Pretty amazing what the internet can do...

Google: The world’s number 1 (sucking) Search Engine?

March 8, 2009 by Big Internet Marketing  
Filed under General

It’s Sunday and it is time to Kick Google a bit. Take note, this post is not to whine about Google but just to show you what can be done and how easy these things are. So, don’t misinterpret this post. I love Google cause they bring in dollars for free. But, that is besides the actual point of this post. :)

You know, people say, Google is the world’s number one and best search engine due to its perfect ways to give the searcher what he or she wants. Sure… It gives a certain group of people what they want, but, mainly, they are NOT the searcher crowd. The people who think Google is the greatest are indeed us, the internet marketers… (And, the Big G’s group of stock holders of course)

Google states: Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. We work hard to return the most relevant results for every search we conduct. To that end, we encourage site managers to make their content straightforward and easily understood by users and search engines alike.

(Every time I feel sad, I log on to the page where I can read that. Moments later I am laughing. It IS the biggest joke…) Then, they claim this:

Search Quality is the name of the team responsible for the ranking of Google search results. Our job is clear: A few hundreds of millions of times a day people will ask Google questions, and within a fraction of a second Google needs to decide which among the billions of pages on the web to show them — and in what order. Lately, we have been doing other things as well. But more on that later.

For something that is used so often by so many people, surprisingly little is known about ranking at Google. This is entirely our fault, and it is by design. We are, to be honest, quite secretive about what we do. There are two reasons for it: competition and abuse. Competition is pretty straightforward. No company wants to share its secret recipes with its competitors. As for abuse, if we make our ranking formulas too accessible, we make it easier for people to game the system. Security by obscurity is never the strongest measure, and we do not rely on it exclusively, but it does prevent a lot of abuse.

The details of the ranking algorithms are in many ways Google’s crown jewels. We are very proud of them and very protective of them. By some estimate, more than one thousand programmer/scientist years have gone directly into their development, and the rate of innovation has not slowed down. (source Official Google Blog)

What crap is this?

Ready to go down the rabbit hole just a tiny bit?

Google is the easiest search engine to manipulate. Seriously. And, if they claim to be, they ought to do something about that to actually be, or, stop claiming to be.  That would be false advertising and we can not have any of that.  And, then I do not mean what they are already doing: Just saying they do something and ARE the best…

To be honest, they have been hiding LONG enough behind their impeccable imago.

Google is a cash machine. Especially for internet marketers like myself. Sure, I will not state otherwise. Once you know how, Google is the place to cash in. But, saying that Google is the best search engine providing the searcher with only the best results related to the searcher’s inquiry  is to be called utter bull shit.

Let me give you two examples:

First, looking at the keywords ‘private jet for sale‘ (Results 1 – 10 of about 317,000 for Private jets for sale)

To give you an idea: This is what other companies pay per click on Adwords: (And, obviously, the number one on this result page is NOT paying)

Around 3-4000 people searching. So, let’s say 1,000 click. That is more than $8k p/month on advertising costs that the Adwords advertisers need to pay, and that Omnijet in this case is saving. They get the traffic for free.

Sure, the results are targeted precisely to the keyword. Yet, my point in this part of the post is showing you how easy it is to manipulate going AGAINST Google’s TOS)

And, before I will show you the way the first page (with red circle) is build, I will show you part of Google’s TOS on for instance Keyword Stuffing:

Keyword stuffing

“Keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.

To fix this problem, review your site for misused keywords. Typically, these will be lists or paragraphs of keywords, often randomly repeated. Check carefully, because keywords can often be in the form of hidden text, or they can be hidden in title tags or alt attributes.

Once you’ve made your changes and are confident that your site no longer violates our webmaster guidelines, submit your site for reconsideration.

Not familiar with keyword stuffing?

Simple, you basically make a html document, lash in as many on topic keywords as possible, hence ‘keyword stuffing’ and your page.

I know, I am not such a writer, so, to make it more clear to you, here is what Wikipedia says:

Keyword stuffing is considered to be an unethical search engine optimization (SEO) technique. Keyword stuffing occurs when a web page is loaded with keywords in the meta tags or in content. The repetition of words in meta tags may explain why many search engines no longer use these tags.

Keyword stuffing had been used in the past to obtain maximum search engine ranking and visibility for particular phrases. This method is completely outdated and adds no value to rankings today. In particular, Google no longer gives good rankings to pages employing this technique.

Hiding text from the visitor is done in many different ways. Text colored to blend with the background, CSS “Z” positioning to place text “behind” an image — and therefore out of view of the visitor — and CSS absolute positioning to have the text positioned far from the page center are all common techniques. By 2005, many invisible text techniques were easily detected by major search engines.

Ask nearly any black hat SEO marketer about keyword stuffing and they say it is passe and not effective anymore. But, is it?

So, based upon the above, Google does not allow, nor will it rank high, pages that practice keyword stuffing.

Have a look at the source code of the page and try to see, whether or not it is hard to determine if this page is using ‘keyword stuffing’ or not: (sorry for the huuuuge image… :) )

What? Me? Keyword stuffing? Noooooh, not me…

What do you think?

Well, I think this can be defined as ‘keyword stuffing alright. So, if we were to follow Google’s TOS, we should, once we find this out, report this to Google so that they can take these nincompoops out of the index.

Ha, guess what? I know someone who did report this site. Many times. Google does nothing. Google states that keyword stuffing can ‘ can harm your site’s ranking’ Then, how about the above results? How is that harming the site? If at all, it is harming other parties (stupid enough) to follow the Google TOS. It harms sites that pay $8k per month on Adwords for sure. (should it rank confirm Google’s TOS then ok. But, is it?)

Fair? Nope. Therefore, I think it is time Google stops hiding behind their so called imago.

Want another typical case? Why not, it involves a site of mine which does not participate in black hat techniques and is filled with relative (quality) content.

Sure, the site was made to rank high in order to make sales on the Howies Apprentice 3 launch coming Monday.

I watched this page as a hawk and saw it land on the #1 spot on the keywords ‘howies apprentice 3′ amongst others. I managed to do this following Google’s TOS at all times. Yes, it can be done.

Thing is, today I noticed my site was overtaken by someone else:

Hold on a minute. The second ranking is the basic ‘about’ wordpress page. How can THAT rank based on being quality and relative content?

Please… Have a look at the perfect on topic and high quality relevant posts that are to be seen: (PS: I could have copied the text, but I refuse to have such textual crap on my blog, therefore the pic:

What on earth is this? Sure, it is English… but.. wtf are they writing about?

Is this nice related and quality content that deserves to rank #1?

In my opinion, if we have to believe Google it shouldn’t. Unless there is some kind of secret message embedded that only customers who use Google and want to buy Howies Apprentice program 3 understand.

I certainly don’t understand it.

Of course I know how this page has been made. It took the owner less than 2 clicks to do. She, since I know her, then fires up software to get back links pointing to this crap site. She does this with submitting screen savers to software download sites and she does this buy firing this kind of content to massive blog networks all with references made to her site.

That my friends is the key to success it seems

Where there are black hat marketers who say keyword stuffing and screen saver submissions to rank are not effective anymore, Google seems to think different.

What do other bloggers say?

Just read on Shoemoney.com that not only the organic search results are attracted to spam and scraped sites. Ranking on Google has become a business as you can see on Problogger.

So, conclusion is this:

If you want to rank highly on Google following their TOS you can. You need not to worry taking over HIGH competitive keywords as easy as you may hope but doing it right you can beat millions of other competitors to it with the greatest ease. This is what I do and have made thousands of dollars with personally. My shit works. Period.

However,

The black hat techniques ’she’ uses work as well and I have to say, even better.

The funny  thing is this though.

I make way more sales then she does. She may rank well but her conversions stink. Trust me, I know.

So, another conclusion is that if you do not know the whole package on how it is done, you may rank well but won’t convert your visitors in to buyers. They simply go back to Google to find my site lol.

If you know how to convert but don’t know how to rank then you are still lost. Find the key to both of them and you’re smiling.

Anyone interested to know how this is done? I might just tell you how you can. :)

PS: I know there will be people saying that the keywords in the above examples are piss easy. to rank for …

Sure, I will be the first to agree. Yet, I have seen sites (I made) beating tens of millions of other sites in a matter of a day’s work. Once you know how, yes: too easy.

But, do you know how to convert those visitors too?

Another question I have is this:

What do you think of Google?

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Technorati Tags: best search engine, black hat seo, General, Google, google is crap, Howies Apprentice 3, Marketing, search engine optimization, seo, Traffic

Search Engine Optimization

February 28, 2009 by Big Internet Marketing  
Filed under Free Traffic

Somebody just send me this article about Search Engine Optimization which I wanted to share with you. There are some pretty interesting points mentioned in it. More important is that it gives perfect way to introduce to you a program (or two rather) that will make it so you never need to be worrying about SEO EVER again. Let’s read the article first and at the end I will sort of shortly let you in on what I know will happen pretty soon from now… :)

Do SEO right and get free traffic from the Search Engines. Sounds too good to be true? Trust me, do  this part correct and you will get free traffic from the search engines.

Today it seems as though most webmasters know quite a bit about search engine optimization. Here is a list in the order from most important to least important of tips I have found to work the best.

1) Google PageRank (PR), which I have discussed at lengths earlier in this book. This is the single most important thing for any site (especially those which have a lot of pages).

2) Title of your page. This goes in the <title> </title> tags of your webpage. This should include approximately 50-80 characters/7 words max (usually a lot less) and should not simply be keywords listed. Many search engines view that as spam. Sometimes what I feel works the best is making short titles for each page with a direct keyword in each one. This is not only what shows up when someone searches in search engines, but it is also believed to be the single heaviest item that most search engines consider when performing a search.

3) Content is king, especially original content. Slapping a picture up on a page and writing a sentence about it will not get you the search engine placement that a page with 400-1000 words of rich content will. Title images with keywords, while also using alt tags for images, and don’t overdo the content optimization. It is good to include your keywords in your content, however, if you overdo the keyword insertion, you will do more harm than good.

This is called ‘keyword stuffing”. A good guideline for the frequency that your keyword should appear in a content page is about 4%. Anything over 8% would most likely get you penalized, while anything under 1% may not even be picked up on the Search engines’ radar. Also what is strongly suggested is that you include your keywords in your heading on the top of your site. You should use either <h1>, <h2>, or <h3> tags for the heading.

4) Your Domain. Try to make your Domain contain keywords for the market you are targeting. If you are creating a website about “dog food”, then choose a domain name with at least one of those 2 words in it. Examples would be Mut-food.com, dog-muchies.com or even better yummydogfood.com. Remember though that you have to balance search engine optimization with the ability of members to remember the domain name and come back. Even though something like dogfood-dogfood.com may be good for SEO, it isn’t something people will quickly remember. Also, Search engines usually don’t discriminate between .com, .net, .biz, .info, etc, but people do. Choose a .com domain unless it is absolutely necessary to choose one of the others.

5) Be Smart – Don’t just use the most popular keyword phrases. The market is so competitive that you should be sure to include some niche keywords too.

Another thing that I have found to be true is that most search engines including Google do not like PHP scripted pages very much. If your site is PHP based, you want to have it scripted to appear as .html extensions to visitors and search engines.

Most programmers should understand this request, if you tell them you need “mod rewrite done to make php appear as html”. I have found this to help significantly with Google results.

Meta Tags are also very important to help your site get indexed better in search engines.

You could always choose to skip the line and learn from the best. Personal coaching for instance. Where some gurus will charge your credit cards with $1000,00’s per hour there is one course about to be opened to the public from Howie Schwartz. It is called the Howies Apprentice 3 membership.

Howies Apprentice 3 will teach you the whole concept of getting a site on the first page of Google and you will be taken by the hand by Howie Schwartz himself and his team of internet marketing specialists assuring you that you WILL make your own fortune online. There are some very impressive testimonial videos out there. But, more on Howies Apprentice 3 on a different post in the near future.

Think Search Engine Optimization is too hard? And that it never brings you any result? Think again.

I recommend using WordPress Blogs from now on. This will save you all of the hassle since everything is pre installed and with the help of some pretty amazing plugins your site becomes a SEO MONSTER!

Never worked with Word Press before? Don’t worry! Not so long from now, Blog Crusher will launch. This is a membership for maximum 250 people teaching you everything you need to know PLUS handing you all of the tools you need to truly become successful.

So, if you never had any results before with SEO, paid too much for it or simply do not want to learn how to do it properly then just have a little patience.

So far not much is known to other people. I can tell you, since I have seen it work that it is something you want to get on the inside on.

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Technorati Tags: content page, General, Google, Marketing, search engine optimization, search engines, seo