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.)

So about a month ago when I was in a meeting with a business partner and he brought up a service called Backlink Booster… it must have been the 10th time I had heard someone talk about it over the past few months, I knew it was time to look into this and see what all of the hype was all about. So I created an account and started using it to see what it could do for some of our client’s sites that had not seen much improvement lately.

A week and a half later the first site, which had been stuck on page 2 for several months, had risen to the #5 spot! The second site, which had been stuck on page 3 for quite a while had risen to the top of page 2 and not much later it was also on page one! Those were the “test” sites and they past with flying colors!

Since I ran that little test I’ve added many more sites to the backlink booster system and there has been a significant increase in rankings for most of these sites. As someone who has been doing SEO for nearly 8 years, I can honestly say that for one very cheap service to make this much of an impact is nothing short of amazing!

I don’t do many product reviews here on the blog, but when I see these kinds of results I use any means necessary to spread the word.

What Backlink Booster Does

So you have a site, or multiple sites, that you want to get ranked in Google so you can leverage all of that free traffic. So you go submit articles to ezinearticles, submit your site(s) to web directories, social bookmarking sites, forum profiles etc. And it works… your site starts to rise in Google. The only problem is many of those backlinks are never even found by the google bot. So basically, you reap the rewards of your backlinking efforts, but only a small percentage of them!

Believe it or not, even ezinearticles doesn’t have a 100% indexing rate. Thousands of articles on their site never get indexed! And article marketing is one of the most popular forms of manual link building. The indexing rate just gets lower and lower as you go to different techniques like social bookmarking, web directories, forum profiles etc.

What backlink booster does, is it actually builds backlinks TO your backlinks and it works very well! So all of those backlinks that google didn’t find, are now found by google. But that’s not all. Not only do all of these hidden backlinks count as a result of “boosting” them with backlink booster, the authority they all possess is multiplied, which flows through to your website! So the result is more, stronger backlinks!

What I Don’t Like

This thing works… it does what it’s supposed to do, so I don’t complain! But if I were to bring up one thing with the Backlnk Booster guys, it would be to make it more user friendly. However, it’s a complex system in the backend, I can only imagine, and having alot of experience myself with web app. development, I know how it can be difficult to take something so powerful and complex, and simplify it for the users. So what I’ve done is I’ve made a video that should help clear up the confusion that I faced when I created my account, so you can get started with Backlink Booster and benefit from it ASAP.

I’ve been in touch with them over the past several weeks. They are very responsive and eager to improve the system even more, so it seems to me that this is a legitimate, long-term SEO solution that will be around for a long time to come.

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I Highly recommend Backlink Booster and use it on a daily basis!

I am obviously an affiliate for Backlink Booster, but if you know me you know that I don’t do product reviews to simply make money. I want to give back too. So if you order through my link above, and you have any questions about it, I would be happy to personally help you with it. Just shoot me an email to joshspaulding1 at gmail dot com and I’ll get back with you ASAP.

Case Study Results! (Update)

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A good majority of the money that I have used to support my Family over the years has come, in one way or another, from my email list. So for me to say that email marketing is valuable would be an understatement!

But, let me show you a few stats that one of my business partners came up with:

- The average email open rate is approximately 6.5 hours.
- The average SMS text message open rate is approximately 4 minutes.
- The delivery rate for email is approximately 26%.
- The deliver rate for SMS text messages is approximately 98%.

And to add to that, although I don’t know the exact numbers, I would say 99% of everyone 16 years old to … probably 65 or so own a cell phone.

Now let me ask you this: Which one sounds better to you? I know my answer is a resounding SMS.

But, don’t’ get me wrong, there will always be a place for email marketing. There will always be people who prefer email over text and there will always be situations where email is just the better option, so I don’t think SMS marketing is necessarily replacing Email marketing, but if your business DOES currently benefit from email marketing, then I BET it will benefit even more from SMS marketing!

These stats along with the incredible increase in SMS marketing over the past couple years got me and a couple business partners very interested in getting into this market…and we are…but I’ll save that for another day.

Today, I want to ask you, are you currently using some form of SMS marketing in your business? If not why? If I can generate enough revenue to drive a 6-figure business with email, then how much revenue can I generate with a different communication method that has PROVEN to be more efficient. That’s my line of thinking… hopefully it gives you something to think about as well.

Although there is obviously much more to the book than this, the one thing that it has driven in to me is that massive action equals massive success. It’s something, I think, we all know, but it’s also something that we all need a reminder of from time to time…at least I do!

So I’m using this post simply as a reminder. Just think about how much time you’ve spent (me too!) on your personal facebook page when you could have been working. Think about how much time you spend reading news articles. Think about how much time you’ve spent on smoke breaks (like me, before I quit a few years ago.) Think about how much time you spend each and every day on things that do not deserve your time, at least not during the work day, or the time you block off to spend working on your online business if you’re not full time.

How much time do you think that is? Now imagine if all of that time was spent putting up affiliate sites or writing content or building backlinks or learning a new technique.

It took me a few years to make a full time income online, but I’m absolutely convinced that if I would have taken massive action and truly got the MOST out of every minute that I was supposed to be working, that I would have reached that level of success in half that time if not sooner!

So for me, just after reading half of the book, it has really motivated me to reevaluate my work time and resist laziness! I’ve squeezed much more work time out of my days and I believe I’ve already made more money just in the past week by very simply doing MORE!

Before I explain how you can “recession proof” your IM business, first I need to provide a brief explanation of the current economic crisis. In 2008, as you know, the U.S. and much of the World suffered from a recession that was caused by the housing bubble, among other things. And although the markets recovered somewhat, any smart economist that isn’t politically biased will tell you that the economy is still broken.

While the market begins correcting itself in some aspects, it is only getting worse in many others. Since most Internet Marketers target the U.S. market and it’s the market I know the most about, I’ll talk about it. As the U.S. Dollar is the World Reserve Currency, the U.S. has the luxury of printing their own money (via the Federal Reserve) when they need it. That is a luxury however, only if done so responsibly.

The problem is that the Federal Reserve (Fed,) which isn’t even “owned” by the government, is NOT responsible and many people believe they are even corrupt, as they have NO transparency and consistently decline audit requests! So here is where the problem is. The U.S. is nearly 15 TRILLION (yes, with a T) dollars in debt and it currently does NOT have enough money to pay its own bills. SO, instead of cutting spending, like a responsible government would do, the Fed just prints more money in order to cover all of the interest the Government owes on all of these bonds (loans.)

That’s great, the U.S. can do that, so why not? I’ll tell you why not! Because the more money it prints, the less value the U.S. Dollar has. And the less value the U.S. Dollar has, the higher inflation goes because oil etc. are based off of the World Reserve Currency. And the higher inflation goes, the higher prices on OIL get. And the higher the price of OIL gets, the more money farmers have to pay to run their business. The more farmers have to pay to run their businesses, the higher they have to charge for milk, eggs, corn and every other food we need to survive.

In a nutshell, that is the problem. The good news is that the problem could easily be fixed, but the bad news in the U.S. doesn’t have people in office who care to fix it! I’ll tell you why. Because in order to fix the problem, big government programs MUST be cut! And if you tell people who are used to being given free handouts that they will no longer get those free handouts, they get mad. When they get mad they DON’T VOTE FOR THOSE PEOPLE and THAT is the root of all of these problems! Politicians who deliberately create a welfare state in order to further their political career, completely ignoring the fact that welfare states historically do not work and even CAUSE recessions.

So, instead of solving the problem, the U.S. has politicians, both democrat and republican, who are going to play politics until they can get out of the spotlight, to save their political careers. The next election will not be held until November of 2012 and I predict, along with many smart economists who are not afraid of the truth, that the current economic troubles are only going to get worse until we get a new government into office in 2012 who will cut spending, reduce regulations and allow the markets to correct themselves (maybe someone who can appeal to both sides like Ron Paul?)

That in itself is going to hurt and it’s going to take time, but it’s the only way out of this mess. To make things worse, the U.S. has HUGE oil reserves in their own Country, but the government (the same government that refuses to cut spending) also refuses to drill into their OWN oil reserves, which if tapped, would buy the U.S LOOOOOTS of time to fix this overall problem while at the same time dropping gas prices to historic lows AND creating thousands of jobs. They won’t do it though, so we need to take care of our families!

So how do you, as an Internet Marketer, protect yourself?

Simple, you get into the right markets! The markets that maintain and even profit from recessions! I wish I could give you a step by step plan, and maybe sometime in the future I will, but for now you simply need to know that:

1. this recession is only going to get worse, the numbers are proof!
2. SOME MARKETS ALWAYS BENEFIT FROM RECESSIONS! So as Internet Marketers we have a huge advantage on other business owners, because we can target any market we want! A local donut shop, for example, can’t just jump right into another market, so we really have an advantage here!

So what markets are either not effected by the recession or even benefit from them? Well, the precious metals market for one, always benefits because you can’t create gold and silver out of thin air like the Fed does the U.S. Dollar, so no matter how bad it gets, Gold and Silver will ALWAYS have value. This is why Gold and Silver prices have skyrocketed over the past few years…because they are sound currencies, while the USD is NOT sound.

Discount business models also benefit because when people are hurting for money, they’re looking for deals. So anything you can do to help people save money is going to do well in a recession. This is why I predict Wal-Mart (for example) will do just fine over the next few years. They may be negatively effected a little, but they will not collapse because their entire model is based on low prices, which always wins in recessions.

The Entertainment markets like video games and even sin markets, although I don’t recommend getting into them, always do well in recessions. I personally see these markets still being somewhat negatively affected, but some businesses in this overall market WILL benefit!

So whatever it is you do in the IM space, whether it’s something in affiliate marketing, blogging, what have you, start looking into these markets and doing your research to find other markets that will benefit from a recession.

Maybe I’m wrong along with hundreds of Millionaire and Billionaire economists, and if we are oh well… you’re still building your business and you’ll still benefit. But if we’re right, YOU will be one of the very few who not only maintain, but gain, while millions of others lose their job, home and more!

I don’t know about you, but I know what I’m focused on right now and if what I strongly believe is true, really is true, this will be the most valuable blog post you read in years, if not your life!

Aside from the same ol hassles like setting up redirects etc. I came across one thing that if not taken care of could cause a big problem. The problem is in the internal linking structure my WordPress theme (and most others) has. There is no problem if you have a small site with maybe 50 pages or less, but I plan on adding alot of content and will end up having several hundred posts.

So why is that such a problem? That’s a good question. I’m glad you asked It’s a problem because the more posts you publish, the further down your older posts go. First they drop off the front page, which reduces the amount of authority that is pointing to them. Then they roll off the second page… even less authority and so on.

But we also have categories and they are crucial in authority distribution. However, the category pages pose the same threat, only on a smaller scale. The more posts that are published in a particular category, the more posts fall off the first category page.

So having an even authority distribution among all of your posts is difficult. You could just link to the second, third fourth etc. category pages, but that’s not really user friendly (most will wonder what the heck these links are) and even if it was it’s still not ideal since it is all duplicate content.

So, the best solution I’ve come up with so far is to do three things:

1. Get a good related posts plugin to show related posts under every post.
2. Show a list of your more important posts in the sidebar.
3. Show only post summaries to reduce duplicate content and increase the number of posts shown on each category page.

That’s what I’ve done so far and I think I’m getting pretty close to the optimum internal linking structure, but I don’t’ feel like I’m there yet.

And a word on sitemaps since I know everyone is going to jump on that… sitemaps are good for getting large sites indexed, but they don’t increase the authority of any page. So while it might not be a bad idea to have one figuring out a good internal linking structure is an overall solution, while sitemaps are only a solution to one particular issue.

So what do you think? Have you come across this issue? How did you resolve it?

The basic concept of niche marketing is very simple. The most common mistakes those who aren’t successful with it usually make are:

- over-analyzing keywords
- under-analyzing keywords
- not giving it a solid chance

I made those same mistakes when I started, but eventually figured out some things, like:

- Finding a profitable market (different than finding keywords) is crucial! The value of one qualified lead to a real estate agent is worth thousands. The value of one qualified lead to a $10 product salesman is worth much less.

- Over-analyzing keywords is a time waster!!! Come up with a good system for competition analysis, use it and move on.

- Ignoring keyword research completely is like walking in the dark. You might get lucky, but you’ll probably fall down the stairs.

- It often takes multiple attempts in multiple markets to succeed. If you target one market and have no success that doesn’t mean you are doing things wrong. Competition and value can easily vary drastically from one niche to another. Some niches are just difficult to target with niche marketing, while others are very easy.

So how can you be a successful niche marketer?

1. Find a profitable market. It is VERY important that the market you choose has alot of money in it, but it’s not crucial what particular market it is you choose. Just make sure there is money in the market. Find average Adwords CPC numbers for the value of a market. I use [removed] for this as well… ok I use [removed] for everything.

2. Generate a list of keywords that are related to that market. Guess what I use to do that?

3. Take that list of keywords and get rid of all of them that just don’t make sense to target… keywords that people search for, which an article explaining something is obviously not what they’re looking for. And also get rid of all keywords in your list that are too competitive (you can use… you guess it, HotNicheSpy for that)

4. Get an article written that targets each keyword. So if you have 8 keywords, have 8 articles written. Get the articles up on your website.

5. Now do some basic SEO. Level 1, 2 and sometimes 3 is all that is usually required. These long-tail keywords are typically very easy to rank for!

6. Once you get one site up, go on to the next! They will not all succeed! Accept that and never rely on one particular site to perform. As the number of niche sites you own rises, so will your profits!

That’s it in a nutshell. Using this very simple “formula” I’ve made thousands of dollars over the years and you can too.

Fortunately after a few years working part time online while serving in the military I did finally get my IM income to the point to where I could pay my bills with it, barely. But as time went on I started to realize more and more than although I’ve never thought of myself as a Entrepreneur or business person, I was exactly that! That was my “tipping point.”

There should come a time in every IM’ers online ventures when they hit that same tipping point and start to see the bigger picture…the bigger opportunity that is the infant Internet… yes, it’s still very much an infant!

But the question for those who haven’t reached that point yet is, do you want to keep working a JOB or do you want to become an entrepreneur? If you just want to pay the bills, you might as well just get a job. At least then you have more stability… that’s how I see it anyway. But I don’t think that is what any IMer wants.

So how do you go from an Internet Marketing worker to an Internet Marketing Entrepreneur?

The first step is to learn the basics of the business… learn SEO, email marketing etc. You don’t have to be making loads of money in each, you just need to know the techniques and their markets… just learn the basics. That is the “work” we all have to endure before we get to our tipping point. The next thing is to decide whether you WANT that tipping point or not. I’m guessing you want it!

One thing I learned about life while in the Army is that almost everything that is challenging, whether mentally or physically, can be accomplished if you truly set your mind to it. So if you don’t believe you are an entrepreneur, or at least have the potential to become an entrepreneur, then you will never become an entrepreneur because you will not possess the mental confidence required to become one.

So what’s the difference anyway?

To me, the primary difference is in what you devote your time and resources to. If you’re constantly working to write and publish articles to get your site(s) ranked in google… creating sites to earn a little adsense income… etc. etc. then you probably have a worker mindset. If you’re constantly coming up with new ideas for software, applications etc. and you’re looking to outsource everything you possibly can… also thinking about automation (so one project doesn’t tie you down, but brings in residual income,) then you’re on the entrepreneurial track.

This all seems like fairly basic stuff, but I’m writing about this today because as I watch conversations and updates on facebook, twitter, blogs etc. I see 9 out of 10 Internet Marketers (if not more) who are completely focused on working for a living and very few who are focused on becoming true Entrepreneurial business people.

Of course it is nearly impossible to filter out all of those who are still in that required learning phase, but just by evaluating the overall mindset, I believe there are more IMers who are looking for a JOB than there are who are looking for a solid business opportunity.