Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

There was a page rank update last week, me, personally, I’ve lost all interest in that little green bar but I know there are a lot of people who still hang on that figure. To them “unranked” is a dirty word, a dirty horrible nasty word! I’ve had my fair share of unranked pages in the past and for the most part where I’ve chosen to I’ve managed to get them “some rank”, here’s my tips for getting back on Google’s good books.

Anybody want to guess what this chart represents? There is a bit of a clue in the title. Give up?…. That chart shows organic traffic for a new website built almost entirely from freely available articles. It is the laziest type of content and according to every SEO expert out there should not be getting organic search traffic.

Ever since I wrote my post about having a launch pad to boost any new websites you create I’ve been running an experiment. All I’ve done is create a couple of totally new blogs but instead of going through my usual approach of giving them some serious link love from my more established websites I’ve left them on their own. It’s been quite interesting for me to see that each of them has performed almost identically in terms of the traffic that Google has sent them.

So you start a brand new website, one of the first things you want to do is let the search engines know about it. A sitemap is one of the best ways of doing this, so 5 minutes later I had a sitemap that I submitted to Google’s webmaster tools. 2 days later I check and I can see that some of my pages are now included in Google’s index, excellent. Now in the first week my website starts to rank, quite well actually and I’m starting to see nice amounts of organic Google traffic heading my way. It looks like all systems go.

Jump forward to 2 weeks later, all of a sudden my website is no longer ranking anywhere and the traffic has all but disappeared. Has my website been penalised for something? What’s going on?

What I Think Is Happening
I think that Google loves fresh content. However because it’s so new it knows that it will have a very bad linking profile (if any) and so it’s rank is based almost entirely on it being brand new content. As the days pass your fresh content goes from being new to aged and at this point Google starts paying attention to who and what is linking to it. Don’t have any/many quality related links and you slip all the way down the SERPs.

How Do You Stop It?
There are 2 approaches I’ve found that work. The first is just to pump out more fresh content, that way you always have something that is fresh in the eyes of the search engines. It also helps if you can link back to some of your older content with your newer content, remember that your internal linking structure is just as important as your external linking structure. The big problem I’ve found with this approach is that after many months with none of your pages getting good links from external sources then Google seems to flag your domain as being crap (This is just my experience). At that stage it doesn’t matter how much new content your write you’ll find it very hard to attract organic Google traffic.

The second approach requires a little more work. You’ve heard of link building, well this is where it matters. I’ve found that even by having 4-5 new links to your new content every week or so can help to maintain it’s position in the SERPs. To keep your content in it’s original position for a month or 2 is not that hard with just those few links, it’s much easier to put that little bit of work in early rather than have to try and boost your content later when it’s fell of the SERPs altogether.

So after all the fuss of the last much delayed page rank update that saw many blogs and link sellers getting slapped by Google who would have thought that they’d slip in a page rank update so early in the new year?

It was certainly a surprise for me but I’ve just gone through all my websites and it looks like an improvement all around. One or 2 pages have dropped from a 5 to a 4 but other than that everything else is up at least a 1, some as much as a jump of 3. Great news for this Blog as well, not the 5 that the page rank prediction tools predict but still an increase to a 3. As the domain and content ages and Google begins to trust me more hopefully it should continue to improve.

Anyway that’s enough about me, how have you got on with this latest page rank update?

When I first started this blog one of my main aims was to achive some sort of ranking for perhaps what is one of the most popular 3 word search phrases on the internet today “make money online”. I even went to the trouble of securing a keyword targeted domain name. The problem with blogging though is that so much of what you will write will not be keyword specific and my success was not exactly startling, I did break the top 30 mark for several months and received some nice traffic for the phrase but not the huge quantities of traffic I really wanted. In the end I decided to forget about my primary keywords and just blog!

I do like my stats and have a routine that I follow for checking Google Analytics, one of those checks is to see what searches are bringing people and how long they stay. Part of being successful on the internet is the ability to adapt and it is those stats that have brought about a few changes. I noticed that a search for money making schemes was starting to bring more visitors than anything make money online related. Money making schemes was not one of my phrases that I’d ever mentioned but through links from other websites this blog was ranking well so I decided to push it and see what happened. I’m ranked number 9 on Google at the moment but it will be interesting to see how the on-the-page changes I’ve made affect that ranking, I’m noticing that my search traffic is going up and up all the time.

It just goes to show that checking your keyword stats might give you some ideas for phrases that you’d never normally consider targeting.

No, not another dodgy niche website but my list for Father Christmas this year.

Dear Santa,

This year I’ve been very good (my mum says so too), I’ve played fair and shared with all the other boys and girls and I’d really appreciate it if you could maybe help me out with some of the following:-

1. Could You Please “Fix” The Exchange Rates? – All because of some very naughty men in the US lending money to people who couldn’t afford it I’ve had to take an 18% pay cut. This is really bad because I’m doing the same amount of work and earning my friends the same amount of money but when I get paid I get a lot less. Either weakening the pound or strengthening the dollar would really help!

2. Can You Make Google Play Fair? – I don’t know what I’ve done to upset them but they’ve not only been spreading bad rumours to make me unpopular but they’ve also started to take money of me. It seems that they don’t want me to have any of my own money. I still like them (they’re almost my bestest friend) I’d just like it if they could be honest with me and let me know where I stand.

3. Can You Make WidgetBucks Like My Other Friends? – I made a new friend this year called WidgetBucks, we got on great but then they suddenly announced that they didn’t like me anymore just because of where most of my other friends live. It was really bad because I’d just told everybody how nice WidgetBucks were!

I only want 3 things for Christmas this year so if you could help me out I’d really appreciate it.

Merry Christmas,

Paul

ps Doesn’t Santa work fast, looks like WidgetBucks are going to start paying out something for non US visitors after all!

What’s on your list?

According to ProBlogger Darren Rowse Google are going to change the rules for Adsense publishers by limiting what areas of an ad are clickable. Going are the days when a click anywhere within the block counted, visitors will now have to either click the ad title or the URL at the bottom in order for you to earn money.

I’ve got mixed feelings about this one, in the short term I expect to lose money. It’s not that I built MFA websites or deliberately try to mislead visitors it’s just that a certain percentage of any Adsense publishers clicks must come from accidental clicking. On the other hand if it improves the quality of the ad network as a whole then bid prices will naturally go up over time resulting in more bang for you legitimate clicks. As an Adwords publisher it’s not going to affect me at all, I experimented for a long time with the content network (Adsense) but CTR and ROI were soo bad each time that I gave up. Who knows if Google can improve this it might be worth looking at again. Also the fact that Google are still tweaking Adsense gives me hope that they are not going to phase out pay-per-click adverts quite yet.

Overall I think the biggest losers here are going to be the people who insist on churning out MFA spam websites so that’s not a bad thing for the rest of us.

Here are a couple of things to keep in mind as Google roll out the new rules:-

1. I’m assuming images will remain entirely clickable, is it worth reconsidering accepting image ads?
2. It is now even more important than ever to make sure your ad titles look like standard web links.
3. With this extra level of targeting before a click counts is it worth swapping out PPC blocks for CPA?

A large part of my day is spent checking and answering e-mails, I suppose in an average day I probably get about 50 genuine messages and maybe 3,000 spam mails! Yes you read right, about 3,000! However e-mail is so time consuming for me for more than just the spam reason, I work in 2 locations, I have a home setup and an office that I work from most days. This can make managing my multiple e-mail accounts a real pain, especially as I like to use Outlook and GMail (Gmail has the most effective spam filters for any free e-mail account I’ve found to date, and I’ve tried a lot).

Up until the last few days I accessed my primary work e-mail from the office using Outlook and used the GMail web interface when I was out of the office. Of course this means that I have to go through and mark-as-read messages that I’ve already dealt with. This is all just a long winded way of saying that POP3 is rubbish if you work from multiple locations or work stations. Google have just answered my prayers though, GMail are to become the first free mail system to roll out FREE IMAP SUPPORT. This is huge, it’s bigger than huge, it’s immense. IMAP allows your e-mail account to be fully synchronised automatically, reply from your mobile and it’s there in your outlook, delete something in outlook and it’s removed from the webmail interface. To mobile professionals or just people that only like to do something once this is an epic step forward in free email.

The scary thing is I have no idea how they can do it. The problem with IMAP is that you have to maintain a connection to the server in order to synchronise, this causes heavy strain on the server and limits the number of users you can have. How Google have scaled this with the millions of GMail users out there I don’t know, if it works it’s going to save me probably 25% of my daily e-mail time so I don’t care. The question is now what to do with all that extra time?