Posts Tagged ‘google blackhat’

Q&A with Google at SES

0, March 6, 2010
Posted by admin

Q: Tell me more about Google SiteLinks. How do they determine which links are used?

A:

I have tested SiteLinks algo pretty hard and the one thing I have learned is that the algo is NOT easily influenced. In other words, attempts to “steer” Google to the links you want included doesn’t work on a consistent basis.

As far as getting certain keywords to appear as SiteLinks for your domain, it has mostly to do with your site being “the” landing spot for that search. It isn’t as easy as you might think. For example, I am getting a Mac this weekend. It is my ritual, a new laptop every Labor Day, and this year, I’m going Mac … let’s see if it sticks this time. :-)

If I do a search for “Apple” … apple.com has SiteLinks. However, it does NOT have SiteLinks for the following phrases: iPhone, iTunes, iPod, Mac. The only phrase I could get to come up for Apple.com with SiteLinks was “macintosh”, and that was really one of my “last gasp” phrases to try.

So, as you can see, even the large companies have issues when it comes to getting the right keywords tagged with SiteLinks for their domains.

Q: Does the geographic location of the web host matter for search? Organic? Local?

A: I had a great discussion about this with three Google engineers. The actual location of the server does not matter. Even though there is some “chatter” that it does matter, the choice where to host is clearly yours as a business owner. However, where people tend to get into trouble is the TLD (Top Level Domain). For example, if you had a web business in Portland, Oregon, it wouldn’t make too much sense to have a co.uk domain would it? And the same is true the other way around. If you want localized traffic, and you’re in the UK, get both the .com and .co.uk domains. Build out the .co.uk and 301 redirect the .com to your localized domain. This way you keep your brand, but you are far more likely to get localized traffic with the proper TLD than without it.

Tip: If you are in the US, you don’t need a local host to rank well locally. Your “dot com” doesn’t need to be hosted in Portland if you are also in Portland. You can host in Miami and rank just as well in the local search.

Q: What changes is Google working on right now?

A: I was able to get some info when a group of Googlers thought I was an employee by accident. The biggest issues was a new filter they are working on which would “kill half the businesses here tonight.” The individual who said that was pretty young, and I have learned over the years in this industry that young people like to talk and say bold things in order to get attention and have a feeling of “betterment”.

I don’t believe that statement for many reasons, first, he has no clue about the level of people at the party … as SES attracts mainly newbies. And I followed this comment up with a few Google engineers that I am good friends with and they basically laughed it off. I was on the Organic SEO panel with Aaron (he’s on Matt Cutts’ team) and there are no big filters being worked on currently.

First things first – lets define the Supplemental Index. The best way is to take it straight from Google

A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that its pulled from our supplemental index. Were able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.

If youre a webmaster, please note that the index in which a site is included is completely automated; theres no way to select or change the index in which a site appears. Please also be assured that the index in which a site is included doesnt affect its PageRank. For tips on maintaining a crawler-friendly site, please visit our webmaster guidelines.

Reference: Googles Webmaster Help Center

Search Engine “Cheat Sheet” Posted

0, February 23, 2010
Posted by admin

Search Engine Cheat Sheet Posted

The Search Engine Cheat Sheet which was originally posted in the On-Page Factors eBook is now posted in the Tutorial section and it has been updated.

There were a few updated changes, here they are:

The displayed characters each engine accepts changed:

Google increased one character from 65 to 66. Here is an example of the new longer Title tag:

Yahoo! is currently 71 characters as evidenced by this example:

Microsofts Live.com shows 70 characters:

What does this mean? Basically that you have one extra character to play with when creating your Title tags. I just posted the information from Live and Yahoo! to show how the other two engines are currently behaving, but Google is still your main focal point. Since they are the lowest, you target that number.

Why?

The testing numbers are stil accurate. Titles which have ellipses (the three dots at the end) have a lower click through rate than Titles which do not.

AdSense Tips & Tricks

0, February 15, 2010
Posted by admin

I will start of by saying my method of adsense behind image works pretty well, altho it is very blackhat if you need good money fast thats the way to do it…. However..

I know I am not an AdSense Monster but I feel I do well for myself even though I use things differently than most do. I use AdSense to help with my PPC bill. Let me show you quickly and then well go through some points that can help you with your AdSense.

Create a plan for why you are going to use AdSense. You will want to do this because the amount you are earning per click is a fraction of the amount an advertiser is earning. That is the reason why they are paying you to do it, you will make more money then they will.

Caution: Do not settle for many 50 cents when you could be making $12.00 instead.

Robots.txt Tip:

To ensure that you get your site indexed properly by Google Media Bot ensure you place the following code into your robots.txt file. After you put it in you will see a difference so make sure you put it in there. One of the main benefits of having this code is that it will place relevant ads and fewer PSAs. You dont need to be nervous about the Disallow statement that is in the code, it is the syntax of the robots.txt file. It doesnt have anything after it so this means its not disallowing anything from the bot meaning you are giving full access to all your pages to the spider.

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:

When AdSense first came about I decided to sign up and placed the ads onto one of my affiliate sites. It turned out that my conversion ratio for that affiliate program didnt have much movement keeping a consistent rate. When I looked a bit further I noticed that I had a 6% CTR. Before AdSense my conversion rate was approximately 2% so it turned out I was earning money from 8% of the visitors I received. Not too shabby.

I decided to test this out on more sites and the same figure came back to me but the conversion still stayed quite consistent. So why exactly was this happening? I did an exit survey but that didnt give any details since the people leaving didnt seem to fill out my survey. I came to the conclusion that the people that purchased my stuff were already going to buy anyways with or without ads showing. For those that were leaving higher percentages were hitting the back button and the other handful looked for a way out and they usually were the ones that hit the AdSense ads.

In all honesty its not my fault they didnt find what they were looking for. There is no possible way you can please everyone and nor would I like too, but I would like to maximize the revenue my site gets so I came up with a plan. Take a look at the plan I came up with:

1) Having a targeted monthly budget is key so when I launch my affiliate program I will already have the list of keywords that will convert. As an example we will use a budget of $1,000.00 per month.

2) Target the average CPC. This is actually pretty easy to do. You never want to have a bid that is more than 50% of the revenue youd earn per visitor. So for example your PPC campaign has a commission of $50.00 with a conversion ratio of 1% youll have revenue of 50 cents per visitor ($50.00/100=$0.50). To ensure you have profit this means you can not go over $0.25 per click. By bidding more then that you will actually see yourself loosing money and this is the main thing you want to avoid. Now for another example lets say your conversion ratio increased to 4% meaning youd have revenue of $2.00 per visitor, meaning you can now have a bid of $1.00 per click. Quite amazing isnt it?

3) With AdSense try to project a 6% CTR with a revenue of $0.50 per click. For every 100 views you get to your page youd get revenue of $3.00 or $300.00 EPM (Earnings per Thousand Views).

4) For our example we spent $1,000.00 a month for our PPC with an average of $0.25 a click. You brought 4,000 visitors into your site holding an average number of page views being 3 per, or 12,000 page views.

5) 1% conversion: 40 sales x $50.00 = $2,000.00 (Affiliate Revenue)
6% AdSense CTR: 720 clicks x $0.50 = $360.00 (AdSense Revenue)
Subtract the PPC Spend – $1,000 (PPC Spend)

Google “Slap” of Affiliate Review Sites

0, January 28, 2010
Posted by admin

A few years ago Google first slapped thin affiliate sites with low quality scores, and now, webmasters are complaining again because their high quality review sites just got slapped.

What do I mean by slapped? A Quality Score of 10 being reduced to 1. Thats a slap right in the wallet, because what use to cost $0.50 a click, not is $20.00.

Ouch.

First things first, many experts are claiming that finally the time has come when Google is going to stamp out affiliate marketing because it isnt a real business. Hold on now not a real business? Really? Then why, might I ask, does Google OWN an affiliate network?!?!

They dont hate affiliates, they just hate the lazy ones.

Fact: This issue is with AdWords not the Organic listings.

Testing Results: Of the dozens of affiliate review sites I have, not one of them was slapped in AdWords. Not one.

I also had the opportunity to review sites that did get slapped, and you know what? All of them were awful. They werent high quality, they didnt add value, and they looked like they were built with a content scrapper tool. If you are serious about affiliate market, then get serious about it.

Every program I do my #1 goal is to have a better site than the merchant. Why? Because I know that if my site looks better and performs better, they will want to buy it.

Note: This issue has nothing to do with cloaked links or redirects according to my testing.

Easy $25 Adwords Credits

0, October 29, 2009
Posted by admin

I should preface this by saying I’ve put in motion a fairly large scale operation to get you guys virtually unlimited $50 and $100 adwords coupons as well as a ton of free money for starter traffic on dozens of other traffic networks which you’ll be hearing about all this month.

$25 $50 or $100 isn’t a whole hell of a lot in the grand scheme of things, unless of course you know the easy ways to constantly make new accounts and utilize the free money which I’ll be sharing my strategies on and hopefully other members here can add to them or share their own.

An easy guaranteed $25 adwords credit is simply filling out the form here:

services.google.com/ads_inquiry/awhomepage

Give it about 72 hours and you should get an email like this:

This method is very powerful and can make you a lot of money with very little effort in a short time.

It could also get you banned from AdWords and your Network really quick, so use it with caution and only if you absolutely have to.

For example, if you can’t pay your Hosting, use it to make $200 quickly.

It is well known that Trademarks and Brands are the most profitable keywords, this is why most companies do not allow their affiliates to bid on them.

If you try to bid on a trademarked term using Google AdWords, the system will not allow you to do so. This is because the company owning the brand has asked Google to restrict it.

Adsense Under Image

0, September 2, 2009
Posted by admin

Be warned this can get you banned from adsense but hell its nice:

It seems that more and more often people are dropping AdSense a revenue stream do to ever
decreasing ad clicks and the fact that traffic is just worth more through affiliate sales or CPA offers. With
every intention of being banned from AdSense and just playing around before dropping them
completely I started a VERY black hat AdSense campaign which, my to my initial surprise, is still going
strong 5 months later and getting me a paid a ton!
I will not lie; this is very against AdSense ToS so you do risk being banned. All that I can say is that I have
not gotten banned and I get paid. If you are a bit faint of heart or perhaps using your AdSense account
for white hat things and do not want to risk it that is 100% fine just check out other programs, who do
not care so much about quality for their advertisers and do NO manual checking. These networks
include:
BidVertiser
MSN
AdBrite
YSM
All of these networks pay out slightly lower, on a cost per click basis, than Google AdSense but they do
still pay and with this method you will still earn big! I can also attest to the fact that my friends who use
this method have never been banned from AdSense either. As I said though, use it at your own risk and
perhaps consider applying to another network so a ban will not hurt your current or future AdSense
prospects.
Alright, now that youve made up your mind about what pay-per-click program youre going to use how
about we go ahead and get on to the method
Set Up
The first step for setup here is start out a brand new site. You will need hosting for this, a domain is
optional as you can always use a redirect/shortening service but you will need your own hosting as you
are going to be editing some .php files. You can use 000webhost.com for free hosting but it does not
look clean so I recommend moving away from it once you get paid. Since Google Trends, and our traffic
technique, are both very short lived you will be spending about 5-10 minutes each day setting up a new
page based around a new trend. It gets more simple next time as you have your template and only have
to edit the URL for the new picture as well as put it the dimensions for it. This can be done on hosted
sites only! Blogger.com/BlogSpot.com blogs will NOT work as you need to edit a .php page to make the
code for this work!
Your very first step for the day is to head over to Google.com/trends and look for a suitable Google
trend for the day. An ideal trend, for this method, will need to posses one of the following attributes:
Not covered by the major media networks such as Associated Press, CNN or Fox News. These
networks will be the only things that will outrank you in Google, which is going to be your traffic
source. Generally speaking about 1/3 of the top 100 trends fit this criterion and you can run with
them!
The Google Trend needs to be about some sort of content that people are dying to get. This
works with mainly two things videos and pictures. For this method to work you will need your
visitor to click on the picture, you will see why later.
In this example I am a bit limited today because it is the 4th of July so that takes up a ton of Google
Trends and is not too useable to me. However, there are always at least a few Trends out there that I
can work with. Today I went with versus cycling which holds some great qualities; it is not covered by
the big networks, it is related to TV so I can put up a clip and it even has a related Trend a little further
down the list which means the possibility to add some extra traffic (this method will let you target up to
2 Google Trends per blog post)! Here is a little shot for yall:
Now it is time to get a little content for my new page for the day. I will head over to Google Image
search and just type in versus cycling. I found a suitable image in about a minute, anything that looks
like it could be a frame from a video will do just fine. Here is the image that I went with:
Now I want to make it look like a video, this is pretty darn simple! All we are going to do is to stick a play
button right on top of it. You dont even need Photo Shop to make this look good; Im doing it in MS
Paint on my laptop as a matter of fact! I have found the perfect button for you and you can get it at:

Just take that image and paste it right on top of the picture that you found. My final product, for my new
web page, is this bad boy:
Nothing too fancy but since you have to do this daily I prefer to only spend about 2 minutes total to slap
up this picture! From here you can upload it straight to your server for use in your new web page.
You may be thinking that it is pretty black hat to get a person to click on something that isnt what you
make it out to be. Well, youve been warned this is a VERY black hat method and you havent seen
anything yet! I am about to show you how to get credited for an AdSense, or other network of your
choosing, click every time someone clicks on that video!
Now it is time to generate your AdSense code. The big thing here is that you do NOT want a 100% CTR.
Since Google made clicks only count on the text links and not the whole ad this helped a lot. Although
you could easily still get 80%+ CTR it WILL get you banned as it initiates a manual review by Google!
Because of this you want to make your Ad Unit smaller than the picture size. What is going to happen is
that this will make it so that people will have to click the correct area of the picture your fake video
in order to get an AdSense click. This way only a percentage of people clicking on the image will also be
clicking your AdSense ad unit so you have a reasonable looking CTR.
So, it is now time to take this picture and hide it over your AdSense ads. In order to do this simply use
the template that is on the following page. Create a new .txt document and paste all of it in there, then I
will show you what needs to be changed to make it have your current image up and your AdSense ads
behind it. Also please note AdSense now uses a new format for ads, I use copied+pasted ad units from
my old site so it looks like this. If you do the newer ones just stick that code where my AdSense code
shows up
Ok then, here it goes for ya:
<style>
iframe{
opacity: 0;
border: 0px none transparent;
position: absolute;
top: 0px;
left: 0px;
height: 300px;
width: 250px;
filter:alpha(opacity=0);
}
img{
position: absolute;
top: -50px;
left: 0px;
height: 475px;
width: 342px;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div>
<img src=”http://YOURDOMAINN.com/YOURIMAGE.gif”/>
<script type=”text/javascript”><!–
google_ad_client = “pub-YOURPUBID”;
google_ad_width = 300;
google_ad_height = 250;
google_ad_format = “300×250_as”;
google_ad_type = “image”;
google_ad_channel = “YOURCHANNEL”;
//–></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
</script>
<center>Watch versus cycling in this video clip.<br>Versus Cycling is some
great videos to watch!
</div>
</body>
As you can see this is designed for a 300×250 ad unit. If you use a smaller ad unit (a must do if your
picture is somewhat smaller) then just also change the dimensions, highlighted above in blue, to the
dimensions of your ad unit. The areas highlighted in green reflect the height of width of your picture, be
sure to change these to reflect whatever picture you use as well. If you are using a fairly large picture
and do not need a smaller ad then simply change the parts highlighted in yellow. The first thing to
change is to add the URL of the image that you created earlier (in the img src area). Next just replace the
Google AdSense code area, also highlighted in yellow, to reflect the code that you have generated in
your account.
The part highlighted in red is for keywords. As you know AdSense displays ads based on keywords so if
there is no text here you will be showing VERY low paying public service ads. You will also note that I put
a <br> in between sentences. Keep it short and keep that <br> after the first sentence or else it will get
moved behind your image and look a bit fishy.
If you are using a different advertiser such as AdBrite then obviously you would place the AdBrite code
in place of the AdSense code at the bottom.
This is now the end of your page set up. So to cover things, we have identified a Google Trend and built
a page that will get all the interested traffic clicking on ads. Now, aside from my very handy promotion
trick, all that is left is to create your safe page to keep a manual review from slamming you just in
case!
We are going to go and make a new .txt document in wordpad. This guy will be extremely generic and
safe, just slap in the following code:
<head>
<style>
</style>
</head>
<center><script type=”text/javascript”><!–
google_ad_client = “pub-YOURPUBID”;
google_ad_width = 300;
google_ad_height = 250;
google_ad_format = “300×250_as”;
google_ad_type = “image”;
google_ad_channel = “YOURCHANNEL”;
//–></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
</script></center>
<br>
<center>Versus Cycling News</center><br>
A fire that destroyed Team Type 1’s rider transport van threatened to burn up the team’s lead
Sunday morning in the Arizona desert at the Race Across America (RAAM).
But quick action by the crew kept the eight-rider team going and Team Type 1 led by more than
an hour Sunday afternoon at Time Station No. 7 in Cottonwood, Ariz., 437 miles (704 km) into
the race.
The fire started beneath the mini-van that hauls the riders and pulls the trailer carrying their
Orbea bicycles. It happened when the van’s hot catalytic converter came in contact with tall
grass on the side of the road while the vehicle was pulled off to make a rider exchange.
Fortunately, no one was hurt. But the van was permanently damaged and a large area of the
pavement was scorched.
Team Type 1 General Manager Tom Schuler, who is serving as a crew member for the team
during RAAM, said he was amazing by how fast riders and staff responded to the situation.
“They had to put out the fire, disconnect the trailer hitch, reconnect the trailer to another vehicle,
move the bikes around and get a new vehicle,” Schuler said. “We were really fortunate that we
were able to disconnect that trailer from the frame of the burned-out vehicle and move it onto a
different van.”
As a temporary stop-gap, Team Type 1 and Team Type 2 RAAM manager Dave Eldridge put
his utility van into action as the rider vehicle until he was able to secure a new rental. Eldridge is
the father of Joe Eldridge, who co-founded Team Type 1 with Phil Southerland in 2004.
In the wake of the fire, RAAM organizers put out a message to the more than 70 other crews
following teams or individuals in the transcontinental race. It read, in part:
RAAM wish to extend their appreciation for the quick reaction of the crew to mitigate what could
have been a very dangerous event. RAAM is unable to control all aspect of the Race and
therefore they cannot take responsibility for unfortunate events that may occur during the Race.
Please be aware of your surroundings (especially the dry ground cover in California) and the
impact you may have on them during the race.
Follow the progress of Team Type 1 and Team Type 2 during RAAM by going to teamtype1.org.
Both squads are providing inspiration to people affected by diabetes around the world.
Now what you will have to change is simple:
The stuff highlighted in yellow will, of course, be your ad code from before. What I have highlighted in
blue is content. Just Google the Trend you chose and grab a short article. Copy and paste it in there and
you have your safe page ready to throw up. When you start to get a good burst of ad clicks simply
throw up the safe page after you earned your goal for the day ($100? $300?) and the safe page will
replace your old one. This is dual purpose, first of all it will now greatly lower your CTR because you have
the same ad up but no sneaky technique to get it clicked. Second this method will also give you a safe
page so that by the time an AdSense rep comes to manually check it, if you happened to go a bit
overboard, everything will look 100% legit to them!
Thats it for the site creation. Just remember, watch it closely and throw this up once you have a
comfortable amount of cash in for the day. Even if you do not hit your goal for the day still throw this up
nice and early so that you can lower your CTR and avoid suspicion.
Now all that is left to do is to get some traffic. Simply head over to Digg and submit your new site. In the
title box put your first Trend keyword exactly as it appears, in this instance it will be versus cycling. In
the second box put your second Trend exactly as it appears also. Although this is optional as you will
often only have 1 Trend at a time that fits well. Also put a little link bait at the end of this in the
description, after all you do want people to click through.
As an example my title now reads: Versus Cycling
And my description reads: Versus TV Watch versus cycling here, great clip of todays action!
Now just go ahead and submit it. The way that this trick works is that Digg.com is LOVED by Google, at
least short term. So, since you are not competing with CNN and Fox News your Digg.com story (not the
actual site but the Digg submission) will hit the top of Google in about an hour for your Trend and
remain there for 12-24 hours. This way people searching for this Trend will click on your Digg.com story
and the click through the link there which will lead them to the page that you setup. You now have a
TON of traffic ready to click your invisible AdSense ad!
Enjoy it and please do not get greedy and forget to throw your safe page up. It really is some great
money so be sure to do this and milk it long term instead of getting banned!