November 13th, 2007 at 04:24pm
Under pagerank
There is some rumor about a new Google algorithm (or call it parameter) named trust rank. In many webmaster forums it is claimed that Google will no longer actively develop page rank. The reason is that it is spammed to much. Instead of it, the new “trust rank” will be a premier factor in deciding which sites to put up first in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
Google’s trust rank is supposed to be awarded by humans, most probably Google employees. It shall reflect the trust that Google has into a site. High profile sites, e.g. active gouvernment, educational or big-player company sites will probably receive a specific trust from Google. I guess it will be only awarded to the main site, and not any subsites of it. Otherwise it would be too easy to fool the new system, too.
For the same reason, I think that trust rank will most probably not be automatically passed on to pages that are linked by the trusted site. IMHO that would foil the approach to select what is really trusted and what not.
Also, if I understand the concept right, trust rank will probably assigned on a site-wide basis (e.g. www.example.com). I assume this, because if you trust, e.g. BBC, you do not need to verify each and all of its new pages. Plus, it would be impossible to do a human review of that many pages while it is a comparatively easy effort to check the trust level of a site at whole. This is a huge departure from the page rank concept, which was assigned on a page-by-page basis.
So is trust rank good or bad for you? It depends. It for sure benefits the big guys and I am tempted to say that it benefits the average Internet user. I may benefit web masters if the run a well established site with good content and reputation. I am just curios how much effort Google will put into finding those. Thus I am a bit concerned here … If you were used to push up your page rank for a non-quality site, trust rank will probably come very though after you. No wonder, because that supposedly is why it was created.
Depending on how it is implemented, I am concerned that trust rank might shift the web to become more “big guy focussed”. In my worst thoughts, a view highly trusted sites will then probably serve the majority of search results, taking away a lot of our freedom in finding information that is not mainstream (sorry, I know I drive a bit into politics, but that needs to be from time to time ;)).
So I am watching trust rank very closely - not just in regard to search engine optimization and traffic building. Also, so far it is mostly rumors. I’ll try to investigate it further. Maybe trust rank is just another myth. Maybe (and this is more likely) it is a beast different from what we currently think it is. And, as always, Google doesn’t comment at all…
Oh, and an interesting site note: if trust rank is actually what we currently think it is, Google would give in to spammers. After all, Google was always proud to algorithmically (read: automatically) fight spam. If they now really need to resort to human review, that war seems to have been lost … And, yes, that’s one reason why I do not fully believe in the current rumors.
By Rainer
November 12th, 2007 at 04:51pm
Under adsense
I started a dual experiment today. I got a microsite up on the US greencard lottery. The site is in German, targets the German marke (the first “first”) and is site with less than 10 pages (the second “first”). I came along this topic when I searched for travel-related keywords and the greencard lottery was quite popular. So I thought I give it a try.
Even though there is few content, the content that is there is valid and well researched. So I hope it will not be qualified as a MFA site. I am also very curios how the German market works. Promoting that site is probably not easy, but that’s an important lesson to learn.
I keep you posted on the outcome. Any comments are appreciated. If I get any decent traffic, I intend to add a few more pages to the site, but my goal is that it remains at ten at most. After all, there is not much more that could be written about this topic …
By Rainer
November 11th, 2007 at 10:14pm
Under Uncategorized
We just started our own director at
http://directory.letspromoteit.com
The aim of this project is to provide a new comprehensive directory that is both of use for general users as well as webmasters interested in making money online. Everyone is invited to suggest new links and categories, and we hope for alarge-scale participation. It will also be interesting to see how fast Google and others will index this resource.
By Rainer
November 8th, 2007 at 04:44pm
Under linkbuilding
This post is a think-tank. I stumbled across some web directories and, more importantly, meta-directories. I thought it is useful to record these at some place. To keep it simple, I’ll add them to this list for now. Maybe that changes later.
Here they are (list will be growing over time, but I am in no hurry):
By Rainer
November 7th, 2007 at 04:23pm
Under pagerank
The last Google pagerank update caused a lot of confusion among bloggers. Few saw largely increased page rank, most saw their page rank drop. The official thought is that Google has tried to punish those that seem to be selling links or have bought them.
For my blog, however, I think there is a different reason. I started this site on an old domain from my domain properties. I re-used it and the content changed considerably. I guess Google simply noticed that the old site no longer was there and thus took away my PR 4. However, I am lucky to be still at PR 1, so I wasn’t banned or something else. I am quite positive that I will be able to restore pagerank for this blog, as I am now actively building it again.
And, as I have written in another post, it is quite possibly to gain pagerank quickly if you just do it right.
By Rainer
November 6th, 2007 at 03:00am
Under pagerank
I started my space blog roughly six weeks ago. It was an experiment for me: would it be possible to get search engine visibility quickly. After all, the blog was about a space shuttle launch that happened within five weeks of me starting the blog. And, I have to admit, the blog was also a lot of fun, so not much to lose if the experiment would fail.
A lot of folks advised me not to promote the blog quickly, as this would put me into the sandbox for sure. But with just 4 weeks to go (and one week to get traffic), what was to be lost?
So I started to promote the blog and obviously, it worked. After roughly three weeks, I noticed first hits coming from Google. They grew and grew and so the timing seems to have been perfect. A week ago, I noticed that the blog had gained page rank. And, guess what: it was immediately at page rank 4 (I thought to be lucky if I got 1 or 2, but obviously Google was trusting me more). I even waited that week to see if it is temporary, but PR 4 is still there today. So I thought I share the good news.
What did I do? A few basic things:
First of all, I created good content. Except for the very first days, I made sure that I had at least one post each day. Some days had as much as four or five posts - but never overdone, only if justified by events.
I made sure that I got backlinks from relevant (and well-known) forums. That was easy, because the content was great, so I could always find a reason to post a link to my blog entries. Of course, that still required effort as I needed to view forum threads to find matching ones (with this pet project, though, that was part of the fun…).
I also searched for blogs on similar topics. There, I posted comments. Some of them pointed to specific pages of my blog. On others, I just left the generic blog URL with my name. From the later, I had expected nothing as I thought today all of them would have a NOFOLLOW tag. But Google Webmaster Tools tells me that at least some of them qualify as actual backlinks.
I also went to social bookmarking services and posted links to relevant pages. Here, I used only very good content and made sure that it was almost exclusive, at least for a few minutes 
That turned out in traffic spikes, but any long-term effect is yet to be seen.
I posted links on some other sites of mine. Thankfully a have a few PR 4+ sites and on some them it was appropriate to post links. I stayed back from posting links from everywhere. I kept close attention that I did not do any irrelevant linking (which would also hurt the other sites).
I also did a single ezinearticles.com article on the topic. That was timed to be close before launch (the culmination of the blog) and at least the timing worked out nicely. The traffic spike, however, I can not really detect because it came together with lots of other traffic starting shortly before launch day. Google Webmaster Tools does not yet tell me any backlinks from there, but I hope it will show some effect over time.
That’s more or less all I did. Most importantly, I intentionally stayed away from asking old friends to link to that page. The blog, however, made a few new ones and I got links from most of them. Besides that, I waited patiently for the outcome of my experiment and waited for the result. Of course, most of the time I kept adding content. The site is now at 110+ pages and still growing.
I have to admit two things:
First, the domain I host it under is in existence for quite a while. However, I used a brand-new subdomain. Most experts will tell you that this does not bring you any boost in search engines. I concur to this finding. So the domain age was probably irrelevant here.
The second thing is far more important: I targeted the blog on “space launch viewing”. This is a tiny, non-competitive niche. I think the success has much to do what that fact. So the traffic isn’t really soaring (and even less the income). However, I will now add a more broader range within the “space” theme. Again, part of that is because it is also personal fun. But it will be interesting to see if I can keep my page rank while extending the breadth of the site (I suspect so). That would be an indication that it pays to focus on a very small niche just to expand it further over time.
I hope you find my experience report useful. Comments are always appreciated!
By Rainer
October 16th, 2007 at 06:57pm
Under Uncategorized
Google is actively behind those that do not offer great value to advertisers. I have just seen this news in Google’s AdSense blog:
We’ve recently made a change to help make sure that the conversions generated by referral ads are valid. For some publishers who display referrals for non-Google products, the earnings you receive for the ad may now be less than the maximum referral value displayed for that ad. This is because our system will initially place a restriction on referral earnings as we monitor click and conversion data to determine that the conversions generated are valid. Once this validation period ends, you’ll begin earning the maximum value of the conversions as displayed in your account.
In short, you get penalized for displaying others ads, and a good technical reason is provided
The issue behind it is even more serious: there are a lot of sites out that that make their living out of riping AdWords advertisers. Those sites have little or no content and trick users into clicking ads, for example by not providing any navigation except the ad links. Google doesn’t like that for a good reason and is actively looking into ways to avoid it. This seems to be the newest step, with a nice financial side-effect for Google.
The bottom line is that it pays to do a quality site with good content.
By Rainer
October 11th, 2007 at 10:10am
Under Uncategorized
There is an interesting post on making money online with a network of blogs. The idea is quite simple and it also looks like it is not too hard to do. On the other hand, why does it work then? In any case, I find it worth reading and so I blog:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=508563
By Rainer
October 10th, 2007 at 05:44pm
Under Uncategorized
I have now converted my site to WordPress, so that I have better control over how things work. The best part of it was the extremely easy and powerful import function from blogger. It was a great relief to see all post, including comments, back online here (even though this is a small blog).
What was not preserved were most of the permalinks. For a larger blog, that will probably give a big headache. For this small one here, I’ve just created a couple of redirects.
I have now downloaded and (surprisingly easy) installed an AdSense optimized theme. That was one of the drivers behind my change. I have to say it works well. Of course, there is much room for improvement, but I don’t intend to do everything on one day. It will be interesting to see if there is any impact in regard to the ad clicks (though, again, my volume is probably too low to get useful stats out of it…).
By Rainer
October 10th, 2007 at 10:31am
Under edu+ pr
Many people seem to think that a link from a .edu domain offers much more value than a link from any other site. I have even seen people hunting to find places where they can post a link to their site on a .edu domain. Some even pay for it. And some clever folks use their .edu blogs to make good money online.
So what’s all about this? Is an .edu link actually so valuable? Most probably: no. The myth has something to do with the way Google calculates page rank. This algorithm is kept secret by Google, but is is fair enough to say that the number of inbound links is very important as is the age of the URL in question.
Now think about how the Internet was created. Right after the forces, who gave birth to it, universities expanded it. And when the web was born, the first web sites were, of course, universities sites (even Google started as an university project, do you remember?). All of them being hosted at very long-lasting .edu domains. Moreover, these domains (and their sub-domains) are quite stable. There is no need to find new “sexy” domain names, so the .edu folks stay with names following their organizational structure, which is quite stable (at least more stable than commercially-attractive names). Also, .edu admins strongly believe in the “don’t break an URL” rule (don’t move an URL because otherwise some piece of information would become inaccessible). As such, .edu URLs are sometimes very old. So when it comes to persistence of URLs, typical .edu content weighs heavy.
Also, typical .edu content like research papers is cited very often (after all, that’s why it is created). And it is cited in other research papers, of course. The same holds true for other content, even being online discussions and other not-meant-for-eternity content. The bottom line is that typical .edu content has many backlinks from highly relevant sites. It is no surprise that Google assigns high PR to such pages.
Besides that, typical .edu pages do no bad tricks like keyword cloaking, gateway pages and all the other things search engines dislike. Their content is typically very technical and well to spider. If often uses proper titles, and section header (<H1>, <H2>, …) tags. That makes it easy for the search engine to grasp what it is about. That also makes it easy to grasp that the network it is in is indeed highly relevant.
All in all, typical .edu content is the perfect example that “content is king“, that you will get good ranking if you have good content. Think about it.
But what does that mean for the average Joe who wants to monetize his web site? If .edu sites are so well ranked, then, hey, it must be very valuable to be linked from there.
One important thing to remember is that page rank is page rank and not site or domain rank! Google assigns rank to a specific page (URL). It doesn’t matter if the domain’s home page has high PR. What is important is the PR of the page that is linking to yours!
So of course it helps if you manage to get a link from the homepage of, let’s say, the University of California in Berkley. But it doesn’t help as much if you get a link from a student blog, for example at http://smartone.blog.example.berkley.edu/paid-links.html - so I wouldn’t invest any money to be listed there.
And why doesn’t it help? Because it is no typical .edu content! It is low quality content as found on many sites (except, of course, if the student is really bright ;)).
So if you are offered an .edu link, think twice. First of all, it, too, can get you into a “bad neighborhood” and negatively affect your page rank. Secondly, if the page that is linking to you doesn’t have a high page rank, there is no real value in being linked from there (except, of course, that a link never hurts).
The bottom line is that I wouldn’t invest any more time or money into .edu links than on links from any other top level domain. If it is easy to find and free, go for it. If it is hard to do or expensive but the page has high page rank or traffic potential (page rank is not everything!), consider it seriously.
Just don’t jump on any .edu page just because it is .edu!
By Rainer
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