We were recently presented with a challenge by Google; no it’s not the typical “I will beat your algorithm and rank my client sites” although THAT particular challenge is becoming more and more difficult; thank you Panda and Penguin (funny how both algo updates are both black and white animals..Mirror to white hat and black hat SEO? “oh Google will the irony ever end?”).  I’m talking about teaching SEM or in this case Google Adwords advertising to the media companies in Lima, Peru.

I know what most of you internet marketers are thinking, “Media companies that don’t manage or understand Google Adwords?” Well yeah. I live in Lima Peru and most of the media companies both BIG and small (local and international Peruvian branches of American companies even) in this country are not certified to actually practice Google Adwords (and yet it is offered to their clients…).  Google spoke to their local branch and they decided to have an institute help to certify the local advertising companies who currently manage the system.

So my good friends at Google (yeah an IM’er can have friends at google) contacted me and asked if I would be willing to present the system to some of the digital media companies who run accounts of interest to Google.  Now even though some or most of these companies are my direct competition I decided that it was a good opportunity to make some contacts for the future so I decided to take the teaching position since it didn’t take up much of my time anyway.

Now that I explained the situation let me get back to my challenge.  I have to say I am a pretty good teacher, I’ve actually taught English before so I kind of have a knack for it; however it has been very difficult for my “students(?)” to pass the certification exams.  I mean I know that the fundamentals exam is not exactly easy but I would have thought that people who actively look at and “manage/create” (obvious outsourcing) pay per click campaigns would have a pretty good grasp on the concept.

So far only 2 students out of a total 28 have passed the fundamentals exam.  What does this mean? Well it means they don’t study the material for one but there is a more important truth in all of this.  Having a certification for Google Advertising is a definite plus here.  I have never really pushed the cost per click aspect of m y internet marketing business until recently (due to the classes and all the failing grades) and it has been working marvelously for me.  I recently got a client with 15k/month budget and another one with an 8k/month budget and maintaining campaigns is pretty easy.  Currently I have 2 more clients on the works and both of them are rather big.

I honestly hope the next group of students do better and pass the fundamentals exam, but even if they do that still doesn’t mean they have the knowledge and experience to make an optimized campaign but I will keep my fingers crossed.

World Searches

need to pinpoint because that is where their clients await.  Likewise I have come across hundreds of posts in the IM forums where someone asks “can I target keywords in Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic (insert language here)” with your service? And the answer is usually a resounding no.

I believe that Internet Marketers are closing a lot of doors to a lot of potential clients with this way of thinking, sure it is always better to develop a platform which you know well in this case providing a good service in English with English websites and English link building services. Personally I have found that I get clients due to my use of multiple languages, I speak English Spanish Portuguese and French so this allows me to create platforms where I can supply these clients with access to the required markets.

Maybe some marketers are busy, lazy or they make enough with the clients that they have, I on the other hand always enjoy a challenge and if making networks, buying websites and creating content in 50 different languages is going to provide assistance for someone and of course leaves a healthy profit in my bank account then I think it’s a win, win situation.

Since my Internet Marketing and social media company is based in Lima Peru I have been working with clients from the USA, Mexico, Brazil (Portuguese needed), and Peru, Argentina (different Spanish altogether), Colombia and a few others. Most in English but a few want local traffic via organic or paid so really I t pays off to keep an open mind and give some focus to new potentially beneficial platforms to work with.

A lot of people’s keyword rankings have dramatically dropped.  Imagine waking up one day and checking your hard earned SERPS when they are nowhere to be found, people stated having paged 1 position 1 rankings gone to page 6.  Some said they had worse rankings now then when they had originally started to link build.

Apparently there were a number of factors associated with all this; the first one was certain link networks being de-indexed. If you are in the online marketing business you know what I’m talking about, ALN reported almost 50% of their network having been lost and other networks had similar figures.  We’ve all used ALN and similar products and if you do SEO work for clients then they probably noticed their rankings disappearing (eh maybe 50% of them would) so this was a big hit for some people.  Another issue was Google rolling out and update which attacked sites that were “overly optimized?” Well this is the info I got from a couple of sources but I wouldn’t put too much weight into it.  As far as I’m concerned how could Google devaluate a website for being “too well put together “ , the idea sounds a little idiotic and to be honest none of my very well optimized websites or clients sites have had any issues with this.  If indeed big G had issued something like this I suspect it would affect thin sites with Huge bold H tags for example but most importantly they would have to be relatively new.  Websites are continuously growing and should be optimizing in time, a brand new site with 100k links indexed and with a perfect structure and tons of affiliate links is not natural, if this is the case I wouldn’t put it past Google to take these types of websites down.

As far as the de-indexing issue goes, well that is a bit more complex.  We were using these networks to help us rank and they did a great job BUT it should never have been the only type on link building we used.  Google is always coming up with ways to  derail the latest trick to have better SERPS, so your link profile should always be a very varied one. Personally I did not have any of my sites or client sites take any hits from this, except one but there was a bit of a twist in this situation.  I most certainly used ALN with them for competitive keywords, however all their SERP spots were heading south.  I kept asking myself why this was going  on, none of the other sites had taken a hit like this, this website was aged and had seals and certifications.  This client is a legit company providing tangible services to customers from around the world.  So finally I realized what was going on with them, the owner of the site had understood in one of our many meetings that more links CAN mean better SERPS however he had not understood that now its more of a matter of good quality link building.  He actually hired and Indian SEO Company to work on some keywords without actually letting me know, they had promised ranking for 30 keywords at a price of $120.00 US!

When the client informed me they had been working on this for a month and a half I decided to look at the total links indexed and BAM 20,000 links in the last 30 days from which all of them were forums profiles and cheap blog comment spam.

So that  is the reason for their recent fall in SERPS however many other internet marketers experienced this due to the overuse of public networks, right PUBLIC.  I use my own private one to maintain competitive terms up there so this helps me out a bit; this should be the goal of anyone in the internet marketing game.  Have your own private, white hat network of sites as a base and then continue to link build through other means.  It is not an easy thing to do but when you have a private network which you alone control it gives you leverage whenever Google decides to either change its algorithm or manually de index websites.

Now if you excuse me I have to go fix up the mess a cheap seo company with an xrummer license made.

From my perspective not a whole lot has drastically changed,
but then again I have always been led by a golden rule “variety is the essence
of life” in this case a varied link portfolio might have just been what saved
my sites and my clients site from disappearing from SERPS.

A big change which might have been the one that packed the
strongest punch, in boxing terms I would say it was an upper cut to the chin
for the many in the IM world.  I am of
course talking about the forum profile link, a low quality link which had a big
effect in Google ranking for a very long time. This link was like a godsend
since it was cheap and had a big impact, in reaction to this many link
strategies not just used it as a base but some used it exclusively.  Post panda this link has become all but
obsolete, some still use it as a 2^nd or even 3^rd tier link,
“backlinking you links” strategy.

Another big part of the Panda update was what it did to
article sites and article networks.  From
personal experience I think networks such as BMR (build my rank) lost a lot of
credibility in the eyes on google after the Panda update, because seriously;
how difficult would it be for google to find and isolate networks of 200 post
blogs? Not very, google has dozens on programmers working specifically to find
these disruptions in their search system.  The posts on these networks were too short and
if you were in of the grandfathers In this network you were allowed to post as
many times as you wanted to, making them look too spammy.

Some of these networks have however taken a few measures to
fix their google rep and seem to be working for people again, not to the extent
they did before though. I think it also all comes down to competition and what
your niche is, I believe some niches need to have more authority site links
than others and any Internet should take that into consideration before signing
a new client of making a proposal.

For now I feel like the backbone of any backlinking campaign
are contextual homepage backlinks. Now it is no secret that homepage links have
always been the most powerful ones, having your link on somebody else homepage
bring a lot of link juice, especially if the homepage has a high PR.  What we have now are more available homepage
blog networks which allow you to post an article with a hyperlink to your site.
These networks have not just become more common but have also become
affordable.  A good network will have
sites on different IP addresses with varied PR, network sizes vary from 10 to
over 200 websites.

Machu Picchu is Peru’s main tourist destination and is frequently visited by celebrities. Others such as Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz have also visited the Inca Citadel in recent years.The Inca ruins are 2,400 meters above sea level at a summit of the  Andes and was built in the fifteenth century by the Inca empire that  ruled Peru before the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century. The Citadel is 500 kilometers southeast of Lima and was elected in  2007 as the new seven wonders of the world in a global Internet vote.