December 19, 2007 By

The Google Sandbox Effect on Your Blog SEO

Have you ever heard about the Google sandbox? The Google sandbox is a security step if you will that Google put into place around 2004 to stop spam blogs from ranking well in the search engines with non relevant terms. The Google sandbox was often called a myth and heavy discussions have evolved through this. However, it seems that the Google sandbox is a reality.

One thing that I know, is that my blog is now in the Google sandbox because I made the mistake of registering a brand new domain opposed to buying a pre-registered one at auction.

What most bloggers don’t understand (and I didn’t either until recently) is the fact that pretty much any new domain will end up in the Google sandbox. These are protection steps from Google against spammers and no matter how good your blog is, how much traffic you receive or even how little, you will be reduced to limited search engine positioning through the sandbox.

I believe that the average sandbox playtime for blogs plays out around 3 month up to nearly 18 month for some. What happens during this time is your blog will loose search engine rankings for keywords and eventually disappear.

I’ve always wondered why I managed to hit the first position on Google for a couple of days with a well place blog post in terms of keywords and then suddenly poof it disappeared without trace.

Now I know it is due to the Google sandbox effect and there is nothing I can do until the time comes when the blog will come out of it.

Once you are in the sandbox there isn’t much you can do.

But knowing this, there is one thing you can and that is to buy a pre-existing domain instead.

Hope you don’t get sand boxed!

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December 18, 2007 By

Beware of Buying Banned Sites

Buying pre-owned domains is what experienced smart marketers do instead of registering a brand new domain. By buying the right pre-owned domain we not only avoid the Google sandbox, but we can also get started on the right foot if the domain happens to have already good page rank.

This sounds all great in theory, but in reality it is a different kettle of fish since not every pre-owned domain is what it seems. A typical example is a domain that I found the other day. It had a PR 7 and was registered in 2004, which is great for not being any more in the sandbox. But then things always look a little suspect when they are too good to be true. Nobody had bid on the domain yet and I thought cool, this might be a great buy.

But then I checked a little closer and found out that the domain was both banned from Google and Yahoo. Lucky me for not falling prey to this! But what about the other bidders who have since started to bid on this domain?

They obviously don’t know that this could be the case. They probably think that since the domain is for sale from a reputable company everything else is fine too.

Well, think again, it isn’t! If you are into domain buying, please avoid paying for worthless domains that will do nothing for you because they are either banned or they are not what they appear to be.

Double and triple check your finds before you separate with your money. It can save you a lot of hassle later down the track.

Use the following SEO tools to check the domains back links and whether it is banned or not.

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December 17, 2007 By

Become a Seller with eShop for WordPress Plugin

Finally bloggers can start their very own eShop from their blog with the help of a simply but totally cool Plugin. It is called eShop Plugin and allows you to open your very own store (limited) right from your blog.

Bloggers who always wanted to sell their own ebooks, software or even PLR products can rejoice as this super cool Plugin utilizes PayPal. Look at all the things you can do with eShop:

  • At present it accepts Paypal only
  • Showcase 1 product per page
  • A Product form will appear on the edit page
  • Products can have multiple options
  • Upload downloadable products
  • Offers Basic Statistics
  • Fully searchable
  • 3 methods for calculating shipping charges, plus various zone settings via Country or US State
  • Parent pages can list featured products, or sub product pages (just like categories with posts)
  • Admin has access to an Order handling section
  • Automatic emails on successful purchase, with option to send one from the admin order handling section.
  • User configurable email templates.
  • Configurable Out of Stock message.
  • Basic Stock Control
  • Automatic creation of required pages such as shopping cart and checkout
  • and more!

eshop plugin

With this stuff you can even sell all your household junk since you will be able to input shipping charges. Say goodbye to EBay (just kidding) and say hello to your very own eShop.

Ideas to use eShop for:

  1. sell your own jewellery
  2. sell your own craft related products
  3. sell your digital creations
  4. sell your wp designs
  5. sell second hand clothing
  6. sell garage sale stuff
  7. sell junk
  8. sell whatever you want to sell

I must admit that I am really tempted to give this a spin, I will just have to decide on which blog. The eShop Plugin should be compatible with the latest version of WordPress too.

Some earlier bugs have been fixed by now and your eShop should impress your visitors once you have installed and configured the Plugin.

Download eShop

Visit the Plugin’s home page

Visit the Plugin’s Forum

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December 16, 2007 By

Earn Money with Google Video Units

Google video units are a relatively new way to earn money with from your blog or website. Google partnered with YouTube to allow users to show customizable video units on their blog and earn money with targeted advertising. (Google owns YouTube, but they are still run as two independent companies).In the screen shot below you see how the Google video units look.

But what differs those units from a normal YouTube video are the two ads that are placed strategically on the top and bottom of the video window.

Google Video Untis

When you place a Google Video Unit on your site, you can choose the video content by the following strategies:

  • by content
  • by individual content providers
  • by automatic targeting to YOUR site’s content

The ads shown on the videos will be relevant to your content as well, which can result in higher click through rates. The ads aren’t intrusive to the overall look of your video screen and you can also customize the color scheme and the layout of your video.

To display and utilize this new joint venture between Google and YouTube, you’ll need to have an AdSense publisher account with Google which is free of charge to you. Most bloggers are already using AdSense in some way or another and if you haven’t got an account yet, then you can sign up now to start displaying video units on your pages.

Notes: At present, video units are only available for publishers located in the United States with English-language websites.

How to Add Video Units to Your Page:

  1. You need to link your YouTube account with your AdSense account
  2. Sign into your account at AdSense
  3. Select AdSense Setup tab and then navigate to video units
  4. This will redirect you to YouTube to customize your video unit. It will also ask you to login unless of course you already were.
  5. Choose a name and description for your player so you can remember it in the future.
  6. Now you can customize the colors and the layout to fit into your blog site. Feel free to play around a little.
  7. This step is probably the most important one; you’ll now need to choose the content you want displayed on the player. Remember, you have 3 choices as explained above and need to make sure it is targeted to your site.
  8. Once you are happy with the choices, click on generate code
  9. Copy and paste the code shown into your HTML source on your blog
  10. Click publish

Congratulations, you should now have your first Google video units video playing on your site.

Monika Mundell

Editor of Easy WordPress

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December 15, 2007 By

WordPress Endorsement & SEO Advice from Google

Matt Cutts is a famous Google engineer, head of the “Search Spam” unit in Google. This department basically determines what sites are trying to game the search engines, and how to stop them.

In this video Matt Cutts talks about the search engine benefits of WordPress, and why he would recommend using WordPress as a website building tool.

Some important points:

  • WordPress is probably one of the best SEO tools you can use for free to build your website, especially version 2.3 that works better at avoiding duplicate content
  • Consider keyword variations that a real user would type into the search engines
  • Provide some form of useful resource on your site to give people a reason to keep coming back
  • Use Google’s Webmaster Tools to make Google understand your site better, and improve your SEO with their free tools
  • If you’re using videos on your site, you can get indexed better by having a transcript (text) on your site with the video as search engines still have problems indexing videos
  • To get a real view of how a search engine’s “bots” view your site, try looking at it from a text-based browser like Lynx or use an online SEO tool that allows you to see your site as it would appear in Lynx
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December 14, 2007 By

Advertise To Your RSS Feed

With the Feed Footer WordPress Plugin you can advertise up to ten different products in your RSS feed. Admittedly unless you want to upset your subscribers for good, you don’t want to use all ten optional fields. But using one or the other might bring in some extra sales.

Feed Footer WordPress Plugin will enable you to:

  • Use HTML in your ads, displaying banners, images, underlined text, bold text or italic text. You are only limited by your imagination here
  • You can display a Copyright message or an open invitation to share
  • No limitation of message length
  • Use your Clickbank links, Amazon or even your very own products
  • Give away FREE products
  • Announce important messages
  • Be creative!

feed footer plugin

The Feed Footer Plugin will only add feed ads to new posts once activated. The old RSS feeds won’t be touched.

Installation & Usage:

  1. Download the “feed-footer_11.zip” on your computer. And then unzip the file.
  2. Upload the unzipped “feed-footer” folder to your wp-content/plugins folder.
  3. Log in to WordPress Admin. Go to the “Plugins” page and click Activate for the “Feed Footer” plugin.
  4. Go to the “Options” page and click on the “Feed Footer” link on the submenu.
  5. Add HTML codes for the 10 footers.

Enjoy

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December 13, 2007 By

Malaysian Spammers Selling Email Addresses

Don’t you ever fall for this deceiving scam – someone sends you an email, asking you if you want to buy ALL the email addresses on the Internet!

I have seen a few Malaysian spammers spamming me with an advertisement, asking if you want to join them as a spammer.

malaysian-spammers

These email addresses are collected by a spider, bot or other software without the permission of the owner. If you send them emails based on this, then you’re spammin them.

It doesn’t matter if by paying RM15 you can get 1.5 million or more email addresses as well as the software to send out spam – at the end of the day it’s still spam.

It will not make you rich overnight. Instead, it can get you in a lot of trouble by being banned and blocked by email providers and ISPs. It’s to bad that Malaysian authorities are not dealing with these spammers which spoil it for the rest of us and gives Malaysia a bad name, but I do foresee more strict action against spammers in the near future.

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December 13, 2007 By

WP Bankroll Plugin Version 2.0

image

The WP Bankroll Plugin has been around for a while. It was released back in the first few month of 2007 and many bloggers have successfully installed this Plugin since. It is perhaps most commonly seen on contest blogs that advertise blog contests (at least that’s where I keep finding it).

With the recent Google mayhem regarding paid links selling from your blog via third party advertisers this Plugin might or might now be an alternative. The creator of this Plugin states on his homepage that “the only way to stay out of Google’s radar for selling paid links is via contextual links.”

So what is a contextual link, and how can it keep us safe from the almighty powers that are the big G?

Contextual advertising is nothing else than targeted advertising relating to the blogs topics. So if your blog is geared toward the golfing industry, then only golf related advertising can take place on your blog.

However, this sounds great in the first instance, but upon taking a closer look, there are a couple of issues that disturbed me greatly.

  1. Apparently there have been issue with contextual fraud that installed some kind of code on users computers that then lead to websites who didn’t pay for ads at all. You can read this on Webopedia.
  2. Most importantly, I couldn’t find any mention as to whether this Plugin allows the user to attach the “needed” no follow tag to all ads placed on the site. Why would I want this? Google doesn’t want unnatural link building activities on our blogs. Selling ads without no follow is just that.

Google will crawl your site several times a day if you update your blog regularly, so they don’t want to waste their spider power by having to crawl a paid link or an affiliate link for that matter and therefore they penalize blog owners who dis-obey these rules.

To use the WP Bankroll Plugin you have several options. You can choose to download it for free (it will require you to link back to the Plugin site), or you can pay for the service.

See the screen shot of the WP Bankroll Demo Page. In the top right hand side of the sidebar you see the following:

Buy A Blog Post (hyperlinked)Powered by WP Bankroll.
Feature Posts:

  • Link 1
  • Link 2
  • etc.

image

Your readers will be able to purchase links, blog posts, feature posts and more either as a paid version for whatever you set the price for, or else you can also offer these for free.

Once your reader clicks on the link ” Buy A Blog Post” (link can be named differently too) they will be lead to a new page were they make their choices and then pay via PayPal.

You will receive notification of the new “sponsor” and are then required to approve or reject the payment depending on quality. (If you reject, the buyer will get a full 100 % refund).

The following is the admin options page screen shot:

image

And the manage admin screen shot:

image

The WP Bankroll Plugin might be a great Plugin for some. I would love to get some feedback on whether it has worked out for you and also to clear up the issue of the no follow and whether this is actually possible.

Monika Mundell

Editor of Easy WordPress

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December 12, 2007 By

Win a WiFi Photo Frame On My Expense

estarling_7_8_le Sick and tired of getting photo frames for your birthday? Too many of them already, and yet you continue to save all your pictures in your PC?

With the WiFi photo frame, you can display all your latest digital photos automatically as long as you’re connected to a Internet network. It also reads tags and pictures from Flickr and PhotoBucket – just so darn cool!

If you want to win this for Christmas, read my Christmas Gifts Contest page and find out how to enter the contest. There are also 5 other cool prizes to be won.

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December 11, 2007 By

Analyze Your Search Engine Traffic

Search engine traffic is agreeably the best kind of traffic any blogger or website owner can attract. After all it is totally free of charge and once we manage to increase the amount of search engine traffic to our site we are onto a winning streak.

Naturally this takes time and if somebody says to you that it can be one within 2 weeks, I’d say they are full of rubbish. To rank high in search engines, not only do we need a fair amount of natural incoming links, but also a good amount of targeted and relative keywords.

image

And yes, you can rank high in search engines rather fast for a well structured blog post (I’m talking 3 days or faster) which I have done many times over. But the real trick here is to build on this and keep the ranking strong.

After the initial high placement, our blog post normally drops gradually in rank over the course of 1-2 weeks and unless we back this up with more targeted content, we will struggle to keep the top position.

Especially in a high competitive niche!

So how can we possibly do this you ask?

One such tool that can help us dig deeper into our analysis is using 103bees. 103bees is a fantastic tracking tool that allows us to analyze your keyword traffic, both search terms and long tails.

Analyzing keyword traffic is great because:

  • it can help you to build your natural search engine traffic
  • you can see exactly what search terms lead visitors to your site
  • you can write more keyword related blog posts and build on this traffic
  • find “hits” that are killer content which you can use to your advantage
  • use the stats correctly and drive a ton of free traffic to your site
  • and more…

What 103bees can help you with:

  • find your latest search hits
  • see the top performing landing pages
  • learn what your top search terms are
  • what are the top keywords that drive traffic to your site
  • which search engines send you traffic and at what percentage
  • where does your particular blog entry rank in the search engines
  • what long tails can be utilized to drive even more traffic to your site
  • find funny questions people type to find your blog/site

The search engine traffic tools from 103bees are a great way for you to build better search engine rankings. You can sign up for free for the first month and if you’d like to utilize the full suite of their search engine tools, then paying $9/month is peanuts.

Monika Mundell

Editor of Easy WordPress

 

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