It seems Google is run by incompetent fools – at least in the web spam department (or are they?). Their recent PR update is outrages! Although their aim is to reduce web spam – I believe they have a different agenda when they pushed the ‘update PR’ button on their PC.
 What difference could they possibly make apart from reducing global PR stats?
Advertisers would still have cash to burn, to buy links from sites and to exploit SEO further using many other ‘unethical’ ways deemed by Google in order to get their search engine ranking up.
Publishers would still seek ways/methods to monetize their sites and there would be a never ending supply of new websites which would be added into the pool of sites participating in link sales and paid posts.
Google can penalize these sites one-by-one or rather manually but how far can they go? Google commented that their recent update uses some form of manual assessment on whether the site ‘deserves’ to be demoted in terms of their PR.
But I find it laughable that they don’t even dare to ‘touch’ a few high profile sites which still trade links or rather sponsored posts, one way or another. Do they fear these ‘high profile’ sites, which someday might repel and launch a massive anti-Google campaign and indirectly cause Google’s stocks on NASDAQ to come crashing down? (That’s what happened on E*Trade)
You can interpret paid posts and sponsored links two ways – Your way or Google’s way.
Sponsored posts/paid links (interpreted my way) – advertisers just want some buzz from you and pay you money so that their business can gain exposure from the paid post that you wrote or simply to divert some of your traffic back to their website through the paid link.
Sponsored posts/paid links (interpreted Google’s way) – either way, it infringes their TOS as it screws up their algorithm when it comes to search engine ranking (or does it?) Either way, you are not allowed to write any paid reviews or put any sponsored links on your site or your PR would be demoted, you loose web traffic and advertisers wouldn’t want to advertise on your site anymore.
The online advertisement industry yields billions of dollars in revenue every year and the big three namely Microsoft, Yahoo and Google are seizing every opportunity to increase their market share.
The main question remained unanswered – did Google’s recent move to penalize sites that published sponsored posts and paid link have anything to do with their main agenda of securing a much larger market share in the online advertising arena?
I felt the recent PR update was pretty biased and although they say PR is dead – is it really dead? The answer lies within you! (and Google)
You Comment I Follow!
Do you think that the recent PR update was fair or controversial?
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Google is watching – each time you update your blog with paid postings, your PR gets demoted. I didn’t update one of my blogs and it remained PR4 until end of October – after I have updated it with paid posts, Google demoted my PR from 4 to 2 and now 0.
I believe Google has changed their algorithm to update any site’s PR once a paid post is detected. For example, if you use words such as
1. sponsored
2. brought to you by
3. this is a paid post
4. PayPerPost
OR
5. Text Link Ads
Google will know that you are posting a paid post and subsequently demote your PR. Getting penalized by Google doesn’t mean that paid blogging is dead. You can still write paid posts provided you take necessary steps to prevent Google from detecting it – by not using any of the words mentioned above and writing paid opportunities that is similar to your blog’s category.
On the other hand, you can use paid posting alternatives such as
1.SponsoredReviews – you don’t need to disclose anything and you can even earn up to $175 per referral using their new referral system
2. Smorty/ReviewMe/PayU2Blog – you can use these but there are limited opportunities available
3. AssociatedContent – Write articles and get paid for each of your articles! I made close to $500 bucks from writing articles for AssociatedContent alone
Read my Free Make Money Online Guide here.
However, if you have yet to diversify your online earnings, you should try diversifying into
1. Traffic exchange sites
2. Link directories
3. Affiliate Marketing
I just bought a domain yesterday and will be developing it into an affiliate center. The domain is BestBuyout.com and I hope to capture traffic from Best Buy. I believe that I will be spending most of my time developing this site.
On the other hand, I’m also shopping for good domain names with PR on GoDaddy. Who knows I might land myself with a nice PR6 domain name – that would surely brighten up my day :) AndrewOoi bought a PR4 for only $18.99 from GoDaddy.
What other online ventures are you aware of?
You Comment I Follow!
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In response to Google’s clampdown on sites selling links such as PayPerPost and Text Link Ads, IZEA has launched their own website ranking system called RealRank. According to IZEA, RealRank uses a different metric system which more or less gives advertisers more accurate info regarding your website’s performance. See a screenshot of PayPerPost’s RealRank in action:
However, I personally think that RealRank is not a strong selling point for IZEA or rather PayPerPost. Google still hold the upper hand when it comes to search engine traffic. Sites which were penalized earlier by Google have started surrendering to Google – most of them took some time to clear paid posts off their site while the rest have stopped using Text Link Ads.
Even with RealRank in place, I doubt that it would have any ‘real’ effect in their market place. For example, I noticed that there are still hundreds of paid opportunities in PayPerPost with no taker. People are simply scared to be penalized by Google while advertisers are demanding for quality links from publishers– PR5 and above.
My 2 Cents:
Publishers are the ones who suffer the most. As publishers, we just want a method to effectively monetize our sites – so that we can pay our bills or to create a career out of blogging. With Google’s stance in penalizing sites, we lost a huge percentage of our paid blogging income. I myself lost more than 50% of what I usually earn from my paid blogging activities. What makes things worst is there aren’t many paid opportunities out there which is as lucrative as paid blogging.
 I find Google guilty of monopolizing the online advertising arena. There is nothing wrong monetizing one’s site – there is no law or rather ‘bill’ in the US parliament stating that blogs can’t sell links. Sure it does affect the search engine ranking of one’s site but I think that it’s plain crude to punish blogs by severely reducing the PR.
Sure enough, rather than ‘manually determining sites which sell links and penalizing their PR’, I believe that Google has the capability of creating a better and more accurate algorithm to rank sites on their search engine.
I find Google guilty as charged.
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 I’m currently trying to diversify my online income – Google’s stance to slap blogs has caused me to loose 30-50% of my paid blogging income. Paid blogging is lucrative and you can earn ‘easy and fast money’ because it just takes 10 minutes to write 100 words in your post and publish it on your blog. If you get paid $10 for the blog post, every word that you type earns you 10 cents!
Based on my blog’s performance:
1. I don’t have high traffic
2. 99.9% of the people who visits my blog don’t want to buy anything
3. The other 0.01% are new to blogging and would only purchase 1 or 2 months of web hosting services using my affiliate link
Sounds hopeless doesn’t it? Here are my plans:
1. I’m trying to create an affiliate center whereby I can publish my affiliate links on the site. I’ll be buying a new domain for this affiliate center.
2. Use Adsense to target keywords so that the web hits would be referred directly to the article
3. Pay minimal for hits using Adsense
4. Use free classified ads to promote the page
5. Social media sites are your best friend!
Based on my previous CJ sales, 5 out of 2,000 web hits generated some form of sales on that single article. I paid RM43++ for the 2,000 web hits on Adsense but I got an accumulated sales of more than $100 or RM333++.
The plan will commence next month.
On How to Make Money the Evil Way in Affiliate Marketing: Email me using this Contact Me form and I will provide you with a simple guide FOC.
Disclaimer: If you get caught doing this and your account gets suspended and you loose all your money – it’s not my fault :)
On my previous post on Adwords and BlogCatalog:
keeyit thinks it darn expensive! While Edward recommends social networking sites. xBrain has free hits to offer while Nik has a great idea on online advertising.
Do you think my plan will work? What are your thoughts? |
Adwords Marketing Campaign:
I have been marketing my site using Adwords for 10 days ending November 10 – so how did it go? One word – Expensive!
Paying RM0.52 cents for a web hit is too expensive – at least in Malaysia. When converted to US currency it’s roughly $0.15 per hit. If you are living in US, Europe or UK, I bet that this is darn cheap but for the price that I’m paying, I don’t think that it is worth it.
Throughout my marketing campaign, Adwords sent me 265 clicks to my site which totaled RM137.68. Look at the screenshot below:
My 1 cent: I rather spend my money someplace else such as purchasing paid reviews from other sites rather than paying one lump sum to Google. I believe that Social Media Marketing on the other hand is much more effective as the hits are natural and it’s free.
BlogCatalog Campaign:
On the other hand, I paid $25 bucks to be listed on BlogCatalog for a month. BlogCatalog is a PR7 site with an Alexa rank of 1,400++. I was attracted to the amount of traffic going through the site but to my disappointment, none of these traffic were diverted to my site.
I was expecting BlogCatalog to give me at least 100-200 hits on my first week, but so far according to my customized web stats software – they hardly contributed more than 15 unique hits. However, I noticed when you do a search on Google using ‘Make Money Online Malaysia’, you’ll see my site listed in the top 10 list under BlogCatalog.
My 2 cents: $25 bucks without any traffic coming to my site is plain stupid (yeah I’m really stupid in this case).
Concluding using my 3 cents:
1. Never advertise on BlogCatalog – even when they say they have a monthly traffic exceeding 1 million hits per month.
2. Google Adwords is cheap when you are advertising in the US, UK or EU. Unless you have cash to burn, try using other advertising networks or try using social media sites which is free.
On my previous evil backlink post:
Edward said don’t use the evil plan too often while xBrain recommends using commenthunt.com to check blogs with PR and ‘do follow’ tag. Mani Karthik on the other hand thinks it’s pure evil but it does not have effect on my ‘Google juice’.
You comment, I follow! What are your thoughts? |
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