EzSEO Newsletter # 86

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EzSEO Newsletter # 86

Andy Williams ez SEO

ez-search-engine-optimization.com

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This week:

1. Here comes the bandwagon. Quick, jump on

2. Google updates PR

3. Concerns over Article Announcer.

4. Content Publisher.

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1. Here comes the bandwagon. Quick, jump on
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Imagine the scenario.

You buy the latest tool that promises to build you a 10,000 page site in minutes. You add Adsense to the site, and then build your next 10,000 page web site, and then the next.

For a while it works. You make a reasonable amount out of Adsense.

Then it happens…

Overnight, your Adsense revenue falls to near zero.

How could this happen?

We all know (even if you do it) that building a 10,000 page site in minutes using some generator tool is a way of spamming the search engines. Sites without useful unique content are spam.

Filters at Google are getting better at detecting this type of spam, and removing offending sites. You might think that losing one site like this is unfortunate, but how could Google find and ban all of your spammy sites so quickly?

If I were an engineer at Google, I could find all your spam sites in seconds, merely by searching the database for pages that contain the same Adsense Publisher ID in the Adsense Ads as the first spammy site I find. Now I am not saying they do this, but they could.

Your Adsense code can be traced back to you, and since most people have just one Adsense account, it would be easy for Google to trace sites owned by you, and ban them all if they wanted to, by using the logic that once a spammer, always a spammer. They could of course close your Adsense account as well.

What I am trying to get across to you is a simple principle that you should use in your daily business.

That rule is simple: Fly under the radar (even if you don’t use spammy techniques).

This means not leaving “fingerprints” in your sites that can be easily traced.

Examples of these fingerprints include such things as:

* Software that includes a “Powered By..” link in the content it generates.

and

* Software that puts in a meta generator tag on your pages, showing what tool your pages were created with.

Apart from the tools created by others, there is also a growing number of bandwagons being built by the search engines themselves.

Recent “bandwagons” included:

* Yahoo providing a free submit URL after they introduced their new PPC model.
I have never recommended submitting URLs to search engine submission pages. It is easy enough to get found and indexed by creating articles and submitting them to article sites, or other webmasters for publishing. This method has worked ever since the search engines have been able to spider the web, so don’t fix what ain’t broken.

* Search engines announcing the nofollow tag as a legitimate way to stop a spider from following a link.
There is of course a lot of legitimate reasons to use this tag.

e.g. on blogs to prevent blog spammers getting a useful backlink by posting one of those “Texas Holdem Poker” links in your comments section.

Another legitimate reason is on your website when linking to privacy or disclaimer pages. There is no reason why the search engine needs to index these.

You get the idea.

By making it so easy to hide links, the search engines are inviting webmasters to hoard PR to their own site, which is something they don’t like. A site with very few outgoing links is going to look suspicious, and may well suffer a penalty for doing so if you get caught. Use this tag as it is intended and you will be OK.

* Google sitemaps.
Google is now providing a way for you to get your site indexed quicker by using “Google Sitemaps”. I personally have not jumped on this bandwagon, and will withhold my judgement on this technology until it is a little more established. I have been using normal sitemaps on my sites and interlinking related pages, and these sites have no problem getting indexed and included quickly.

So what information does one of these Google sitemaps contain?

Each webpage inserted into the sitemap is defined by the following characteristics:
- Changefreq: how often the webpage?s content is modified
- Lastmod: the date of the last modification
- Loc: the webpage URL
- Priority: the priority of the webpage with respect to the other webpages in the site

For anyone building a Google sitemap using one of the many tools available, what worries me is the ability to enter information such as Changefreq & priority.

Anyone wanting to get all there pages indexed frequently and give all their webpages a high priority, will just enter the maximum values for these two fields.

In return, Google will see this obvious attempt at manipulating the spiders, and could decide they want to penalise your site.

While this may be paranoia on my part, I just don’t see why I need to fix what isn’t broken. My normal sitemaps work fine, so why give Google my fingerprint?

For anyone wanting to try Google Sitemaps, there is a fr.ee. Google Sitemap builder here.

My advice is to use common sense, and of course, if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.

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2. Google updates PR
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This last week saw Google updating the PR in the Google toolbar. This only happens about once every three months now, which means that as of today, the Google toolbar is already out of date, and will continue being out of date until the next update in around three months time.

What this means is if you want to do any research or reverse engineering involving PR, you need to do it quick. In a week, the PRs you’ll find in the Google toolbar, or those found using PR sniffer tools, will be well out of date.

So why does Google still provide us with PR in their Toolbar? Perhaps it’s Public Relations.

Incidentally, don’t expect that just because your site appeared to go from a PR 1 to a PR 4 “over-night”, your rankings will go up accordingly “over-night”. They wont.

PR updates of the toolbar may only be every 3 months or so, but the PR values held at Google are updated much more frequently than that. As links are found and counted, PR is adjusted in Google’s database. They use the actual PR of a page in their ranking algorithm, not the value shown in the toolbar.

Maybe it is time everyone stopped placing so much emphasis on PR, and concentrated on building quality websites. While it is most definitely important, an obsession with it can certainly cause you sleepless nights.

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3. Concerns over Article Announcer.
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If you are a regular reader, you will know that I have been testing Jason Potash’s new Article Announcer tool. You can go back through the last few issues of this newsletter if you are interested in reading my own quite impressive results.

I have received a lot of emails about this tool, from people who are concerned that this is another spamming tool that will get you into trouble with the search engines. The fact that I have recommended it means I certainly don’t agree with these individuals, but then I am speaking from experience of actually having used it and seeing how it works, not from the point of view of someone who misinterprets a sales page.

Let’s try to answer the concerns.

Concern #1. Article directories will be filled with spammy articles submitted in their thousands.

If you could import 100 articles into Article Announcer, click a button, and go for a cup of tea while Article Announcer submitted all 100 articles to each of 1000 directories, then I would agree that the tool was a spammer’s dream. Article Announcer does not work that way. You can’t even put one article into Article Announcer and have it submit to 1000 article submission sites while you take the dog for a walk.

Article Announcer is a tool that helps manage submissions. You enter an article into the software, and then select the directories you want to submit that article to. Once you have done that, you start the submission process. This requires YOU sitting at YOUR computer while the submissions happen.

Article Announcer will go to the first site you have chosen to submit to using its built in browser. You may need to login to that site before you can submit the article. Once confronted with the submission form, Article Announcer fills in the details for you. i.e. it puts your name into the name box, the description and keywords into the description and keywords boxes, and the article and resource text into the article and resource boxes respectively.

You need to check this data is filled in correctly. You may need to select a category for the article from a drop down box on the submission site. You need to check that your resource box meets the requirements (HTML or no HTML) of the submission site. Only after doing all this, can you click the submit button.

Once you get notification that the submission was successful, you can click on the “Next Submission Site” button, and that site loads. You repeat the above steps.

So, there is nothing here that is 100% automated. This may disappoint those who want to use this tool for spamming, but then this tool is created for professional webmasters who want to simplify and speed up their article submissions, without breaking rules.

Article Announcer certainly speeds up the process of submitting your content to directories, but you are in total control, and have to oversee the whole submission process. There is nothing spammy about tool.

Concern #2. A lot of article directories don’t allow automated submissions, so this is spam.

As you see above, Article Announcer is not an automated submitter. It submits one article to one site, before moving onto the next submission site. You have to check your submission form is all correct, and then click the submit button. Where Article Announcer is great is in the time is saves entering the article into the submission form, and then moving to the next submission site without you having to remember URLS, or where you have and have not submitted to yet.

Ezine Articles is one of the biggest and best known submission sites, yet Chris Knight (from Ezine Articles) has promoted this tool. Obviously he has no concerns about Article Announcer.

Concern #3. Duplicate content will choke the search engines.

This is one I see a lot, yet from my own experience, an article can be reprinted many times on different sites without causing a problem (see the results from my own experiments in pervious newsletters). Perhaps this is because each page that publishes the article has enough different content on it to fool the duplicate content filters, or perhaps it just is not problem. This is my only real concern for the future, and only time will tell.

Long before Article Announcer was released (in fact years before), a lots of savvy marketers were submitting their articles to article directories, ezine authors and other webmasters for publishing. This method allowed many to become gurus in their fields, while building up incoming links to their sites that would generate traffic and increase search engine rankings. The search engines never found this a problem in the past, or at least never introduced counter-measures.

My own thoughts on Article Announcer is that used properly, with quality, unique and useful content, it will continue to make gurus, build rankings and save time for the busy netpreneur.

On the flip side of this, have you thought of creating your own article submission site, and sending Jason an email asking to be included in the list of sites in Article Announcer? A site like that could become a great Adsense earner!

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4. Content Publisher
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Content Publisher was released last week to those on the notification list, at a big discount. Tomorrow the price goes up to the full $149, but if you are interested, you can still get it at the discount. Here is the special order page.

This page will be removed tomorrow.

For those wondering what Content Publisher is all about, it is a tool I created to help manage the publishing of content on your own sites (as well as offering your content to other webmasters by using the distributor module).

The Content Publisher homepage shows why I built this tool, and takes you through the process of publishing articles onto a demo site I set up.

There is also a short video on there showing Content Publisher at work.

One thing that I have been asked about is whether Content Publisher can be used to gradually publish articles on a site, at say 2 or 3 articles per day, rather than all the articles posted at once. Search engines seem to like this approach, as they get suspicious of a 500 page site put up overnight. I myself have seen big benefits to this approach in a test site I built using Content Publisher.

The answer to the question, is of course, yes. You can publish 1000 articles at a time, or 2 or 3 a day. Content Publisher allows you to select which articles you want published from your database and then published them as it updates the whole site to include these new articles (and natural linking to them).

I created a training video for my customers to show them how to do this. The video does talk a fair bit about server side includes (SSI), as these give you a lot more power in how your articles are linked together. The manual does explain how to create these, so don’t worry if you are fairly new to it all.

You can see the video here.

(I will be removing this link moving this file into the protected members area soon, because of bandwidth issues).

Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online here.

For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives.

Have a great week!

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