Ryan Abood, founder and owner of GourmetGiftBaskets.com experienced first hand what it is to be hit with a Google penalty and the big cost and impact it can have on your business. As he explains in the latest INC article, a penalty un-indexed his website from the engine and 80% of his traffic was gone from one day to the next resulting in a serious loss of revenue.

Nevertheless, if you read the article, it does have a happy ending. Google does have a re-inclusion forum where as he states, “We call it the Google confessional. We said, “These are the links that were paid; these are the links that weren’t paid. We’ve obviously violated your trust, and we’re taking steps to remedy it.”

Also, from this story as well as many others, we always see the positive side of a mishap such as this.

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Danny Sullivan explains, “…How will we find stories going forward? For one, our editors will continue to look for good stories to feature. In addition, we’ll still be accepting news ideas from others.

Our submission form will continue working. But those ideas will go in front of the editors to decide, not to a page where people will vote. If a submission is selected this way, the individual who submitted it will be credited.

Part of me is sad to see the voting system go. But the reality is that stories have been getting fewer and fewer votes, while the site’s traffic hasn’t changed much since our Sphinn 2.0 rollout. That tells us people are interested in a collection of good stories, not in actually voting for them.”

When any community is shaken by change, there will be revolt. This community of online marketers is no different. In the sphinn story, controversy is hot and people are mad.

I can see both sides of the argument but at the end of the day, as much as it is a community and we all really do have to respect that aspect of it, I’m 100% Danny does, you have to move forward with choices that may not be so easy. On the other hand, I’m not sure this may be the right decision moving forward as this is currently the ONLY website where online marketers can go and vote for stories and decide what makes a story ‘hot.’

Opinion?

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“A different angle of attack is to redirect only search engine crawlers to a different site. By doing this, they can make it look like the pages of a website moved to a new domain name. In general, when search engines find redirects like that, they will more or less pass the “value” that a page had on to the new URL — that generally also applies to PageRank. So in a sense, they are trying to steal the value that a webmaster has built up over time.”

The quick and easiest way to figure out if something is up with your website is checking out this website: http://web-sniffer.net/

Make sure that everything checks out fine in terms of any sort of re-direction on your root domain, etc.

Here is an example he used to show a hi-jack:


























Learn some of the codes if you have no idea what any of this means:

- 301 Re-direct
- HTTP 302
- HTTP 303

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For different reasons, I can’t go exactly into what I did but it’s a blog that is just focused on content as an ‘affiliate’ site. The blog, started about 3 months ago or so has about 200-400 visits a day and brings in about over $1,500.00 in sales to the site it points to. Not much…but growing…

Us SEOs and online marketers spend so much time on finding strategy, etc. Sometimes, you can overlook the simplicity of what the internet is, how it works, and what it can do without much if you find the right thing. TEST TEST TEST. The blog is growing 100% organically. No SEO or any sort of link building. Of course, every post has its keywords and I do put emphasis on meta data as that has always been the basic rule of SEO and still applies as importantly today as ever.

Thinking back to an older post I wrote in 2008, I blogged about a very similar subject. Really the same. Read the story: Achieving #1 Google Results Without a Link

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If you haven’t read or heard about Googles latest algorithm change, see the post titled, “Googles New Algorithm Change: More Domain Authority.”

So, now that we know what this change will bring about, how will users and people who are involved in the SEO community feel about this change? Is this a smart change for Google to implement? Is it really bringing about a change that will ultimately help users while searching for certain queries that are strong on domain matches?

I was pretty surprised at what some readers of the official Google webmaster blog had to input regarding this change (comments taken from blog post announcing change):

> “I dont think its very useful. it will eat up my time by having to click on subsequent pages, for if i wanted more results from a single site, i could always do “more from site” command.”

> “I don’t think it’s very practical. Users don’t want to check the same site over and over again.
One page results with ONLY 10 results is not a good place to put 7 from the same site…”

> “…these changes seem too intense. They have the potential to take out relevant information a searcher might not have know existed, for instance. Today the links under the main listing (for those that are strongly related to the search) are or should be enough. The site and homepage should be structured and designed friendly enough to let me find what I’m looking for on the site. Lastly, I can’t help but to imagine the SERPs being populated by pages unintentionally optimized for the search term….then again, these are all first impressions. I hope I’m wrong. But I can see lots of people not liking this.”

>”Agreed with the people who said this could get to be a problem in a hurry. I know how to navigate around a website. I don’t need a page of results from the very same site. I want to know what else is out there – and this change makes me have to work harder to find the best information.”

>”This is a horrible feature.. Major retailers that sell “branded” products will be pushed off the page, giving users fewer options. ”

As you see, feedback from the get go from certain users points to a negative view on this change. Then again, when anything changes towards the algo, that creates a whole new problem for seos but may also result in some very positive results for certain websites.

We’ll see what feedback will result once it begins to really take place and be noticed.

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What does this new algorithm change and do? (according to Google Webmaster Blog)

“Today we’ve launched a change to our ranking algorithm that will make it much easier for users to find a large number of results from a single site. For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain…”

If you ask yourself what benefits there is to this change for website owners? Well if you think about it, go do a search of your domain. How many other sites are ranking that can mean less visitors to your website? Not only that, but also this can be a blessing for many who try to outrank other sites for certain issues with online reputation management.

Google goes on to explain, “Prior to today’s change, only two results from www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History’s website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it’s far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results.

We’re always reassessing our ranking and user interface, making hundreds of changes each year. We expect today’s improvement will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page.”

Have you seen any changes in search related to this new algorithm change?

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Although content is king for SEO, content is really king for everything. The way you’re going to dominate your niche is by distributing content all over the place. You don’t necessarily have to have the BEST content, but you have to have LOTS of content. You want to dominate your niche, don’t you? That’s just how you do it.

Content can mean everything for your online business.

Make sure you have the following in place as you build your online empire:

> Large website containing LOTS and LOTS of CONTENT.
> Blog
> Videos (YouTube, MetaCafe, etc.)
> Image Distribution (always save images with keywords)
> Article Distribution
> Social Media Channels (Facebook, Twitter)

The more content you put out, the more traffic you will bring in to your website. Put aside SEO for a minute. Create content for your visitors and create as much as you possibly can for your niche.

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I blogged about a great speech he gave about the way to really succeed in life, and most of us know this, is you have to do what you love. In this speech at SXSW, Gary talks about the most important factor in order to succeed in today’s digital world, CUSTOMER SERVICE. My first ‘business idol,’ I guess you can say is Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com. He is most known for preaching customer service and has an amazing story to back up why it truly matters. I suggest you read his book which he just released for the first time titled, “Delivering Happiness, A Path To Profits, Passion and Purpose.”

Watch Gary Vaynerchuk talk about customer service and the power of followers:

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The NyDailyNews.com reports that ex American Idol Simon Cowell who is also involved in working on other projects, has hired a search engine optimization company to ensure that his Google searches are top-heavy with positive stories.

“Meanwhile, insiders say that online critics of Cowell can have an incredibly hard time finding their work on the Web. Or worse.

For instance, one insider tells us the story of Hans Ebert, a former executive for Universal Music and EMI in Asia and a blogger who frequently writes about music on the Web.

On Aug. 5, Ebert posted an essay titled “Why ‘American Idol’ Is Better Off Without Simon Cowell,” which asserted that Cowell is “the Sarah Palin of music,” that the “Simon Cowell brand is seen as something horribly uncool” in the U.K. And that his “choices appeal to the lowest common denominator.”

A source close to the situation tells us that after posting his blog, Ebert discovered that it was “de-activated” by the host of his blog, Wordpress, because it had violated the “Terms of Condition.”

After a 12 hour “hiatus,” the source says the blog was reinstated, and after Ebert did some investigating, the trail led to “an SEO company out of Bangalore, who is hired by a company based out of London to ‘monitor’ news of a few ‘name personalities.’”

Celebrities are jumping more and more into online reputation management. How is your name/brand/business reputation online? What are you doing to improve its outlook?

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For this post purposes, we’re looking at the average time a user spends on Facebook and the average time a user spends on Twitter. Are you thinking the answer may be obvious? I guess so. If you think about the purpose each of these two social networks serve, they are pretty different, right? So, we would agree that users spend more time on Facebook because it is a much larger network and for the most part, can perform more actions ON the network such as uploading pictures, sharing music, etc.

Last year, Nielsen put out a chart showing the time spent on the top 10 social networking websites (2009) and you can find that report here. Looking at Alexa now, here are the statistics, currently.

TWITTER:
3 month avg min:7.65667 -2%

FACEBOOK:
3 month avg min:32.04833 -1%

While Facebook shows a significant time different spent on its website, nevertheless, it’d be interesting to see where users log in to more frequently.

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Where do I see Google in 5 years? In the past 2 years or less we’ve seen Google do some change in design in search. A few examples are:

-You can now redesign Googles main search homepage with your own background.
-Googles search queries now include a left side navigation bar to personalize your search.
-Sponsored search results now offer ratings taken from comparison sites.
-Google will implement reviews in organic search results very shortly.
-Google implemented phone numbers in paid search to click and call.

While these may not be the biggest of changes, anytime Google does change something in its results, it is big. They are being more aggressive on trying to add more elements to search results. Is this the smartest move? If you ask anyone why they don’t like Bing too much, most people say it’s a little too crowded. Googles clean search page and search results have proven to be VERY successful. Do they really want to keep heading in this direction of search add-ons?

It’s hard to dictate where Google will go in the next 5 years in search.

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Always start expanding your search query by clicking links on the left hand side of the search results where you will see a few options.

On top- related searches- you can see a bunch of good related keywords for your query which can REALLY REALLY help the keyword research process. You can say the same about Googles Wonderwheel which you wil also see that link on the left hand side.

Click on PAGE PREVIEWS and you’ll see images of the website and it also expands the description which you can see moreless the content of the site in a nutshell which can help you see what keywords it’s optimized for, an idea of kw density and more.

Mess around with the search results and you’ll be surprised how many ideas you can get for online marketing.

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For someone who is in the link business (SEO,) this is just a great post in how it describes the breakdown of the links that get acquired towards a full linking portfolio for a website. It is also a great resource for those who work on trying to classify their link portfolio.

{This content is taken from VeritcalMeasures.com and you can get straight to their post on the link above with the title of their post, couldn’t put it in better words)

In each of the mentioned ratings (except for about 2,) there are notes where you’ll see PALATNIKFACTOR VIEWS where it gives my personal opinion and a view on the rating.

Content Distribution

Description: Links from press releases, article marketing, guest blog posts, aggregated links such as RSS feeds
How to Obtain: Write unique SEO optimized content, publish, promote via social networks
Difficulty Score: 1
Quality Score: 3

PALATNIKFACTOR VIEW: This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Article marketing will take a bit of time and the link may not be worth it. Make sure, to be as effective as possible to try and outsource the content creation of that channel. Being a guest post is a great method, make sure you aim towards high authority websites but it may take some real work to get in touch with webmasters. Some are easy…some are hard.
________________________________________
Blog/Forum Comments

Description: Links from forum signatures, posts, profiles, and blog “signing”
How to Obtain: Search relevant blogs & forum topics, register, create profiles, create anchor text signatures for forums
Difficulty Score: 1
Quality Score: 2

PALATNIKFACTOR VIEW: These links are easy to acquire but the work towards some of them can be real tedious. Some forums where a link will actually be worth getting may have a rule where you have to post at least 10-50 post to get a forum signature links and start adding links to threads. I see signs of these type of links devaluing for seo.
________________________________________
Purchased Links

Description: Links obtained through direct exchange of money, includes directories
How to Obtain: Search for keywords + sponsor, advertise, sponsored by, banner ads, submit URL, add URL
Difficulty Score: 1
Quality Score: 2
WARNING: Use caution, understand the risks, and don’t get caught buying links or Google might take your keys away!

PALATNIKFACTOR VIEW: While many may think just because you pay for a link it’ll be easy to get, I have to disagree with the difficulty score. Some very good links will come if you pay for them but they may even be the hardest links to possibly get because the person that really takes care of the website may be hard to get a hold of or you’ll have to do some real work even if you pay for the link as the webmaster may want that link to look at natural as possible and may have you write a review, etc. Not that it’s hard, but won’t be as easy as opening a beer can.
Just a note on what was just said, that is by purchasing links through contacting webmasters. Paying for links through directory, difficult score: 1.
________________________________________
Reciprocal Links

Description: Links from partnerships, exchanges, and trades (use sparingly, stay topically relevant)
How to Obtain: Use only highest authority relevant sites to exchange with, try to do a 3 way instead of reciprocal
Difficulty Score: 2
Quality Score: 1

PALATNIKFACTOR VIEW: This tactic is just as hard OR maybe I’d say takes as much work as purchasing a link. Using highest authority sites to exchange links with is 100% absolutely the best strategy towards acquiring reciprocal links.
________________________________________
Social Media/Bookmarking

Description: Links from various social media profile pages and bookmarking tools
How to Obtain: Find top bookmarking sites based on PageRank, Alexa, dofollow and submit website using good keyword anchored phrases
Difficulty Score: 3
Quality Score: 3

PALATNIKFACTOR VIEW: This tactic may be easier actually, in my opinion, than purchasing a link. The How To Obtain is on point and should be a fairly easy way to acquire links. Try to submit some good stories to the bookmarkingw website before you submit just yours with the anchor text. The best ways to succeed in social media communities is to become a part of one. While most of us don’t have time, try to be as natural (non-spammer =)) as possible.
________________________________________
Embedded Content

Description: Links via widgets, infographics, badges, and other embeddedable content
How to Obtain: Create visually appealing and useful content, promote via social networks
Difficulty Score: 3
Quality Score: 4
________________________________________
Link Reclamation

Description: Links to no longer available resources to re-point at your pages
How to Obtain: Check Google Webmaster Tools for pages not found, contact websites linking to those to change link or redirect on your site
Difficulty Score: 3
Quality Score: 5

PALATNIKFACTOR VIEW: If you can do this and have a good success rate, it’s a must in your seo strategy and part of your monthly process.
________________________________________
Natural Links

Description: Links gained naturally due to link worthy (viral) content, link baiting, etc.
How to Obtain: Create good, informative content and promote through your networks
Difficulty Score: 4
Quality Score: 5

PALATNIKFACTOR VIEW: CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT.
________________________________________
Link Requests

Description: Links acquired through manual requests from webmasters, site owners, etc.
How to Obtain: Conduct competitive link analysis, use search operators, keyword searches, manual email requests
Difficulty Score: 5
Quality Score: 5

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“Search engine optimization professionals started using the nofollow attribute to control the flow of PageRank within a website, but Google since corrected this error, and any link with nofollow attribute decreases the PR that the page can pass on. This practice is known as “PageRank sculpting”. This is an entirely different use than it was intended originally. nofollow was designed to control the flow of PageRank from one website to another. However, some SEOs have suggested that a nofollow used for an internal link should work just like nofollow used for external links.” states the no-follow wiki page.

From what I’ve personally seen in the past months (almost a year now) I think pagerank sculpting is dead and even more, I think there may be possible penalization. Please note these are just my opinions and I can’t guarantee facts, only from what I see myself. What do you think?

Matt Cutts, as stated above for those who don’t know if one of Googles main, if not, THE main search engineer to the SEO community, has talked about pagerank sculpting before. Let’s look at two videos from 2009 and one very recent from 2010.

I guess when we’re discussing pagerank sculpting, we’re really talking about placing the rel=nofollow tag on certain links on your website to keep the link juice all condensed in one place. I have seen it boost rankings in the past, not so much anymore at all.

Great Reads on

PageRank Sculpting

:
- Matt Cutts: PageRank sculpting

- PageRank sculpting – Siloing and more

- PageRank Sculpting: Parsing the Value and Potential Benefits of Sculpting PR with Nofollow

- The Art of Google PageRank Sculpting & Five Sculpting Tips

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Have you seen this widget yet? Basically you can find it right here at the very bottom of the main title of this post. When you click the like button on this post for example, a small facebook pop up window will appear asking you if you’re sure you want to share the story and you go from there. Once you do, it will appear in YOUR profile as saying “John Does likes Steps To Add A Facebook Like Button in Wordpress in the PalatnikFactor.com.”

STEPS TO ADD A FACEBOOK LIKE BUTTON IN WORDPRESS

1. Go to your wordpress admin area.

2. Click on APPERANCE–> EDITOR

3. On the right hand side on Theme files under Template, choose ‘Single Post’ (single.php)

4. Paste the following code in to that file anywhere you want the button to appear

5. Click save.

Now your whole wordpress blog, every post, will be Facebook ready for people to hit like and start distributing your content.

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