First a little background, I personally don’t see the problem with a website or blog selling text links if they review the advertisers site and feel it is up to snuff and could be useful to their visitors. I also think that Google has a multi-tier policy that allows big brands to buy as many links as they want and there is no penalty whatsoever. It seems they mostly go after the smaller webmasters and they do it to discourage folks from spending advertising dollars on independents but instead to spend their budget with Adwords.

Google’s claim that they punish link buying and selling because it is an attempt to ‘game’ the search engines and it therefore makes the search results less relevant is pure BS. Google themselves sell the premium positions in their search results to the highest bidder and many of those sites are much crappier than any links I have ever sold.

Here is an interesting example: http://www.edutextlink.com sells text links, but not just any kind of text links; these links are from .edu domains which are supposed to give your website additional authority when ranking in Google. This website even has a section titled: Fly Under the Radar, the sites home page is a page rank 5 and many of their internal pages have rank as well. They also rank very high in the organic results for terms like, text links, buy link, buy text links and others.

So basically their entire business model is centered around ‘gaming’ the search engines by Googles own ToS but Google still ranks them high both in page rank and in the search engine index. But my blog, www.2BlogSEO.com has had PR and index penalties for years because I accept paid advertising on my site. Go figure….

So one of my favourite webmaster hang-outs, digitalpoint.com has been trying to clean up their business forums as of late, especially the buy and sell ones. So what they have done is take on a zero tolerance policy for small, simple offences like bumping posts. One infraction of this type results in an instant one week ban and judging by the numbers of banned members it does not seem to be working yet. DigitalPoint has become a victim of it’s own success, with 100’s of new members signing up daily and almost none of them reading the rules of the forum it just sets them up for an insta-ban. I am glad they are cracking down on the uselss posts but I am not sure making so many folks angry is the solution.

One angry digitalpoint user (or a small group of them) have decided to fight back by launching a tounge-in-cheek blog called digitalpointless.com. Some of what they are saying is a little funny but the overall negative and aggressive tone I feel from their blog seems to be a bit sefl-defeatiing. They throw a lot of threats around and single out individuals they feel have wronged them on the digitalpoint forums. But freedom of speech is such, so I will keep checking on on them and see if they take their game up a notch in the future.

Ok, well not really in porn but looking at porn….but that does not really sound any better does it.  Just watch the video below and you will understand it.

“Fraudsters know that clicking on a certain ad will create anomalies in the data that will trigger further investigation of their IP addresses, methods, or the targeting of a particular advertiser’s ads.

So they try to ‘even out’ the anomalies by creating more impressions to balance out the clicks, and other attempts to make the fraud seem more ‘real.’ But all this does is dig them in deeper, creating other anomalies.”  But from what I heard on the forums Google is still able to filter out these frauds.  It is very frustrating for those of us that don’t pad our adsense because I see smart-pricing come into effect sometimes and get dismal payouts per click.

Link building and driving traffic to a website are the life-blood of any successful web endeavor. Unfortunately it can be quite difficult but one proven method is by offering free online games.

Most folks, from your average computer user to your hard-core gamer are looking to whittle away a bit of time each day relaxing and having fun on the web. If you can get them to come to your site to play card games, racing games or something of the sort then they might just hang around and become a frequent visitor.

If you want to offer these type of games then there are three options available:

1. Just link up to an existing game. This is the cheapest, free and can be as easy as installing a few lines of code for a Google widget but the downside is you can’t brand it as your own.

2. The second option is to purchase a license to use an existing game. These can be custom branded to your website and don’t cost very much. But your game won’t be unique and can be found dozens or hundreds of other places on the web.

3. Have a custom game developed for you. This is the most expensive route but also offers the largest benefit, especially if you offer it for free to other sites (including your link back of course).

My advice is to start off with something free and see if it increases traffic. Once you build up a bit of a visitor base then move on to number 2 an eventually number 3.

Yahoo! Inc.announced the launch of Yahoo! Buzz, an extension to Yahoo.com, which would form the groundwork for an open ecosystem of publishers, advertisers and consumers.  Yahoo said that Yahoo! Buzz would open up the Internet’s starting point by uncovering the most interesting and relevant content from websites across the Internet and bringing more buzz-worthy stories to its homepage.

Yahoo stated, currently in beta, Yahoo! Buzz measures consumer votes and search patterns to identify interesting and timely stories and videos from large news sources as well as niche blogs around the Web. Top stories are then given primary editorial consideration for feature placement on Yahoo.com.

Yahoo noted that Yahoo! Buzz would enable publishers to share relevant content, connect to more advertisers and reach a broader audience. Yahoo added that it would allow users to submit Buzz stories to social news sites including delicious, Digg, Facebook, Propeller, Reddit and Stumbleupon.  Yahoo! Buzz can highlight anything, a major news event, an intriguing video or image, or an interesting blog post and help publishers deliver their best content to Yahoo!’s broad and diverse audience, Yahoo noted.  Looks interesting but we are going to have to see if this ever develops into something worthwhile.

Many folks over at DigitalPoint forums are discussing what effect the possible buyout of Yahoo by Microsoft will have on the SEO industry but most, including myself think it is a positive step to help combat Google’s complete dominance over the search industry.

Here are a few relevant posts on the topic:

swedal; A merger between msn and Yahoo could be a way to create a company which could better compete with Google.  That would probably be a ways down the road and a offer to buy is a long way from an actual merger.

SilkySmooth; Niether MSN nor Yahoo were able to compete against Google as individual entities, merging them together wont change anything. IMO.

popotalk; Lets put this in numbers. If both MSN and Yahoo competed and nothing happened then an outcome of 0 would be put in place. Therefore 0 + 0 = 0.  Silky is right there won’t be a change.

jg123; I don’t think that is accurate, MSN has 10% of searches, Yahoo has 20% and Google around 60%…so together they get closer to being a legitimate competitor for Google. I don’t think this merger will have any effect directly on the directory industry but it does put both those companies in a better position to challenge Google, which is a good thing IMO.

As you can see, lots of opposing views and a very interesting topic.

It looks like the first rumblings of a page rank update have started.  I just saw a post by Mike over at DP about some directories that appear to have their page ranks moving.  Page rank in general has become a bit of a farce since Google has been using it to bitch slap webmasters around that it thinks might be gaming the search results.  But many folks still give it quite a bit of weight so let’s keep an eye on this one and see what Google has in-store for us.

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