"Attract Perfect Clients " the Online Newsletter from Valiss,
Helping You Attract More Clients With Less Effort
In this week's issue – Google Strikes Again!
A few weeks ago, Google made another adjustment to their algorithm, this time changing the lives of many Adsense users. The good news is that I personally benefited from this change because www.valiss.com is now sitting perfectly in position 3 when you search for "personalized website design" in Google.
If you don't know what Adsense is, it's the Google program where you can put ads on your website to earn money. Anytime someone clicks on an Adsense ad on your website you earn money.
Like anything else in life, there are some people that constantly look for ways to manipulate the system to their advantage. Adsense is no different. Many legitmate websites use Adsense to earn money. The problem is that there are thousands of websites using Adsense purely to generate income for the website owner. These "blackhat" websites are usually generated automatically by a program that you purchase. These programs research the most profitable keywords for you and build a content-rich website full of articles containing those keywords. In a matter of minutes you can launch a website with hundreds of articles containing highly profitable keywords.
Sounds great doesn't it? The problem is these sites look terrible and the articles contain very little value. Here's an example of a "blackhat" Adsense website that came up when I searched "work at home".
http://www.cockeyed.com/workfromhome/workfromhome.html
See what I mean? Is this what you were looking for when you searched "work at home"?
Many times the articles don't make sense and are written in broken English. Either they were computer generated or written by someone that barely speaks English but they are full of popular keywords.
Often the content quality is low so they click on the Adsense ad to see if they can get better information. The Adsense ads that show up on each web page contain the same keywords that are in the article. Google automatically scans every web page and determines the best ad to place on that page based on the keywords found on that page. Very ingenious and very profitable for the website owner and Google.
Since Google's ultimate goal is to provide high quality results for your searches, the new algorithm began to identify these "blackhat" websites. They also identified the keywords that the "blackhat" sites were using and raised the cost of these clicks from 5 to 10 cents a click to 5 to 10 dollars a click in Google Adwords. Overnight millions of Adsense related websites and Adwords accounts were affected.
Of course Google never announces these changes and never gives the details of the changes so SEO experts everywhere are "guesstimating" what happened. If you want to keep up with the latest Google changes I highly recommend subscribing to Perry Marshall's newsletter at www.perrymarshall.com and visiting Ken McCarthy's blog at www.kenmccarthy.com.
I'm not complaining about this latest Google update because I jumped from position 21 to number 3 overnight. I like that Google is constantly weeding out the people who try to trick the system and ultimately lower the quality of our search results. It reinforces my philosophy that you should provide lots of high quality content for your web visitors and don't try to trick the search engines. Google will eventually figure out how you're tricking the system and you'll get caught. When Google catches you cheatering you'll either get blacklisted, dropped down in the search results or end up paying more for your Adwords clicks.
Marketing Tool Of The Week
The VEO Report (VEO = Visitor Enhanced Optimization) by Colin McDougall
This amazing ebook describes how to build websites that won't get banned or penalized by the search engines. Colin believes in my philosphy of building high quality content-rich websites and let the search engines do their job. Get to the top of the search engines in 10 easy steps.
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Copycat
Our very own tool to help you create and keep track of your articles, ezines, blog and sales letters all in one easy to use interface.
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What Am I Reading?
I'm currently reading Michael Port's Book Yourself Solid and i'm enrolled in his 15 week coaching program. This is a fantastic resource that helps you clearly define your ideal clients, create a marketing message that attracts them to you and helps you build an online and offline promotional strategy to keep your sales pipleline full. I highly recommend this book and the coaching program. |
I'm off for a few days of R&R in the Sierra Foothills. We're staying at the Pioneer Hotel in Sheep Ranch, California population 32. No television, no internet and no cell phones!! Here's a picture of our hotel which was built in 1850 next to a gold mine owned by William Randolph Hearst. The hotel is closed to the public so it's all ours for the weekend!
Until next time,
Ted
Ted Prodromou
valiss-info@valiss.com
(415) 785-1796
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