It's commonly known that the Big Three search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo) base their ranking of results primarily on one thing: links. Yes, the documents need to be relevant to the search query, but after meeting that criteria it's the quantity and quality of links to a document that lands it in the top spot for any given set of keywords.

While links are a great way to provide a baseline of trust or authority, links are not the only way a document should be judged.

Here's an example of how using links as the primary ranking factor fails. Go to Google (or Bing) and search for:

old time radio

You'll see the #1 result is RadioLovers.com. It's a very popular site because it offers a lot of downloads of old time radio shows in MP3 format.

That's great if that's what you were after, but what if you were actually wanting to read about Old Time Radio? In that case RadioLovers.com is a terrible #1 result — it's mostly just a list of links.

The #2 result in Google isn't any better (Otr.net) — it's all links.

In fact, if you go through each of the top 10 results in Google for "old time radio" you'll see that, with the exception of the Wikipedia entry that comes in at #9, there's very little information about Old Time Radio in any of the results!

Thus the failure of using links as the primary method for ranking web sites becomes clearer.

In some cases using links is perfect, such as when looking for the official web site of a particular company. Search for "Microsoft" at Google and you'll get Microsoft.com — even though there's very little information on the home page. But if you searched for "Microsoft" in the hope of getting some information about the company, that doesn't start until Google's fourth result (the Wikipedia entry for Microsoft).

That got me thinking: while links are a great way to establish a measure of trust or authority, wouldn't it be better to have an alternative ranking method that puts sites that offer the most information first?

What I'd like to do is:

1. Pull the top 30 results from Google (or Bing or Yahoo).

2. Gather up all of the information in all of those top 30 documents.

3. Score each document to see how much of the overall body of knowledge was covered in each document.

So, for instance, if a particular web page contained 80% of the information covered by the top 30 results, that's the web page I'd want at #1 because it covers most of the information found in all 30 documents. Number two would be the next best coverage, and so on.

That would mean that I'd have to visit a lot fewer pages to get a great overall understanding of a topic.

This method would also be great for news items, since it would list the news article with the best overall coverage of a topic first — saving a lot of time reading multiple articles to try and get a balanced or complete picture.

Wouldn't that be nice?

Well, stop day-dreaming, because it's a reality! I've incorporated the methodology listed above into my search engine, Shablast:

Click here to go to Shablast.com

Now, when you enter a query into Shablast and select either "Standard" or "News" from the drop-down list next to the keyword field, Shablast will score the top 30 Bing results using the methodology listed above and sort the results to show the web pages/news articles with the best coverage first.

Search Shablast for "old time radio" in Standard mode and RadioLovers.com comes in at #13 because it only contains 19% of the overall body of knowledge contained in the top 30 results. The #1 result is MysteryShows.com, which contains 64%, followed by the Wikipedia article at #2 with 56%.

Search Shablast for "Microsoft" and the #1 result is the CNet.com news page dedicated to Microsoft because it contains a whopping 84% of all the information contained in the top 30 results for "Microsoft."

The top 30 results are pulled from Bing using their awesome API. The advantage of using the Bing API is that links still play a part. It takes a lot of links to get into the top 30 results for major keywords, which ensures a certain level of trust or authority. But then Shablast examines those top 30 documents and resorts them to show the documents with the best coverage first.

Why not give it a try and let me know what you think, either in a comment on this post or by discussing Shablast at the Shablast discussion forum?

Yesterday your site was in the top 5 results in Google for your keywords. Today your site is nowhere to be found. You spent the last week building new links to your site. Did you overdo it? Did you "break the rules"? What happened!?!

First, take a deep breath and relax.

Good.

Now, let's talk about why this happens, why you usually shouldn't worry about it, and when you should.

Why Your Site Disappears

Especially when your site is new, it is not at all unusual for it to be ranking very well one day, and then disappear from those rankings the next day. This is especially true after you do some link building to your site.

Here's a scenario:

1. You build a brand new site (or go back to work on a site you haven't done anything with for a while).
2. You start building links to that site.
3. After a few weeks your site jumps into the rankings for the keywords you're working on. Yes!
4. Another week or two later it disappears from those rankings.

It's at #4 that most people freak out, but you really shouldn't. That's because of #5:

5. A few days later your site pops back into the search results, often in a better position than it was before.

If you're not doing anything spammy or evil, #5 is very likely to follow #4. Let's talk about why.

Why Does Google Do This?

It might seem like Google's goal is to give you a heart attack, or at least put the fear in you, but it's really not (though those two things might be side effects of what they are doing).

What's happening is what's commonly referred to as the "Google Dance." You see, Google has a massive index, which it updates on a daily basis as it discovers new links and makes adjustments to old links, removes dead pages, etc. But because Google's index is so huge, it takes a while to recalculate all of the ranking information for your site in among all of the others.

I'm not sure why Google doesn't keep a static version of the search results up while making these adjustments, but they don't. Perhaps it would require too much overhead, so it's just easier for them to do real-time updates like this. Whatever the case, these updates mean that your site will jump around in the result list, often disappearing altogether for a couple of days, until Google finishes its little "dance", at which point your newly acquired links will often make your site appear even higher up in the results than it was before.

When Your Site Doesn't Come Back

If your site does not return to the position it was before (or at least on the same page) within a few days (at most 3 in my experience), the next step to take is to make sure that your site is still indexed by Google. To do that, go to Google and do a site search on your domain name, like this:

site:jonathanleger.com

Replacing, of course, jonathanleger.com with your own domain name. If Google returns a list of your site's pages, then you're probably fine. If it doesn't, that means Google has decided that something you did was bad and has removed your site from their index altogether.

Coming back from being deindexed is tricky, and is beyond the scope of this blog post. More often than not your site will still be indexed even if it doesn't come back into the rankings.

Why Didn't My Site Come Back?

The primary reason this happens is that you got too many links too fast and then stopped getting links altogether (or slowed down a lot).

You see, if you get a huge number of links to your site all at once and then stop growing your links, Google will rank your site well for your keywords pretty fast for a while. But once it sees that your links have stopped growing, it assumes your site's popularity was short lived and drops it back out of the rankings again.

That makes logical sense. If a site is suddenly popular because of some big event that happened which caused it to get a lot of publicity, it makes sense to keep that site high in the rankings for the duration of that notoriety. But once the jets cool off, it doesn't make sense to keep the site ranking so well.

That's why it's important to grow your links slowly over time. If you tapper off your link growth (or just get a small number of links over a long period of time), then Google doesn't usually drop your site out of the rankings like that.

So instead of getting 1,000 links in one week, getting 10 a day for 100 days will keep your rankings stronger for a lot longer! If you've chosen your keywords carefully, your site is likely to hold its position until a competitor comes along and gets more links than you — in which case it's time for you to go back to work and go through this experience all over again.

Summary

Google will often drop a site from the rankings if you get too many links too fast and then stop growing your links altogether, so be sure to grow your links slowly over time if at all possible. But even if you do everything right, Google will "dance" for a while after you grow your links, bouncing your site around in the search results for a few days before it settles back down.

One more point: once your site has been established for a while (usually six months or so of steady link building), the dancing tends to stop happening so much (if at all). At that point your site can usually sustain short bursts of big link additions without Google going crazy on you. In the beginning though, you just have to expect this kind of bouncing around.

Please post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.

Webmasters are constantly in search of new and creative ways to get backlinks to their web sites in order to improve their rankings in the major search engines.

One free, easy way to get backlinks is to monitor forums where people are discussing your areas of expertise. This is really easy to do with Google Alerts.

Simply create alerts for each of the major keywords in your industry, and set the alerts to monitor "discussions" only. Click here for a snapshot of some alerts I've setup to do this.

I personally recommend you use an RSS Reader to keep track of these alerts, which is a lot easier than keeping track of email notifications. Google even has a handy built-in RSS reader that you can use if you don't already have one (thus the "view in Google reader" link in the image above).

How this works is simple: each time Google finds a new discussion that is related to the keywords you specify, it makes a note of that in the RSS feed. You can then scan the feed for threads where you can jump in and respond. Most forums let you have a keyword-rich link to your web site in your signature, and so you get free links by joining in these discussions. Those links help your ranking in the search engines over time.

Doing this also establishes you as an expert in your field at these forums, which at a busy forum can be just as valuable as a #1 ranking for your keywords. Not to mention the direct traffic you can generate from your signature links.

How many threads will Google find that you can respond to?

Well, as an example, the "Discussions" alert for "internet marketing" over the last ten days has generated 350 question threads on 140 unique domains. By "question thread" I mean a thread whose title is a question (e.g. "Where do I find a list of blogs to submit comments?" — that's a real thread). The question threads are often the best to respond to, since they establish your expertise, but you can, of course, respond to any thread that you feel you can contribute something to.

I wrote a script to extract only the questions from the RSS feed, since I find those to be more valuable. Getting free links on 140 domains in 10 days isn't a bad deal at all! And that's no doubt going to grow over time.

So if you're needing some free links, head over to Google Alerts and get started following discussions related to your keywords!

Please post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.

My wife and I were just settling in for our week-long 10th anniversary trip in the Ozark mountains. We had a great week planned, with lots of hiking and site seeing, even a trip to an old car museum which I love to go to when we visit there. I woke up the morning after we arrived ready to get started, only to see that there was a voice mail on my phone from 6 a.m. It was Amin Motin, my helpdesk manager, informing me that a number of my sites had been hacked into…

As you may be aware of, three of my servers were hacked into last week, resulting in a number of my sites displaying the hacker's "look at what I can do" message as the home page. Fortunately no data was lost from any of the databases, and the sites were restored back to their proper working order within a matter of hours after I reported the issue to my server host.

It would appear that my computer got a keylogger-style virus installed on it, despite the fact that I only use a Mozilla browser (which I didn't think was targeted by such things, but apparently due to its popularity growth this is no longer the case). I often scan the "black hat" and "software cracks" forums for references to my own software so I can close any loopholes those guys find to try and rip off my software, and I can only imagine that the virus came from one of those sites. Shame on me for getting busy and not updating my virus protection software.

Well, long story short, I had these 3 server's open in a shell (SSH) window, and next thing you know the hacker was logging in and doing his thing.

The virus has since been removed, the servers restored to their normal working condition and all passwords changed.

This is not the kind of thing I wanted to deal with while I was away on my 10th anniversary with my wife, and it's certainly not the kind of thing she wanted me to have to deal with on such a special occasion. However, the matter was resolved within a few hours of my reporting it to my web host, which allowed my wife and I to enjoy the rest of our trip in peace. It could have been a whole lot worse, to say the least, had I not had such fantastic support from Amin, my customers and my web host.

I wanted to share with you the lessons I have learned from this incident in case they will help you.

1. Having strong passwords is not enough.

It doesn't matter how "unguessable" your password is if a keylogger gets installed on your computer and the hacker gets the password sent to him by the virus. It's also not enough to rely on your virus protection software, because a brand new virus may not be detected.

That's why I've had my host block all shell (SSH) and FTP access from all IP addresses except my own. So unless the hacker manages to break into the data center where my servers are, or breaks into my house and sits at my desk, even if he has the passwords it won't do him any good.

Since I never do any SSH work away from home, this works just fine. But even if I did need to access the server via SSH from somewhere else, I can always log a ticket with my web host to get the IP address temporarily added to the "allow" list.

2. Having loyal customers is a beautiful thing.

Within an hour of the hack, there were a dozen emails sitting in my inbox from customers and colleagues informing me of the issue and offering to do whatever they could to help. Within two hours there were two dozen emails.

I can't even being to describe how good it made me feel to know that my customers and associates all have my back, and were willing to go the extra mile to help me resolve the problem if they could do anything to help. That really lets me know that I'm running this business the way I should.

Thanks to everyone who alerted me and offered to help. It is VERY much appreciated.

3. Having a responsive host is vital!

It wouldn't matter much if I knew about the hack while out of town if my web host was slow in responding. That certainly was not the case! Within a few hours of my notifying my host, they had the problem cleaned up and everything set right.

I was informed later that two of their top-tier systems administrators were set on the task. It wasn't long before they knew exactly how the hack occurred, what to do to close the hole, and how to tighten security to prevent any such incidents in the future.

I always knew that my web host's service was top notch, but you REALLY know you're in good hands when something like this happens and they're on the ball. I am SO glad I switched hosts a couple of years ago. My previous host was incredibly slow to respond no matter how urgent the matter.

In case you're wondering, my server host is:

http://AQhost.com

I cannot recommend their services highly enough. Their response time even on trivial issues is incredible, and when it really matters, they're on top of things in a flash.

Disaster Averted

The situation certainly could have been a lot worse than it was. I cringe to think how things would have gone had I still been with my old web host (which shall remain nameless — but it was a BIG host, which you think would have great support, but didn't). I could have been stressing it out all week long waiting for things to get corrected IF I had even known about what happened. I might have been obliviously hiking through the mountains while a dozen of my sites were down for a week. Just thinking about that grows gray hairs on my head!

But things didn't work that way. Everything was set right the day I reported it to my fantastic host, thanks to being informed by Amin and my customers and associates. Because all of the links in the chain were strong, disaster was averted, and the security of my servers are now far stronger than they were before.

I have certainly learned a lot from this situation, but the biggest lesson can be summed up in these smile-evoking words: I'm in good hands.

Please post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.

I spend a fair amount of time on a few Internet Marketing forums, mostly searching for threads discussing my areas of interest. Obviously one of those interests is content spinning.

In case you're not familiar with what content spinning is, it's basically formatting an article with code that allows for a random selection of synonyms to generate unique content.

For example:

The {quick|fast|speedy} {brown|tan|beige} fox {jumped|leaped|soared} over the {lazy|languid|slothful} {dog|canine|pooch}.

That coded content can be used to generate a variety of different sentences by randomly selecting one of the synonyms found inside the {|} for inclusion in the generated sentence. Using this kind of "coded text" on full articles allows you to generate a large number of articles that the search engines see as "unique content."

Sounds like a great idea, right? Not everybody thinks so.

The Controversy

In reading through the many, many forum threads discussing content spinners lately, it seems that people almost always fall into one of three categories:

1. They hate spinners because they feel that they just generate unreadable garbage.

2. They hate spinners because they feel that, even used properly, the content created does not add any real value to the web.

3. They love spinners and use them in every aspect of their search engine optimization.

Let's discuss each of these points of view one at a time.

Hate Group #1: "All Spinners Create Garbage"

In my mind, the group that is completely convinced that all content spinners generate nothing but unreadable garbage have very little real experience with spinners. I do, of course, understand and agree with the idea that you should not just push the synonym button and keep whatever the content spinner adds to your article without modification. If you do that, even with a spinner as highly advanced as my software, The Best Spinner, you usually end up generating articles that read very badly.

However, that's a very irresponsible use of a content spinner. A good spinner can be used to generate a large number of quality articles if the user takes a few minutes to clean up the synonym selections that the software makes. Unfortunately, a lot of people who use spinners don't take the time to do this, thus giving all content spinners a bad name.

Even so, to make the blanket statement that "all spinners are worthless" because of the actions of some spinner users is like saying that all prescription medicine is bad because some people overdose on it. A content spinner can be a powerful tool, and can also be a garbage generator.

Computer programmers have a saying: Garbage In, Garbage Out. That axiom certainly applies here. The quality of a spun document depends very much on the time and effort the user puts into that document.

Hate Group #2: "Spun Articles Add No Real Value To The Web"

I'm much more sympathetic to this point of view than the first. I understand the argument that spinning a document doesn't add any new knowledge or understanding to the web in general. I can see where somebody who feels that way is coming from.

However, syndicating articles through sites like EzineArticles.com doesn't add anything new to the web either, and yet I daresay that almost all of the people in this hate group have nothing against article syndication. What's the difference? The only difference is that with mainstream syndication you're putting the same exact article in many places, whereas with article spinning you're putting the same information worded differently in many places.

So unless a member of this hate group also feels that article syndication adds absolutely no value to the web, it's really hypocritical on their part to have this point of view.

I don't agree, though, that putting well-spun (or even just syndicated) articles in many places on the web doesn't add to the overall pool of knowledge. In my mind, the more places that a well written, educational article appears, the more chances it has of being read, the more people that will benefit from it.

The flip side is also true, of course. A lousy article can also generate a lot of misinformation — but that's where reader discernment comes into play. Misinformation was alive and well long before content spinners were created!

Badly written articles don't prove that content spinners are worthless anymore than a badly made smoothy proves that a blender is worthless. If what goes in is bad, what comes out will be bad. Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Love Group: "Content Spinners Are My Bread And Butter!"

For every spinner hate post I've read on the forums, there's another post talking about how wonderful spinning is and why you should be doing it. I agree. Used correctly, content spinners can help you with search engine optimization in two major ways:

1. They allow you to get links to your web site without manually writing hundreds of unique articles one at a time.

People often post articles to article directories in an effort to get links from other sites to their own site. These links improve your web site's ranking in the search engines. But it takes a long time to write hundreds of unique articles one at a time.

A content spinner makes this much faster by allowing you to create spin-formatted articles that generate dozens or hundreds of unique articles in a tiny fraction of the time it would take to write them all one by one. This saves countless hours of precious time, allowing you to leverage your time much more effectively.

2. They prevent the problem of your syndicated article outranking the article on your web site because they're duplicates.

Has this ever happened to you: You post a new article to your own site, and then submit that same article to some of the major article directories, with a link back to your site, only to find later that the search engines are putting the syndicated article higher up in the search results than the original (if your original is anywhere to be found)!

It happens all the time. That's because the major directories (especially EzineArticles.com) have millions of links into them which give them a large amount of authority in Google's eyes. That means that an article posted on EZA can rank very well without many links to the individual article, whereas you have to do a lot more link building to get your article ranked on your own site.

Google makes it clear that for any given keyword search they will only show one copy of any given article. So if both EzineArticles.com and your own site host the same article about "green widgets", Google's only going to show one of the two articles in the "green widgets" search results. Unless you do a good bit of legwork in advance, EZA is going to win almost every time because of the site's authority.

Content spinners solve this problem by making it easy to generate unique versions of your own site's content for posting to major article directories. That way the search engines see the two documents as different from each other and prevents the article on your site from being filtered out of the results without all of that extra backlinking.

Another advantage of this is that it gives you the ability to have multiple listings for a given set of keywords in the search results. So instead of only the article on your site showing up in Google's results for "green widgets", both the article on your site and the EzineArticles.com article have a chance of being in the top ten. This greatly improves your exposure and traffic potential.

(A word of caution: EzineArticles does not want duplicate content to be submitted to it. So you have to really work hard to get a unique version before submitting it to EZA. The Best Spinner has built in Copyscape checking so you can ensure that your spun version will actually appear unique. All the same, proceed with caution when it comes to EZA.)

In Summary

Are content spinners worthless garbage generators? Yes, if used incorrectly.

Do content spinners not add any real value to the web? If not, then neither does article syndication which nobody has a problem with.

Are content spinners powerful tools for improving your search engine rankings? You betcha, which is why they are so popular these days.

Do you agree or disagree? Please post your thoughts in a comment below.

I've got four dogs, and every morning I go outside to put the dogs into the yard, get them their water, etc. For the past few months (as is pretty typical this time of year in the Dallas area) it's often overcast and breezy. Sometimes the weather looks downright ominous.

For a while I would always check the weather at Weather.com to decide whether or not it was going to rain. If the probability was too high, I would keep the dogs inside. It was often the case, though, that it wouldn't rain even if Weather.com said it probably would.

At one point I made the correlation that when the birds were singing outside, chirping away and having a good ol' time in bird-like fashion, that it definitely would not rain — no matter how bad it looked outside. However, if the birds were silent and the clouds looked heavy, it almost always did rain.

I still check Weather.com when it looks ominous, but it's the birds' opinions that I really trust.

The point of my story is that just because somebody claims to be an authority on a thing doesn't mean you shouldn't trust the knowledge you've personally acquired over the years. The web is chock full of self-proclaimed "gurus" on every imaginable subject (especially Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization!), and some of those guys do know a thing or two, but many are only as accurate as Weather.com (sorry Weather guys). They've got a few of the variables right, and won't always lead you astray, but if you base all of your actions on their information alone, you're probably missing out on a lot of success.

I'm writing this now because there are lots of "courses" out there that promise to teach you a step-by-step method for making money online or ranking in the search engines. I got a barrage of emails this morning from some marketers I follow about yet another "magic button" system that does all of the work for you while you sip martinis and eat bon-bons. Sorry if that last sentence wasn't clear, my eyes were rolling around in a reflexive response as I typed it.

I'm not saying there's nothing to be learned from some of these courses. There usually are some kernels of truth in them. The point in this blog post is that you should not take such information as absolute, unchangeable fact. What works today sometimes won't work next year (if it lasts that long).

So if in your personal experience you've found something else to be true, even if it completely contradicts what I or anyone else says, if it's working stick with it. Don't question the birds you've come to trust just because Weather.com says it's going to rain.

Keep up with what successful marketers and SEOs are saying, because it can often give new insights or add an angle to your own knowledge that you hadn't thought of, but if they claim that what you're doing won't last and yet it's been working for many months or even years — who are you going to believe, them or your own eyes?

End the end, it boils down to this: check the weather, but trust the birds.

I'm painfully aware, however, that this is NOT the case for a lot of people right now. The global economy, while improving, still has a long way to go. Unemployment is high and people are suffering because of it all.

If you're one of those who could really use a hand, then this post is for you.

You see, I'm about to release a free report on how to rank your web sites in Google. It's easy to understand and follow, and avoids the tech-talk and geek-speak that leaves most people scratching their heads about search engine optimization.

Inside this report there are links to 6 different products. They're not REQUIRED to benefit from the knowledge given in the report, but they do help make things a lot easier.

Here's why this is good news for ONE person who could use some money right now. The report is rebrandable. That means that those who read it can turn around and get a copy of the PDF with their own affiliate ids for ClickBank.com and PayDotCom.com plugged into the report. Give the report away for free and when people click and buy, you earn.

Initially, though, I'll be sending you a link to MY personal "rebranded" copy of the report. And I am going to put ONE person's affiliate ids into the copy that I email to my 70,000+ email list.

Would you like it to be YOUR ClickBank and PayDotCom ids? If so, then go to this thread at my JLForums.com forum and tell me why it should be you (be sure to include your ClickBank and PayDotCom usernames in your response):

Click here to go to the thread on the forum.

I'll read all of the responses and pick one person's CB/PDC ids to rebrand the report with. I'll make my choice Friday, April 30th, so be sure to get your post in before then.

The report is going to be made available Monday, May 3rd. I'll email my list with the link where you can download it once it's ready to go.

Well, it seems as if Facebook wants to own the web. But this blog post is not about Facebook or their plans. In reading the news item regarding their plans, however, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, made a comment that web pages linking to each other was a good model, but that more is needed.

I have often contemplated the idea of using links to rank web pages in the search results. No doubt it was a great idea, and still has a large degree of merit. But like any other great idea, once it's discovered that there's money to be made, us savvy business folks get busy making sure we swing the votes in our direction. That is, we get more links to outrank the competition.

That, of course, means that what you're seeing on page one of the search results is often (even usually) the result of businesspersons' efforts, not Google's ideal of pages that were "voted" there by other webmasters.

Maybe that's the way it should be. Maybe who's on top should be the result of who puts the most effort into making sure they're on top. After all, as I've stated in a previous post, just having a great product is not — and should not be — enough to make you successful. You have to get the word out. Right now, with Search, that means getting more links.

Of course, the idea of a democratic web is appealing. If a majority of folks believe Site A is the best, then Site A ranking number one is probably a good thing for most people. If Site B is liked by another large share of folks, then it being number two makes sense, and so on. But that's not what any of the major search engines' results look like right now for most queries.

Honestly, though, with all the time, thought and energy I've put into trying to discover a ranking "property" that cannot be so easily manipulated, I haven't been able to. Today, the ranking "property" that wins the game (especially in Google) is links. But links can be manipulated. Maybe "manipulated" is the wrong word. Maybe, as I stated earlier, it's right and good that those of us who put more effort into our rankings should be number one. So perhaps I should say that links can be "engineered"?

The problem, of course, is that it's just as easy (or hard) to rank a mediocre site as it is to rank a great one — especially in small niche markets that don't get a lot of attention from human reviewers. It's those spammy results that I believe fuel the SEO Puritans belief that any "artificially" acquired link is "black hat", or morally wrong. I, of course, completely disagree with that assertion, but I can at least see that side's point of view.

Since I've failed completely to come up with any great idea on my own, I thought I would put the question to you — my readers. Do you have a better idea about how search should work? Some understanding about what's wrong with the way it's being done now? Or is everything right in the world of Search, and should it stay that way?

After all, before Google came along, links were not a part of the search equation at all. After Google discovered that links were a great way to rank sites, now all search engines use links as a major part of their ranking equation.

So, dear reader, what do you think is the next "big thing" in Search?

Please post your thoughts in a comment below.

This member is not alone! Many times I've heard the story of people who did the keyword research and found great "high paying" keywords only to earn pennies on the dollar compared to the AdWords estimates.

There are two primary reasons, in my experience, why this happens. They are:

REASON #1: AdWords Pricing Is NOT The Same As AdSense Pricing

The price you're seeing in the AdWords Keyword Tool is the estimated cost for a click on Google's search results (AdWords). But the price that advertisers are willing to pay for clicks via AdSense is typically much less (A click may be worth $4.25 on search but only $0.07 via AdSense). There are two reasons for this.

1. A visitor via a search query is highly targeted and typically far more ready to buy than a web site visitor.

Think about it. If somebody goes to Google and searches for "Texas life insurance quote" it's pretty obvious they're ready to buy some life insurance in the state of Texas!

But if somebody reads a news article about some life insurance scam happening in Texas, and the site owner uses AdSense to monetize the site, it's very possible that ads for life insurance in Texas will appear on the page. Out of curiosity the visitor clicks the link. Was that visitor worth $4.25? Probably not.

That example is fairly extreme, but you can see how a visitor on a web page is often far less primed to buy than a Google searcher entering clearly commercial keywords.

That's not the only reason AdSense values are less though. Unfortunately, there's a darker reason as well.

2. Click fraud drives the actual value of clicks from the AdSense network down.

There are huge networks of bogus "clickers" who are hoping to get a payday at the expense of AdWords advertisers. Although Google works hard to prevent such clicks from being charged to the advertiser, it's impossible to prevent them all. I've read estimates across the board, from 10% to 33% of AdSense clicks being fraudulent.

How big the problem really is is anybody's guess, but AdWords advertisers have learned to keep the price they pay via AdSense (the "content network") much lower than their Google search bids.

For advertisers it's just a matter of return on investment (ROI). Lower ROI for the advertiser means lower payouts per click for AdSense publishers, whether the lower ROI is due to the less-targeted nature of your traffic or due to the prevalence of fraud.

REASON #2: Google Has "SmartPriced" Your Site

The second reason you will sometimes see a dramatic difference in earnings per-click is that Google has "SmartPriced" your site. "Smart" Pricing is Google's way of estimating how valuable the click-throughs coming from your site are to advertisers. If they feel your clicks are very valuable, you'll earn a higher amount per click. This is determined (in part) by conversions tracked by the advertisers, and by other guestimations made by Google about the traffic they receive from you.

There are two schools of thought about "Smart" Pricing. The one school says it's a joke to try and determine how valuable traffic is without having access to 100% of the conversion data from advertisers (and the majority don't share that data with Google). The other side says that Google has to try and do something or advertisers will just go away and there will be no AdSense network at all. I tend to lean toward the first school of thought, but then I'm a much bigger AdSense publisher than I am an AdWords advertiser.

There's pretty much nothing you can do about the AdWords versus AdSense bid difference, but you have some control over "Smart" Pricing. Here are a couple of ways to keep Google's valuation of your site higher:

1. Don't send junk traffic to your site.

When I say "junk traffic" I mean traffic from sites that advertise "Get 1 million visitors for $10!" and from buying ads on low-quality networks that are full of fraud. A rule of thumb is this: if the traffic doesn't convert visitors into sales for a salesletter that's known to perform well with Google traffic or AdWords, it's junk traffic and should be not be used to earn from AdSense.

2. I've found that the more my traffic comes directly from Google for searches related to the advertisement, the higher my payout per click is.

For example, if your AdSense-monetized page is about electric motor scooters, and the ad that gets clicked is about electric motor scooters, and the traffic you're getting is from Google's search results for "electric motor scooters", then your payout will generally be a lot higher.

Google tracks this transaction from search to click, so they know when the clicks come from their own traffic. Google understandably trusts their own search traffic more than any other and so are willing to pay more for clicks from their own results. They assume it's "quality" and will convert better for the advertiser (which is probably true).

So try to focus on getting traffic from Google to generate revenue from AdSense. Don't be surprised if it takes Google a few weeks or even two months to figure out they need to increase your payout per click, though. "Smart" Pricing isn't an instantaneous thing.

Does that mean you can't earn good AdSense money from other traffic sources? Of course not! Just don't expect Google to value the clicks as highly and payout as much as clicks originating from their search engine. If what you're doing is working, keep at it, but the more your traffic comes from Google the closer your click-values will generally be to what the AdWords tool says.

Please click here to discuss this post at the forum.

Wonderful, I'm ready to buy.

Problem #1: Where's the buy link?

But, wait, how do I buy? I'm looking around on the page describing the various levels of the software I can purchase, but there's no "buy" link next to any of them.

After a few moments of hunting, I finally see it in the upper-right hand corner of the page — masked by its background color. Not easy to see at all.

I click Order Now.

Problem #2: I can't buy without an account.

After clicking Order Now, I'm taken to a screen informing me that I have to create an account or login. What? Why? Why do I need an account to purchase a piece of software?

I'm annoyed, but I start filling out the form. It asks for all kinds of irrelevent information: my address (it's a software download, why do they need my address?), my company name, fax number (does anybody fax anymore?) etc.

At least it doesn't make me verify my email address before logging me in.

Problem #3: I can't buy using the email address I gave them.

After logging into the system using the account I (for some reason) had to create, I have to step through four pages of selections before finally getting to the "make your payment" button (yes, four pages of unnecessary selections).

I click the "make your payment" button — but wait! — I'm informed that I can't purchase using a Gmail email address.

Seriously! They won't take my money because my email address is through Gmail! How ludicrous is that??? On top of that, they inform me of this AFTER I go through four pages of selections and NOT before I create the account!

So after hunting around the account screen, I finally find an 'Account Settings' link where (I assume) I can change my email address to an email address that I never use (since they won't take the one that I use all the time).

Are you sensing what's coming?

I can't change my email address!

Nope, I have to contact their support staff to have my email address changed. Their support staff which is currently offline.

Problem #4: Where's my software?

Rather than going through the process of contacting their support staff, I just logout and create a new account (under an email address that I never use) and walk through the four pages of selections again. I make it to the "make your payment" button again, and, holding my breath — I click it.

It works! I'm taken to WorldPay to checkout. They don't take PayPal (which I prefer to use), but that's okay — I just generate a one-time use credit card number via PayPal and use that instead.

On the checkout page, there's a big box asking for the billing address, and a box below that asking for the zip code. Hmm… do they want my FULL billing address in that box, or just the PO Box number? I don't know, and the help under the Billing Address link doesn't tell me.

I enter in my full billing address and other details and — holding my breath again — click submit.

Yay! It works.

After the payment is made, though, I'm immediately informed that my transaction has to be verified by the vendor before I'll get my software, and that the process will take 24 hours.

What??? Why on earth do you have to verify the transaction? You have my money, where's my download link?

NEVER sell ANYTHING online like this!

The support software these guys sell is stellar, but their sales process is the most painful I've ever had to get through. The ONLY reason I didn't cancel and walk away from it is that I know how good the software is. I actually did walk away for a while before deciding that I had to put up with it in order to get the best software to provide the best support for my customers. Had I even a little less conviction than I do, I would have left them behind (and they would have lost about $300).

I'm telling you about this because you need to know how NOT to sell online. People purchasing online are impatient and easily put off by long and difficult sales processes. The high rate of abandoned orders at major retailers is evidence of this.

When you want people to buy from you, make it work like this:

1. Show them the product, complete with description and price and a BIG VISIBLE "BUY NOW" BUTTON (or link).
2. When they click BUY NOW, take them immediately to the checkout process. Don't require them to create an account first, and PLEASE don't prevent them from buying just because they use Gmail.
3. After the purchase is complete, if it's a digital product, deliver it instantly. Don't wait to "verify" the sale. If your payment processor doesn't support that, GET A DIFFERENT PROCESSOR. There's too many out there that support instant delivery to use one that doesn't.
4. If you need the person to have some kind of account with you for support purposes, etc., have them create that account after the sale. Send them directly to the account creation process after purchase, and email them a link to create their account in case they fail to do so. Trust me, when they need support, they'll eventually create an account with you!

Whew. Okay, I had to get that out of my system.

Please let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment on this post.

[Edit]To respond to some of the comments: I'm not giving the name of the software because the purpose of this post is not to bash the vendor. Let me just say that it's a BIG NAME in the help desk market. Also, the software is GREAT, but their sales process is lousy — must be different teams responsible for the two![/Edit]