Those who watch the search engine space, or make a living online, have long realized that Google personlizes search results. That is: based on what type of PC you use, where you are when you browse, whether you’re logged into Google (gmail for instance) or not: it all influences the top ten search results that comes up when you search.

Google has good reason to do this. When an Apple fan searches for ‘apple’ it’s more likely that they’re not that interested in the fruit at that moment than when an average person does so. Similarly, if you live in Europe you’re going to find other news stories relevant, other banks, etc.

However, if you’re like me: trying to make money online, you want to see what the ‘average’ person online sees when they look for something. You don’t want that site you own to come up into the top 10 merely because it’s you searching for it. Yes, that happens. What you want to know is, if someone searches for ‘keyword’, does my site come up?

Scroogle filled that gap. However, unfortunately, they’ve closed ship. In fact: the former owner feels so attacked by hackers that he has closed all sites he owns down.

The alternatives to Scroogle? Well of the ones recommended I’ll be going with Google’s own ‘Google Encripted‘. However, it’s still Google, so it’s unclear how unpersonalized this option is. However, it certainly brings up US results when I search for ‘bank’. I was not logged into Google at the time, which may make a difference.

Pagewash looks less pretty, but it is one of the ways to browse the web anonymously – so you’ll be browsing Google anonymously too.

See also: The demise of Scroogle, and Privacy online

I found out about this at Wizzley, one of the places where I write.

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© Katinka Hesselink for Marketing Spiritual, 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: google, scroogle

Two months ago, when lensroll disappeared, I had the following exchange with Megan Casey about Squidoo SEO Policy:

Katinka Hesselink

Disabling lensroll means a big change in the SEO structure of squidoo: that is, people will have to feature lenses they want to promote or use a link list, instead of being able to just link to something through lensroll. I realize it didn’t send traffic, but that doesn’t mean the links were meaningless.

Megan Casey, Cofounder

Lensrolled links were not a critical part of our SEO strategy or structure.
Yes, people should continue to use various modules like the Featured Lenses or My Lenses module, and the Featured Lenses sidebar widget, and the Related Lenses tool, to cross promote lenses.

Katinka Hesselink
I don’t really care about your strategy, nor does Google. What I know is that those lensroll links were visible to Google, and thus made an impact, and that removing them will impact the site structure in that sense.

I have to repeat that last comment in altered form: I don’t really care about your strategy, nor does Google. What I know is that featured lenses and my lenses module links were visible to Google, and thus made an impact, and that removing them will impact the site structure in that sense.

What am I talking about? Over this weekend I discovered that the modules and widgets most of us use to interlink our own content, are in fact at present not seen by Google at all. I don’t know whether this was already in place when Megan and I had that conversation. I noticed loading issues with the My Lenses module and Featured lenses widget about a month ago. I suspect the changes to them were made around that time.

Take a moment to digest that – it took me a weekend, so I’ll give you all some time too: when you feature a lens, your own or someone elses, that link is only seen by visitors, not by search engines. So you’re not helping that lens rank at all. This makes most lensographies moot as a link building tactic, for instance. It also explains why some of my lensographies, which ranked last year, don’t do so this year. The content that helped them rank isn’t even visible this right now.

That’s today’s newsflash, though I started a conversation about it on squidu on Friday, so it’s not new for the attentive.

Given that the above quote from Megan, I have some hope of this technical change having been taken without HQ realizing the SEO impact.

Hubpages made it a policy to stimulate hubbers to interlink their content – and in fact link to places all over their site – through measuring ‘hub karma’: how much people were linking out from their hubs to other pages on the site. My hubkarma is rather low (49 or something) because I only link to my own hubs.

What’s the point? They actively WANT people to link from one hub to another.

Judging by it’s actions (always louder than words, though in this case enacted silently and without official announcement) Squidoo HQ does NOT want us to interlink our content.

Never mind that in the past I’ve seen lenses suddenly rank after I’d featured them somewhere (yes, that was when a feature still meant a link in Google’s eyes).

Never mind that Google loves editorial links. That is: links put up by an actual human, because they liked the content.

In practical terms:

The only linking module in Squidoo I trust my links to at present is the link list module. It loads very fast, so it’s not at danger of being hidden from search engines. The link plexo is a tempting alternative, but it’s had too many technical difficulties over the years for me to recommend it. Anyhow, I’m not sure that it’s indexed these days.

I’m not looking forward to going in and changing every one of my over 700 lenses. Yet that will have to be done if this isn’t changed. I can’t ignore Squidoo as a platform as I make the majority of my online income there. However, I fully understand any one moving away from the platform for this reason: one change too many (well, more than one).

As a teacher this move silences me – I’m seriously at a loss for words about dealing with this myself, let alone advising others on how to deal with this.

What do I tell newbies? There’s a not-yet-squid I’m looking forward to mentoring and this is not the kind of thing I want her having to face in the first days of attempting to create content not merely for humans (which she does instinctively) but for search engines as well.

When we discussed this issue on Squidu, Barbrad said:

I guess I just don’t have time to keep up with all this. I click on related lenses from featured lenses, my lenses, etc., when the links interest me. It seems that it’s easier to follow Google’s advice to write for people, not search engines, and that’s what I plan to do. That doesn’t mean I will ignore search engines. I will try to stick my key words into the lenses in appropriate places, especially into titles and subtitles. I’m not going to go back and redo all these modules to please search engines. If what you’ve said about lensographies is true, they may count as link farms and do Squidoo more harm than good. I have never seem much point in them except to help one get organized. It would really be interesting to see what Google thinks of both the lensographies, plexos, and even specialized lenses with lots of links such as angel blessing lenses and purple star lens compilations, etc. It would be pretty sad if Google saw Squidoo as  a giant link farm because so many lenses are full of almost nothing but links — even if they are all interlinks on Squidoo.

I totally understand where she’s coming from. I really think the platform should avoid getting in the way – it should just make it as easy as possible to instinctively do SEO reasonably well. Squidoo has never gotten close to that ideal when it comes to interlinking. This recent step is a step in the wrong direction. How will I teach this to newbies? This move is so totally counter intuitive!

Barbrad’s post needs a reply: it’s an example, IMO, of how paranoid we can become when we start thinking everything we would normally do is suspect. I’ll repeat what I said in the thread:

Link lists can easily rank in Google – some of mine on other sites do.

As long as you make sure each lens has it’s own unique content, having links to other lenses on the topic is a help to visitors AND helps for Google’s sake.

Lensographies are no exception: some of mine even rank seriously in their niche. In each case they contain more than just featured lenses modules.

As long as you don’t ignore what would work for people there’s no reason to ignore what works for search engines.

Google LOVES editorial links – links hand picked as great quality by an actual human who doesn’t link to just anything. So angel blessing lenses and purple star compilations aren’t a problem, though unless they’re keyword researched they aren’t likely to rank themselves. However, when the featured lenses module is indexed, such lenses should be a help to any lens listed ON them. In fact that’s one of the reasons I make those.

Google loves editorial links. That’s the main point here.

I suspect this change was made to make Squidoo as fast as possible. As I said in the thread, I can somewhat understand when it comes to the My Lenses module: I would not have created it in the first place.

Another important consideration is that Squidoo seems to have made it a habit of simply hiding from Google any content it doesn’t know how to serve up fast enough. The amazon module is another example.

In the Google webmaster guidelines it says:

Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors.

The policy hiding content in certain modules from Google definitely breaks that guideline. Squidoo is effectively hiding content with javascript.

In my mental hierarchy of Google guidelines this one is a way more imp0rtant consideration than page speed. But I really don’t understand why Squidoo can’t make an amazon, featured lenses and my lenses module that loads fast AND is seen by search engines.

As you can see in the thread I am not too positive about the My Lenses module. I understand hiding it. However, given that it does exist, I think it really deserves to be indexed by Google. The Featured Lenses module is an even clearer case: those are editorial links, links a lensmaster wanted to share with the world. Google expressly WANTS to see such links.

What I’d suggest for both is as follows:

• The featured lenses module and widget should no longer offer the option of showing lenses in random order. That was a fun idea, but nobody really enjoyed it anyhow. After all – who’s going to ask a user to refresh a lens to see the rest of the content in a featured lenses module? We used to do that on Squidoo groups, but it never worked.
  Getting rid of the ‘random’ aspect of the module should help save coding space.
• Both the featured lenses and the my lenses module should only update their content on two occasions: on republish of the lens and on lensrank update. In between the content should be cashed.
• And yes, both modules should be coded in such a way that their content IS visible to search engines and people on alternative browsers.

The most disturbing thing about this whole business is that the advice given by Megan two months ago is already outdated. Never mind that mine is too.

I am going on holiday soon, so I can’t keep up to date on this issue for you all. The way the My lenses and Featured lenses modules are at present so clearly against Google guidelines, that I have some hope of HQ reversing this decision. My recommendation to individual lensmasters is to not go out of your way to replace either with a link list just yet – but when you do go in and edit a lens, make this part of the to-do routine. That is – till we know what HQ does about this, if anything.

[edit] I just checked the link-plexo. It too is no longer visible to search engines. [/edit]

Related Posts

• Don’t rely on Squidoo Lensmasters for Traffic (1)
• What the new google rel-nofollow policy means for squidoo (10)
• Optimizing tags on squidoo lenses (3)

© Katinka Hesselink for Marketing Spiritual, 2011. | Permalink | 17 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: seo squidoo, squidoo modules, squidoo seo

First watch this video by Matt Cutts from Google:

Do you recommend article marketing as an SEO strategy?

Since I’ve been advising people to do article marketing for ages now, I think I should explain. Matt Cutts says you should NOT do article marketing. I say you should. The difference is due to a difference in definition and perspective.

What Matt Cutts warns against is writing for sites that will distribute your article all over the web. This will create duplicate content and help you get low quality backlinks to your sites and pages. I would never recommend this method and have never done this myself.

So we agree on that point.

Where we differ is in perspective; Matt Cutts is in charge of watching the quality of the search results on Google. He doesn’t want anything done that takes away from the ‘natural’ working of the web. However, what is natural?

I’m in the business of writing online and making a living that way. It’s my business to rank highly in Google by any ethical method that works.

I’m tempted to go all philosophical on you, but that is not what you read this blog for, so I’ll stop myself.

Instead here is why article marketing done right DOES work and how you should put it to good use:

Writing quality articles about your niche on various quality sites and interlinking them works because Google is not about to stop counting ‘editorial’ links. You can get this out of the video too, if you listen carefully.

However, they are on the move to try and give social signals a higher priority. So you do also need to be on twitter and facebook. Though the Twitter-Google deal recently fell through, so unless Google+ really takes off, Google can’t really use many social signals at the moment. This is one reason though to check Google+ every once in a while to see if it’s taking off. I tried it for about a week and don’t think it will be very successful, but there is enough activity there to still have a chance.

Back to practical matters: what I do recommend is writing for various sites, interlinking your content and making sure you write on platforms with a high quality standard (like Wizzley). I also recommend starting and keeping up your own niche blogs if you have the money / technical skills to do so.

The thing to remember is:

• Google cares about editorial links: in many niches your own links will help a LOT towards ranking because there just isn’t that much quality competition yet.
• Google cares about editorial links: if you create quality content, you will get such links yourself.
• Google cares about editorial links and to drown out article marketeers it will also look at how many domains you get links from. This is a reason to write on various sites and to own various sites.
• People care about links too: link TO quality articles and sites and you’re more likely to GET links as well. Don’t be greedy about links.

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© Katinka Hesselink for Marketing Spiritual, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Article marketing tips, link building, online promotion, priorities, promotion

HUGE – hubpages will be moving all of it’s authors to their own subdomain, to counter the inpact of Panda:  Source

You can move all your stuff over to your own subdomain today, manually, or wait till they do it automatically. I advise moving over ASAP.

The steps are simple:

1. Log into hubpages
2. Go to your profile
3. Edit it
4. Go to the tab ‘subdomain’
5. Follow instructions under ‘subdomain’ in the sidebar

You get the subdomain of your username, so those of us who picked one with a keyword have an added bonus. I’m at: http://spirituality.hubpages.com/

[edit]Of course the hubs will get new URLs but the old ones will redirect to the new URLs.  [/edit]

You will have to change your Google Analytics account information:

1. Log into your Google Analytics account
2. Go to your Hubpages account
3. Add a new profile (on the right, don’t click through to your stats), select ‘add a profile for a new domain’.
4. Add the subdomain, in my case: spirituality.hubpages.com - in general it will be yourusername.hubpages.com
5. Follow instructions
6. It will give you new GA code to put on your site: on that page you’ll also find the GA code for your subdomain in the from of ‘UA-1111111-2′
7. Go to your Hubpages account
8. Go to ‘Earnings’ > ‘Affiliate settings’ > ‘Reporting Settings’ > configure Google Analytics
9. It will take a while before GA picks up on the change. Change things now: summer is a low season in most niches anyhow. You want things in place well before traffic start picking up for Halloween and Christmas.

All in all I’m very glad with this move by Hubpages. It will help people who have good content on the site: they will have their own subdomain, so their own content determines your ‘trust’ rank but you will still have the advantage of the hubpages directory and tag structure to get your pages ‘internal’ links.

Another way to explain this is that this is a bit the way it works at blogspot: there are a lot of spammy and semi-spammy blogger blogs out there, yet individual blogs rank very well. The content in one subdomain is not impacting the ‘trust’ of blogs on other subdomains.

Similarly this will help hubs by one author avoid being penalized by the low quality hubs by other authors on hubpages. The best will rank better, the worst will no longer rank better than they deserve (at it certainly did pre-panda) because it’s on a generally trusted site.

Instead each author will have their own site and with that their own ‘trust’ imparted by Google, based on their link profile and content.

Note: this post was made possible partly by my Google+ friends.

Related Posts

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© Katinka Hesselink for Marketing Spiritual, 2011. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: google seo, hubpages

Most of the people who comment on here have done this, but a few haven’t, so I thought I’d remind people:

If you want your avatar to show up on wordpress blogs, nine times out of ten what you need is a gravatar account. It connnects your email address (hidden from viewers) with an avatar of your choice. As on other online networks you should use an image that is recognizable – either your brand, or a photograph.

http://www.gravatar.com/.

This works for all WordPress blogs: self hosted or not. You can, if you insist, use different email addresses and connect them to different ID’s and online profiles.

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© Katinka Hesselink for Marketing Spiritual, 2011. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Article marketing tips, blogging platform, online promotion, promotion, techniques

I had a panicky email from a fellow squid this weekend who was worried about whether she’d get to stay in the Giant Squid program, after having been accused of problem making on the new squidu forums. It really is unfortunate when people who worry are perceived as rocking the boat. When what they’re doing is really caring about the boat and not understand where it’s going. But that’s off topic.

She also shared that she’d been banned from adsense, so now Squidoo was the only way for her to make money online. I emailed an answer back, of course, and this post is a longer answer.

The bad news is, and she already knew this, that once you’re out of adsense, you can’t get back in. A way around is to have someone else sign up for you, of course. Or move and have your husband sign up for you. Such options are not quite legal and besides the point. The fact is: without adsense you’ll make less money online. So for those of you who have not been banned yet – follow my advice and stay out of the adsense program till you have at least 100 visitors to your account a day. That way, when you or your kids accidentally click an ad, it won’t mean your account gets blocked right away.

Now for the various alternatives to Google Adsense. Unfortunately there isn’t really any program as good at monetizing general content as Google Adsense. You’ll have to live with that. However, there are ways around the ban and there are also ways to make money online that don’t involve Google Adsense at all.

Squidoo of course acts as an intermediary between adsense and other advertisers and we get paid out based on lensrank tiers and affiliate sales. So making content on squidoo is a way to make money online even when you don’t have an adsense account any more. The bad news is, of course, that it only starts to add up once you make lenses that end up in second or first tier.

What’s less well known, because it’s more recent, is that Hubpages now has their own internal HubPages Ad Program as well. They launched it right after the Panda update, which I think is a coincidence though. The Hubpages system pays out through Paypal, just like Squidoo does. So when you want to do article marketing, you can stick to hubpages and Squidoo. Interlink your lenses and hubs on topic and both accounts are likely to do well.

[edit]Unfortunately, it appears that one of the basics for the hubpages program is that you DO have an existing adsense account. This puts people in a bind, obviously, because it means that if you’ve been banned – for whatever reason – you can’t sign up for the hubpages program either. Source. Unfortunately they deleted their own official hub on the topic, so I’m not sure what to think of this program.[/edit]

Furthermore – among affiliate marketeers adsense doesn’t have a very good name to start with. Loads of professional affiliate marketeers don’t touch adsense because they feel people are less likely to buy stuff from their sites when there are ads along side them. The argument is that a sale through an Adsense click is not going to make them as much as a sale through a direct affiliate link. Which is true, however all those clicks through affiliate links that do NOT make us money, do make us money when they’re adsense clicks. I think it evens out. Still, lots of people make sufficient online to live off without adsense. What they do have are affiliate earnings.

Affiliate earnings of course include earnings you can make off your own products – Zazzle or cafepress products. Market them through Squidoo, Hubpages and your own blogs. Of course this really only makes sense if you have the necessary talent.

My own online strategy started out with content, not sales, so I rely heavily on Adsense. If you’re banned from adsense you’ll have to see your content as marketing and link bait and limit your business strategy to sales instead. This should not stop you from blogging: a blog heavy in buying advice may still make you a lot. And a blog like this one, without ads at all, is still good marketing. However, you’ll have to accept what I did without such force: that it won’t make you much in any direct way.

To conclude: it may be harder, but there is still money to be made online after an adsense ban. Squidoo, Hubpages and affiliate sales on your own blogs and sites can combine to make a living. And that squid who mailed me won’t have trouble doing this, but others reading this may not: d0 make sure you abide by their terms of service.

Do also read my tips on how to become successful on Squidoo.

Related Posts

• How to make more affiliate sales – conversion for web publishers (0)
• Don’t rely on Squidoo Lensmasters for Traffic (1)
• Don’t rely on lensroll for interlinking your Squidoo lenses (3)

© Katinka Hesselink for Marketing Spiritual, 2011. | Permalink | 12 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Article marketing tips, money, sales, techniques, tips

Chefkeem at Wizzley shared some great tips for making it online on their forums today. One post he shared was the Noble Samurai videos on web conversion.

Web conversion is basically the art of turning traffic into buyers. This post is about how to turn traffic into buyers on affiliate sites.

Noble Samurai has published a list of conversion tactics, but not all are relevant for online publishers like us. So I thought I’d pick the ones that are, and elaborate on them:

• Qualifying Questions – Life is too short to work on lousy project
  Questions to ask yourself: ‘Would I buy this myself?’ and ‘who would I recommend this product to?’ If the answer is ‘no’ and ‘nobody’ then step away and just don’t do it. The answer to the second makes good copy for your page btw. It may even be a good title ‘the best laptop for moms’, for instance.
• Logical Flow, Lead people  through a logical sequence
  This is targeted at webshops. However, when you’re picking webshops to be an affiliate for, it pays to check this. Is their site logical? Would you buy from it? Try their checkout process: do you get lost? Are there many steps? Many steps and you getting lost are both indications that the site doesn’t convert well. And if it doesn’t convert well, it will be hard to make money off them as an affiliate. One reason why Amazon is such a popular site to be an affiliate for, is that their site DOES convert well and is easy to use. One reason why Godaddy is getting less popular as a domain host and registrar is that they include so many extra offers on the site these days that it’s hard to just buy that one domain name you came to the site for.
• Market Segmentation – Match offers to customer segments
  Translated into creating sales pages on Hubpages, Squidoo and Wizzley this means: know who you’re writing for. You’d write differently for a guy on a pension than for a teenage girl. Make sure you know who you’re aiming at. If a product is suitable for different audiences, consider making pages for each. The reason that guy on a pension wants a laptop is likely different from the reason that high school girl needs one.
• Clear Value Presentation- Simple, clear presentation of value is critical!
  Is it clear what you’re offering? Is the headline clear and believable? Is it obvious why people should buy that product? Bullet points and emphasized text can help. Do graphics reinforce my message, or do they merely distract? (rephrased from the PDF)
• Specificity / Believability, Be specific
  Very important: don’t be vague, don’t drag in stuff that doesn’t belong on the page, give people what they came for, make sure what you’re saying makes sense.
• Personality, People buy from people, not faceless websites
  This is one point that my own affiliate sites can benefit from: a look at how to make the site more of a brand, more personal. I recently updated all my Squidoo profile pictures recently to use the same picture of me, with a branded image in the corner to make the difference between the accounts clear. More personal, no longer faceless.
• Look at the competition (not just on squidoo)
  What are they doing right, what can I learn from them? What are they missing? How can I improve on them? Back to those laptops: most sites talking about laptops are geeks recommending stuff to other geeks. If you’re a mom, why not recommend a laptop to moms? What’s the stuff you as a mom need from your laptop and which laptop would you recommend most? This can obviously translate into other demographics as well.
• Scarcity / Urgency, People buy scarce resources for fear of loss
  In my niches this is not often relevant. However, if in your niche it is – do stress the fact that there is limited  supply, that people have to buy before a certain date etc.
• Social Proof – People feel comfortable following the crowd
  This is why I’ve installed Google Feedburner widgets on my popular blogs, one of the reasons why it’s a bad thing that Squidoo disabled fanclubs, why having social buttons that tell people how many other people have tweeted or liked a page are a good thing. It’s also why best seller lists work and you may want to have comments enabled even on sales pages.
• Authority , Use Authority to legitimise your offering
  I’ve used this where relevant – as a teacher I’m an authority on some topics at least. When quoting authority make sure you mention their qualifications.
• Distractions / Friction – Don’t distract users as they’re doing what you want, don’t ask people to think
  Don’t sell posters on a page about calendars. Don’t sell calendars on a page that sells posters. Make sure all your content is relevant to the page. You can LINK to a page selling cat calendars on a page about cat posters, or the other way around. In fact you should. But don’t put up an amazon module for one on the other. If you DO do this – I have on occasion –  make sure you’re making it very clear that this is something else than what they came for.
  This is a good reason to turn OFF the related lenses feature on your Squidoo lenses: they push down the amazon widgets and make people click out to other lenses. Since right now this won’t even mean your lenses disappear from OTHER people’s related lenses feature, it’s likely to turn your sales lenses into even more efficient sales machines. [Yes, I've reported this as a bug. Me blogging about this may lead to the bug being fixed. It's clearly NOT policy.]
  Link to related lenses at the bottom of your Squidoo lens, when people have apparently decided NOT to buy something. They might be interested in related stuff.

I’d like to end with one general tip on how to convert more:

Make more of what sells:
If you made one page that sells pink pens well, do make another on blue pens, and green pens, and purple pens etc. If on a page about green pens you find people are really buying green fountain pens, make a page about that.

Related Posts

• How to make money online after being banned from adsense (12)
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© Katinka Hesselink for Marketing Spiritual, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Article marketing tips, money, sales tip, sales tips, techniques, tips

Last year I had the biggest webdesign job in my career (also the last one, as I quit designing websites for new clients just after). I wanted to make the CMS as user friendly as possible and went with WordPress. Two reasons: ease of use – with Joomla as the alternative WordPress was the clear winner. I could not figure out Joomla even after several tries and was dreading the day I’d have to explain it to others. WordPress on the other hand is easy to use. Of course Blogger is even easier, but we needed a professional site, not a blog. The other reason: I’d made WordPress sites before and was familiar with the platform.

Anyhow – the one thing that was missing was tables. I looked high and low for a table plugin that would satisfy my requirements, and could not find any. In the end I went without a table plugin and when push came to shove convinced the one person in the organisation who would have had to work with tables that he didn’t need them.

However, for a new site I just built for myself I did want tables. So I went and looked again.

Most table plugins create a database table in the backend somewhere and then expect you to pull it in with a shortcode. That may be the best method for things like forms, but for every day editing it’s just not a good solution. I wanted to be able to edit the table in the post itself just like you’d do in a word processing program.

There were a few table plugins I found that DID do that, but when I looked at the result in source code it turned out they added javascript to every page in the site. That’s not good. A table only requires some HTML, no JavaScript necessary. And extra JavaScript means a slower site, which is annoying for users and may cause Google to give the site a lower ranking.

So I looked on.

In the end I found the popular TinyMCE Advanced plugin. Last updated in 2009 unfortunately, but it does the trick.

I am not sorry I didn’t implement it on that client site, because teaching a newbie to use it would have been a bit of trouble. To make it look good you have to manually enter the width (100% works best in most cases). But once you’ve done that you end up with a table that can be edited too: you can merge cells, add rows, change the aligning of cells or rows or the whole table etc. In short: you can do what you’re used to doing with tables in your favorite word processing software.

So, TinyMCE Advanced is the best table plugin I could find. It’s reasonably user friendly and it doesn’t add bloated code to the finished post or the site as a whole.

See also: Must have WordPress plugins and The WordPress plugins I use.

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© Katinka Hesselink for Marketing Spiritual, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: wordpress

On the Wizzley forums people were panicking about Hubpages, thinking the site is dying.

Well, since I have a number of articles on hubpages I went and took a look. Doesn’t look like  site that’s dying to me. There are a LOT of recently active threads in the forums, more than I’ve ever seen at Squidoo. The backend has recently been made over, so they’re still investing developer time.

Greekgeek did an overview of their traffic stats recently and Hubpages is, like Squidoo, holding steady.

Remember: this means it’s still one of the top 300 sites of the web worldwide and one of the top 100 sites in the USA.

http://greekgeek.mythphile.com/2011/06/hubpages-vs-squidoo-traffic-holding-steady/

It also means that Hubpages and Squidoo are at present getting roughly the same amount of traffic. The kind of traffic our individual sites can only dream about. Sure, the trend over the past few months is negative, but the amounts of traffic are still very impressive IMO and represent a solid business model.

I don’t think Hubpages is going anywhere soon.

All that traffic translates into adsense money. Maybe less than they’d counted on 6 months ago. The recent google changes may have cut deeply into the pockets of many hubpages contributors. Still, no reason to think the site is dying.

They’re responding to the changes Google made with more stringent quality guidelines and filters – not enough for my taste, but still. I would not be surprised if their traffic started increasing again within a few months.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not contributing new articles on Hubpages, but then I’m not contributing new articles to Squidoo either. I’ve decided to focus on my own sites.

But I’m not backing up my articles either, which is definitely what I’d do if I thought the site was dying.

For what it’s worth traffic on some of my pages seems to be improving already. And on my account the downwards trend in traffic could easily be explained by seasonal factors, there is little indication of a sudden decrease in traffic that can be attributed to the Panda update.

That’s only one account of course. Mileage will vary. Still, I see absolutely no reason to abandon the site as though it were a sinking ship. It’s merely a ship that’s gotten into some bad weather and perhaps the captain wasn’t prepared for that. Still, no broken bones, no holes in the hull. No reason to panic.

As for moving articles – do I need to remind you all what I think about that?

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© Katinka Hesselink for Marketing Spiritual, 2011. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: hubpages

It’s always good online to diversify. Especially if you interlink your stuff, it will strengthen your online profile to be active on several publishing platforms at once. Though I’d also advise any of you to start your own niche blog, once you’ve found that niche.

The new kid on the block is Wizzley. Of course it’s not the only place where you can write and share revenue with the owners, but it is the only one I take seriously next to Squidoo and Hubpages. Yes, I still take hubpages seriously, after it lost traffic in the latest Google update. It still gets as much traffic as Squidoo does. That means something.

But back to Wizzley. I signed up because it is managed by people I know from Squidoo and who’ve shown they’ve got staying power in previous projects they started. A few of the people who started this site were also responsible for squidlog, one of the community blogs in the Squidoo sphere. Starting a community blog is easy. Keeping it alive is a totally different matter. Squidlog is still alive. That’s an accomplishment.

However, community blogs isn’t where the money is, and I guess the owners realized that.

So now they’ve started Wizzley. It’s closer to Hubpages than to Squidoo in technology. For instance: it is based on revenue sharing. You enter your adsense, amazon, allposters and zazzle account information in the backend and every other impression will have your ID in it when using the respective modules.

The main reason, aside from liking the people, I signed up for Wizzley and made 11 pages there so far, was that I like the package:

• Easy to use
• Tough anti-spam and anti-duplicate content policies
• Automatic interlinking of content by category and author (shows the latest 6 articles by that author)
• Community building (I guess I’m not the only one who likes these people)

Of course from a business perspective what’s most important here is SEO: is Wizzley a well optimized platform from the Search Engines perspective?

Yes, and no.

ON PAGE SEO on Wizzley is fine. Nothing wrong with it, nothing spectacularly great about it either. The title is coded in, the module titles are H2 and H3 and images can easily be added in a way that they include alt-text.

INTERNAL LINKING on Wizzley is a bit different from what you’ll be used to. They skipped tags altogether. This has SEO advantages: it means that there won’t be orphan tags, and less duplicate content on the site as a whole. It also means that most of the internal linking the site creates automatically is by category.

This means that if you produce articles on wizzley that is related, but shows up in different corners of the site, you’ll have to interlink the yourself. Of course, really, you should do that anyhow, but the thing is: Wizzley will not do it for you. For instance, there are several wizzley articles about calendars. They show up, as they should, in their topic category. So Jewish calendars show up under Judaism, while cute planners show up under ‘home organizing’. Nothing wrong with that – except in the related articles in the sidebar, it would make more sense to show other calendar pages on the site, whether made by me or someone else. Instead it shows other articles from within the ‘home organizing’ subcategory where it can, and from categories up from there if there isn’t enough available in the subcategory.

I would not have gone this path. I’d have copied the hubpages approach to tags myself. Still, I don’t think this will turn out to be much of a problem for Wizzley. After all, all it takes to fix this is to just take the title into account a bit more when calculating which pages to feature in those related links.

Still, there are simply LESS internal links on a Wizzley page by default than on hubpages or squidoo. That might prove a problem long term. I don’t know. SEO is to some extent a guessing game.

However, as you use Wizzley, do interlink to counter the weaknesses of the platform: make sure to interlink pages that are related, but in very different categories.

QUALITY CONTROL on Wizzley is better than on Squidoo and Hubpages combined. Those other sites have an existing community to take into account. Wizzley can afford to set the bar high and attract new writers who are willing to live up to them. Specifically there are manual as well as automatic controls. Automatically there is a check for a minimum of 400 words per article and duplicate content: it flags at a short sentence copied from elsewhere. There is also, like on Squidoo, a list of topics you’re NOT permitted to write on. Since I think that list on Squidoo was one of the reasons Squidoo wasn’t punished in the Google Panda update, I think this is a very wise move.

My sense is that because of the stringent quality controls – both automatic and manual – Google will love the site.

REL-NOFOLLOW on Wizzley is less stressful than on hubpages. On hubpages the author and page hubscore determine whether links are nofollowed. On Wizzley it simply takes 5 approved articles before your links get followed. If too many nofollow links is one of the signs Google used to determine that Hubpages would be punished, this policy might backfire. On the other hand – this does mean that it doesn’t pay, like it does on Squidoo, to create an account on Wizzley, make 4 almost the same articles and interlink them and use them to link out to somewhere else.

You’ll be picked off as creating articles that are too similar before that, and the links are nofollowed anyhow, so the incentive for spammers is low.

Other issues

You’ll be glad to hear that the Wizzley team did not follow Squidoo’s recent example with absent social features. They do have fanclubs. They even have an internal messaging system. So far the community is so good that I got over 50 visitors a day to my new articles, most of them from Wizzley itself. ALL my articles had comments on them within the week and all have been liked as well. You can be kept informed of new articles made by the people you’re a fan of – they’ll be sent individually as emails. Yahoo has already decided those emails are spam. That’s unfortunate for the site and I have advised the team to make that a daily digest or better yet, a weekly newsletter or something. Or just create an updates tab on the backend.

Still, that’s a minor hitch on a site that is doing well so far. I’ve made it part of some of my link wheels and would recommend you do the same. If we all do that, the site gets a decent amount of starting out backlinks and within a few months they’ll start getting decent traffic as well. Perhaps in time for Christmas?

A note on referral links. If you link to them using your referral links, and someone signs on, you get a lifetime of 10% of their adsense earnings. That can add up if the site and the people you get signed on are successful. The system they use is a lot like the one Hubpages uses except that it’s more Search Engine friendly.

Yes, the links on this page are referral links. Don’t worry: that 10% doesn’t come out of your earnings but out of Wizzley’s.

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© Katinka Hesselink for Marketing Spiritual, 2011. | Permalink | 19 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: hubpages, revenue sharing, squidoo, Wizzley