The effect it had on some of my own sites are an excellent example of just how bad this update was in regards to actually improving their results.

My Germany Tourism site EverythingAboutGermany.com which has been ranking in the top 3 for several years… is nearly 8 years old and has alot of natural, authoritative backlinks, to include DMOZ listings and ORGANIC Yahoo Directory links (most links in yahoo directory are paid, my listings are NOT.) That site is now ranking #6 from my location in Google for “germany tourism,” a drop of 3 spots. That site has all original content written by me, after living in Germany for 5 years and my wife who IS German… born and raised. A good majority of the backlinks are natural and many of them are from VERY authoritative websites. Would you say that is the type of site that SHOULD be at the top of google? I would! Smelly Penguin didn’t think so.

BUT nearly ALL of my adsense sites, which target various niches that I know nothing about, acheived their rankings with web directories, social bookmarks, forum profile linkes etc. continue to enjoy top 10 rankings, some even have BETTER rankings! One good example is my split toe shoes site, splittoeshoes.org which still holds the #2 position in google. That is one of many, many examples. So Smelly Penguin says these sites are higher quality

So why did this happen? Maybe a Bing representative infiltrated Google and sabotaged it. I doubt it, but if that were to happen, the result couldn’t be any worse than the result of smelly penguin, that’s for sure.

My partner with Keyword Canine (See this video, announcing a HUGE update we just released!) and one of the most highly respected IMers out there, Jonathan Leger, explained it quite nicely here: “Ranking in Google After Penguin”

He explains it very nicely there, but what it all comes down to (if you even WANT to try to keep up with Google’s madness) is analytics… good competition analysis… seeing what is working for those in the top 10 and what isn’t working for them.

As always, I’ll continue to do what I’m doing until it no longer works. So far it all continues to work! Yes, my Germany site got hit a little, but all sites go up and down from time to time. I’m not too worried about it and I will not be doing anything drastically different. I will vary the anchor text in my backlinks a little more and continue to diversify my backlink strategy, but beyond that the same things that always have worked, continue to work. If anything, lower quality and irrelevant sites now rank higher than ever. Bravo Google and congrats to Bing.

- The sky is falling and all blog networks are worthless.
- The sky MIGHT be falling, proceed with caution.
- The sky is NOT falling and people are overreacting.

But, as a regular user of LinkVana (LV) and 1WayLinks (1WL) and also as someone who personally knows and communicates weekly with the owners of both of those networks, which happen to be two of the most popular and effective blog networks on the market, I can tell you that I’m not worried about Google’s deindexing of BuildMyRank (BMR) and although I obviously can’t say for certain, I honestly don’t believe that LinkVana or 1WayLinks will be going away anytime soon.

The sites within the networks of both LV and 1WL continue to have a very high index rate and many of those sites continue to pass a great deal of authority to the sites they link to.

I confirmed the high indexing rate from the owners themselves and the continued amount of high authority passed as a long-time user of both networks. Both networks are ran by VERY SMART internet marketers! Both of which I know very well and both have put into place some very creative and effective measures to reduce the SE footprint left for SE’s to pick up. I don’t know how BMR was setup, but it obviously left some heavy footprints.

Could Google still figure out all of the sites in each of the networks? I’m sure they could break the law by creating an account with both networks and use other shady techniques to figure it out. They could rely on users to report the links via webmaster tools, which they have been doing. And by doing that they can probably find a few of the sites in the network, but not the entire networks.

Google has done things like this in the past and they have successfully “nuked” a small percentage of the top network’s sites, but they always recover. The fact is, the guys running these networks have been in this game for a very long time. And while the possibility of Google discovering and nuking all of the sites in these networks is there, in my opinion, which was formed on insider information, I believe it is highly unlikely. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

I even added a fresh, unindexed site to the 1WL network a day after I head about BMR’s de-indexing. The site was indexed on the SAME DAY and the entire site, including all new posts, are fully indexed in google today!

But even if that likelihood was high, the fact is the networks are currently just as powerful as ever. And unless you rely solely on them for your backlinks, you have very little to worry about. I mix in links from LV, 1WL, Web Directories, Social Bookmarks etc. and continue to get excellent SEO results on just about every phrase I target.

But as time went by, it became pretty obvious that Facebook was here to stay. I have to admit, I didn’t think it would still be popular in 2012, let alone become the HUGE platform that it is today. With 836,000,000 users and counting, it’s ridiculous to ignore it if you own a websites! In this post I’m going to show you exactly how to optimize for Facebook, in order to maximize the number of visitors it sends to your website.

Steps to Optimizing your Site for Facebook

1. Set the Default Image that Shows on Facebook when Shared – This one is talked about the least of all, so I made it a point to explain it first. If a page on your site is shared by a visitor, Facebook will just randomly select an image off of the page. In many cases it will show an ad or some other irrelevant image, which really sucks considering people aren’t very compelled to click a link next to a big ad or some other weird image.

You can tell Facebook which image to show though. I use the MaxFB SEO WordPress Plugin to do this and it works perfectly. Go ahead, share this post and see. If you’re a developer, or someone like me who knows enough to get in trouble, you can probably figure out how to do this without the plugin. You just need to insert specific META tags for each post/page. So it would be easy enough on a basic html page, but I’m using that plugin, which makes it effortless and I’m not a developer, so I wasn’t real sure how to do that with wordpress, and have the ability to set a new image for every new post.

2. Integrate Facebook Comments – Whether you have an html site, a WordPress blog or anything in between, it’s always a good idea to allow visitors to comment on your articles with Facebook. I just recently started doing this and I’ve seen more traffic from facebook since doing so. The main advantage is that each person who comments, is also sharing the post on their facebook wall, which is even better than a regular share, because their actually interacting. MaxFB SEO also does this and is what I currently use. It makes it very quick and easy to add and moderate facebook comments on your WordPress blog. (Just FYI, a recent study shows that more facebook users comment, than “like” content.)

If you have a site that is not running on the WP CMS and you’re at least a little technically inclined, you can still add Facebook comments with the Facebook social app. You just generate some code on that page, paste it to your site where you want the comments to show, add a few meta tags and you’re ready to go.

3. Add Easy Options for Sharing and Liking individual posts/pages – This is probably the most obvious and there are loads of options out there for this. I use and really like Sharebar. It’s the sliding bar to the left of the post that slides up and down as you scroll the page. MaxFB SEO also offers an option for this, but I disable that option and use Sharebar instead because I used Sharebar first and as they say “if it aint broke, don’t fix it.”

4. Add a Widget so People can Like your Facebook Page – Adding the option for people to share and like a page/post will help the promotion of your site, but it won’t increase your own Facebook pages exposure. That’s why you need to have a “Like” option in a promenant spot on your site for people to like your Facebook page. The facebook page could be your business facebook page or you could even set up a page for your site. Which way you decide to go is really up to you. If you’re trying to get your brand out there, then I would recommend started a facebook page for your brand. If YOU are your brand, like I am in the IM niche, then you would want to get people to like your facebook page. You can see mine in the sidebar at the top. Have you liked my page yet? To add this is easy. Just go to the Facebook developer page for that, enter a few details and it will produce some code with some simple instructions.

5. Tell Facebook what Title and Description to use – Just like with the images, if you don’t tell Facebook what title and description to use, it will decide for you. This is especially important on pages that have sales copy and any other copy that just would not be beneficial to go along with your post. Once again, MaxFB SEO to the rescue. With this, along with the image you want to show, you can also set the title and description for each post, making it all quick and easy.

That’s it. There are a few other things you can do, but these are the most important in my opinion. Hopefully this post will help save you time, as it took me alot of time and several headaches before I finally got this blog Facebook friendly.

That is until a few minutes ago when the same person called me back telling me that after reviewing my account, which processed nearly $65,000 in revenue last year alone (see 1099 below,) did not “pass review.” And because it did not “pass review” PayPal will be holding 15% of all of my PayPal income for 4 months. What a great way to treat a merchant who has been with you for 6 years, has payments coming in every day and has processed 6-figures with ZERO account issues in the past and no chargeback issues. Sounds like a criminal running that account, right?

After the conversation I login to my PayPal account and sure enough, I see this:

After asking him the reasoning I was told it’s because I did a higher than normal volume of sales last month (Keyword Canine launch.) and that they need to see a longer history of high volume sales before they fully trust me. So apparently PayPal only wants merchants who do very little sales volume and if you do, they do not trust you. Very nice.

I’m not even sure how it all works. All I know is that they’re going to keep 15% of all of MY money that comes into the account in the future for the next 4 months. I don’t know if all future payments will be held for 4 months after the payment, or if it starts today or what. I have no clue. They basically told me that they don’t trust me and because of their trust problem they’re going to start keeping 15% of my money.

However, I’ve learned in life that you learn a very important lesson when things like this come about. In this situation that lesson is to not trust one individual payment processor. With that being said, I’ll be opening up a merchant account with my bank and processing my own payments when possible. In some cases I’m STUCK with PayPal… the company who thinks I’m a criminal. But I’ll certainly use an alternative every chance I get from this day forward and I advise others to as well. PayPal’s fees are pretty high anyway… it’s really not much of a loss.

I believe I got the first one ranked is about 2 weeks and the second in about 3 weeks. One of the sites was splittoeshoes.org targeting “split toe shoes” (currently #1 from my location) and the other was sugaraddictiontreatment.net targeting “sugar addiction treatment” (currently #4 from my location.) In this post I’m going to go through the entire process of how I did this. We’ll use splittoeshoes.org for the example.

1. First, from within Keyword Canine I found a niche that had an “Easy” (Green) competition rating, at least 400 monthly searches (KC shows exact match, so you’ll also get traffic from related phrases in alot of cases,) at least a $1 estimated CPC (also strict match, so it’s much closer to adsense payout than what adwords usually shows) and at least 70% advertiser competition (if you’re putting up an adsense site, you want as much ad competition as possible… the more ads the more chances of showing a relevant ad.)

(Side note: The difficulty rating is an internal algorithm that Jon and I put together that checks multiple data points, including but not limited to competitor avg. PR, sitelinks, number of search results and more.) I then used common sense to filter out some niches that an adsense site just wouldn’t make sense targeting. I ended up with split toe shoes.

2. KC told me that the .org version of that EMD (exact match domain) was available (the above screenshot was taken after I registered it,) so I registered it, entered my server’s nameservers at GoDaddy, added the site to my server and installed wordpress.

3. I then added some pages to the site for credibility purposes (about, contact and privacy.) For the About and Contact pages I just entered some basic info. For the Privacy page I generated a website policy from here. I removed all of the default wordpress stuff from the sidebar except for the categories and archives and I removed all of the links from the blogroll and added a link to an authoritative website in the niche for credibility purposes. I also added a copyright statement in the footer.

This is probably not all necessary, but they are things I always like to do… just trying to think like someone who runs a search engine and I’ve had pretty good luck over the years, so I keep doing these things.

4. I then ordered 4 articles to publish to the site, although the more content the better! Four articles is a bare minimum. If I wanted to ensure that this site stayed at the top, I would add more content. If you don’t want to outsource the content or write it yourself, Article Builder is an excellent alternative.

5. Once I got the articles back from my writer and published them to the site, the site was done and ready to be promoted. All I did for promotion was order 30 web directory submissions, 30 social bookmarks and 30 forum profile links. All spread out over a few weeks to look natural. (Edit: I completely forgot Backlink Booster!! duh) I then boosted all of those backlinks with backlink booster.

The site now enjoys the #1 spot in google Do I get the #1 spot every time I do this? No. But I frequently get top 10 rankings doing this! And once there, it’s not hard to get it to the #1 spot nearly every time.

This site currently earns a buck or two just about every day. If I had the time, I could make several of these sites every day and you could too. It’s actually a pretty easy process.

Also, we’re looking into making this entire process as automated as possible from within Keyword Canine, from finding the profitable niche and getting cheap quality content to promotion, so keep an eye out, the doors to KC will be open once again in the near future.

But up until early 2010 the extent of my profits were from info products, affiliate sales, adsense revenue and ad selling. And I still make money with all of those things to this day, but in early 2010 I realized something that has since made me much more money.

I realized that even though I’m not a developer, there is ALOT more money in software!

Don’t get me wrong. There are people making millions just concentrating on affiliate marketing. There are people making millions just concentrating on adsense etc. etc. all of those things are good money makers and have the potential to be huge. But there is one major difference between all of those things and software and that is in the fact that with one good idea, anyone can have some kind of software created, whether it be a desktop application, web app, mobile app, or something else, that could make them millions in a very short amount of time, with little work and in some case with very little investment!

My first two software ideas weren’t groundbreaking, they weren’t even anything super special to be honest. But both made me tends of thousands of dollars in profit and like I said, they were my FIRST ever software products, 100% outsourced.

There is somewhat of a learning curve, but that should be expected with anything that has this kind of potential. With software, it really is all about the idea… ok you have to figure out how you’re going to accomplish it too, but that’s where API’s and really good developers come into play.

Getting your First Software Project Off the Ground

1. First thing’s first, the idea! Don’t make the mistake that many make and start brainstorming ideas that you THINK other people would like! Instead, think about your own processes… what YOU do in your business and start thinking about all of those things that you’ve said “a tool that does ‘this’ would make this so much easier.” THOSE are the software ideas that really sell.

2. Now you’ll need to do a little research on how you’re going to accomplish this. This step can be skipped if you have no clue, as you can just find a developer who can figure that out for you. BUT over time, as you learn more and more, you’ll realize that the more logic and detail you can provide to your developer, the happier your developer will be, the better the software will be and the more money you will save.

API’s are often times VERY useful… so that’s typically the first thing I do… look for API’s. If you don’t know what an API is, it’s basically a “backdoor” that most big product/service providers offer either for free in order to reduce “scraping” (scraping is basically using software to perform queries on a site that are meant to be performed by actual users) or for a fee, usually a small fee per query. For example, most software products that show their users estimated cost per click numbers of keywords, usually pull that data directly from the Google Adwords API. Almost every big website/product/service has some form of an API… some even have multiple API’s.

But if you can’t find an API that provides the data that you need, then you may need to have your developer figure out the logic for doing whatever it is you need done. That will take more time and money, but sometimes that is what needs to be done to create an awesome product.

You will also want to draw (literally) the UI (User Interface… what the software actually looks like… where the buttons are etc.) unless you want your developer to do it, which I never want. It’s my software and I want it to be just as I have it in my head. Just grab a few pieces of paper and draw exactly what you want it to look like.

3. Now it’s time to find your developer! I use oDesk to find my developers. There are alot of low-quality, low-end developers on there, but there are also alot of high-quality developers! I’ve found several REALLLLY good developers there who I still work with to this day! If you sign up there and need a little direction, shoot me an email and I would be glad to help. I’ve used many of the different freelance sites, and oDesk is by far the best!

You will want to be as specific as possible with your developer. When choosing him or her, be sure to look at the feedback… be sure they have a solid work history with at least 4.5 star feedback. Look at the length of time they worked on projects. If you see a bunch of 1, 5, 10 hour jobs you may want to think twice. If they’re good, why are they messing with little 10 hours jobs. Also look at their rate on their profile. If this is a complex project you may want to think twice about $17/h. developers. I find that the really good ones charge no less than $20/h. which may seem expensive, but BELIEVE ME! If you give a complex project to a bad developer, you’ll end up spending much more money, as you’ll end up paying him or her to go back and fix bugs every time they add functionality. In most cases, unless your project is very small and simple, you will actually save money by hiring a more expensive developer!

4. Once the software is done it’s time to test. Test, test then test some more! Open it up to a small number of users or even friends. Have them test. If it’s a desktop app (software that must be installed on the user’s computer) be sure to test on Windows 7, Vista, XP and Mac if compatible. If it’s a web app (no installation, just login to a website) be sure to test on all of the common versions of IE, FireFox, Safari, Chrome and Opera.

That’s about it. I could probably write a book about all of this and I’m still learning myself, but this should enough to at least get you going, if you’re interested in getting your first software product out there.

This has been a problem in IM for a very long time and I’ve wanted to get something started that would provide the truth about Internet Marketing techniques and products without bias.

For the longest time I just had too much going on to get something like this started, but I’ve recently freed up alot of time, so together with my friend and fellow Internet Marketer Mark Mason, we’ll be launching a new website in the near future (probably sometime in March) where we will be personally doing legitimate, non-biased case studies and reviews of various different Internet Marketing products, services and techniques!

Very clearly, we WON’T be thinking about money. Yes, we will make money from it… we will use affiliate links. That will be clearly disclosed, but we’ve made a pact (and we WILL stick to it) that we publish the true, unaltered, non-biased results of every case study that we do, whether the result is good or bad. We know that if we veer away from that, that we will quickly lose your trust, so it’s really a no-brainer to us.

But first, we want your feedback! What product/service/technique would you like to see us do an honest, non-biased case study on? We’ll take your feedback and develop a list that we’ll start hammering out ASAP.

Just leave your recommendation with as mush or as little detail as you like in the comment form below. Mark and I will both read every single one of them and they will all be considered!

Last Thursday (1/19/12) Matt Cutts announced a new Google search algorithm update on the Google search blog. This is an update that has been rumored for a while now and it looks like it has finally happened, or begun to happen at least.

This new update looks at the above the fold content to advert ratio of pages and it is sitewide, meaning that if they find just one page on your site that they believe is pushing the page content too far down the page, they can and probably will punish the entire site!

Ironically, on the SAME DAY that they made this announcement, I received an email (and alot of others did too) from the Adsense team, telling me that my Germany tourism site should show MORE ads, even though most of my internal pages currently display a large rectangle ad that pushes most of the content down quite a bit. So there is a little hypocrisy there, but they’re famous for that. Check out the ad placement recommendations they made in the image below:

While they’re not recommending that I ad all 14 ad units shown in this image, as they allow no more than three ad units on any one page, their recommendation is still out of line with the Search team’s new above the fold ad guidelines.

For example, what if I decided to take their advice and add the three ads in that diagram that appear above the content. That would push my content about halfway down the page, which is exactly what the google search team is telling us they will PENALIZE our site for! And if that weren’t enough, Chris Richardson of WebProNews points out that the google search team is even guilty of breaking their own guidelines (see the screenshot toward the bottom of this article.) But it is what it is … we’re used to this kind of thing from google.

In reality it’s a smart update and it will improve the quality of their search results. What it all comes down to is the user experience and while even I may lose money from this update, as I own sites that are solely monetized by Adsense and I also place a large rectangle adsense unit directly below the titles, we should all try our best to maintain the mindset that it’s about the user, not the income!

As Zig Ziglar once said: “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want” and that applies to our online business as well. If we are constantly trying to help people, whether it’s by showing only the most user friendly pages in search results or doing something much greater, just having that mindset will make you much more money in the long run and more importantly, you will be able to help more people in the long run.

However, there were many times when I allowed those people to get to me… I allowed their words to cause doubt and worry. I wondered if I was going down the path to wealth or the path to failure. And I think, what if I would have just listened to them and believed them? Luckily, I’m very stubborn when I truly believe in something and I truly believed that there was loads of huge opportunities online. I was right and I’ve made alot of money because of that stubbornness!

But it also made me realize, there are probably thousands of people in that same position right now! You may be one of them. Although I still feel like my business has more potential than success, I do live a very comfortable live. So I’d like to give you some advice if you happen to be in that situation (making little to no money online…getting negativity from others) and that is this:

- If you have little to no money coming from your online ventures, gain some type of employment so you can pay the bills while learning! This is important. I’ve heard from many people over the years who have loads of potential and tell me they “must” make this work. It will be extremely difficult to deal with negativity and failure, which WILL happen, if you and your family’s livelihood is on the line. Having a day job may slow your business growth, but it will provide that needed mental and financial stability.

- I promise you this: What will determine whether you become highly successful in the Internet Marketing space or not will be how well you react to this criticism and also how well you react to failure! I failed many times before I succeeded and I STILL have projects that fail. Failure is a part of life and business. Stay positive and optimistic. If you can do that, I don’t care how intelligent or unintelligent you are (I wouldn’t even be able to spell that word without spell check) you can and most likely will be successful at some point!

And if you’re doing well with your online business, this still applies. I’m a very optimistic person in general, but even I occasionally get caught up with negativity when a product/service doesn’t take off like I had hoped. But I always “regroup,” re-evaluate, look at the positives and figure out how to get it to where I want it. And that positive attitude and optimism goes a long, long way!

It can get a little confusing trying to figure out exactly what Panda is and what it means to you specifically. However, it’s important for you to know at least the basics because even if your current sites were not affected yet, future sites may be. You might start a new site and do the things you’ve always done, but it just never gains traction in Google.

As you may know, I run a very unique Performance Based SEO Service (take a look at our partner program if you have seo clients,) an offline internet business and I also have my own sites, many of which I like to optimize to get as much free search traffic as possible. So it’s important for me to understand and keep up with SEO.

Lets go over what I’ve learned and/or experienced over the past few months…

1. “Thin” sites get no love. If your site has only a handful of pages, start writing. For many years, you could create a small, five page content site, stick some adsense ads on each page, do a little seo to get those pages ranked for their respective long-tail keyword and you could easily be making money from that site every day. You can still do that, but you need to have more than 5 pages. For my “thin” sites I’ve increased the minimum to 10 and rankings have come back for many, but the more the better.

2. The longer the article the better. This goes hand-in-hand with the first point. You don’t only need to add more pages, you need to ensure that each content page has alot of content. I went from a minimum word count of 300 to 400, but the more the better. Some people are even recommending 500 or more words.

3. Frequent updates are more important now than ever. People have been saying you need to frequently update your site to get good SE rankings for years and years. But in many cases it just wasn’t true. One good example is my Germany site. It went YEARS without a single update and it always held top rankings for some very competitive phrases. But when Panda came around traffic to the site tanked by over 50%. I added some new articles, updated some old articles, updated the entire site template and the traffic has been steadily coming back. So although this was not true for years when people were saying it was, it IS true now.

4. Your site needs to LOOK credible and useful. If your site holds any top rankings now or in the future, human reviewers from Google will probably see your site at some point. Design, structure and ad saturation are the major factors they look at. Do you have huge ads commanding the main parts of your site or do you use the opportunity to present your most valuable content? Does your site look like something from the 1980′s or is it clean and professional? Is the layout of your site good? Does it make sense? Is it easy for your viewers to find the content they need to find? These are all questions you should ask yourself.

5. Consider your entire site, not just “money” pages. From the examples I’ve seen, the Panda update targets entire sites, not just single pages. So when considering all of the points on this page, be sure to think about ALL pages on your site. Do you have pages that are indexed in google that really shouldn’t be? Pages that people really don’t need to see? Pages that serve no value to the searcher? If so you may want to delete them completely or at least add a META nofollow tag to those pages… you could also restrict them in robots.txt.

6. Be careful with affiliate links. Google never has been a fan of affiliate marketing, so this one really isn’t a change, but it’s as important as ever to cloak any affiliate links in some way, whether with some kind of link cloaker software or by simply redirecting a page on your site to the affiliate link, then using the rel=”nofollow” attribute on that link. So, for example, if my affiliate link is affiliatesite.com/?affid=34 I would create a redirect on my server that would redirect a page like mysite.com/bestsite to affiliatesite.com/?affid=34 then I would actually link to mysite.com/bestsite and in that href/linking code, add the nofollow attribute, which tells google to ignore it. Whether that is 100% effective in eliminating the chances of google finding out it’s an affiliate link, I don’t know. But it’s better than nothing.

7. Understand what the searcher is looking for. This is another thing that isn’t new, but more important than ever to realize. Both Google and Bing have one ultimate goal: to return pages to their search users that provide exactly what they are looking for. If your sites do not do that, then you are in for a long, uphill battle when it comes to SEO.

8. Article Marketing has changed. One of the big site types that the Panda update targeted where HUGE content sites including article directories. That does NOT mean that article marketing is “dead.” But it does mean that many article directory sites that previously provided good or decent backlinks to our sites via the articles we submit to them, now do not. So stop submitting to hundreds of article sites and concentrate on only the top few article sites. I actually limit my article submissions to ONE site these days. Sometimes that site is ezinearticles, sometimes it’s a LinkVana blog and sometimes it’s another site, but I don’t syndicate articles anymore, just to stay on the safe side.

These are what I’ve found to be the most important points, but I’m sure there are other SEO’s out there that would add to it. The most important thing to remember is that SEO is always changing and the ultimate goal of the major search engines, as I explained in point #7, is to provide the best possible page to the searcher… a page that provdies the EXACT information they are looking for and gets that info to them in the quickest and easiest way possible. If you always keep that in mind, you’ll be good to go!

(If you’re not already subscribed, remember that if you would like a free SEO tip from me sent directly to your cell phone once per week, free of charge (aside from standard text messaging rates associated with your cell company) and you’re in the U.S. just text “seo” (without quotes) to this number: 50464. This is a service provided by FunnelPro, an SMS Marketing Company that also has a great affiliate program.)