Hit by the Dreaded Google Penalty

Just when I thought it couldn't happen, my main site Celtnet has been hit by the dreaded 'Google Penalty'.

If you don't know about it this is when your site's search results begin falling down and down the results until they're all below entry 200 or less. It's taken me over 3 years to build the site and at the beginning of last year 2008 I started to make a breakthrough, adding links and content every day. This success impelled me to build the Celtnet Recipes region of the site to over 6500 recipes; each unique and hand crafted by me.

The success snowballed so, but January 2009 I was getting over 15000 hits daily and I was making a decent income from AdSense. This is Google's own advertising program. Then, last Friday (February 6th) my traffic suddenly dried up. Over the next two days I dropped down to only 4000 hits per day, basically just those people who have bookmarked my site and income dropped by over 2/3.

OK, Google only does this when people have violated their terms of service and it's probably an automatic flag set in their system somewhere. This, though would be easier to swallow if I had changed my code and the way the site works in some way... But I haven't.

So I can't, personally, explain this drop in SERPs (serge engine page rankings) position. And that's the thing... OK, if I've violated Google's TOS then this some kind of penalty is fair. But I'm just one guy trying to put good content and new content on the web... I'm not an SEO expert and I don't have a team of people behind me.

The only way to get page rankings back is to use google's 'reinclusion submission' form. But this form assumes you know what went wrong and that you've fixed it and then you confess to them what you did and why and then you say you will never do it again. But I haven't got a clue!!!

And this is where it really gets unfair. Google hit you with a penalty over-night and don't tell you why. So if you've unintentionally done something wrong you have no clue as to why they penalized you and what you did wrong because they did not tell you! So I now have to try and figure out what I might have done wrong so that I can fix it then tell them 'I'm sorry' and 'I won't do it again'.

My income dropped dramatically during these days and is continually dropping. Now, I could blame myself and say it's my fault... except that my income from the website isn't going to me.... I'm actually using it to fund the education of Liberian refugee children in Dakar, Senegal (see One Million People Campaign Pages to see why. So this drop in SERPs for my site isn't hitting me, it's hitting others.

I work damn hard on my website, over 50 hours per week (and I have a regular job). I try and do my best, I make certain my content is novel and good...

But if I can't figure out what went wrong, and with no help from Google, in the next few weeks then I'm going to give up.

Google say they want good content on the web, but this really isn't helping. There are plenty of spammy sites out there and mine isn't one. I have unique content not crap! So why has my site vanished and now sites with far less content than mine are the only one users see.

If Google is really true in what they say about good user experiences then this is not the way to go. I'm fed up and rather than dealing with any of this nonesense again I'm going to give up and get a second job to help those Liberian kids. I've just lost them over $800 a month and to them and their future and there must be better ways of earning the money than this.

If Google are just going to pull the rug from under your feet without telling you why and giving you a chance to fix it (after all, it's only fair to be warned if your income is about to be wiped out) then why should the little guys doing individual things and actually adding to the web experience bother?

It's not the penalty that gets me... If I did something wrong then a penalty is warranted. It's just that there was no warning, no information is forthcoming and no grace period was given to fix things.

Google's motto is 'don't be evil'... But how is this not evil in any way? I've been royally screwed by Google. But, unfortunately, in the end I'm not the one who is going to suffer. I might actually get the time I spend on the website I've created from nothing all by myself back.

My website was a labour of love and this is just the way to completely kill my spirit.

Browsing Habits and the Days of the Week

Have you been examining your visitor stats lately? Do you take note of what happens on various days of the week and how the day can affect click-throughs and conversions?

Well, if you haven't been taking note of these factors affecting your website and your income, then shame on you! Because, the days of the week and what you have on offer can have a huge effect on the income you make. Indeed, these fluctuations in the behavours of people visiting my Celtnet website was one of the main reasons I began to develop my site into an authority site.

I began my site with the Celtnet Celtic pages, all based on my hobby and interests, the ancient Celtic gods and the ancient texts of Wales. I added adsense to this, but more in hope than any real expectation. There was some income and that's when I began the Celtnet Information region of the site. This was much more an attempt at making some real money... and, yes, during the middle of the week I did actually make some money, but over Friday and the weekend that steady flow became only a trickle.

Obviously, what I was offering only seemed to be needed during the middle of the week. To try and plug the obvious gap I added a Celtnet Recipes Collection and a Medicine Section and the addition of these two new parts to the website did even out the earnings across the week. Finally, I was getting a monthly cheque from Google.

Then I made a huge mistake... I began trying to grow my entire website across the board. I was adding new content in as many different places as possible but there was no focus. I now know that it would have been far better to focus on a single area of the site, growing both the content and the in-bound links. It took me a year to make this realization and that's cost the site a lot of income.

A year ago I decided to concentrate on the Celtnet Recipes region of the site. During the past 10 months I've grown the content from 1100 recipes to almost 6000 (each hand edited) my traffic has increased 6-fold and my income almost 10-fold. This has been due to building lots of content, getting deep links into the site and re-designing my pages so they're both more visitor friendly and better at converting. And now, in contrast to when I started, the weekend is my most productive time of the week.

I get more hits and more click-throughs on the weekend, by quite a large margin, and this is probably due to the visitors being just a little less 'internet savvy' and less ad-blind overall.

And whilst I'm still growing the recipes site I've added a growing Articles Submission site, where anyone can submit their articles (a key aspect of link building) as well as an eBooks sales section and a ClickBank Marketplace where anyone can search ClickBank products or even create free ClickBank-based ads for their own sites. Each separate income generation strategies.

If you would like to learn how the site was turned around from the doldrums to a success then check-out the How to Maximiey your Web Traffic eBook and course. And if you would like to know what drives me to making the most from the site then please check out the One Million People Charity Campaign as it's this to which the proceeds from the website are given.

Yes, you can make your website into a success, but it will require effort on your part, and there are no shortcuts. You HAVE to grow your content and grow your links.

Does Page Rank Really Matter?

At the end of September the webmaster forums were all-a-twitter in that Google seemed to be performing a page rank update. The first in many, many, months. Webmasters were desperately scanning the various datacentres to see if their page ranks had changed or not and reports were flying thick and fast. But it seems that no proper update of page rank was forthcoming. So, does it actually matter?

In a way page rank is critical, but in another it's totally irrelevant. Google uses page rank as an algorithmic measure of how important a website is (ie its rank in comparison to other similar websites, based on the number of links coming into a site and the 'authority' of those sites (ie their page rank).

As a result sites began to scan page rank and there grew a market around selling links from sites with high page rank. A site with high page rank could command a fair amount of money for selling links. Which distorted the natural, organic, growth of links to websites. Obviously this created an artificial skewing of results and Google didn't like this. So they began clamping down on the selling of links.

Now it seems that they are obfuscating page rank. The rank shown in Google's toolbar, or even on Google's datacentres may not actually represent the true page rank or ranking of a site. Indeed, I run the Celtnet and Celtnet Recipes sites. Both these currently have a PR of 0 yet I've managed to grow my traffic five fold in the past six months and my income almost ten fold. If the observed page rank was the true arbiter of a site's quality and position in the search engines then this could not happen.

Which does lead to a bit of a problem. Because higher page rank gives a site more 'juice' in terms of website ranking and getting links is the only way to improve your position in the search engines many webmasters have decided to only exchange links with high PR sites (typically 3 and above). But if page ranks are no longer accurate, how do webmasters with good sites but low PR (artificially low, it seems) exchange links?

We're in the position of having another artificial stewing of how websites are percieved and the placing of a huge barrier in front of new entrants into the field.

The Importance of Links

Unfortunately, the Internet is not a meritocracy. You may have the world's best content on your blog or website, but if nobody reads that content then it's effectively less than useless to you as the site's publisher.

I'm not saying that great content isn't important. In fact it's a vital component for any serious presence on the internet, because you want the experience of anyone visiting your website to be a good one. So you need to give them confidence in your site and the only way to do that is to provide them with great, individualistic and above all useful content. So you need to build your site and add great content each and every day.

This is where the true currency of the internet comes in — links. Unless you have links coming into your website then your site will not be found and your content will not be indexed. How you do this may well vary, but here are some of my favorite strategies (and I've used these to increase my website's traffic 10-fold in the past 6 months!

• Submitting articles to article directories. This is an all-time favorite and still works really well. In essence you write an article on a topic related to your site and you then submit that article to one of the web's main article directories. Personally, I tend to use the following:
  
  
  EzineArticles.com — not the fastest, but it's been around for a long time and has lots of kudos
  
  GoArticles — submitted articles are instantly live you can enter affiliate links.
  
  Celtnet Articles — not one of the biggest, but articles are quality reviewed and they are published quickly.
  
  Article Dashboard — turn-around time can be long but this is good for getting your articles picked-up by eZines and published elsewhere.
  
  
  
  These are only a few and you can view many more on-line. These are the ones I tend to use myself and they've been good to me in terms both of getting my articles published and picked-up by others. Just remember that each article accepted gives you at least 2 links (typically 3) back to your website and if your content is picked-up by others you get even more links.
  


• Link exchanges — whether you do this through a third party or go for link exchanges personally it can still be a good way of getting links back to your site. Many say this methodology is devalued these days, but remember that it's not just search traffic you want... any means of getting quality links to your site is useful and if you exchange links with a related site you will get referral traffic from that site.
  


• Blog posting — posting to blogs such as this one can be a very useful way of getting more links to your site. Basically you can write a post on a given topic and then include links back to your site that are relevant to your topic.
  


• Free Web Page sites — Sites such as squdoo and hubpages allow you to create individual web pages. You can use these sites to write on a topic and include links back to your own website that are relevant to that topic.
  


• Submit your site to Directories — this is probably not as important as it used to be, but some directories such as DMOZ have a high traffic ranking and can be beneficial.
  


• Blog Comments — Commenting on onthers' blogs or on on-line forums can be an excellent way of disseminating your website's URL. You will increase your traffic both by the virtue that there are more links pointing to your site and by people coming across your URL 'by accident'.
  

These are just some of the ideas of the ways that you can help get more links to your site. And the truth is that I tend to spend at least 2 hours a day on getting links. In the end though the processes above can be considered as 'priming the pump'. You need enough links into your site for your site and its contents to get on the search engines' radar. But, eventually, if you have good content, then you will start to develop good links back to your site as other webmasters and bloggers mention your site and give you links back to it.

These are just some ideas about how you can improve the links to your site. You can read more about this in the article: How to Improve your Google Ranking.

If you are truly serious about improving your search engine rankings and your traffic then you really need to check out: The Secret to Maximizing your Web Traffic. And whilst you're there, why not sign-up for the free six-part eCourse.

The Earnestness of Absence

I know that it's been a long while since I updated this blog... and that's never a good thing. My excuse is that I've been madly working on my website. The site has expanded in so many ways that I needed to give it a complete overhaul. So, not only does the Nemeton Home Page have a completely new look and feel and should make it much easier to navigate and find the various sections of the site.

The Celtnet Recipes recipe section of the site has also had a major overhaul and now has almost 5000 recipes from all corners of the glove in the database. No mean feat as all the recipes are edited and annotated by me before being published. There's no copying and pasting of standard recipes going on here. As you can imagine, all this means that I've been extremely busy, hence the silence on this blog for a while.


Given that I've also updated the ClickBank Marketplace and given the ClickBank Ads Generators pages an overhaul (and, yes, they're still free for anyone to publish and create their own ClickBank-based ads on these pages) you can see that I've been busy.

Of course, all this effort is in aid of the One Million People Campaign that I and my website support, so all the effort is worthwhile! And now I'm onto the Celtnet Celtic section of the site. That bit of the website that actually kicked everything off so many years ago now.

What this comes down to is SEO. Websites change and adapt and the whole look and feel of websites also changes and adapts. To make certain your website is taken seriously you need to keep the site looking young and fresh and that means keeping up with the latest trends. Some of this is easy as I've used CSS from the start. But there's still a fair amount of re-engineering involved as I was learning CSS as I was going on. I now have a nice design developed for the recipes section of the site and I want to roll that out everywhere. It uses pure CSS to ensure that the central most important information part of the page appears first in the HTML so that the indexing spiders see this first.

But, as is often the case, all this frenetic activity has meant that I dropped the ball on several important SEO factors. The first of these is not doing enough link checking. I've ended up with hundreds of broken links for one reason or another and we all know that the search engines hate broken links and will penalize your site for it. I've been busy cleaning-up these broken links over the past few days and already my rankings and traffic are both climbing.

The other thing I ignored was a proper, systematic, approach to getting more in-bound links. Now, I'd been working hard on writing articles as ways of getting in-bound links and this was working quite well for me. Between January and April I tripled the traffic to my site (and did the same for my income). Which was great, but I kind of left things to stabilize at that level and that wasn't good.

Now, optimizing my ad placements helped raise revenue and that I did as part of my overall re-design (and it worked!). Then I had to go away and leave everything for almost three weeks and visitors fell. All the hard work in writing articles was only really working as long as I kept writing articles. I needed better ways to get links. So began a campaign of proper link building and link exchanges. I began writing articles for Wikipedia again as well as leaving recipes and comments on blogs. I also began using digg and other sites to promote my various web pages.

This led to an extra 400 in-bound links in the first week and my traffic and income began to climb again. Basically it means that the old stalwarts of the internet biz aren't dead at all. And if you want to make a profit then you need to keep working on your link-building. Write articles, exchange links, leave comments, join forums. Basically use any means you can to get links to your site 'out there'. And make certain that you get plenty of deep links into your site as well.

If you want more tips like this, then why not have a look at the How to Maximize your Web Traffic page where you can sign-up to a free six-part e-course on driving more traffic to your site. Just think what you could do if you could triple your website's traffic in three months (or even less!)

And, if you have a recipe-related site why not sign-up for a link exchange with the Celtnet Recipes Links reciprocal links page?

Free ClickBank Ads for All

ClickBank is a great resource for finding products to promote and profit from. But it's really designed for putting afiliates (those who will promote the products) in touch with products that they can promote. As a result it's intended for those who aggressively market products singly. But ClickBank is also a great source of income, with typical affiliate payments per product sold ranging from $20 to $100! What if you want to tap into this bounty without having to go through each product and write sales scripts for them.

For anyone with the time and patience, ClickBank produce an XML feed every evening (called the ClickBank products feed) and this contains information about all the products in the marketplace. You could download this feed, parse it into a database and then produce a ads based on the result.

One problem with this is that ClickBank's descriptions are indended, in general, to show how good a product is for an affiliate to promote. They are not promotional tools in and of themelves. For any product you producted to be effective you would have to update the title and the descriptions to be better at selling the product.

This is a lot of work, especially when you would need to create Ads or RSS feeds on top of the database. Now that's a lot of programming work.

Fortunately, several sites have already done the hard work for you. The best of these provide AdSense-lik contextual ads (for example see Celtnet's AdSense-like ClickBank Ads). Such ads look exactly like ClickBank's ads and you can typically change the style, chose which section of ClickBank to promote and chose the style so that it fits in with your site's overall context.

One problem of such ads is that they cannot be displayed alongside Google's AdSense ads because this conravenes Google's TOS (Terms of Service). [For more information on this issue see: Lami Reviews' Information on ClickBank Ads].

The only way you can mix AdSense ads with ClickBank ads at the moment is to integrate an RSS feed of ClickBank products, such that available at: ClickBank RSS Ads into your website. As RSS feeds count as news aggregation (no matter what's displayed) this falls within Google's TOS so this is OK and well within the rules. It's even quite easy to do this as all you need to do is to add the RSS feed to one of the many RSS to JavaScript converters on the web and then copy the JavaScript code into your own website (just do a web search for 'RSS to Javascript' and you'll get a whole range of results back).

One very recent innovation is the use of Images in AdSense-like ads, but based around ClickBank code. Curently these are only provided by the Celtnet ClickBank Marketplace (in their ClickBank Image-based ads product where the ads are free for anyone to use and deploy) but it probably won't be long before other vendors also begin to produce similar ad formats. After all the use of images in Ads seems to be the way that Google, themselves are going.

Why are such ads worth considering? Well, generally the barrier to putting these ads on your site is very low. Also, if you have enough traffic and enough ad clicks hey can be very lucrative. However, these ads are what's termed PPA (pay per action — you only get paid when someone buys something, whereas Google ads are PPC (pay per click). But ads based on ClickBank products give you all the usual affiliate earnings potential of promoting ClickBank products by standard meansh. This is basically $20 to $100 per purchase made through these ads. Not something to be sniffed at.

For more information, see the review at How to Use ClickBank to Monetize your Site.

So, should you be considering these ads for your site, blog or web page? I will leave that qustion up to you. Try them out, do your due diligence and find out what works best for your site.

Why You Should NEVER 'ContactThem'

Or why the 'ContactThem' emails are a tempting scam...

If, like me, you have an internet presence then you've probably seen one of a rash of eMails going round that read something like this:

Subject: I’ve visited your website http://www.celtnet.org.uk

Hi,

We’ve seen your website at http://www.celtnet.org.uk and we love it!

We see that your traffic rank is 349,775

and your link popularity is 356.

Also, you have been online since 4/15/2004.

With that kind of traffic, we will pay you up to $4,800/month to advertise our links on your website.

If you’re interested, read our terms from this page: http://www.contactthem.ws/hit.php?s=10&p=2&w=103047

Sincerely,

Tony Gagliardi

The ContactThem Network

I've been receiving two or three (at least) of these messages each and every day. Each one refers to a different page or sub-section of my site and and they all come from different senders (but each one is in the "The ContactThem Network") and they all have different referral links. It was becoming a nuisance, and the offers also looked too tempting to be real.

I'm always on the look out for new web scams and the latest of these all go up on my Internet Scams Pages. I simply just had to look into this...

When you click on one of the referral links you're taken to a very snazzy website and an audio track starts and begins to read the content of the web page to you. It all looks very professional and it's done very well as a squeeze page. You're very tempted to click on the affiliate link or to join the program. After all who couldn't resist a passive income of “up to $4,800/month” just to display some links and banners on your website or blog. After all, it just sounds like an offer for text link or banner advertising. What's actually happening is that they're trying to recruit you into a multi-tier affiliate program.

When I began to dig further it didn't take me long to find out that the person behind ContactThem network is Stephan Ducharme, the man behind the famous (or should I say, infamous), 'Free Google Ads'. Yes, this is Stephan Ducharme, “The FreeAdGuru”.

What Ducharme is trying to do here is to get you to buy the ContactThem software product which extracts user and website details from a number of databases and allows you to use this personalized information to send out a mass mailing. Indeed, if you've ever recieved an email like the one described above then you're a 'victim' of Ducharmes ContactThem software product. One of the product's affiliates extracted YOUR details out of a database and spammed you with their ContactThem affiliate link…

You're being spammed here and the offer is only for you to join the band of spammers. I believe the product costs $50 per month (or thereabouts) and only by recruiting more into the spam brigade can you begin to make any money. It's a hybrid between affiliate marketing and MLM in that you need to recruit more people into the system to make money. Only with the twist that you're using the product not to sell anything or offer a service but to spam others.

I have to give it to Stephan Ducharme in that he writes excellent copy and is a dab hand at getting a viral campaign up and running in record time. He's obviously raking it in from this launch... But he's also notorious for atrocious customer service, not honouring refunds and massivlely under-delivering on his product promises.

This is a scam and a home for spammers, If you get any email like this just hit the delete button or add it to your spam filters...