I really do wonder if sometimes they have completely the wrong idea about what should rank in the indexes.  Last week i was doing a search for a particular golf club I wanted to buy, I typed in the club makers name and model and added review to the end , as I wanted to see what everyone else thought of it.  Almost every site on the front page was an online store.

The reviews were generally just a picture and the makers blurb about the club. I had to get right down to below 50th place to get a decent review by someone who had used it… how does that give a good customer experience?  The guy who wrote that review had spent sometime giving his impressions and his experiences , the content was unique but because he didn’t have a big budget SEO company working 24/7 to get his site ranking high he was virtually ignored.  Why So low ? probably because he had a link to the club on amazon.

One of my members at WordPress Goldmine recently had a whole heap of trouble with Google all to do with a DCMA notice that was filed against her , her crime? To add a youtube video to her site that had a share and embed link available. Sorry Mr Google if someone adds the ability to share a video then complains the problem isn’t with the people who have used the videos. The worst problem she had was actually getting anyone at google  to respond to her.

Almost everyday I see people with 100% white hat sites who write lots of original content get penalized, the problem is it’s impossible to be 100% White Hat. In an ideal world google wants you to build a site then leave it and hope people find it naturally,  if you get people to like it, post links to it then you no doubt breach their terms and conditions which are incredibly broad and contradictory, for example this is taken from the Webmasters help page at google (https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356)

Examples of link schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)

 

The quote above from Goolgle’s guide to what it considers link schemes implies that reciprocal links that aren’t excessive are ok (point 3) ….  but the first point says that any links intended to manipulate page rank are not allowed..   Now call me stupid but doesn’t every link you get manipulate page rank.

It’s this lack of clarity thats is infuriating. Whats more it punishes basically good web site builders and leaves the door open to blackhat site builders.

I did a another search over the weekend and virtually the who top 10 consisted of baldy spun content that was taken from the 1 good article there , it was the same content just 9 of the sites were unreadable. Surely this isn’t acceptable or an example of what Goolge is trying to achieve.

I consider myself to be a white hat site builder so I and every other white hat site builder are more likely to feel the wrath of google for getting a few links or having someone “like” our pages or commenting on a few blogs because we don’t feel the need to cover out tracks. We are easy picking adding penalties to our sites is like shooting fish in a barrel. With a manual review almost everyone of our sites would probably be penalized because we will have broken some google rule.

On the other hand the Blackhat site builders take lots of precautions, use private networks, pump out 100′s of thousands of profile links like via tools like xrumer as a result of the precautions they get away with it.  Is there really any point to being a White hat site builder anymore? Maybe we should all just just take Adsense off of our sites, remove our sites from google analytics, Use privacy when we register our domains and spread the sites among lots of small hosting accounts then turn to the dark side?

So the Question I wan tho pose to you today is, Are google’s current methods forcing intrinsically white hat site builders to start to adapt black hat methods?

Let me know what you think.

There has been volumes about how Ezinearticles have suffered and having read some comments you’d be start to believe that none of Ezinearticles content was ranking.

You’d be wrong.

I am still getting clickthroughs from Ezineartilces, I have actually been scratching my head over the past week wondering why there has been so much written about something that impacted me and several people I talked to so little.

Having lived through numerous google updates one thing is certain the initial changes will be temporary, google will continue to tweak and modify it’s algorithm to ensure the best content ranks. Although for some reason google seems to thinks in many niches the best most pertinent content is stores… Go figure!

Several major sites were affected and there were several major ones that didn’t seem to have any adverse effects so lets look at 2 of them and see what we can deduce.

Lets compare eHow and Ezinearticles. I searched both for an article on how to clean brick fireplaces, look at the images below and tell me which one looks the most appealing to a visitor. They both have ads yet one looks like a MFA site (made For Adsense) and the other looks like an informative site with images and a step by step guide.

If you were google which would you choose to rank higher?

The images above show that The Ezinearticles content starts much further down the page and under the title , it’s not content but ads. It seems logical to me that if google see’s a title then it expects to see content next , instead it’s getting ads

eHows content starts higher and is immediately below the title, I am not saying that this is a factor BUT it may well be worth testing. But as that may impact the income Ezinearticles earns from OUR articles then it probably won’t be tested.

Once again if you were google which one would you rank higher??

Ezinearticles identified the 7 niches that they say are the biggest problem :

1. Penis Enlargement
2. Get Your Ex Back
3. Acai Berry
4. Reverse Cell Phone Lookup
5. Credit Card Debt Relief
6. Male Enhancement Pill
7. TV for PC

We’ll wow those are certainly not niches full of scams and low quality products are they! If you go to each site and check out how many articles they have on each topic you’ll find Ezinearticles have way more of each.

While on these topics Ezinearticles overall response has been very indicitive of how they treat their authors. Last year they introduced new rules in an attempt to stop what they called Derivitave articles , multiple articles saying the same thing. Good idea, it’s just a pity they didn’t enforce it.

When the Farmer update hit last week they introduced more rules and wanted feedback on what to do with the magnificent 7 above. It’s obvious, what they should do. The editors should do their jobs and not approve poor quality articles.

The top author in the Get you Ex back at ezinearticles has written almost 2000 articles on the topic.. She really needs to get over it and move on!

The top author in the penis enlargement niche has over 1300 articles… he needs to get out more!

Maybe we should hook both of them up!

Now let Ezinearticles tell me that those articles are not derivitive! Every solution EZA have proposed have been aimed at changing the rules , it’s their mess they approved the articles , get in there and re-edit the articles.

So what should you do about the farmer update…. Nothing!

Ask yourself this if you were searching for a solution online and found your own article would it be useful and helpful or just a pile of rehased poop?

If you write good quality content unique content then you’ll be Fine if you are writing poor quality articles then you’ll have problems… It’s always been like that and it always will!

Sometimes I feel like getting all my sites and placing them in a basket pinning a note to them and placing them on Googles doorstep. The note would say… “I can’t cope any more…you look after them”

I remember when google used to use the mantra “Do No Evil” now it seems to just do what it wants. The latest changes were supposed to weed out content farms, the end result is that good quality content has been replaced by piles of derivative crap and more shopping sites at the top of the rankings.

The only way to avoid all these google changes is to make your business google proof. Luckily for me I started to do this last year.

My business is now split into 2 “departments” The 6 year old blog/websites department and the year old product creation department.

Because the blog aspect is at the mercy of google and it’s fickle algorithm changes the income from that portion fluctuates. I didn’t notice any drop in impressions this week but my adsense ecpm dropped significantly mid week , but it’s back up to normal levels now.

The product creation side of the business doesn’t get affected by what google does as I don’t rely on google for traffic. I must point out that my products aren’t just Internet marketing based I have more non Internet Marketing products than I do IM based ones.

The great thing about that side of the business is that it’s self generating, you start off with 0 customers you then get a few affiliates who get you customers, those customers generate more affiliates, those affiliates generate more customers etc etc. It’s a cycle of increasing profits.

Then when it’s time to create another product you already have a market for the product.

So how do you google proof your business?

The first thing is to ensure that you collect email addresses on any sites you have then if google closed down tomorrow you can still contact your client. I’ve had over 300,000 clicks from ezine articles to my blogs and didn’t collect any email addresses…IDIOT

Develop more sources of traffic, find high traffic blogs and offer to do guest posts

Create reports and Videos

Create products and build targeted lists, If I can get 4000 subscribers in one day at my first attempt so can you.

Collecting email addresses isn’t just about selling it’s about building a relationship and positioning yourself as an authority in your niche. We all get hundreds of emails selling us stuff. People assume that this is the way you should email market. It’s not.

Start to Google proof your business now.

If you want to find out how I create products in under 4 hours(the last took 2 hours 14 minutes and earned over $1000) and Google Proof my business visit Beyond Commission

If you haven’t started to look at facebook as a means of driving traffic to your site you need to startt o look at that option now.
I’ve recorded a short video to demonstrate exactly what I mean.

I’d love your thoughts on the whole Google vs Facebook battle and what you think will happen in the future
BTW if you don’t have my Article Dominance Book and do article marketing you might want to check out my WSO How to Increase Your Click Through Rate

I’ve been recommending Micro Niche Finder to my members and subscribers for several years now. yesterday there was an update that makes it a complete and total no brainer. If you want to make money online micro Niche Finder will now make the job so much easier. In the video below it takes me less than 10 minutes to find a Niche i can rank at #1 for with very little work.

The key things you need to make money quickly are:

A niche with searches and very little competition.

A keyword based domain name

An indication of how much work you need to do to rank well.

MNF now delivers this with a few clicks of a button. Watch the video below where I find a good niche in a few minutes.

Once you find your niche there are several things you can do , expand it into a site with 5 to 10 related pages and work on getting all of them ranking well or why not try the simple and easy option. Create Micro Micro niches.

Micro Micro Niches are small sites that start out with just 1 or 2 pages. You create them then leverage your content until you rank #1 in google. You can then either leave them or add to them using the keywords that have been used to find your site. They are quick and simple sites that are designed to make you money , base them on the keyword phrase you are targetting and use good on page seo and they will rank well in a short time.

If you’d like to know how to leverage your content then grab my free report from this post Article Leverage Report