After Google’s recent Farmer or Panda update, where untold thousands of webmasters, including myself to a lesser degree, perceive themselves as collateral damage in Google’s attempt to police the quality of online content. See my other post on Panda and solutions here.

Admittedly, things were pretty out of control. LOL.  The economics of outsourcing content creation, , then monetizing called Content Farming, are, hehe or were, compelling.    Freelancers overseas will produce blog posts for $1 or $2, a web page created, with advertising, ranked on the search engines, which earns back the ‘investment’ within days. Multiply by millions and a huge industry prospers.  And what fun it was!  But all good things come to an end.

Google spanked everyone’s butt with a new rule – if you have one page of poor content, that will drag down the whole site.  Whereas previously, low quality content was merely ignored, which created no or a very low incentive to raise the bar.  Now, however there is – low quality content is being deleted on a vast scale, in the hopes of raising search engine rank.    SearchEngineLand estimates over 1 Billion pages removed since March.

The idea of removing low quality content to reclaim rank is open to differences of opinion, my own experience with sites that have fully recovered from Panda, and the logic that G is applying, gives a clear and obvious incentive to do so.  Deleting poor quality content is a good start but that’s not all though.

Manually reviewing close to a thousand blog posts on numerous of my sites, it really does seem G has figured out a very tricky way of detecting good content from bad.  Which may not really be so tricky, just applying massive processing power to the information G already has about a website, which is substantial.

At this point, Google knows who 70-75% (my guess) the users are and what they are doing on any given query, and can guess accurately at another 15-25% based on browser/software/system profiles (even if your ip changes and you are not logged in, Google can match all the above metrics to a profile on you)….

Finally, after all that data, the user probably types in a query: (if the search didn’t come from off site).

Also while reviewing and evaluation blog posts, I have pondered the information hierarchy -

Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom.

Or as T.S. Eliot Put it,

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

This speaks to the heart of what G is trying to do, and various economic incentives have really messed things up.   Most blogs are just data, divided up into little bits, without enough connecting threads that establishes the context either to the blog and website or to the larger Web.  Most often blogs are ‘sensory stimuli.’   Try making your Blog into a book.    Simply assembling your blog posts together into a book doesn’t really work- it can be done, but be prepared for a huge amount of editing and writing transitions.

Something falls through the cracks – the part of life that is lost in the living.   That is the editing and transitions.  Scientifically assembling blogs for search results misses out.    It worked splendidly in monetary terms for quite a while, but no more.  And, surprise, surprise, some of the high brow advice on blogging, actually turns out to be true!  Imagine that!

And indeed – it turns out that blogging requires more than installing Open Source software, downloading keyword lists and hiring freelance writers overseas.   Blogging requires a higher order of skills that are more academic and research oriented, like a librarian or University professor.

Google is joining Citigroup and Mastercard to set up a mobile payment system that will turn Android phones into a kind of electronic wallet, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.

The new technology, which is in its early stages, will allow consumers to wave their Android phones in front of a small reader at the checkout counter to make payments, the Journal reported.

Sounds exciting! Oh, there is more…

The planned payment system would allow Google to offer retailers more data about their customers and help them target advertisements and discount offers to mobile device users near their stores, the sources told the WSJ.

Maybe some people would find that ‘not exciting.’

One of my favorite blogs, The Satorialist, a fashion blog by Scott Schuman in New York. A satorialist, is a person interested in sartorialism, which is an interest in matters of or relating to the tailoring of clothing.

I keep getting asked for how to make wordpress secure so here is the URL for changing your tables –

http://tdot-blog.com/wordpress/6-simple-steps-to-change-your-table-prefix-in-wordpress

This is a tutorial for getting under the hood and into the guts of WordPress and making it bullet-proof.

Is it really necessary is the next question. That depends on whether you have anything worth taking. If your blog has no traffic and no Page Rank, then it probably isn’t a big issue because there isn’t anything worth stealing. If you have a PR6 blog that is clean (no links to prescription drug sites, life insurance sits etc.) with hundreds or even dozens of Authority sites one-way linking to you, then you have something valuable and worth taking.

How valuable? A PR 5 – 6 link sells for $20 – $30 per month. The last hack on one of my high value sites put 50 or so invisible links at the bottom of the page. Even at $20/month, thats $1000 per month of free links!

If you have been blogging for a few years, or even 4 or 5, then you have accumulated a huge amount of material on your subject matter. And presumably, covering every possible facet and related topic.

If it is properly indexed, they you have 300 or 400 pages of material which is a huge boost for your rankings and traffic. Beyond that, it is just sitting there.

What you do with this accumulation is compile it into an ebook which you can sell! Here is what I did with a 5-year old blog, plus several years of article submissions and masses of site content.

First I hired a guy who was referred to me by a client as Editor and Project Manager. He had a Masters degree and was unemployed and agreed to work of $20/hour. First I got him to come up with an outline or table of contents. I asked him to research every single possible topic for the book (in this case on how to study) so that the book would be the complete guide on how to study and cover every conceivable aspect and topic.

Once we had the table of contents, I zipped all of the material together (which was quite a lot) and sent it to him together with a quick index of the material.

The first step was for him to go through and inventory everything and compile a list of topics that are missing. Once he gave me the list I hired my usual freelance writer to write up the missing parts,which was about 40 pages total.

While that was being written up, the Editor was putting the existing content together as well as writing transitions. A book is more than just a collection of blog posts and articles put together, and putting them all together into a cohesive whole was harder and more work that I expected.

Simply copy and pasting a huge collection of blog posts together feels very disjointed. As well blog posts tend to be quite short, and often just give a cursory coverage of the topic. Often blog posts had to be taken out or used as a basis for a more in-depth article which was then integrated into the larger document.

Still, a successful project, although it took longer, cost more and was more difficulty than I originally planned.

The result? 3 ebooks, on related topics, 200 pages, 110 pages and 50 pages respectively. Hooked them up to paypal, linked everywhere internally on the site and re-couped my investment for the freelance editor and writer in just over 1 month. From here on in it is all pure profit.

One of the ebooks, here, was so successful, I had my main writer, add another 50 pages.

All of the ebooks are undergoing extensive multi-variant testing to determine price breaks, and sales copy. So far, it looks as though my original guess at price was too low, and tweaks to the sales copy have increased conversion by 57%.

Very Nice!

Here is the high-brow view – http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/03/28/blogonomics-monetizing-readers/ – Chase READERS not Pageviews!

Aaron Wall offered an interesting view on his blog http://www.seobook.com/blog which I can’t locate, and I am paraphrasing here, saying to keep most content just above the medium quality level, and then smaller amounts of very high quality content.

How do you actually convince someone to pull out their credit card and actually busy something from your website?

Anyone who knows the answer to that question, or even part of the answer is worth a million bucks. Unfortunately there ins’t any one answer and ‘the answer,’ such as it is, comes slowly and hard. And further, it is different for different types of sites.
Strategies for Education sites are going to be different from strategies for sites that sell machinery.

My personal strategy for promoting sites is the “learning library” approach where lots of free information is provided for browsers with a soft sell approach. This type of promotional strategy works well for education related sites, dating sites, some web and Internet related sites, for example SEO content sites, but not web design sites. Maybe more…

The learning library strategy means creating an online library of material that is related to your product or service. See my other posts on Anatomy of a Content Site, Broad Conent and Content Sites Sell

Surveys and statistics released this week show that Web2 continues to explode and Web1 brochure sites are stagnating and getting left in the dust. Consider:

* Blogger.com is the web’s fastest growing service at 528% over last year.

* Myspace.com grew at +318%

* Wikipedia grew at +275%

* Traditional web1.0 sites are losing ground: MSN.com (+1%), AOL.com (0%), ebay.com (-3%), Yahoo.com (+5%) and Google is still positive at +21% but slowing.

The Wall Street Journal summarizes the ComScore Data in New Trends In Online Traffic

Here’s what it means for small businesses with websites:

1) If you don’t have a blog, better get on it. The party is in full swing. If you have a website now, think about converting it to a blog.

2) Content, content, content is the name of the new game. It is all about personal opinion, and ultra-specialized information from experts in their niche. High-quality content floats to the top of the pile. If you can’t write or don’t have time, hire someone to produce content for you. Be prepared to supervise though!

3) The days of hiring a web designer and then hiring an SEO company and then sitting back are long gone (if that was ever a reality). Start thinking about how you can update your site with new information at least twice a week.

4) If you are looking for an SEO/SEM company, ask to see their marketing plan for Social Bookmarking and content creation.

5) Use Multimedia. Audio podcasts, and shared videos online are key to marketing Web2.

The web has always changed, and this is just another change and evolution. Nice to see the chaotic, personal expression aspect of the web winning over the attempts to control and regulate.

Opportunity still abounds online, with more opportunities than time to implement them.

Here is a great plug-in that I have found for increasing traffic from Social Bookmarking sites. This WordPress plug-in automatically bookmarks your site to Social Bookmark sites each time you post, including:

blinklist.com
furl.net
del.icio.us
myweb2
shadows.com
simpy.com
spurl.net
ma.gnolia.com
blogmarks.net
rawsugar.com
smarking.com
linkrolling.com
blogmemes.net
markaboo.com
linkagogo.com
feedmelinks.com

This plug-in avoids spam with a clever option which randomly selects ‘X’ sites for submission, so you aren’t spamming.

Check it out Auto Social Bookmarking

Lots has been written about promoting blogs which covers the basics, of pings, submitting, creating content people want to read and all that. In this article I thought I would take it one step further and talk about some of the techie SEO aspects of promoting an blog, and specifically, avoiding penalties.

For the basics of promoting a blog, the best article I found was Margin of Eric – Making Yourself Known.

This is the place to start and covers all of the basics.


Techie SEO considerations.

Dup Content on Blogs
Google is extremely vigilant detecting and penalizing duplicate content in their search engine results, with often unwanted side effects.

When you make a post on your blog, a page is created for that post with the full text. In addition, the full text of the post is added to a Category page, and also to an archive page. That makes 3 copies of the same text on your site. When Google’s indexing spider (Googlebot) crawls your site, it notices 3 identical pages and assumes that you are trying to pad your content by repeating yourself 3 times.

2 Levels of penalty, SERP filters kick in. One, the allegedly duplicate pages are penalized. The other penalty or filter is trickier. Googlebot takes the total amount of content on your site, and then checks to see how much of that content is duplicated on your site, or elsewhere on the web. If the percentage of content on your site is duplicated elsewhere, Google concludes that your site may be lower quality and may not be of interest to Google’s search/browsers.

The whole thing is a LOT more complex than this but this is a good way to think about it. In fact there is no magic percentage or threshold, but rather a long list of ‘signs of quality’ which Google’s algorithm calculates to assign rank.

The Fix

A discussion at Webmasterworld gives the code to place in the HEAD of header.php.

Also, WordPress Support recommends the same code to fix the issue of dated posts being indexed, and the page disappearing.

Post Regularly and Post Often! — keep going and don’t slow down! It WILL pay off! If you can’t or don’t have time to write the posts yourself, hire a writer.

Some Useful SEO Plugins

Jerome’s Keywords

Allows keywords to be associated with each post. These keywords can be used for page meta tags, included in posts for site searching or linked like Technorati tags.


Social Bookmark Creator

Add social bookmark links to your blog.

Auto Social Poster – automatically submits to social media sites. (A MUST have!)

This is one of the best. This plug-in replaces the built-in ping (works? doesn’t work?) with a function that pings only when you publish not when you save.