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Is Google Only Telling You What You What to Hear?

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

Search engine results confusing and frustrating

Don't be Deceived by Your History

In the world of internet marketing and search engine optimisation there has been a lot of discussion about Google Caffeine and Panda. No doubt I shall write more about these innovations too as they develop and improve the algorithms to bring us all the quality, relevant information that we’re looking for.

For this article though I’d like to talk about something else altogether and that’s the self-deception that you can indulge in as a Google researcher and webmaster at the same time. Although it has been around since 2009, many of us forget about “Personalised Search” .

When you search, using Google search, for the keywords for your money site, well unsurprisingly, more often than not you click on your own site. Because you frequently click on your own site, over time, Google will show you your site first above your competitors.

If you allow cookies, it won’t matter if you are signed in to your account or not, Google stores your clicks for six months.

Now, for most people that means that Google seems to magically know what they like and lead them down familiar paths but for others it can be a bit of a pain. Firstly, if you’re covering a familiar area of research and want to explore avenues of enquiry you have not followed before you may find the results biased to the sites you are already familiar with or those similar to them.

Worse perhaps, you’ll keep seeing your own site popping up at, or near, the top of the search lists and believe you are an expert in search engine optimisation. Sadly though, when you use somebody else’s computer your site is nowhere to be seen and you blame the search engine for dumping you!

The obvious solution would seem to be going down the road of deleting your browsing history, clearing your cookies, temporary files and cache and starting over. That will work but all it does is reset your your history for now and you’ll be in the same position in a month or two. And worse you’ll have lost all the benefits of the personalised search experience and have to hunt for those brilliant web sites whose names are so darned hard to remember all over again.

Do not despair!

The solution is encapsulated in just a short little code &pws=0 which you need to put at the end of the search phrase. Easier said than done, of course! Here’s how it’s done:

  • Conduct your search in the usual way from the Google search box
  • The query will appear in the browser address bar with your personalised results
  • Click on the address bar, click again to enter edit mode if all the text is highlighted
  • Press ‘END’ to jump to the end of the query
  • Type &pws=0 and press ‘ENTER”
  • Your results will be depersonalised and reflect generalised relevance criteria

If you’re a bit of a geek, you can go to the next step and set up a bookmark or favourite location which you can use to do this automatically, if it’s something you’ll either forget how to do or will be using al the time. Rather than explain it all here, I think I’ll send you off to another chaps blog because he’s gone to the trouble of explaining the procedure for Firefox and Chrome. Go Craig Addyman!

http://www.fusionunlimited.co.uk/blog/turning-off-googles-personalised-search/

Thanks to Craig for that, as I am not going to bother. I have lots of other SEO toys to play with, lucky me, and will only need to resort to he trick occasionally.

I hope you find the trick useful and aren’t too disappointed with what you find!

Alex Hope, playing here, working elsewhere…

Image: Maggie Smith / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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The Importance of the Right “Niche” as Seen by Panda

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

Google's page rank algorithm

Google's patent algorithm

I read something the other day that reminded me of something pretty basic but essential to bear in mind for us marketeers so I thought I should share it with you again today. It is the basic key to solopreneur marketing on the internet, which is finding an appropriate niche.

In its broadest sense, this web site is all about internet marketing but use that phrase as a keyword search on Google and you’ll see over a hundred and seventy five million results! So the Spare Time Billionaire has quite a few competitors all vying for your attention, and that makes me chuffed as heck that you’ve reached this page at all!

I’ll come back to the rod I made for my own back later but first let’s think about the 2006 survey conducted by iProspect and Jupiter Research (source file PDF) and some of its key findings. Although, in internet terms, a few years is a very long time indeed, this research paper is still generally considered to be the most reputable and comprehensive in its methodology and the results also reflect anecdotal experience.

  • 62% of search engine users click on a result on the first page shown
  • 90% click on a result within the first three pages
  • 41% of search engine users change their search terms if they do not get a good result on the first page
  • 36% of users believe that a top listing reflects a brand leader in the field

The findings can be summarised in a single sentence from the report: “Search engine results continue to impart brand equity on those companies that appear on top of search results“.

So that all being said, what can we do to make our site appear on that precious first page? With, as I said, 175 million rivals, this site does get first page presence sometimes through careful investigation into what Google believes important when it’s doing its calculations.

Page Rank

In December 2001 Google patented its now famous page rank algorithm which has become an infamous challenge to SEO specialists over the following decade. In a nutshell, it’s Google asking how popular your site already is, who’s linking to it. Although still important, Google no longer treat this as the ultimate test of quality, because so many marketeers were using link engines, link exchanges and other similar tools to boost their sites value.

The patent expires soon, allowing other search engines to adopt it exactly. They will not because it is already well out of date.

Google Panda

It turns out that Panda is the name of a programmer, Navneet Panda in fact, from Google – so that’s your first question answered. This is the latest release of algorithm that is used to assess the “quality” of sites for ranking based on more than just the actual content of the pages.

Panda is about the automatically assessing “user experience”. In an interview at TED in early 2011, Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts explained how it works. The background was sending out a batch of web pages to a panel of interested people and asking them whether they judged the pages as good quality or not. Then they got a set of bad and good pages and started throwing code at them to analyse them. Eventually, they managed to get a set of criteria that achieved the same results as the human experience.

So what makes for a good quality site in Panda’s eyes? Put simplistically it can be summarized in two short sentences:

  • The site must be “trustworthy” meaning that the information it conveys is credible and customers will feel confident in relating to the company behind it
  • The user experience must be “enjoyable” and I think we can all agree that pop-ups, content locking and aggressive graphics are not enjoyable

Recency and Authority

Some articles and web pages become standard reference sources and are consistently placed high in search engine listings. Google are understandably reticent about exactly how they judge how “authoritative” a site is but I’d guess that a site looked by a disparate audience over an extended period might get a few points in that direction particularly if the number of readers is large in comparison with its competitors.

Where there are thousands of articles about a subject, those that are more recent also tend to filter to the top of the pile. So keeping site content fresh and relevant to your subject is always important. And this, rather neatly leads us full circle back to the importance of your niche.

The Increasing Value of Niche Specialisation

If you are fortunate to have found a subject upon which you only have a limited number of competitors, your life is automatically easier as search becomes more sophisticated and the old tricks are addressed by the major search engines.

Competing against hundred of thousands of similar businesses is always going to be hard, so narrow your focus. Specialise.

Alex Hope, still competing with 175,000,000 internet marketing rivals

Illustration: An art draw drawn by Felipe Micaroni Lalli (micaroni@gmail.com).

 

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Google & YouTube Policies Are Strict – A Salutary Lesson

Tuesday, November 15th, 2011

Google and YouTube are One

Google and YouTube

Now, those of you who have been with STB since the beginning will remember that we wandered into the dark arts of so-called “Black Hat” search engine optimization and we did have some pretty good results.

But today, if you page back through the archives, you’ll find pictures blanked and links broken as is the way with come and go adventures. That is all in the natural way of doing things.

Of course, back in the day Google and YouTube were competitors and not the same company. Now they are and I’ve neglected to pay attention to that rather important detail and cleaning up my tracks when the project took me into the darker places in the internet marketing forest. There’s no point getting into an endless loop about how the old video actually lead it’s victims into a wasted space that earned maybe $0.02 if they finally downloaded the file that told them stuff they had learned by going through the process to find it in a snazzy PDF format.

Anyway I put up a video that suggested that I knew a way to get one over on Google to get free advertising spend. It was an exaggeration, not a lie. However it did breach a number of the rules of YouTube at the time in that it was a direct unpaid for promotion of a link and a product for the purposes of commerce – some might call it an advertisement!

At the time, the powers that be in YouTube let it pass but it began to pull in the viewers and the next step was the YouTube people suggested that I get into revenue sharing with them – that is having paid adverts on the channel – “Free Money” I thought and signed up STB with grateful thanks.

Nothing happened for quite a while and the video was pulling in a trickle of viewers as the months rolled by and then the YouTube team of people took a look, probably for the first time and realised what was occurring. Now, strictly according to the terms and conditions what was in the video was not a breach of them but I had used some screen capture footage that could be interpreted as making Google look a little incompetent but worse showed information in a clear breach of the AdWords confidentiality clause. OOPS! Same company.

Anyway, the good folk of YouTube sent me an automated email suggesting that the video had been removed and I had “received one Community Guidelines warning strike, which will expire in six months” but when I later logged in the account had disappeared altogether.

So the lesson of this tale is “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you!”

Alex Hope from the detention hall

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A Great British Way To Start In Affiliate Marketing

Wednesday, November 9th, 2011

The Aflite Affiliate Network

The Aflite Affiliate Network

We have talked before about Viglink and using them to monetize links within your articles to pick up a bit of spare change from your readers.

Now I’d like to introduce you more formally to Aflite, a relatively new affiliate network specialising in smaller businesses in the United Kingdom.

Unlike the larger networks, Aflite currently has fewer than a hundred merchants on their books though this is growing all the time.

Even so, they do offer a very wide variety of products from which to choose to promote.

This is where it serves you, the affiliate marketer well, particularly if you are thinking of creating micro-niche mini-sites to market products.

All of the merchants provide tools for you to us on your website, including graphics and banners for strategically placed advertising. Some also offer further tips and special promotions that you can highlight too.

If you know that you want to start using your skills to sell on the web but do not actually have any idea what to sell, Aflite is a great place to get your inspiration. Once you sign-up you will be shown the list of merchants available and what sort of commissions and extras you may be eligible to earn if you promote them.

How it all fits together

  1. You choose which merchant you want to promote and apply to them.
  2. If they agree that you are a suitable affiliate, they will accept you and you will get an email to that effect.
  3. You set up your sales pages using the tools provided on the Aflite website.
  4. Your readers click on the unique affiliate links.
  5. Aflite systems, using cookies, ensure that each visitor you send to a merchant is tracked.
  6. If your reader buys, you get paid – Aflite pays out twice per month by Paypal.

Why choose Aflite?

  • They are British so suited to the UK market
  • They are relatively small – which means less competition
  • Merchants maintain a credit balance on Aflite guaranteeing payment
  • Products in a wide variety of niches

If you think that affiliate marketing will be your route into starting your online business then it will be well worth your time investigating Aflite.co.uk. There is no set-up fee for affiliates and you can start pretty much straight away as many merchants approve applications in a matter of minutes or hours.

Actually, you may be looking at this from the other side. You already have a product that you want to promote more widely but you are not making it in the search engines and with conventional advertising methods.

Have you considered recruiting affiliates to market your product? The advantage of using Aflite is that the Aflite Affiliate Network is designed to be accessible for startups, small and medium size online businesses that would like to take advantage of affiliate marketing in the UK.

You will need to set up a credit balance of £100 to get started as the network operates a prepay system to ensure security for your brand new sales force. That’s it though and, from there on in, there are no long term contracts or commitments to worry about. You set your goals and Aflite provide the tracking code for your site. They will advise you how to put it all together too.

Apart from recruiting your own commission only sales team, you will get the added value of high quality links to your site from unrelated places adding to the quality of your site in terms of the Google search algorithm – it’s a winner whichever way you look at it and I strongly recommend you check out the idea of getting on the network!

Aflite, A New Way to Promote and Sell Online

The Aflite Affiliate Network

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Information Marketing? What’s that all about then?

Wednesday, September 14th, 2011

Perfect Home Business e-Book

PERFECT Home Business

One of the things about trying to make money at home is that it is very easy to bogged down in research.

You may find yourself going to page after page on the internet, perhaps joining forums and downloading all sorts of files.

The net result is you get very confused and very disappointed with the number of schemes that are clearly a waste of time.

But out of the mist you may have noticed one consistent theme occurring over and again as a, theoretically, profitable way to make decent money, if you do not have your own tangible products to sell.

The clue, of course, is in the title of this post.

Like you, during the course of research into the Spare Time Billionaire Project I trawled through a ton of literature and there is one document which holds up as a solid basic tutorial in how to set up your own information marketing business at minimal cost.

You can get your FREE copy simply by joining the mailing list for Spare Time Confidential, it will be with you an hour or so after you confirm your email to our, tightly regulated, personal mail handling service.

The “PERFECT Home Based Business” is written by serial small business entrepreneur Paul Kaliher who, as any good young American would, has been grafting since a childhood selling excess fruit to his neighbours!

It’s written in that typical high pumping positive salesman style that makes me feel slightly sick and a little violent toward the author but what he has to say is actually an excellent distillation of his many years experience in selling on-line. What is even better about it is that his system will work even for a modest introverted Brit!

He puts PERFECT in capitals and tags it with a trademark symbol ™ (which means nothing in law but an assertion) because he has devised a clever little acronym which I like when assessing home business opportunities:

  • P: Profitable
  • E: Easy
  • R: Real
  • F: Fits With Your Desired Lifestyle
  • E: E-Friendly
  • C: Competitive
  • T: Testable At Low Risk

That alone caused me to forgive the author his nationality as it serves as a great little yardstick to bear in mind when looking at the plethora of business ideas that have come my way and may come yours too.

Furthermore, Paul goes on to explain how you can go about finding the thing that you know more about than others and turning it into a product. Then he goes on to use a different PERFECT acronym to help you set up a marketing plan.

But you’ll get the idea when you read the guide which, incidentally, at over forty pages of words (no massive screen shots to bulk it out) is an in depth read for an e-guide these days.

It’s yours for free if you sign up on the right or put your email address in the box below.

 

I don’t need your name or any other information and I do not share your details.

There are very few of these how-to manuals that I can recommend and most of those cost over £20 on Amazon or in bookshops so Paul Kaliher’s decision to give this away for free is pretty remarkable.

So, what’s his angle?

Kaliher wants you to sign up for his marketing course and associate lists and puts links in the book to encourage you to do so. You don’t have to, there is no obligation and it’s just residual income for him but, every penny counts!

What’s my angle?

I want to let you know all the stuff I learned on the project that I cannot put on the web because it’s a little scary and works too damn well to be handed out like sweets at Christmas and with luck upsell my own expert services as your business begins to take off.

Don’t forget you can cancel your subscription to emails any time. I do not do pressure selling here!

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An alternative method for affiliate marketing – Viglink

Thursday, September 8th, 2011

Never frightened to try something new, I’ve decided to give Viglink a whirl. They sell themselves as an easy alternative method for monetizing your website with affiliation to a wide variety of merchants without having to sign up for individual affiliate programmes such as Amazon associates and so on.

The advantage of Viglink over other such services is that it is not going to interrupt your reading pleasure by bothering you with irritating pop-up advertising or such like and, if you click on a link from one of the articles here you’ll be able to take advantage of great deals and I might earn $0.0000001 if you decide to buy something.

As with other things, I’m trying this here myself to see whether it is something I can recommend to clients at a later date. I’ll also be letting loyal readers here know how it performs too.

I am looking forward to seeing how the interactive dashboard works too as it will be a good way of finding out more detail about the things readers here are interested in and want to know more about. Shortly they will be writing a report to let me know how much I should expect to earn per month and I shall compare that with what actually happens sometime in September.

One of the drawbacks that this programme holds in common with many other affiliate programmes is that it takes months for you to get your money. They are quite up front about that, which is cool, as many other affiliate programmes leave that detail far down in the tiny print. Another is that they make their money taking a cut out of the commissions paid by the actual merchant, meaning that the earnings paid to the member are lower than direct affiliation. Their argument is that it would take such a long time and effort to sign up for the myriad programmes out there that it would not be worth it and as a blogger you have the possibility of a single link in one article earning something.

Well, we’ll see what happens.

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