30 November 2006

Internet Business Qualifications

Did you know that you can now study online for an accredited qualification to show all the skills you have gained from setting up your own website or blog? I have just enrolled for this type of course myself, and although I am nominally enrolled at a bricks and mortar establishment, I will actually be studying at an online college with a real tutor who contacts me by email. The range of courses that you can take is huge - it encompasses graduate courses in Business studies, Information Technology, even Psychology. I recommend this method of business learning for anyone who wants to improve their skills and reputation. It is available in dozens of countries and you no longer need to live close to a seat of learning in order to study.

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Adwords Arbitrage Threat to Affiliate Sites

If you have heard of Adsense Arbitrage you will know it is a way of playing the Adwords market to increase Adsense income from your site or blog. It is financially risky - it looks like dire "quality score" penalties could await Adsense Arbitrage sites. I leave it to Shoemoney to explain:

'Adwords Quality Score. It has been no secret that Google has been working on launching a new quality score bot. I have read threads about it on pretty much every forum. I have also been getting tons of emails about the subject asking me what I think is going to happen.

I talked to a close (anonymous) friend inside Adwords and she tells me the big changes are purely targeted at the arbitragers. This really again should come as no shock. She was super vague on specifics but did tell me that they were fingerprinting (my word) links and text on page that would indicate the page was a landing for contextual search arbitrage or cost per action arbitrage. For those in Rio Linda that means if your running a landing page and directly linking with your affiliate link or running a scraper with nothing but Yahoo/Google ads then YOU'RE IN TROUBLE!

People inside Microsoft AdCenter also told me a while back that they had finger printed affiliate links and were going to start penalizing (denying or making you pay more) those that were doing that. Soooo what does all this mean? MASK YOUR LINKS. If you have a landing page for products for science sake (anyone watch southpark in the last 2 we If you have a landing page for products for science sake (anyone watch southpark in the last 2 weeks will get that joke) DO NOT directly link with your affiliate code. Make sure you have your own internal redirection system. For instance if I was paying for Google Adwords to goto shoemoney.com and on shoemoney.com I had offers for RING TONES with AzoogleAds. I have 2 ways to link to AzoogleAds Ring tone offers.

http://c.azjmp.com/az/ch.php?f=3375&i=12345 –> THIS IS BAD
OR
http://shoemoney.com/link.php?go=3375 –> this is GOOD!

Then of course in your robots.txt you disallow link.php

Ohh and for those of you doing contextual arbitrage…. unless you're cloaking your content prepare for impact.

Keep in mind Google is not going to stop letting you do this… They are just going to charge you more cause of your “quality score”. There is just to much money to be made right now in arbitrage and Google wants a bigger slice. '
From Shoemoney 9 November

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Precious Investing

Always alert to new investment opportunities, I have been considering buying some gold - seriously! Rather than giving each other some useless Christmas Present that is left at the back of a cupboard before being sent to the charity shop, I would rather buy my nearest and dearest something beautiful with a hint of magic. I am fascinated by precious metals and their history: gold has been used as a currency and investment since ancient times, and can still be purchased in the form of ingots. As an investment, gold can quickly be turned into cash if required, and it is a beautiful appreciating asset.

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24 November 2006

Google Guide - Dynamically Created Web Pages

Google has a new way to deal with dynamically created web pages. Dynamically created web pages often cause problems with search engines. If your web pages are dynamically created, it's likely that many search engines have difficulty indexing them.

Why do search engines have problems with dynamically created pages? Many search engines don't like dynamically created pages because they might get in an infinite loop if they follow some dynamically created pages.

Google has an official statement about this in its webmaster guidelines:
'If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a '?' character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.'

What did Google change?
Until November, Google had the following statement in its webmaster guidelines:
'Don't use '&id=' as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index.'

This entry has been removed from Google's guidelines. Here's the official statement from Google's blog:
'[Google now indexes] URLs that contain that parameter. So if your site uses a dynamic structure that generates it, don't worry about rewriting it -- we'll accept it just fine as is.

Keep in mind, however, that dynamic URLs with a large number of parameters may be problematic for search engine crawlers in general, so rewriting dynamic URLs into user-friendly versions is always a good practice when that option is available to you.

If you can, keeping the number of URL parameters to one or two may make it more likely that search engines will crawl your dynamic urls."

What does this mean to your web site? If you have a dynamically created web site that uses only one or two parameters to create web pages then it's likely that Google can index your web pages without problems.

If you use more parameters then you should rewrite your URLs. Rewriting your URLs makes sure that most search engines will be able to index your site.

If you cannot rewrite your URLs then it helps if at least one stable link points to a dynamically created page. If a web page can be found through a direct link then it is more likely that search engines index that page.

If you want to find out how Google's search engine spider sees your web pages, take a look at IBP's search engine spider simulator. The spider simulator is available in IBP's free demo version and it allows you to check your web pages with any search engine spider."

From Free search engine ranking facts newsletter
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09 November 2006

Earn Google Adsense Income without a Website or Blog

You can make money from Adsense even without a website or even a blog of your own.
Many sites, directories and forums share Adsense earnings with members and contributors to their sites. There are many popular public sites where AdSense publishers can earn money on their Adsense account.

1. Simpy is a social bookmarking site every member has a public page (e.g. flowergirl). When you can enter your Google AdSense ID into Simpy, your public page will display adsense ads and you receive the earnings. You will not see the ads while you are logged in, so you cannot click the Adsense Ads in error.


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