Exposed seo and internet marketing

This is not a guest post. There is no doubt that a guest post is a decent way to gain links to your site, new followers, and establish a reputation for yourself. But does every third guest post have to be about guest posting?

Is there really anything else you can learn about guest posting beyond what I’ve written in the first paragraph? No. So does the web really need more guest posts rambling on at length about the virtues of guest posting? No. Isn’t this post a rambling post about guest posting? Yes. But at least it’s not a guest post.

The real point of guest posting is for the SITE OWNER to benefit, not the guest poster. How does that work? Look at some of the big names allowing guest posts- John Chow, Shoemoney, Problogger, etc. etc. These are not people who put things on their site without an underlying purpose. And without a clear moneymaking hook in the guest post like an affiliate link, why would they want some random no-name blogger to post on their site?

The answer is actually quite simple: free content, no work. The guest poster (even if they’re writing the 1000th post about the benefits of guest posting) is providing the site owner with free original content. You know someone else besides site owners that likes lots of original content? Hint: it starts with a G and ends with an oogle.

There is a downside to letting guest posters on your site though; less control of your content. Sure you can proofread the guest post, but how rare is it that a guest post is of the same quality as the regular articles? Then there’s the chance that the guest post has been posted in many other places just slightly reworded to avoid copyscape. There’s the risk that you alienate your readers- they want to hear you, not some random guy guest posting about guest posting.

It all comes down to quality; whether you are guest posting or allowing guest posts- make it good.

One more quick point is that if you are heavily involved in article submission to article directories, you should definitely try to switch over to guest posting those articles instead. The reasoning is that if you going to spend the time to write an original article solely to get one link from an article directory that no human ever actually reads, you are better served in my opinion by posting that same article as a guest post on a relevant blog that has actual readers instead.

That said, if I see one more guest post about guest posting I will need to be restrained and/or sedated (although just reading the article about guest posting might work on the sedation side). Just stop it.

And so it begins! Google had previously said they would stop sending referral information for logged in users and as promised they’ve done just that. If you clickthrough to make the image larger you can see the increase in “not provided” keywords from Google searches. Even Google’s own Analytics isn’t getting the information.

What does this mean? We’re all screwed! Or not. Basically right now this is only a small subset of all Google searches (about 5% for me since it really ramped up Nov 1), so you can still retrieve the majority of your search keywords in Google Analytics or whatever stat program you are using. But as you can see from the chart, this is a growing concern.

Who else is screwed? Besides webmasters who rely on this data, another big user of search engine referral information is advertising networks. Many of them use this data to provide relevant ads. If you’re using these ads on your site you will get less relevant ads and less clicks on these ads and less money. So yeah basically you’re getting screwed twice on this deal.

Oh but look, Google Adsense ads are not affected and are still getting the keywords to provide relevant ads. Do you hear that sound? Ding ding ding ding. Those are bells going off. So what I’m saying here is that this change screws over competing ad networks and thus improves Google’s own money printing Adsense by making it relatively better without actually changing anything to Adsense. Sounds about right.

Information is power. And Google has the information.

But there’s hope for you Webmaster. Sort of. Google’s own Webmaster Tools does provide the keywords that were referred to your site. BUT and here’s a but so huge I think that Sir-Mix-a-Lot can see it, BUT the information and ways you can use it are much more limited with Webmaster Tools. Analytics is a far superior tool for drilling down who is coming to your site and what they are doing on the site and more.

Why aren’t these two tools combined into one super tool anyway? Webmaster Tools is better for tracking trends but overall this is a change for the worse for Webmasters that helps nobody but Google.

What do you think?

If you read any of these so called Make Money Online or SEO sites or webmaster forums you’ll see a lot of people freaking out about Google’s Panda updates. While of course on an individual basis, you don’t want to see anyone losing money, but as a whole they shouldn’t have been earning the money to begin with. Here’s why.

Content has and always will be king. Let’s repeat that one but in bold italics: content is king. End paragraph.

Google knows this, you know this, everyone knows this. This is not new stuff. The days of autoblogs and scraped content sites stealing content from legitimate sites and making money is over. You can call yourself a “content aggregator” but you’re still just taking content from other sites and citing your source- there’s very little difference. Google finally caught on. You’re busted. Do not pass go, do not collect $200 in Adsense money.

Google’s “Panda” updates are nothing more than their algorithm doing what it should have been doing all along- filtering out duplicate and useless content. Real original content sites, written by humans, are doing better than ever. You don’t see owners of those sites freaking out on webmaster forums about the Panda updates for one reason: they’re busy writing content for their sites instead of writing content on forums trying to find a way to avoid writing content for their sites.

So how can you make money online these days: content. Write original content. Pay someone to write original content. Have your readers submit original content. Are you sensing a theme here?

Yes you can (and in some cases should) still use other sites for inspiration but rather than straight up copy or run that content through Google Translate a bunch of times or use a tool to scramble the words around, you need to just add a few original thoughts of your own. It doesn’t take much- you can quote a whole article and then just add a quick paragraph or two of your own.

You can only outsmart Google for so long. I’m sure by now there’s some other trick or scam that’s going around that people are doing that Google hasn’t caught on to; but you know eventually they will. What will always rank well in Google? Original content. Simple as that.

Most SEO experts will tell you one of the best ways to rank highly in Google for your targeted keywords is to amass huge quantities of links to your site with your keywords as the anchor text. Something like this: Anchor Text Bullshit. I just moved up one slot in Google for a term nobody searches for-yea!

But using keyword anchor text links is total bullcrap and borderline spam. Yes it works to some extent but it’s the most unnatural “natural” links you can find. If you ever look in the comments of any of the make money online “gurus” (or any other sites on the web), you will find them just littered with other wannabe MMO bloggers putting every possible and improbable variation of the term “make money” as their anchor text. And it’s all a bunch of bull. It’s spam.

The real natural links to websites are not in the comments but in the articles themselves and the majority of writing this is legit copy (ie not written for search engines only *cough* squidoo *cough* article directories *cough* but for actual people) WILL NOT use a keyword but will use the SITE’S NAME as their anchor text. You know it, I know it, Matt Cutts knows it.

Think about it- if you were going to link to this article on your own SEO blog how would you do it? Odds are you would say something like “I read this article on Exposed SEO about anchor text lies” See what I did there? Other popular terms to use for the link would be things like “here”, “article”, “new post”, “interesting post”, etc. That is how a natural link happens most of the time.

Blogroll or sidebar links to other sites? Nobody in their right mind would link to a site using any text other than the site’s name unless they were getting paid for the links (or it’s another site owned by the same person as the site with the blogroll).

Now of course if your keywords are in your site title that’s a huge bonus for you because anyone who links to your site using the site’s title will be giving you extra keyword anchor text links. (and also why for example a name like Engadget is better than Gizmodo, it has gadget right in the title- yeah the other one has gizmo in the title but what the hell is a gizmo?)

But the big problem with keyword anchor text links is that they actually work to rank well in Google. This encourages comment spam, paid links, sploggers and others trying to take advantage of the system. People who build sites the old fashioned way, with quality original content, are getting screwed out of rankings by those who hire SEO firms to build keyword links for them.

It comes down to this: can Google differentiate between a true natural link and a “link-building” link with a keyword in the anchor text? Perhaps it’s some sort of factor in the SERPs but unfortunately at this time I don’t think Google really knows real from fake.