Press Release Sphere

Before we investigate these arguments, let’s understand some fundamentals of search engine listings. First, most search engines líst web pages, not domains (websites). What that means is that every web page in a domain has to be relevant to a specific search term if it is to be listed.

Secondly, a search engine customer is the person who is using that engine to seek information. It is not an advertiser or the owner of a website. It is the user seeking information. The förm of words that is used by that customer is called a ‘search term’. This becomes a ‘keyword’ when applied to a webmaster trying to anticipate the förm of words that a user will employ to search for their information.

A search engine works by analyzing the semantic content of a web page and determining the relative importance of the vocabulary used, taking into account the title tags, the heading tags and the first text it detects. It will also chëck out text related contextually to what it considers to be the main ‘keywords’ and then rank that page according to how relevant it calculates it to be for the main theme of the page.

It will then examine the number of other web pages that are linked to it, and regard that as a measure of how important, or relevant to the ‘keyword’, that the page is. The value of the links is regarded as peer approval of the content. All of these factors determine how high that page is listed for search terms that are similar contextually to the content of the page.

Without doubt, there are web pages that are lísted high in the search engine indices that contain very little in the way of useful content on the keywords for which they are listed, and have virtually no contextual relevance to any search term. However, a careful investigation of these sites will reveal two things.

The first is that many such web pages are frequently lísted highly only for relatively obscure search terms. If a search engine customer uses a common search term to find the information they are seeking, they will very rarely be led to a site that has little content other than links, but it is possible. The second is that they contain large numbers of links out to other web pages, and it can be assumed that they have at least an equal number of web pages linking back.

It is possible to find such web pages for many keywords. An example is on the first page on Google for the keyword ‘Data VOIP Solutions‘. There is a website there that is comprised only of links. The site itself has little content, but every link leads to either another website that provides useful content, or another internal page full of more links and no content. That is how links can be used to lift a web page high in the SE listings.

Such sites frequently contain only the bare minimum of conventional search engine optimization, but the competition is so low that they gain high listings. You will also find them to contain large numbers of internal pages, every one of which contain the same internal and external links.

It is true, therefore, that it is possible to get a high listing without much content, but with a large number of links. However, is that a legítimate argument for those promoting links against content? Could you reasonably apply that strategy to your website? Could a genuine website really contain thöusands of links to other internal pages and external pages on other websites, and still maintain its intended purpose?

In the second part of this article, titled ‘Search Engine Rank: Google Page Rank Misconceptions‘ I will explode some myths about Page Rank, and explain how many people are wasting their time with reciprocal links, and perhaps even losing through them. It may be that a linking strategy is not so much an option, as a choice between the type of website that you want: to provide genuine information or to make monëy regardless of content.

Improved search engine rank might be synonymous with Google Page Rank, but perhaps only if you want to sacrifice the integrity of your website.

Part 2

Improved search engine rank is difficult enough to obtain without you having to trawl through all that has been written about Google Page Rank in order to find the truth. There are many misconceptions about Page Rank, and Part 2 of this article dispels the most common of them, the first being that Yahoo and MSN have their own version.

In fact this is not so. Yahoo had a beta version of a ‘Web Rank’ visible for a while, ranking complete websites, but it is now offline. MSN has no equivalent as far I can ascertain. The term ‘PageRank’ is a trade mark of Google, which is why I refer to it as Page Rank and not PageRank. A small difference, but a significant one.

If you are one of those that believe that the more links you can get to your website the better, then you are wrong. When Google started the Page Rank frenzy by putting that little green bar on their toolbar, they didn’t realize the consequences of what they were doing. People fought to get as many links to their website as possible, irrespective of the nature of the websites to which they were linking.

That is misconception Number 2. You do not link to websites, you link to web pages, or should I say, you get links back from web pages, not websites. It is, after all, the link back that counts isn’t it? The link away from your site doesn’t count. Wrong! Misconception Number 3. The link to your web page counts no more than the link away from your web page. In fact, it could count less. You could löse out in the reciprocal linking stakes if your web page is worth more than the other person’s.

Let’s dispel that misconception right now. When you receive a link from a web page (not web site) you get a proportion of the Google Page Rank of that web page that depends on the total number of links leaving that page. When you provide a link to another web page, you give away a proportion of your Page Rank that depends on the number of other links leaving your web page.

The Page Rank of the website you get a link from is irrelevant, since that is generally the rank of the Home Page. You will likely find that all these great links you think you have from PR 7 or 8 websites are from a links page that has a PR of ZERO! So you get zilch for the deal. If you are providing them with a link from a page on your site even of PR 1, then you löse! Most people fail to understand that.

No incoming link can have a negative effect on your PR. It can have a zero effect, but not negative. However, if you have an incoming link with zero effect, and an outgoing reciprocal link with a positive effect to the target page, then you will effectively löse PR through the deal. Every web page starts with a PR of 1, and so has that single PR to share amongst other pages to which it is linked. The more incoming links it has, the higher PR it can have to share out.

If your page has a PR of 4 and has three links leaving it, each gets twice the number of PR votes than if 6 links leave it. Your page with a PR of 4 has to get a similar number of PR votes incoming as it gives away to retain its PR. In simple terms, if your PR 4 page is getting links from a PR 8 page with 20 links leaving it, you löse out big time! It’s simple math.

No page ever gives away all of its PR. There is a factor in Google’s calculation that reduces this to below 100% of the total PR of any page. However, that is roughly how it works. You don’t get a proportion of the whole website ranking; you only get part of the ranking of the page on which your link is placed. Since most ‘Links Pages’ tend to be full of other outgoing links, then you won’t get much, and will likely get zero.

That is why automated reciprocal linking software is often a waste of time. If you want to make the best of linking arrangements, then agree with the other webmaster that you will provide each other with a link from equally ranked pages. That way both of you will gain, and neither loses. Some software allows you to make these arrangements.

Another misconception is that only links from external web pages count. In fact, links between your own web pages can be arranged to provide one page with most of the page rank available. Every page has a start PR of 1, so the more pages you have on your site then the more PR you have to play with and distribute to pages on your website of your choice.

Search engine rank can be improved by intelligent use of links, both external and internal, but Google Page Rank does not have the profound effect on your search engine listing that many have led you to believe. Good onsite SEO usually wins so keep that in mind when designing your website.
About The Author
Peter normally has his new websites listed on Google, Yahoo and MSN within two days, and consistently gets high search engine listings. His website Improved Search Engine Rank offers to show you how exactly how he does it, including how Page Rank and SEO can be used together to achieve the highest listings for your keyword.

In a post to the Inside AdWords blog, “Invalid Clicks – Google’s Overall Numbers“, Google gave a brief outline of how it claims AdWords’ 100+ data-point clíck detection system works to filter out 99.98% of the nearly 10% of overall clicks Google determines to be invalid.

Other industry analysts have pegged the number between 15% and 20% with the clíck fraud index maintained by Clíck Forensics suggesting, “The average clíck fraud rate of Pay Per Clíck advertisements appearing on search engine content networks was 19.2 percent for Q4.”

Google has nevër given specific figures citing how much of the PPC-traffic they filter is caught and disregarded as invalid clíck activity saying it fluctuates from month to month but is below 10%. Though evidence of these clicks might appear in server logs or be noted as clíck fraud by third party analysts, Google says it does not charge for them. In the absence of a fee charged to an advertiser, the most such invalid clíck activity can be called is attempted fraud.

On one side, a large third party verification system suggests a very high percentage of clíck fraud. On the other, Google says that invalid clicks represent less than 10% of all AdWords traffíc and of those, only 0.02% get past Google’s detection filters.

The true numbers likely sit somewhere in between but when it comes to understanding clíck fraud by the numbers, Google tends to play the numbers down. Though Google is the world’s largest repository of information and a publicly traded company running the largest advertising system online, it is amazingly secretive about its data. Google has gone as far as balking at pursuing any legal action against cyber-criminals if such action might expose their systems in open court.

Proving or disproving clíck fraud is next to impossible without access to the data Google holds closest. Unfortunately, the only numbers we have to work with are the ones Google gives us.

Google Product Manager for Trust and Safety, Shuman Ghosemajumder uses Google’s current revenue rate when he notes that, “…every percentage point of invalid clicks we throw out represents over $100 millíon/year in potential revenue foregone.”

This is an important point to remember as we slow down the spin to ask some critical questíons about the 0.02% claim. First, let’s cover some things we do know.

While Google can claim to have cut the rate of actual clíck fraud to 0.02% of all clicks, it is unwilling or unable to provide hard evidence to prove the point. Instead, they provide images.

According to Google’s year end financial statements, Google saw revenues of $10.6 billion. Of that, $10.5 billion was generated through AdWords advertising. Assuming that the rate of known invalid clicks is about 10%, Google expunges about $1.05 billion in suspicious clíck activity each year. 1% of Google’s PPC activity equals approximately $105 millíon, similar to the number Shuman Ghosemajumder cites.

Google puts a great deal of effort into detecting and deleting pay per clíck charges stemming from invalid clicks. We know that they recognized the enormity of the problem early on. In December 2004, chief financial officer George Reyes told a Credít Suisse First Boston investor conference that clíck fraud could critically damage the PPC model.

CNN quoted Reyes saying, “I think something has to be done about this really, really quickly, because I think, potentially, it threatens our business model.”

According to the article, Reyes went on to say, “There’s a lot of bad guys out there that are trying to take advantage of this and it costs, I’m sure not just us, but eBay and Yahoo! and Amazon and the whole crowd, you know, tons of money.”

Two years and tens of billions in revenues later, Google says it has won the better part of the fight. Citing the 0.02% figure, Google appears to claim it has conquered clíck fraud. Now that’s pretty amazing considering the awesome scale of revenues that flow through the AdWords platform.

The statement comes a few weeks after Google’s chief Internet evangelist, Vint Cerf declared that up to 25% of all computers on the ‘net are infected and exploited by bot-nets. In a session at the World Economic Forum in late January, Cerf suggested that, “… of the 600 millíon computers currently on the internet, between 100 and 150 millíon were already part of these botnets.” (sitepronews, Jan 25, 2007)

In a prior investigation, Sitepronews learned of and wrote about botnets used to commit clíck fraud. One such network, made up of over 50,000 computers, was thought to makë over $250K per week before it was shut down.

According to security experts, Google and other pay per clíck search advertising providers faced clíck bot activity on a daily basis. Though details are scant, a source has informed us that Google has recently adopted new methods of better detecting bot generated clicks.

We also know of pay per read and pay to clíck schemes working around the world. While we recognize the seriousness with which Google takes the issue of clíck fraud, we find it very difficult to believe Google has successfully disempowered a criminal industry known to be employing the resources of tens of thousands of people and tens of millíons of computers.

If they have, we urge them to release data proving the case. In the absence of hard evidence, Google is asking the search marketing community and its advertisers to take it on its word, offering an absurdly paltry figure of $2,100,000 as the end effect of criminal clíck endeavors. That’s a stretch of a proposition to consider.

Here’s another thing to consider, completely by the numbers.

After meeting staff payroll, maintaining and expanding infrastructure, investing in R&D, buying a few cool companies, bankrolling its philanthropic foundation and paying oodles of income tax, Google made a net income of $3,077,446,000.

That net income provides a pool from which investors get to draw returns and is the first balance sheet entry looked at by financial analysts. When market research firms such as Outcast Inc suggest that PPC spending might decline by 1% this year due to advertisers’ fears of clíck fraud, 1/30th of Google’s net income is threatened. Yikes!

Has Google really cut the charges associated with Clíck Fraud to 0.02%? I have no idea. Neither does the next speculator. Nobödy except Google is able to substantiate the number and given its historic reluctance to share any proprietary information, that is not likely to happen without intervention from the courts or from Congress.

The 0.02% claim is patently ridiculous and awfully fun to ridicule. In making it, Google is not lying but it is not telling the whole story either. Google does not provide nearly enough data to prove their case, asking advertisers to take them on their word and look at their ROI against other forms of mass-marketing for further guidance.

To be serious, Google flirts with monopolistic status in every field they become interested in. They run the world’s information like nobödy else’s business. Google is bígger and more important than most levels of government. Everything they say has to be held to strict account.

About The Author
Search marketing expert Jim Hedger is one of the most prolific writers in the search sector with articles appearing in numerous search related websites and newsletters, including SiteProNews, Search Engine Journal, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide.

So, to help you get started in thinking about Web 2.0 for your business, here are some things for you to consider.

1. Have a plan

Don’t dive in just because it’s cool or because you read an article about it. Be clear about what you’re trying to accomplish, how much you’re willing to invest and what time frame you are working on. Like any aspect of your business – plan ahead.

2. Make sure your target audience is online

Web 2.0 tools are fun but useless if the people who see your stuff don’t want what you offër. Or if they don’t look to the Web for information to help them buy what you sell, then your efforts will be less effective. Like any marketing channel, it only works if your prospective customers are there to see (or hear) your message and they are receptive to it.

3. Create good content

Web 2.0 is the social web, but it’s still content-driven. Lousy content leads to lousy marketing, no matter how flashy it is. Make your content relevant, interesting and real. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and answer their questíons with your content.

4. Don’t sell

Help, inform, educate but do not sell. Web 2.0 is all about people connecting by helping each other. No salesmen allowed! Think education, not advertising. Deliver useful, nuts and bolts stuff or honest opinions they can believe. That’s how you build credibility and trust that lead to new customer relationships.

5. Start with a free hosted blog

WordPress and Blogger both have very useful and simple blogs you can setup for frëe. Use them to start blogging and get a feel for how it works and how people use Web 2.0. Dip your toe in the water before diving in.

6. Talk to kids

Chat with some kids (ages 8 to 18) and find out how they use the web. They are the trend-setters. What they’re doing now, the rest of us will be doing soon. Learn what they do and why. This helps you understand the web from a different perspective.

7. Do it yourself

Web 2.0 is about being real. It’s real people connecting with each other. It’s okay to hire a pro to advise you. But to keep it genuine, make sure you or your employees create the content and do the work. Otherwise people will know you’re faking it.

8. Buy a camcorder and start shooting

Go to Best Buy or Radio Shack and buy an inexpensive camcorder, tripod and lapel microphone. Buy 20-30 tapes too. Then take a weekend and shoot film. Practice, practice, practice. Get comfortable being on camera so you’re not nervous or dorky. Then, write a funny or useful how-to sketch and film it. Use Microsoft MovieMaker to edit and then upload to YouTube.com.

9. Buy an inexpensive audio recorder

MusicBarn.com has a package that includes M-Audio’s MobilePre USB recording interface. Add a microphone and you have a high quality setup to record podcasts and MP3 audio files whenever you want. Then buy NGWave sound editing software to make it sound professional and you’re in business.

10. Surf ’till it Hurts

Surf blogs, YouTube, Google Videos, Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Technorati and other social media websites. Get a feel for how they work and who goes there. Become part of some social media communities. Make new friends online. Immerse yourself in the Web 2.0 culture so you know how it works and if it might fit your marketing plans.
About The Author
Kevin Stirtz helps businesses get more customers without spending a fortune. He is an author, speaker, consultant and president of EasyFastWebSpace.com, a web hostíng service that helps businesses get on the web easier and faster.

OK, so there is a bit more to it than that, like keyword research, keyword density & frequency, which html tags to use, making sure your site/pages are W3 Compliant, using relative/absolute internal linking structures to feed the pagerank where it’s most effective, using titles and descriptions that encourage people to clíck through from the SERP’s etc.

But essentially, once you know how to do all that, it’s not difficult to get it right for all your pages/sites.

It’s also less important in the long run than getting sufficient links to your site/pages from other sites.

Getting links to your site is fundamental to getting visitors, and without visitors all the time, effort and money invested in getting your site up and running, and looking “nice”, is irrelevant.

No Visitors = No Point!

So links are essential to the health of your site, and indeed your business, but all links are not equal in value to your site.

Reciprocal links will help, but they are far less effective than one way backlinks, i.e. links from another site where you don’t have to link back to them. These “One Way” backlinks will give your site a far greater boost in the search engine results and bring you more traffíc, providing of course that you have chosen good (relevant) keywords for your links.

There are many ways of getting these powerful one way backlinks, but most you will have no control over the anchor text used (i.e. keywords) in the link, which means their “power” is unfocused and therefore of less use to you in achieving the targeted keyword results you are looking for.

For example, submitting your site to website directories can be a very effective way of picking up some high quality one way links from high PR sites, but you will seldom be able to choose the keywords/anchor text used for the link, often ending up with the site name as the link.

This is not a waste of time, as the Pagerank passed to your site will, with the correct internal linking structure, be passed on to your sites internal pages, helping them to rank better for their targeted keywords.

So how can you get highly targeted one way links?

It’s fairly common for webmasters to now buy or “rent” links to their sites through services like Text-Link-Ads.com, and these services will allow you to choose the anchor text, but they are far from cheap. A link from a PR 8 site can easily cost $150+ per month. In fact there is now a business model emerging based on building sites simply to sell these kind of links (see LazyGitMarketing.com).

Google has also publicly stated that they disapprove of this practice and are actively seeking to downgrade the value of such “paid links”, although personally it seems like a valid form of advertising to me, but maybe I just don’t have Google’s wisdom in these matters.

As always in business, there are entrepreneurs who have identified this need in the market and a whole new branch of linking services are popping up offering new solutions for one way backlinks.

I’ve been testing some of them out over the last few months and have found a couple that have had a significant positive effect on the sites I used them for.

The Backlink Solution

This first solution is a monthly subscription that provides a network of high quality blog sites for you to post comments on, including a link to your site(s) using your chosen anchor text.

Note: As you make the link yourself, you can also link to internal pages on your site to improve their rankings as well, which you can’t do with directory submissions.

It is a manual process, but is easy enough that it can be outsourced fairly cheaply.

The Pagerank of these blogs varies, but the links provided are very “natural” in appearance to the search engines, and as you can post unique relevant content on market related blogs, the links are highly relevant. You are also limited as to how many blogs you can post to each month, to ensure that the links grow naturally over time, rather than all in one go.

Three Way Links

The internet marketing market is highly competitive, so it’s hardly surprising that another service with a different twist has popped up from this market.

This is an automated “three way links” system, where you link to site A, which then links to site B, which then links back to you. Whilst this is arguably not as powerful as true “one way backlinks”, it’s still a significant step above one way “reciprocal” linking that is the more traditional method used by the majority of webmasters.

The process is also automated for you, making it very hands off. You can submit up to 20 sites with just one account and you can specify three different anchor texts to be used as the links for each site’s, making sure you don’t incur any penalties for over use of just one text link keyword or phrase.
It is also set up to gradually build up the links over time to make it all appear very natural to the search engines.

Your Own Authority Blog

There is one final service that I’ve found to be very useful, although it is more ideal for people with multiple sites to promote.

The service gives you your own blog on an existing high PR authority site. The site has 833,039 backlinks listed in Yahoo and gets spidered several times a day by all of the major search engines. For example in June 2007 Googlebot visited it 14,470 times and Yahoo Slurp 52,436 times, so you can see why it’s regarded as an “authority” site.

I have used this to link to brand new sites and had them indexed by Google within 24 hours, so it’s a great way of getting a new site in to the SE’s quickly, and the link weíght will obviously also help any site linked to.

As a side note, I’ve also found that my blog on this site can get fairly significant traffíc itself when I take the time to keyword optimize the posts, which is always a nice added benefit. I haven’t traded reciprocal links for any of my sites in almost two years, and you can probably see why I don’t need to. Using powerful new linking tools and services like these means I am able to take total control over the “off page” SEO linking strategies for my sites in the same way as I do for the “on page” SEO factors.

Wouldn’t you like to do have the same level of control over your sites search engine rankings?
About The Author
Article by Matt Garrett © 2007 Mat4.com | 4 Minute Internet Marketing Videos Grab Your Free Article Site Building tool, Blog Commenting Software & 90 Page SEO Book Now! http://www.mat4.com/newsletter.html