Avinashsing Sunkur

Two days ago, I decided to try Google Link Units. I’ve always been put off by them because you require two clicks on the link unit to earn money. Anyway, I thought I’d give them another go as I wanted to test whether I could get better targeted ads through the link units. Unpleasantly, I found out that my overall CTR for adsense had decreased which meant my earnings went down as well. My CTR decreased by as much as 4%!

My opinion on this is that visitors to my site saw the link units which were better targeted than the actual adsense ads and clicked on them instead. However link units will display a list of related ads on the category which has been clicked and the results page for these ads are not very pretty at all – it’s like google search results page which is nothing like the theme of my site. Therefore the visitors couldn’t be bothered to click on the ads again which meant my earnings were affected.

All in all, I really think that Link Units are a waste of time unless you put them down your webpage as an exit point.

The previous changes that I made were successful and the CTR is now between 6-8% but the problem I am having is lack of targeted ads on the website. So I’ve decided to use google section targeting to emphasise which content I want ads to be pulled out from. I’ve focused on h1 tag, the content itself and added a weight=ignore tag to the navigation menu.

I’ve also fixed the problem with line breaks in the description meta tag (i was using an escape character “/” which was not needed in the php regular expression code).

I’ve also added a new link unit to the navigation and I’m curious to see how this will now perform. I’m hoping to will drive category related ads to the question being asked but I can’t be sure until I’ve tested it.

Couple of years ago, directory submissions were a great way to boost search engine rankings. People started to use targeted keywords instead of company name to help them achieve better rankings. Nowadays link from most directories do not hold any weight. There are still a few good directories but the majority of directories are worthless.

If you have an aged site, then submitting to directories won’t help you. However for new sites, it is a good way to get an initial boost of backlinks. Of course they will not contribute at all towards ranking but at least you’ll be getting a few backlinks which will help with your PageRank (PR).

The problem with directory submission is that it is a tedious task. You absolutely need to outsource it and fortunately you can get like 1000 directory submissions for a cheap $10. Although people use software to automate the whole process, you will inevitably have to scan through the long list of emails to confirm your listing and that takes a lot of time but there’s nothing you can do about it (well except if you write a program that loops through your emails and visits the confirmation link).

The only benefit that directory submission can have for an aged website is that it will hide your important backlinks. People check competitors backlinks everyday and if your good links are obvious, then your competitor will try to get a backlink from the same website too. Therefore you need a way to hide your backlinks and directory submissions can do that for you.

To make a new website successful, you need to be building links to the website right from the start. You need to get backlinks incrementally and gradually otherwise you may get penalised by google for building links too fast. Below are the link building techniques that should be applied:

1. Directory submissions (general directories, blog directories, niche directories)
2. RSS feed submissions (if you have an RSS feed, most blogs have one)
3. Forum posting (multiple forums, 20 posts each with a signature link)
4. Press release
5. Article marketing (eg ezinearticles)
6. Blog commenting
7. Yahoo/MSN Answers
8. Social bookmarking/networking (tweet, facebook, digg, stumbleupon)
9. Squidoo lens/hubpages/free blogs creation
10. Obtaining links from relevant websites/blogs (whichever way you feel comfortable to acquire these links)

The idea is to have a varied link profile for your website coming from different websites targetting different anchors. Squidoo lens/hubpages/free blogs which are created need to be marketed first before any benefit could be seen from them. Therefore you can do cheap directory submissions/social bookmarking for these to boost the value of these pages.

So I’m not having the best CTR and I want to change some things round. Things which have been changed:

1. Menu has been reintroduced

2. Ads in the middle just after question. (1 after subject, 1 after question description and 1 after answer(s))

3. Post your own answers or comments changed to Can you answer this question?

Now let’s see how that affects the CTR.

Okay, the CTR of my ads are not that great and I know i could do better. So I’ve decided to test a new ad layout yesterday. The problem with the page in question is that the amount of text is not a lot and the ads appear to stand out more than blending in. Anyway, i’ll test it for 2 weeks and see if there’s any improvement in the CTR.

On the 14th of January 2009, i tweaked one webpage of my site in the hope that it will no longer be penalised by the Over Optimization Penalty (OOP) filter of Google. 2 days ago I noticed that the webpage was back in Google’s index, however the ranking is not back yet. This webpage has been penalised since October last year and i couldn’t find it in the index for several months until now. I filed a re-consideration request as well but nothing came out of it.

It was only re-indexed after I made changes to the text of the webpage. The conclusion is that OOP filter is something that is applied to webpages which seem to be highly over optimised as in url, page title, h1 tag are too tighly aligned and the keyword density is a bit high too. For that particular page, i couldn’t change the url because of incoming links and couldn’t change the title as well because this was too risky. So i ended up modifying the h1 tag and dilluted the keyword density for the phrase i was targetting. I’m really happy that it’s now back in Google index but it is ranking beneath another page of my website now for that keyword. This leads me to think that there’s some kind of penalisation which is still being applied to the ranking of this webpage for this particular keyword.

Searching for a unique phrase on that web page shows the webpage which is a good sign and searching for another variation of the keyword shows the page on search results page 2 which confirms my thinking. I’ll give it a few days to see if the rankings come back without doing anything.

Note: It took nearly 3 weeks for google to re-include the web page in its index. From the server logs, i think google crawled it 3 times within that period. However the cache of the page when it first got re-included was for the 21st of december 2008. It was a really old cache which had the over-optimised text. But subsequently the cache got updated to the new version on Feb the 3rd, 2009 when i checked on the 7th of Feb.

I was redirecting a web page with a 302 redirect accidentally and I found out that the page which was being redirected got a PageRank of 2 which is the same PR as that of the landing page. Here’s the scenario:

1. Redirect Page A to Page B with a 302

2. If Page B has PR5, Page A will be assigned PR5 in the next PR update as long as the 302 redirect is still up.

Now you may be wondering why you would want to do such a thing. Well for people who sell links on their sites, they want to have the highest PR to get the maximum value for the links placed. If they have been 302 redirecting to a site they own which has a PR of 6, then even though the other URL does not have any incoming links, it will be assigned PR6. Once the visual toolbar is updated, they will then remove the redirect and when you go to that page, you will see a fake PR of 6 for a site which doesn’t have any backlinks. If they don’t remove the redirect, you will be redirected to the real url with real PR (but that’s going to defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it).

So before buying any links, make sure you’re checking the backlinks in yahoo explorer for credibility!

Let’s see whether these forums links could be killing my SERPs! So i must have about 50 links with the same anchor text pointing to an internal page on my website and the web page appears to be penalised. I edited the content a bit to dillute the keyword density about 2 weeks ago but it didn’t solve the problem. Yahoo and MSN are not showing the page in their search results as well. So there must be something about that particular page which is preventing it from ranking. But what?

I lost most of my rankings for really good keywords in October 2008 but today it seems my website is back to normal in Google. Some keywords are ranking better than they used to back then and some are just a few places down in Google. Now i don’t know whether this is a temporary thing, like some algorithm update but if that stays the same, i’ll be a happy bunny.

As far as the rankings themselves are concerned, most of the keywords have now become more competitive and larger companies are trying very hard with their SEO and spending large amounts of money on it. However, optimisation needs to be done very carefully and there’s this very fine line which if crossed gets your site penalised and makes it very hard to recover from (and may take months as well).

So let’s see if this new update lasts for a bit! (fingers crossed, it will)