "Optimizing Your Web Site: How to "Wu-Wu" Your Title", "Search Engine Secrets That Don't Work", pages on how to submit to search engines, plus "Search Engine Tips & Secrets" for various search engines.

Tips for affiliate beginners

SEO Outbound Link Relevance

by Joel Walsh

You know search engines evaluate a site based primarily on the links going to it (inbound links). The PageRank of the sites on which the inbound links are located, and the anchor text of the links, matter a lot. But if you're like most webmasters, you don't appreciate the value of outbound links.

Outbound Link Relevance & Anchor Text

The clearest way that outbound links can affect SEO is through their anchor text.

Outbound links' anchor text affects a page's search engine ranking in much the same way that inbound links' anchor text affects search engine ranking. Anchor text of inbound links is arguably the most important factor in search engine rankings for particular keywords. For instance, if "fuzzy keyword" is in the anchor text of a link to a webpage, that webpage may well appear in SERPs for "fuzzy keyword" even if neither the word "fuzzy" nor "keyword" appears anywhere on your site.

Outbound links' anchor text works the same way, though it is slightly less powerful. If you have a particular keyword in the anchor text of a link on a webpage, that webpage will likely show up in search engine results--even if it appears nowhere else on the page, and even if there are no inbound links with that anchor text.

Don't believe me? Look at your web traffic logs. Check out the search engine traffic to specific pages. You'll likely see plenty of instances of the page getting traffic for search strings that appear nowhere else on the page but in the anchor text of outbound links.

One example from a site I own is on endometrialcancer.org, a project devoted to provided information about a disease. There are separate pages for symptoms, diagnosis, prognosis, and other aspects of the disease. Strikingly, one page my rank highly for another page's target keyword, if it links to the other page with the target keyword in its anchor text. For instance, the "diagnosis" page may outrank the "symptoms" page for the keyword "endometrial cancer symptoms," merely because the "diagnosis" page has that keyword in the anchor text of its link to the symptoms page.

How to shoot yourself in the foot with outbound link anchor text relevance:

There are four main ways to shoot yourself in the foot by mishandling outbound links' anchor text:

1. Don't include relevant outbound links on the webpage. There are many sites nearly all of whose pages have no outbound links but a standard navigation bar, and perhaps a link to the site's web designer, host, or CMS maker. What exactly is a search engine algorithm supposed to make of a webpage if the only outbound links it has have anchor text such as "about us," "contact," "privacy," "site map," "Design by TechGnome," and "This site powered by Mambo Open CMS"?

2. Don't include off-site outbound links on the webpage. Think about it for a moment: what is the one thing a truly informative webpage would have to have, besides content? Links to other sites! If a page has no outbound links to other sites, there is a good chance the page is a dead end, or worse, a billboard. At the very least, include at least one intra-site link that isn't part of the standard site navigation.

3. Include irrelevant links. I have a client site that sells computer equipment. After paying me all the money for my services largely in hopes of getting more search engine traffic, they decide to sell irrelevant links on the homepage, for a fraction of what they paid me. If you were a search engine algorithm, what would you make of a site that had "computer equipment" in the page title, headings, and inbound link anchor text--but had two outbound links with "Costa Rican beach resort" and "Low-cost mortgages" in the anchor text? If I were the algorithm, I'd get a little confused, and play it safe by ranking the site for none of those keywords. After all, there are plenty of sites that make a less ambiguous case for their relevance for any of those keywords.

4. Include relevant outbound links, but forget the anchor text. If you are linking to a relevant webpage, whether on-site or off-site, by all means, use your page's target keyword in the anchor text! Now is not the time to get lazy and use the URL as the anchor text. You are doing the right thing by linking to relevant webpage. Make sure you get credit for your good deed!

After all, they call it the web because the links go both in and out, tying sites together like nodes of spider silk. If links were only meant to flow one way, they'd just call it the chain.

Don't chain your website down. Start sharing the links.

http://ezinearticles.com/?SEO-Outbound-Link-Relevance&id=122112

Walsh, Joel "SEO Outbound Link Relevance." SEO Outbound Link Relevance. 3 Jan. 2006. EzineArticles.com. 12 Aug 2008 <http://ezinearticles.com/?SEO-Outbound-Link-Relevance&id=122112>.

Advertise Your Website or Blog For Free

by Neccia Celli 

 

There are many ways to advertise your website or blog for free. Advertising online is easy to do and just takes a few minutes in most cases, depending on what type of ad you're promoting. You can take the first step in starting your free advertising by doing a typing “free advertising" on major search engines like Google, Yahoo or Msn. Keep in mind when posting your ads to remember to bookmark the website where you’re posting your ad so you can return often to repost, edit or delete your ad as needed. You can save yourself a lot of time when placing multiple ads, by first copying your ads in Microsoft Word, then simply copying/pasting them onto the online ad forms.

Most free group and advertising forums will rotate free ad forums rotate ads so if you don't post your ad at least once per day, it will disappear and you take the chance no one will see it. I have listed some ways to jump start your free advertising below from personal experience and research on my own. Try them all and see what works. Remember, this is a learning process and it’s a good idea to continue to add more websites to your list of bookmarks as you find what free advertising websites work best for you.

1.) Sign-up and post your ads to Free Classifieds, Network and Banner exchanges and Affiliate websites. Once you sign up with Network Banner exchanges and affiliate websites, they will ask you to advertise their link on your website in return for free traffic on their website. This method of free advertising works very well for both parties. You will want to do a search for the top “Network, Banner Exchange, Affiliate websites and Free Classifieds” so you don’t waste your time on low traffic sites. You can also do searches for “How to Advertise for Free” for more tips. Once you find these sites, it’s very easy to sign-up and get started.

2.) Advertise your website or ads on a blog. There are many free blog websites like, www.blogger.com, www.yahoo360.com, and http://hubpages.com. Once you start writing articles or blogging, you can post websites or ads into your blogs. So when someone uses a search engine and types in keywords, if the keywords match your blog, the link should pop up on the list of websites without you signing up with an expensive ad campaigns such as Google Adwords. This is a great way to start advertising and increasing your web traffic for free.

3.) Post your website or blog to free web directories. You can do searches for free directories but keep in mind, two out of the three listed below require a business e-mail rather then a personal e-mail such as yahoo, hotmail, or msn due to spam issues. The five largest free directories you should consider posting in are www.dmoz.org, www.worldsiteindex.com, www.domaining.in, www.webworldindex.com, www.searchsight.com.

4.) Join Group Forums on websites such as Yahoo, Google and Msn. When you join group forums, you can post your ads free and they will be visible to all forum members once they log into the group forum or via e-mail if they sign up to receive messages that way. Your ad will show up in the main forums, major search engine of the provider who provides the group forum and all forum member’s inboxes. You should post your ads at least once every day or few days for your ad to be seen, otherwise rotating ads will replace your ad with the most recent post and your ad will most likely not be viewed.

You can also utilize free group forum mailers. Most group forum mailers will charge you a fee for this service but there are some that offer free trials. The great thing about these mailers is they already have a form set-up to mail your ad to all the group forums you have signed up with so instead of visiting each group forum and posting your ad manually, you do it in one shot. Most group forum mailers require that you join the group forums they mail to before sending your ad out. This method can be very effective and can mean your ad reaching hundreds if not thousands per day! You will need to post your ad thru the mailer at least once per day for your ad to be viewed.

5.) Join Free Advertising Forums. This is a great way to start posting ads for free. Free Advertising Forums are easy to find on any search engine and easy to get signed up and started. You should post your ads at least once per day if you want your ad to be viewed due to the high volume of ads being posted by other members.

6.) Post your website or blog in Social Networking sites. Posting your link to Social Networking sites is one of the most effective ways to advertise free. Most Social Networking websites have millions of users and viewers and growing. Sites like Technorati, Del.ic.ious, Blinklist, Digg, Reddit, LinkedIn and MySpace are some great websites to start with. If you do a search for “Social Networking”, they are easy to find on any major search engine.

7.) Request or submit your link to websites with high traffic. This could be the most effective way to advertise and receive high traffic for free. If you find a website that has high traffic, click on “links” or “submit your website” and follow their instructions. Different sites have different policies but once you are listed on a high traffic site, this method can really increase your traffic! If you don’t see “submit or suggest a site” link, click on “contact us”, and e-mail the webmaster sending a nice e-mail about why you like their website requesting them to add your website link to their page.

Try all these methods and see if your traffic doesn’t increase. There are many ways to advertise, so you will need to use several methods to see which ones work best for you. Keep in mind, high web traffic can depend on what kind of website you are promoting, how well your ad is written and how often you post it. I hope this article was helpful to those who need advice on free advertising in today’s competitive market. Happy advertising!

www.squidoo.com/advertiseforfree

How To Use YouTube To Drive Massive Traffic To Your Site

by Dan Lok Print

Everybody's talking about web 2.0 or how to use new traffic strategies to drive more people-rather, buyers to your web sites.

And today, I'm going to show you a very powerful to do just that, without spending a dime (well, maybe a few dollars).

What am I talking about? YouTube.

Now you should know YouTube pretty well. But allow me give you some facts:

Fact #1: YouTube went from ZERO to 4,000,000,000 MONTHLY visitors within 3 months. And it's still growing by a staggering rate each day.

Fact #2: In 2006, YouTube won Times Magazine's "Invention of the Year."

Fact #3: YouTube is in the Top 5 most valuable web properties in the world.

Fact #4: YouTube features videos from hundreds and thousands of members, and has made MANY people famous.

Fact #5: And get this-more than 75,000 new videos are uploaded every, single day (you see that right.)

Fact #6: Last but not least-YouTube serves up to two hundred MILLION clicks daily.

What does that mean to you as a marketer or an Internet entrepreneur?

Well, it only means there's a HUGE amount of traffic ready to be tapped into if you know how to use YouTube to drive more visitors to your web sites.

We'll discuss how you can use YouTube to drive massive views on your web sites in a while.

Read entire article here: How To Use YouTube To Drive Massive Traffic To Your Site

How NOT to Promote Your Website on Forums

by Lori Redfield

Internet entrepreneurs, work at home moms, network marketers... you're all fed the same hype about how to promote your website, get leads, recruit members or what have you.One of the first things you will be told is to post your ads on forums. Lots.

This article is a guide to proper forum etiquette so that you don't waste your own and many other peoples time.

The first thing you need to know is that forum owners deal with a ton of spam. I could easily spend an hour a day cleaning up spammy posts in the forum and deleting and banning
members that don't abide by forum rules. It's unnerving to have to waste my time doing that rather then engaging in conversations on the forum and providing my members with useful information.

So from the forum owner perspective, spam is a very bad thing. On the other hand, to help out forum participants and to try to deter them from spamming every forum in the message boards, most forum owners will provide an advertising forum of some sort where you can post an ad.

If all you are planning to do is post ads on forums, then look for this particular section of a message board. Especially don't post an ad in the introduction section of a forum.

But here is the thing about ads. Nobody really reads them. Your time would be far better spent actually engaging in conversations on the forums you frequent. You will gain the trust and loyalty of the forum population if they get to know you. They will much more
likely decide to sign up for a biz op under someone that they talk with in a trusted forum then from some fly by night forum spammers post. Doesn't that make sense?

You will be taught that posting your website link on many forums will help to build your websites backlink popularity which will in turn increase your websites ranking in the search engine results. The truth is, your post is most likely going to be deleted as soon
as the forum owner or moderators find it. All you really will have done is wasted your time.

How you can be certain that you will build your backlinks by forum posting is by putting your website link in your signature on a forum and including your signature in your quality posts. The website owner will be happy to have you posting and in turn will be happy to
allow you a small advertisement in your signature when posting.

Another trick you might not know is this. If there is a keyword phrase that you would like to rank well for in the search engines, use this as the 'anchor text' in your website link. That means if you want to rank well for a term such as 'ameriplan business opportunity' - then you would type that into your signature and have that link to your website.

Keep a folder of forums in your favorites folder on your browser and spend some time every day going to each of the forums. Make it a goal to leave at least one quality post and a few welcome posts to new members.

Informative and engaging comments, coupled with a well optimized signature will win you far more traffic and prospects in the long run. And you might even pick up a thing or two through your engagement on the forum!

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.imnewswatch.com%2Farchives%2F2006%2F11%2Fhow_not_to_prom.html%3FvisitFrom%3D1&ei=m12iSIL8A4mSsQOrnuX7Dg&usg=AFQjCNEETUG1o7BJhAOzz_R0IhIJq1hsDw&sig2=jY4sMhQjN5__zlE0lEYzoQ

3 Simple Steps to Start Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to earn money on the internet. It is also one of the easiest to learn, provided you have the right knowledge base and outlook. You can't expect overnight success without having the key skills and know how to do so.

Many people do not even know the meaning of affiliate marketing so lets start there first. Affiliate marketing is basically a partnership between you and your affiliate where you agree to sell your affiliate's products. Every product that you sell for your affiliate you will receive a commission for the sale. The types of products you sell vary from physical products such as electronics and clothes to intellectual products such as ebooks.

Now there is a lot to affiliate marketing so I will just give you the brief notes on what to do.

Ok so what are the 3 Steps to start Affiliate Marketing?:
http://ezinearticles.com/?3-Simple-Steps-to-Start-Affiliate-Marketing&id=1360047

Clark, Edwin M. "3 Simple Steps to Start Affiliate Marketing." 3 Simple Steps to Start Affiliate Marketing. 27 Jul. 2008. EzineArticles.com. 12 Aug 2008 <http://ezinearticles.com/?3-Simple-Steps-to-Start-Affiliate-Marketing&id=1360047>.

Build One Way Links by Pinging | DonnaMiller.NET

What is pinging?

Pinging is a way of letting search engines know that you’ve created a new post, or updated an existing post on your blog. A ‘ping’ is a message sent to a ‘ping server’ notifying it that the blog has been updated with new content.

What is a ping server?

A ping server is a web-based service that accepts messages in the XML-RPC format. It uses the information in these XML-RPC messages to publish a list of blogs which have updated content. Some of these ping servers run their own blog search engines, and some propagate the information to a number of other ping servers and search engines.

How does pinging work?

Many blog publishing platforms, such as Wordpress, have a built-in pinging tool. In the case of Wordpress, pinging is turned on by default and pings go out to one ping server which updates several search engines.

You can also notify a ping server that you have updated content manually by going to their website and submitting your blog’s name and URL.

One popular ping server is PingOMatic, found at http://pingomatic.com/. When your blog pings PingOMatic it then notifies a number of search engines that your blog has been updated. Many of these search engines also have their own ping server as well.

These search engines can then update their listings with new content almost instantly. This of course will give you one-way backlinks to your blog from these search engines, many of which have a high Google PageRank.

4 things you should know about pinging

1. Only ping when you have updated content. Otherwise, your site might be blacklisted as a spam blog, also known as a splog.

2. If you tend to post to your blog and then re-write the post frequently you might want to make sure you only ping when you actually post new content, not on updates. If you are using Wordpress there are a few plugins that make sure that pings are only sent when a post is created.

3. It’s a good idea to ping several ping services, especially the ones that notify several search engines. Don’t overdo it though. Make sure that if you are pinging a niche search engine that your blog falls into the relevant niche.

4. Make sure that if a search engine is notified by a ping server you are already using that you don’t add that search engines own ping service to your list of servers to ping. Because blog spammers have abused ping servers if you are pinging a search engine multiple times your site might end up being blacklisted, and not appear in the search engines at all.

Popular ping servers

Finally, here’s a list of popular ping servers you might try to get you started.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

Build One Way Links by Pinging

Why You Should Be Careful with Ads on Your Site

There is nothing wrong with trying to make money from a website. You put hard work into it, you provide value to other people, so you should get compensated for it.

The mistake many website owners and bloggers do, however, is to get greedy once they see real bucks coming in. That is when they put one of the following factors on the site:

• too many ads
• ads heavily blended with the content
• ads with flashy colors
• unrelated ads
• animated ads that are distracting

While in the short run these “methods” might increase your revenues, over the long term they will actually hurt your profitability. Having too many ads or intrusive ones will hurt the user experience and make you lose readers along the way.

And you don’t need to trust my advice here. Recently I came across a very short post from a Digg user where he was basically asking Digg to remove the video ads on the front page. Not only these ads were distracting because they played video, but they were also not relevant since they linked to a dating site.

Guess what, the little post created a huge buzz within the Digg community, and it received almost 4,000 diggs.
Now, if digg users, who are loyal and very attached to their site, would not stand some intrusive ads on the site, what makes you think that your readers will?

Why You Should Be Careful with Ads on Your Site

SEO Jargon

The guys over SEOMoz have published the “Complete Glossary of Essential SEO Jargon.” Below you will find my favorite ones:
Cloak: The practice of delivering different content to the search engine spider than that seen by the human users. This Black Hat tactic is frowned upon by the search engines and caries a virtual death penalty of the site/domain being banned from the search engine results.
Doorway (gateway): A web page that is designed to attract traffic from a search engine and then redirect it to another site or page. A doorway page is not exactly the same as cloaking but the effect is the same in that users and search engines are served different content.
Google bomb: The combined effort of multiple webmasters to change the Google search results usually for humorous effect. The “miserable failure” - George Bush, and “greatest living American” - Steven Colbert Google bombs are famous examples.
Google bowling: Maliciously trying to lower a sites rank by sending it links from the “bad neighborhood” - Kind of like yelling “Good luck with that infection!” to your buddy as you get off the school bus - there is some controversy as to if this works or is just an SEO urban myth.
Google dance: The change in SERPs caused by an update of the Google database or algorithm. The cause of great angst and consternation for webmasters who slip in the SERPs. Or, the period of time during a Google index update when different data centers have different data.
Hub: (expert page) a trusted page with high quality content that links out to related pages.

Keyword Cannibalization: The excessive reuse of the same keyword on too many web pages within the same site. This practice makes it difficult for the users and the search engines to determine which page is most relevant for the keyword.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI): This mouthful just means that the search engines index commonly associated groups of words in a document. SEOs refer to these same groups of words as “Long Tail Searches”. The majority of searches consist of three or more words strung together. See also “long tail”. The significance is that it might be almost impossible to rank well for “mortgage”, but fairly easy to rank for “second mortgage to finance monster truck team”. Go figure.
Link Condom: Any of several methods used to avoid passing link love to another page, or to avoid possible detrimental results of indorsing a bad site by way of an outgoing link, or to discourage link spam in user generated content.
Sandbox: There has been debate and speculation that Google puts all new sites into a “sandbox,” preventing them from ranking well for anything until a set period of time has passed. The existence or exact behavior of the sandbox is not universally accepted among SEOs.

Keep your Website Fresh for SEO

Keeping it fresh is another thing that is great for SEO. Make sure to update your website once a week. 

The changes don't have to be big. They could be very small like changing the homepage text or posting comments on your services page. Any change will be considered as keeping your site fresh which search engines love. One of the worst things you can do for SEO is to have a stale website.

No one likes outdated information and neither do search engines.

Webmasters Still Feeling Aftershocks of Google SERP changes

By: Navneet Kaushal

At the beginning of this month, I had reported about the Google SERP changes for July 2008 along with the confusion and chaos it had created. It seems that, the Webmasters are still feeling the aftershocks of the Google SERP changes and according to some, these massive fluctuations are still happening.

Webmaster World had a long thread regarding these fluctuations at the beginning of the Google SERP changes. Now, that thread has been expanded to a 'Part 2' series, discussing the ongoing fluctuations in Rankings in Google SERPs. Here are some of the posts from that thread:

"I run a large, well-established website that has been around for years, generating millions of visitors per month across millions of pages of documents. We have always been diligent about tracking all of our website metrics so that we understand user behavior, where our audience is coming from, and can use the data in order to improve user experience. 

Recently we have been experiencing *very* erratic Google organic traffic which jumps up and down by 30%-80%. The cycle has now repeated itself 6 times over about 6 weeks time. While there have been times in the past where our Google organic traffic has increased and decreased, it always has done it in a measured manner; we have never before seen erratic behavior from Google. 

Here are the traffic specifics:
June 3, Google organic drops by 30% vs. normal
June 4, Google organic traffic returns to normal
June 9, Google organic again drops by 30% vs. normal
June 17, Google organic returns to normal
June 19 , Google organic again drops by 30% vs. normal
June 27, Google organic returns to normal
July 9, Google organic again drops by 30% vs. normal
July 11, Google organic returns to normal
July 12, Google organic again drops, but this time by 80% of normal
July 13, Google organic returns to normal 

While we are constantly in the process of refining our site, the only major change over the last couple months has been to our "related articles" component which does what it sounds like: if you are looking at article A, here are a handful of other articles that are highly relevant to the one you are viewing. Over time, we have been tuning the algorithm that generates these links so as to improve relevancy. 

I have also noticed some other artifacts:
Google bot spidering activity has increased, reaching a plateau of about 140% of pre-link change levels; on some days approaching 1 million pages/day.
The number of page indexed in our Google Webmaster site map reports jumped by 12%.
Any ideas about what might be going on here?"
"Its an update to my previous post, well i had fixed the metas errors in google webmaster tool. Its been little over a week now and errors are reducing by like 30-50 a day. its probably going to take a month for google bot to remove it completely."
"it can be a tip of an ice berg before it hit you badly. Start looking for potential problems in your pages e.g dupe content, meta titles/desc and key word stuffing and any thing which is breaching google tos."
"We are not doing any purposeful keyword stuffing of any sort, however we have over 5 million articles on our site and it is certainly possible that when we are pulling over "related articles" that the titles are very similar.
Is it normal to see organics go up and down repeatedly prior to a penalty?"
"I think that's extremely unlikely. Google wants webmasters to use their service - and all it does is give you reports and a way to communicate as the authenticated responsible person. In other words, it's a report only, and not a cuase of anything. 

Depending on how you generate a sitemap you may introduce spidering problems, expose duplicated urls and so on - that I can see possibly causing some trouble. But not just a WMT account on its own. And I've got scores of them as background experience, too."


Webmasters Still Feeling Aftershocks of Google SERP changes

How to monetize domain names

Domain names are the real estate of the Internet, and domainers make money from buying, parking and selling them. Even if you are not trying to make a living from domain names it is always a good idea to know how they work.

You might want to start another blog in the future and thus having a small portfolio of good domains could turn out to be useful.


Aviva published an extensive article titled “How to Get Started as a Domainer” describing domain buying strategies, best practices, how to monetize domains and so on. Below you will find some takeaways from the article:

• If you are trying to make money with domains look for keyword typos (e.g. Mortgeges.com)
• Consider using automated domain research tools like AjaxWhois.com
• If you are holding domains for long periods make sure to activate the auto renew
• Avoid numbers and hyphens on domain names
• Be careful with domain pinchers (people that register domains using information from whois services) and thieves
• In order to monetize your domains you can either park them or redirect them to a single traffic collector site running your own PPC ads

How to monetize domain names

Careful When Asking for Stumbles!

This is a guest post by maxyRO.

Just a month or two ago, StumbleUpon has started doing some spring cleaning by banning accounts that discovered spam websites and submitted them to the system. If you skipped that part of the Terms & Conditions, know that StumbleUpon forbids the use of one’s account for incentivization or promotion of websites. Inviting users to vote for one website or exchanging stumbles is also strictly frowned upon.

The crusade against spammers is not over. Up until now, the only website banned from the StumbleUpon system was Digital Point, a forum previously infamous for the exchange of stumble or diggs (they now forbid it). StumbleUpon goes further this time, by banning websites with certain voting patterns. In brief, the website received votes from the same group over and over again. One example is http://zedomax.com/ (you can try to stumble it).

Here is the dreaded message you receive if a websites has been banned by StumbleUpon:

But what does lead to this extreme measure? If you have used your account so far for promoting your website, both your account and your website might be already flagged. If you’ve been trying to fake a system that delivers impressive results, it’s time to get clean and start using it properly.

• Actively contribute to the StumbleUpon community! Take at least 30 minutes to build up your profile. Try to discover interesting articles, which can turn popular on their own.
• It’s a social website, so start socializing! Make friends, review their profiles, and communicate. Find people that share common interests, befriend them or simply say hi. It will pay off in the long run.
• Prove some altruism – be less about yourself and more about the community. Don’t submit your own articles; focus on the quality and less on the traffic. If you have a good piece, people will be naturally inclined to stumble it.

Note from Daniel: I believe we can summary this on the following way: do not try to game the system. StumbleUpon has an inbuilt feature that lets you send content to your contacts (the “Send to”), so I am pretty sure they are fine with friends sharing stories with friends. But only get the help of friends to get the ball rolling and not to artificially pump your stories; other StumbleUpon users will gladly promote your content if its worth it.

How To Avoid Common Affiliate Mistakes

3 Most Common Affiliate Mistakes

The process of becoming a successful affiliate and make good money online goes like this. Assuming you have a website already the first step is to do some research around your website's traffic. A key success factor is then to be able to match the outcome of your research with an affiliate program. Not only is the quality of the affiliate program essential but also what products/services they offer to advertiser; you. Manage this and you're well on your way. We will below run through a few common mistakes that affiliates often make. Avoid these and you have all the chances of earning really good money on your website.

“Start by finding out which your website's visitors are. Not their names but more specifically the average age and interests. Just look at what your website offer that makes them visit so often.”

Not Knowing Your Traffic

Affiliate marketing is often preached to be an easy way to make money. Rumors that you can just sit back and relax while your affiliate account keeps growing is thus incorrect. It might be a good time to settle with the idea that affiliates have to work, not more but exactly like everybody else. Start by finding out which your website's visitors are. Not their names but more specifically the average age and interests."

Read entire article here: How To Avoid Common Affiliate Mistakes

Beginners Affiliate Marketing - Learn The Basics

Beginners Affiliate Marketing - Learn The Basics

There are many steps to take when you are trying to make money online through affiliate programs. The most tedious and most important step will always be the marketing aspect. Beginners affiliate marketing should begin with knowledge. Read everything that you can to find out the different paths that are available.

As an affiliate, there will be millions of products and services to choose from. You should always choose a product that is in a similar niche to that of your websites.

A website that is based on technology should not have ads and affiliate programs about curtains and bedding. You can choose to display shoe ads if your website is about shoes, or you can select products that will go well with that topic such as clothing and accessories.

Whatever you choose as an affiliate program, always try to start with a product that you have used. As an affiliate marketer, you are recommending these products to your visitors, and they will not be pleased to find out that the product is subpar after they have purchased it.

You want to suggest a product that you know and love. By telling your website visitors about the honest experience that you have had with a product, the more they will grow to trust your word. Always be honest with your customers. As large as the internet is, it is still small enough and a few bad reviews about you and your website, can travel quickly and destroy your reputation before it has even begun.

A great way to receive and keep new visitors, is with a free offer. When free products are available, other websites will at times link to that web page so that they can tell their own visitors about the great deal. This helps you to get back links as well as new visitors who may decide to check out your website. This can help you to gain new visitors as well as repeat customers.

A well made site can become self sustaining in a short amount of time. This means that you will be able to simply add new content, done by yourself or through a freelancer, while you do other tasks, such as setting up more affiliate websites. You should always keep an eye on all of your web pages, to update and to make sure that there are no problems with your site or server.

While you are still learning, it is best to start with one affiliate program before moving to others. Trying to do, too much too soon can be a recipe for disaster. Put all of your efforts and concentration into making your first affiliate program a success.

Once you have learned how to put your skills into effect, your beginners affiliate marketing techniques can move on to new websites, blogs and affiliate programs.

With the knowledge that you have gained through your first website, you can begin to apply the same techniques to duplicate your previous success. However, you should always remember to check back with websites, ebooks and blogs, so that you are kept up to date on the new affiliate marketing techniques that are available.

Read entire article here: Entireweb Weekly Newsletter

Verify Your Website with Google

Verifying your site with Google’s webmaster tools can give you more information about your site and help your search engine optimization efforts.

If you don’t have an account with Google yet, you need to get one. Google offers a set of Webmaster tools that can help you to manage your site, and get a better understanding of what‘s going on as far as Google is concerned. But most of all it’s a great SEO tool that can also help you with your search engine optimization efforts.

Once you’ve signed up for an account and added your site, the first thing you are going to want to do is get your site verified. By getting your site verified, you will be able to access comprehensive reports on your Website which includes statistics, diagnostics, and link information.

Website verification is very easy to do. Simply click on the link to ‘verify’ and choose the method you would like to use for verification. You can either choose to verify with a Meta Tag or by uploading an HTML file to your site. You’re probably wondering why in the world they are asking you to do this… I know I did too. However, one of the main reasons is security. Google wants to make sure that you are the Website owner. This prevents other users or worse - your competition from putting in your Website into their account and getting information about your site.
After you have your site verified, give Google a few days to populate the information for you. Usually waiting about a week will give you a better idea of what’s happening, and then you can see what you should fix or change to improve your Website.

One of the features I like best about this Website tool is that you can see the query stats. Query stats will show you the keywords and where you are ranking for them in Google’s index. There are couple of different options too that will let you sort the data; you can sort by either web or image search, and also by country. You can even download the information into Excel for further analysis. The only problem I see at this time is that the information is not real time; it is an average over the last seven days. So if you click on a link to see your Website listing in the index, it may not be in the same place as it says in the report.

If you have a rather large site, the error logs can be especially useful. You can see what pages in your Website give you HTTP errors, timeouts, and pages not found. The pages that are not found feature also gives you more details about the error. I would recommend going through these errors and fixing them. The fewer errors on your site, the more professional your site will appear to your visitors and the search engines.

There are many more features to the webmaster tools on Google; I highly recommend that you take a minute to check them out. This tool is great for doing search engine optimization and should be a part of every webmasters toolbox.

Duckeldannys Money Blog - Make Money online with my Money Blog

Multiple-size Embedded Presentations from Google Docs

Google Docs has just updated their embedded presentation feature to support multiple sizes, so now presentations can look even better in blog posts. To add a presentation to your blog, create it in Google Docs and copy the “Mini Presentation Module” HTML into a blog post. (See: Embedding Presentations in a Web Site)

For an example, take a look at this small-sized presentation:

You can include YouTube videos, images, and text captions into slides to condense and display a “deck” of graphical content in a concise format in your posts.

Google Docs is a free, web-based word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application. Try it now.

AuctionAds moves to ShoppingAds!

We are excited to announce that we have merged our AuctionAds and ShoppingAds products into one product that will be located at http://ShoppingAds.com. ShoppingAds is a hybrid product that serves both CPA (cost per action) ads provided by eBay and CPC (cost per click) ads provided by our shopping comparison engine partners. For existing AuctionAds users the only change you will see is the “Ads By AuctionAds” displayed on your ads will change to “Ads By ShoppingAds”. The other significant change is the ability for you to become a Premium Publisher.

By becoming a premium publisher you will have the opportunity to be paid on a CPC (cost per click) basis for all your US and Canadian traffic while you can monetize your international traffic on a CPA (cost per action) basis. Standard publisher’s traffic will be monetized 100% on a CPA basis. Here is a graphic of how this works. Your account will be reviewed for Premium Status in the coming days and you will be notified if you qualify. By having one central system it will allow us to focus on building one great product.

Make Money with Text Link Ads

Submit your site to be approved into our publisher program.

2.

Insert our ad code on your website.

3.

We sell Text Link Ads off your website that look like this:

4.

YOU can choose to approve or deny any Text Link Ads sold prior to the links being published on your website. This ensures that only quality and relevant links appear on your website.

5.

You make money. Sales, invoicing, and customer service are all handled by TLA. You can receive payment via check or PayPal. Payments are sent to publishers the first of every month with a $25 minimum payout.

More Information

• You receive 50% of the sale price for each text link ad sold off your website through our system.
• Our ad serving technology currently supports websites that use server-side processing. This includes any site that uses PHP, ASP, PERL, Ruby on Rails, etc. Most forum and blog software packages are compatible with our technology.
• YES, you can display Text Link Ads on the same page with Google AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network, and other contextually served ads. Our Text Link Ads product is not a pay per click or contextually served ad system.

LinkWorth - Alternative Money Making Program for bloggers

For the past two months I have been testing LinkWorth, and now, I have sufficient info and understanding about the system to blog about it. At first it was quite difficult for me to get use to the system interface, it was not the most user-friendly interface. Good thing is they are working on the new interface to simplify the things.

When it comes to publisher programs, the most crucial thing is not the user interface. It’s the performance of the program, and how much money you can make with it. Surprisingly, LinkWorth performed very well on my blog in a short time. First month, just after joining it, I managed to get few links on my blog. Second month (july) total number of links increased to 8 (links are under Monthly Picks section on the left).

So the next payment I will be expecting $395.32 as shown to the right.And since many of the advertisers joined not from the beginning of July, I should be expecting the profit to rise in the month of August. Because at the moment, some advertisers are paying for 10 days of July only, and some maybe for 3 days only. So in August, I will be getting full amount for all the ads.

50/50 or 70/30?
If you choose 50/50 option, you will be getting half of the price of your ads. But the advantage of choosing 50/50 is that, LinkWorth will promote you to the advertisers. That means your site will be seen by the advertisers for sure! You might choose 70/30 but then you have to wait for advertisers to find your site themselves. I personally think, it’s better to choose 50/50 option in the beginning, when you newly join. After you have some loyal advertisers, then you can shift your plan to 70/30.

Rotating Ads
Another good thing is the rotating ads. These are ads by one advertiser that will be rotating every time the page refreshes. This is especially good for advertisers. Because they can pay certain fixed amount, and display different wordings for their campaign. Currently all 8 links on my blog are rotating ads.

Recommendation
I am not sure how it will perform on your blogs, but I highly recommend that you to try it out. After you are approved, take your time to understand the system and the user interface. As I said it’s not the most user friendly system. You can join here www.linkworth.com.