Archives: The Net

Losing Sleep Over Google’s Move On Paid Links?

Just about every SEO site is talking about Google’s decision on paid links, the reason for the late page rank update and Google’s firm hand in dealing with sites that sell paid links.

I’m reading it everywhere. Many people are wondering if they are losing traffic, page rank or search ranking because Google has discovered that they were selling paid links.

How will sites be penalized? The word is that Google could prevent links from a site or pages in a site from passing Page Rank and drop or remove a PageRank score from ones that already have it. Some webmasters have reported drops of 1-2 scores. To confirm suspicions, Search Engine Land

confirmed with Google that Page Rank scores are being lowered for some sites that sell links. In addition, Google said that some sites that are selling links may indeed end up being dropped from its search engine or have penalties attached to prevent them from ranking well.

I’ve read numerous posts on this and Search Engine Land summed the positions of all arguments perfectly:

  • It’s Google’s search engine. They have every right to say that if you sell links, they might penalize you.
  • Google is not telling people what to do with their sites, which is a popular argument point. Google is telling people what to do if they are concerned about doing better in Google. Don’t want to be harmed in Google? Don’t sell links.
  • Don’t care about Google? Sell links all you want.
  • Despite Google’s policy and even this latest action, they’ll never catch all the paid links. It’s part of the reason I’d like to see them back off the paid links war and instead work out other ways to determine if a link deserves credit, paid or not.
  • I don’t want people who innocently sell links to be harmed.

Ugh…Who knows how far back Google has or will be reviewing their database to apply penalties to websites.

I’ve compiled some great articles/posts on SEO/webmaster experts take on Google’s move. It’s very interesting to read the comments.  Please take time to read some of these articles to decide what you want to do with your website. Right now it’s extremely important to think about your TextLinkAds relationship (if you have one), no follow attributes and protecting yourself by creating a robot file (exclude folders from search engine robots/spiders).

Articles:

I don’t know how far Google is going to dig up dirt on selling paid links…it’s going to be interesting and a bit scary.

Posted in The Net, Traffic | 7 Comments »

YouTube Videos

I discovered a new blog today and was delighted with the humorous findings on James Powell’s site. One of his recent postings gathered some of his top favorite YouTube videos. Of the 12 he displayed on his blog, these are the 2 I loved. I always love a good laugh :)

1) Rowan Atkinson Invisible Drum Kit

He is also one of my personal favorites. Rowan Atkinson plays the invisible drums.

2) World of Warcraft Toyota Advert

Here are a couple of my own YouTube findings:

1) Darth Vader being a smartass

2) Mother’s Day

Posted in The Net | 3 Comments »

Cute Baby Laughing

If this doesn’t bring a smile to your face, I don’t know what will.

Posted in The Net | 5 Comments »

How Important Is Your Alexa Ranking?

Many of us that are utilizing online marketing strive to increase conversion rate by attracting targeted traffic through top listings on search engines like Google, relying on heavy traffic and some even may think that a good position with Alexa’s ranking system might serve beneficial to them as well.

If you’re not familiar with Alexa it tracks the frequency of visits daily to various websites over a period of three months from users who have the Alexa toolbar installed. The traffic is based on “reach” (number of times an Alexa user visits a particular site in 1 day) and page views (number of times a page is viewed by Alexa users).

If you haven’t already, it’s quite easy to download/install the Alexa toolbar which will send data to the central server while you surf the web. Each time you visit a web page utilizing the toolbar, information is sent to the server indicating your IP and the page you are visiting from all users.

alexatoolbar.png

Is It Really That Important?

Too many people mistaken concentrating entirely on improving their Alexa ranking.  Getting a low Alexa ranking gives the impression that your site gets a lot of traffic.  Thus, the #1 spot would mean that your website would essentially be receiving the most traffic in the world, which is currently being held by Yahoo.

It seems that if you manage to make it in the top 100,000 it’s a sign your site obtains a reasonable amount of traffic. Currently SusanSuarez.com is currently ranking at 140,260 but I’ve been wondering, is it really worth anything?

Alexa numbers can be wildly misleading and manipulated. How so? Alexa’s free toolbar is used to report back tracking of those utilizing the toolbar. Since not every Internet user has the toolbar installed, Alexa will multiply the number of visitors by a specific margin to estimate the total number of visitors a site may typically get.

For instance: For every Alexa toolbar user that visits a page, Alexa may assume that another nine non-toolbar users visited the same page. For every 100 toolbar visitors, Alexa may estimate 900 non-toolbar users are also visiting the same page within the same 24-hour period.

Can you see where this goes? If you happen to drive a higher percentage of traffic from Alexa toolbar users vs non-toolbar users to your site, you can increase your Alexa rating faster. Alexa doesn’t account for users preferences or habits. Toolbar users tend to visit particular types of sites more frequently…users like webmasters or internet savvy marketers. So if you are an internet entrepreneur and you attract similar people to your website, most likely they will have the toolbar installed which would inflate the Alexa rating.

To sum up, here is a breakdown of pros/cons of using Alexa:

Pros

  • It helps advertisers and webmasters determine the real marketing potential of your site. Blogs and ordinary websites get ranked the same way
  • Useful tool to compare against a competitor’s site to measure marketing efforts and popularity

Cons

  • Fairly small sample size of audience (those that have the Alexa toolbar installed) to measure marketing efforts
  • Due to the small sample size, there are millions of websites that may get a lot of traffic but are not ranked by Alexa
  • Many people feel that Alexa traffic can be “gamed” to therefore show inaccurate results.

Ways To Improve Ranking

Since there are programs such as TextLinkAds that utilize Alexa ranking, it may be of best interest to amuse yourself with using it. Once installed, here are a few ideas to boost your Alexa ranking:

  • Download/Install the Alexa toolbar and surf your own website
  • Place the Alexa widget on your website to entice visitors to use it.
  • Write on topics that internet-savvy individuals would read and promote it on webmaster forums or social networking sites. Or include your url into your forum signature. There is a higher probability that they have the Alexa toolbar installed
  • Write great articles that could gain you a Stumble! or a Digg which could open you up to a network of even more Alexa users
  • Get your friends to download the Alexa toolbar
  • I haven’t used this before, but I’ve heard you could use an Alexa redirect. Placing http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect? in front of your website’s url will get Alexa to take into consideration clicks on redirected links if the visitor doesn’t have the Alexa toolbar.

Even though the results may be inaccurate due to the requirement of needing the Alexa toolbar installed, a lot of individuals feel that it is valuable for direct advertising and useful for monetizing a site since Alexa focuses on traffic rather than the number of links to it.

Posted in The Net, Tools | 21 Comments »