Well, well… its 2009 already and almost half a year has passed us by since I last wrote anything in this blog. That one was called “Google Hits Where it Hurts” and it reflected on the many changes Google has been making on its algorithm and how it affects website owners of all flavours.

So it’s probably a natural progression to come back here several months on and look at what has been happening as well as take these changes and make something positive out of them.

One reason for this post is as a way of providing some of my other sites with a little added exposure as they all need it and this is the perfect vehicle for doing that. You see a major part of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is getting links to your site. But not just any old links, you need strong link juice that only keyword anchored, one way back links can give your site. When they come from an authority site that occupies the same niche as yours, then it adds to the strength of the juice given in the link. And when that link comes from within a relevant post, you are receiving about the best you can get.

Figuring in the SERPs is all about the amount of authority that Google gives to your site. It gives most authority to sites that are totally relevant to their keywords and that have the most quality back links from other authority sites in the same niche. After all, this is a good indicator for Google that the links are genuine and that the owner of the site giving them is impressed enough by the site they are linking to to give them a keyword text anchor in that link which is relevant to the page, or article or post that it links to.

A great site linking strategy post can be found over at my sister site at thehonestway.com/blog which explains how you can create some authority for yourself using one link building strategy that works quite well for improving a site’s authority.

A really great article about using SEO to improve your edge in the SERPs can be found at another well informed site at How to Make Money Online with SEO. Here it takes a slightly different tack, but the basic recipe for success using search engine optimization techniques is the same.

This was not meant as a particularly long post, because I don’t want to be spending too much time working in the MMO niche as it is downright too damn difficult to rank well enough in to make money online from. Much better to be putting my time and efforts into my several niche sites which are benefiting greatly from the SEO techniques that I use and have explained in the aforementioned articles.

So as we’re now into 2009 already, may I wish you all a happy and prosperous year ahead!

Terry Didcott
Make Money

After my last post several weeks ago Don’t Miss a Franchise Opportunity!, which got a bit off topic, I lost interest in this blog for a while. Noting much was happening in the Make Money Online arena and of course all the new information coming from Vic’s place was dampening any enthusiasm for the make money online niche. It just didn’t seem worth putting any effort into any of my make money online blogs, as they weren’t exactly making money hand over fist and let’s face it, the make money online niche itself just doesn’t make money for the vast majority of its marketers.

So where does that leave us now? And why am I bothering to post anyway?

Well, we’re left in an interesting situation right now. A very interesting situation.

You see, Google is tweaking its infamous algorithm yet again only not in a small way, but in a very big way. An this is a way that is going to affect, and is in fact already affecting a heck of a lot of marketers who derive the bulk of their money online from the SERPs placement they’ve acquired for their money sites using links gathered artificially, or not in a natural way.

Got your curiosity? Good. Read on…

We all knew that a time would eventually come when the marketers who were generating backlinks to their adsense or affiliate websites by the bucket load and climbing over the shoulders of those who were getting them naturally would come to an end. Some of the methods used were:

• Using article marketing software to blast an article to multiple article directories for links
• Using BookMarkingDemon to generate thousands of social links to sites
• Using paid for link farms to create links
• Using blog commenting software to comment on hundreds of “do follow” blogs

Well, Google have known about all these methods for a while now and were not best pleased that more and more marketers were using these artificial link building tactics to game their index. To sat that they may have been ever so slightly pissed off with it all is probably an understatement.

So they have acted.

And acted in a huge way. Long has it been known that Google are not about to start handing out penalties to websites that have lots of inbound links, because that would create a situation where competitors would simply spam their competition’s sites with iffy links and hope to get them de-indexed or at least sandboxed.

No that would not do at all.

So Google have boxed clever. Rather than hand out penalties to a site owner for using BMD, or paid link farms or whatever, they have a much more subtle yet effective way of dealing with it.

They simply ignore the links coming from sources they suspect of being used to game their index. Simple. That way, no one can complain that their thousand links coming from such and such group of sites has suddenly disappeared overnight and they have taken a drop from page one to page 50. Or all those hundreds or thousands of links coming from all those articles they spammed to every article directory that exists suddenly not being counted.

So how are they doing it?

Well, only their tekkies know that exactly, but the educated guess is they can quite easily find link farms and flag all the domains involved and then simply not count the links coming from them. Same goes for article directories. But that one has got to be even more subtle and beautifully genius in its working.

You see, not all links coming from article directories are being ignored. That would be terribly unfair. No, what they’re doing is just not counting links embedded in duplicate content. I have to laugh my ass off at everyone who’s been blasting the same article out to 400 article directories. Only one of those links will be counted because the other 399 are embedded in duplicates.

I’ve been saying this loudly and clearly since I first learned this important marketing truth well over a year and a half ago.

NEVER USE DUPLICATE CONTENT

I’ve always known this, it is such an important thing to know. I’ve always written my own articles or taken information from other articles and put my own spin on them so they are original. I’ve never used an article submitter because I’ve always known that if I did, then I’d be putting my name to duplicate content.

Ok, I’ve lost a lot of ground because of sticking to my guns – my competitors have outstripped me in many niches. But now the tide is turning.

All those websites that were sitting above my sites are falling away as their duplicate content links are no longer propping their sites up. The ones that were getting their links from links farms are starting to feel the pinch too as the link farms get found and their links discounted.

Guess what is happening and will continue to happen?

Google’s index has been jumping around like a barrel of Mexican jumping beans for the last couple of months. Sites have been winking in and out of the index for their keywords. Some have gone for good. Some of the numbers have been changing enormously too. I’ve been watching niches that previously had a million competing pages drop to a few tens of thousands.

Why do you think all this is happening if you still don’t believe that Google are discounting certain groups of links?

Well, I don’t mind what anyone else thinks, to be perfectly honest. I know what I know, which is what I can see with my own two eyes, so either agree with me or don’t – either way that’s fine with me.

What I do know is what I’m already seeing is some of my sites that were previously flailing around on page three or four are creeping up to page one or two in several niches. They all got their links from original articles or other legitimate (in the eyes of Google) sources of links – see my article about that at the Honest Way Blog here: How to Get Legitimate Backlinks

So now it might just be a good time to get back into the make money online fracas, as I’ll bet that a lot of the competition is starting to lose ground.

We shall see…

Terry Didcott
Make Money