Fatal error: Call to undefined method WordPress_Module::_weak_escape()
in ../wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 473

After a little bit of playing around I found the cause… The Redirection plugin…

The cure is simple: Delete the or rename plugin folder in the “wp-content/plugin” folder and refresh the blog login page (had to do it twice because the first time round WordPress had to disable the plugin (reset the database).

After logging back into the blog it was a simple matter of uploading the folder and reactivating the plugin.

Moral of the story?

Deactivate plugins before doing an upgrade – it saves a lot of headaches (by eliminating a major cause of upgrade errors).

Social traffic is the worst for this. Let me illustrate with a real example – The other day one of my sites was “Stumbled” and for a while received a major traffic boost from StumbleUpon. These are the stats:

.

Wait for it…

.

These are phenominal stats…

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Average time on site = 1 second (which has dropped the normal average time on site to 2 minutes 14 seconds, I inlude it to indicate just how useless StumbleUpon traffic really is).

Bounce rate = 90.14%

That means one in ten StumbleUpon visitors stayed long enough to raise their average time on site to one second!

One second!

That’s not even enough time for the fastest web page in the world to open…

But it’s enough to drop a decent Adsense click through rate to almost nothing, and the amount paid per click plummets.

Search engine traffic on the other hand tends to be a bit more motivated, these are visitors who are looking for information, and far more likely to click on an interesting Adsense Ad to get more information.

So how do you set your site up to only show Adsense ads to search engine traffic?

A fella by the name of Rhys wrote a good tutorial which shows you How to Hide Adsense from Social Traffic. He uses a simple system which only displays Adsense Ads to search engine traffic and normal text ads to all other traffic – it’s well worth taking the time to put this solution to work on your own sites.

Their own web stats.

Ok, it’s not really free because hosting costs money, but there’s a very good reason not to ignore the keywords recorded in website stats programs like Awstats.

In the past I’ve been shot down in flames every time I mention this as a viable source of keywords, but a post by Griz (Stats You Can Take to the Bank) reinforces my belief in this as a viable source of keywords. Griz mentions that sometimes the most valuable keywords won’t always be found using keywords research tools, and sometimes the keywords they do reveal lead to no traffic at all. He goes on to say that sometimes the best way to find “real keywords” is to use a whole bunch of keywords and keyword combinations in blog posts and see which terms send search traffic.

For years I’ve seen the same weird keywords appear in web stats month after month, and I’ve never seen them in any keyword research I’ve done. It didn’t take long for me to try optimizing pages for those keywords. Cementing first page search listings for them is drop dead easy… Mainly because hardly anybody else is using them

One affiliate niche website I maintain in a hellishly competitive market gets a fair amount of traffic from loads of these keywords. Many are very product specific (with high commercial intent) so conversions tend to be higher than on pages with more general keywords.

Some of these keywords are so “hidden” that often a top first page search listing can be achieved by merely mentioning them a couple of times on a relevant product webpage, and then using the keywords in a few internal links and social bookmarks.

But, and it’s big but…

The traffic from these keywords will never be earth shattering, however it does add up when a lot of them are used (and it often converts better).

The ‘Easy Keyword Research’ Guide shows you the correct way to conduct long tail keyword research to find money generating keywords that send you customers ready to buy, instead of freebie grabbers and information gatherers.

Get you copy now by clicking this link >>Easy Keyword Research Guide

In the end I decided to rebuild the site on my PC using Wamp, and wanted to make a few .htaccess changes while I was at it. On opening the .htaccess file I found this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^.*(google.|msn.|live|yahoo.|altavista.|aol.|ask.| eureka.com|lycos.com|hotbot.com|infoseek.com|webcr awler.|excite.|netscape.com|mamma.com|alltheweb.co m|northernlight.com|rambler.ru|aport.ru|yandex.ru| pingwin.ru|http://www.ru|punto.ru|search.comcas…oksmart.com).* [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) /501.html [NS,NC,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*(bot|urp|msn).* [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) $1 [NS,NC,L]
Redirect /501.html http://66.249.28.51

Looks like my website had been hacked at the server level… The hacked .htaccess file was sending search engine bots to the IP address in the .htaccess file. Ultimately the search engines dropped the website and search engine traffic dried up completely.

What makes this hack so anoying is I’ve moved the site a few times because I thought it had something to do with the hosting. It never dawned on me to check the .htaccess file, and I do know better – it’s one of the reasons I don’t like using .htaccess affiliate redirects, when the file gets hacked so do all the redirects.

Kaviraj “Kavi” Kodia of eHosting4U suggested that the problem could have been a security issue with a script installed on the website or a leak with the FTP software I was using, and suggested using FTP software which supports SFTP.

So now I use FileZilla with SFTP – SFTP doesn’t seem to have made much difference to the data transfer rate so it’s well worth using for the added security.

By the way, once the the offending .htaccess code had been deleted, my website started receiving traffic from Google within 24 hours – phew!

1) Easy Click Tracker Lite – This is a PHP click tracking script which earns money in two ways:

• The home page which every user sees when they login contains a configurable advertisement.
• When users logout, they are redirected to a URL of your choice.

2) Easy Affliate Link Redirects – This is a PDF report which explains:

• The difference between link redirects and link cloaking.
• How to create affiliate link redirects.
• Which affiliate redirects are the best to use.

The report goes on to promote the Easy Click Tracker script as being the easiest way to create affiliate link redirects and to track them.

You can get your copy of the package from the following link:  PLR to Easy Click Tracker Lite and Easy Affiliate Link Redirects

I have decided to sell 10 PLR copies of the Easy Keyword Research Guide.

“Why only 10?”

Because I am still selling the guide and it is popular, so there’s no way I’m going to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs…

“So why sell PLR at all?”

Because I have been asked, and my reply was I’d set up an affiliate program. I’ve been too slow at doing that so I’ve decided to let 10 copies go with PLR as a bit of a peace offering.

You can get your copy by clicking this link >> PLR to Easy Keyword Research

There are only 0 copies left, so if you want one get it now…

First let me explain how I decide on a topic for any step-by-step guide:

On a daily basis I visit internet marketing forums and keep an eye out for common questions asked by forum members. I keep notes on these questions and potential topics for step-by-step guides soon become obvious.

The best topics are those in which you can explain how to do something which will ultimately make the readers life easier and/or increase their income.

The Easy Keyword Research Guide I created was a result of questions I saw posted on the forums. Because it is based on common questions which are regularly asked, the guide has been well received and continues to make sales because it is so useful.

Here are the sales figures after the first week:

Total sales: 51

Total profit: $359.27

The sales include income from:

- WSO sales (with discount – 48.6% of profit)

- Sales to my optin list (with discount – 28.4% of profit)

- Direct sales from my blog (no discount – 11.3% of profit)

- Sales of product promoted within the guide (11.7% of profit).

While these are not particularly good sales figures, there is one important aspect to bear in mind – Anybody can achieve them.

How so?

To answer that let’s take a look at where each sale came from and analyze what is involved:

1. The optin lists which resulted in 28.4% of the total profit were built by:

   Giving away a step-by-step guide.

   Step-by-Step guides are incredibly easy to create, and when formated properly they become popular. No great skill is required, and with a little research anybody can create a useful “how to” guide (especially if you use the information in my “Easy Step-by-Step Guide Creation Manual” which details the method I use for all my guides).

   One easy method of building a list is to promote Step-by-Step guides through giveaway events and article marketing. All you need to get started is a splash page with an optin form, and a download page.

   Selling to existing customers.

   For every product I sell there is an optin form on the download page for customers to subscribe to an update/new product advisory list. 83.4% of customers of the Easy Keyword Research guide have opted into this, which means I now have more customers to sell future guides to.

   In my opinion, a list of customers is quite possibly the most valuable asset an internet marketer can own.

2. The WSO sales were possible because I have been a member of the Warrior forum for some time and and have a number of helpful posts behind my belt.Warrior forum members who regularly participate in ongoing discussions and create their own useful posts soon build up a following of like minded members. This following makes it easier to generate sales when you promote a product through a Warrior Special Offer.

   Of late the WSO forum has been overrun by new members who make just enough posts to qualify and then try to sell their own junk products. The end result is WSO’s are not nearly as profitable as they used to be:

   - WSO’s fly off the first page within a day

   - Forum members are wary of new products, especially those from new members.

   (This is perhaps a good thing because soon these people will realize that there is a lot more involved in running a successful WSO, and hopefully will pack up and leave…)

3. My blog is fairly new and I don’t publish posts daily.

   I can only imagine how many direct sales I could have generated if I had been posting to my blog daily and it was receiving more traffic…

   One of the cornerstones to successful blogging is to publish posts regularly. No great secret here – the more posts targeting relevant keywords, the more content a search engines has to include in their index.

   The more content included in a search engine’s index, the more traffic they can send your way (in the form of users searching for information).

4. More than one tenth of the profit came from promoting a related product within the step-by-step guide.

   Cross promoting either your own products, or affiliate products from within a Step-by-Step guide is a no brainer. Readers will click on links to interesting related products, and you will make sales through these links (an important point to bear in mind when creating give away products used for list building).

Like I said earlier, anybody can achieve these results, easily…

Personal Observations

1. I may have set the price too low. This is not based on any testing I’ve done, but rather from comments I’ve received from customers who were initially turned off by the low price.
2. I’ve dropped the ball by not using this opportunity to build a bigger list. By incorporating a 100% commission structure some customers would promote the guide which would result in a much bigger optin list to which I could promote new reports.

What’s next?

1. Create a 100% commission affiliate system to build a bigger list of customers.
2. Create new Step-by-Step guides to sell to existing subscribers and customers.
3. Start promoting the guides through other methods such as article marketing, Squidoo etc.
4. Start posting regularly to my blog; more traffic = more sales.

You can expect a follow up case study based on these 4 points.

Their secret is in the keywords they target.

The advice regularly handed out by the “experts” is find keywords which are used regularly in the search engines but for which there are few competing pages.

That advice is incomplete!

There is more to keyword research than that. The key is to find keywords that people looking for solutions type into the search engines when they are at the point of buying.

Target those keywords and your websites will become real profit centers.

I have just finished writing an Easy Keyword Research Guide which shows you you how to find top ranking money generating keywords that send you customers ready to buy, instead of freebie grabbers and serial information gatherers.

Get your copy now by clicking through to: Easy Keyword Research

So let’s explore the difference between the two and throw some light on whether they are real, and if so the effect on search engine rankings.

The Duplicate Content Penalty

A duplicate content penalty is thought to be a punishment for publishing duplicate content on a website or blog which can lead to the website or blog domain being de-indexed and banned from the search engines.

In response, Susan Moskwa of Google had this to say: “There’s no such thing as a ‘duplicate content penalty.’ At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.”^[i]

However Google does say this: “Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.”^[iii]

They also say this: “In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.”^[iii]

This is perhaps how the Duplicate Content Penalty myth was born: It’s not entirely improbable that a couple of black hat sites got de-indexed and a few forum lurkers whose sites weren’t ranking well read a conversation between the black hatters in which they casually mentioned duplicate content. Our desperate lurkers who were frantically trying to find a scapegoat for their poor rankings put two and two together and made five!

How the duplicate content penalty belief was started is not important, what is important is that it doesn’t exist for normal genuinely useful websites. The only time Google will take action is when they think a site is being deceptive and manipulating the search results (which covers a multitude of “sins” and not just duplicate content abuse).

Google gives no indication as to what is meant by “to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results” but they do state this in their quality guidelines: “A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”^[iv]

It would appear that Google is not worried about the content itself (or its origin), but they are concerned about how the content is used. Sven Naumann of the Google Search Quality Team has this to say: “I’d like to point out that in the majority of cases, having duplicate content does not have negative effects on your site’s presence in the Google index. It simply gets filtered out.”^[ii]

Duplicate Content Filters

A duplicate content filter is a mechanism used by search engines to filter all the results for a particular search phrase which only displays single results from all the duplicates (which they determine are the most relevant).

According to Susan Moskwa, “Most search engines strive for a certain level of variety; they want to show you ten different results on a search results page, not ten different URLs that all have the same content. To this end, Google tries to filter out duplicate documents so that users experience less redundancy.”^[i]

In a nutshell; out of a group of near identical pages, Google will display the webpage they think is the most relevant to the search phrase.

Duplicate Content Filters and Search engine Rankings

It is easy to blame the use of duplicate content for poor rankings, but in answer to this here’s what Susan Moskwa had to say: “We sometimes hear from Amazon.com affiliates who are having a hard time ranking for content that originates solely from Amazon. Is this because Google wants to stop them from trying to sell Everyone Poops? No; it’s because how the heck are they going to outrank Amazon if they’re providing the exact same listing? Amazon has a lot of online business authority (most likely more than a typical Amazon affiliate site does), and the average Google search user probably wants the original information on Amazon, unless the affiliate site has added a significant amount of additional value.”^[i]

There are two key phrases in her statement:

1) “has a lot of online business authority” – That is the criteria that determines which of two identical pages will be displayed in the search results. It has nothing to do with originality, the page with the most authority wins.

This is certainly true of identical pages within your website. For example, a WordPress blog category page and tag page can be virtually identical, but because they have so many internal links pointing to them they will be the pages displayed in a search result, and not the actual blog posts.

2) “the average Google search user probably wants the original information on Amazon, unless the affiliate site has added a significant amount of additional value.” – According to this, adding additional value to duplicate content will avoid the duplicate content filter and get a page listed on the same results page as those of similar content.

Conclusion: Duplicate Content and You

In the final analysis the source of your content is not that important, it’s how you use it:

- The content must be valuable to your readers.

- You must give credit to the original authors.

- Your own contribution must add value to the original.

Unless you are engaging in some seriously questionable tactics, don’t worry about using duplicate content. Google actually states: “identical content showing up on several sites in itself is not inherently regarded as a violation of our webmaster guidelines.”^[ii]

However to give your pages the best chance of appearing in the search listings, here are four pointers to avoid your duplicate pages being filtered out:

1. If you are using 100% duplicate content on a website which is genuinely useful to visitors, get as many back links to your page as possible – in other words beat your competition out of the listing.
2. Vary the link text in the back links pointing to your duplicate pages so your pages are associated with other search phrases (they must be relevant though).
3. If you’re uncomfortable using 100% duplicate content, make changes to the content (including the paragraph structure, sentences, punctuation etc.) and include additional keywords, then get back links which use the additional keywords as the link text.
4. Use a robots.txt file to make sure only one version of your content is available for the search engine s to spider – that way you don’t compete with yourself for the listing. This is important for blogs – you want your blog posts to be indexed and not RSS feeds, category or tag pages (unless you add sticky content to these pages so they are individual pages in their own right and won’t get caught in a duplicate content filter – but bear in mind they will compete with your individual blog posts).

References:

^[i] Susan Moskwa Demystifying the “duplicate content penalty” – Retrieved 15 May 2009 from:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html

^[ii] Sven Naumann Duplicate content due to scrapers – Retrieved 15 May 2009 from:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/duplicate-content-due-to-scrapers.html

^[iii]Duplicate content – Retrieved 15 May 2009 from:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66359

^[iv] Webmaster guidelines – Retrieved 15 May 2009 from:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

Sent an email to one of my lists and got a few replies telling me there was a PayPal certificate error after clicking the payment button!

Solving all the problems associated with changing servers recently distracted me so I’d forgotten all about renewing the PayPal certificate (I use it to create encrypted PayPal buttons on the fly) – it lasts 12 months and expired last week.

So there we go – no sales and egg all over my face!