The point is that there is an amazing array of SEO tools and traffic analysis tools and so on our there. I’d like to try some of them out, and since I do make some decent cash from my writing, one might think that I would be willing to shell out $50 or so to try some of them out. And, frankly, I would except they all seem to cost $50 PER MONTH or worse.

Now, I’m all for spending money to make money, and all that, but I can’t help but wonder how much those tools are really worth. After all, I can check my rankings anytime I want for free by running the actually Google searches manually. Of course, that’s the rub, “manually.”

Still, $50 per month is $600 per year. That isn’t cheap, and that is for just ONE tool. What if I liked the rank tracker from one tool, the link checker from another tool and some sort of SEO checkup thing from another tool? That might be $150 per month, or over 10 percent of my income.

My only conclusion can be that either there are a lot of people out there making a lot more money with their websites than me, or that there are a lot of people out there who aren’t spending their money very wisely. I guess the question is how much actual value does the average website publisher make from those tools? After all, I’m already making $1K without them. Would I double my earnings? Triple?

Think about it this way. If I was able to generate a more realistic 10 percent improvement on my income that would be $100 per month, of which $50 per month would go to the cost of the tool. I’m not sure that works out for our heroes.

Speaking of which, I recently dropped $50 to upgrade to the Pro IMAuotmator. I’ll write about it soon.

What are your thoughts about SEO tools, search ranking monitoring tools, and link tools? Any you can’t live without? Any that are very worth it from a pure additional income standpoint?

SEO and Traffic Tools originally published at Make Money Writing Online

If you are using WordPress for your blogs, it’s time to start considering updating them. This update is a minor one. It’s mostly security updates with a couple of bug fixes. As always, staying current helps protect your websites from hacking and malware.

You can update through your WordPress Dashboard by clicking the update now button.

WordPress Update Version 3.3.2 originally published at Make Money Writing Online

As it turns out, it used to be the website of someone called Griz who was/is fairly well known in the make money online circles. At one time, the site got tons of links, and lots of traffic. However, the website was taken down for TOS violations in 2010. That means a webpage that is part of a domain that does not have any content whatsoever, let alone quality content, ranks at #9 in Google’s search results based solely on the incoming links that are still out there on the web.

Here is a screenshot of my search results for the same term (no quotes) on 4/19/2012 at approximately 2:33 PM MDT.

Google Just Counts Links

Google goes out of its way to say that the only thing needed to rank highly in its search results is to produce quality content. Then, of course, people will link that high quality content and you’ll rank highly. Everyone whose been interested in writing online and ranking well for their content for more than 10 minutes knows that’s a fantasy.

Still, Google, and by extension those who believe what Google tells them, continue to parrot the line that content is king. This is proof that is simply not the case.

There is no high-quality content here. There is no content AT ALL.

Still it ranks in Top 10.

Not only that, but since this particular website has been down for going on two years now, it also has virtually no new links, at least not legitimate ones.

So, what does this all mean for someone who wants to make money writing online?

It means that you can generate quality content, but if you want people to find it in on Google, you’re going to have to link it. The sooner you get used to the fact that the number of incoming links you have outweighs the quality of your content, the better.

I’m not saying to write garbage. After all, I started this website for people who can, and do, write well. I’m just saying don’t be naive. You’ll have to do more than just write good stuff to rank highly and make money from your organic traffic.

Grab the MMWO RSS feed to keep up with all the tips, tricks and pointers that will help you take your quality writing to the top of the search results.

PotPieGirl Exposes Google originally published at Make Money Writing Online

I have my alerts set for “all” instead of best and for “when it happens”. If you have very busy websites that generate a lot of links and feedback and people talking about you, this is not the way to go. But, for a smaller website like this one, these specific alerts generally only trigger when:

1. Something I posted gets indexed
2. Something I posted gets linked with the name of the website
3. Something I posted get scraped or stolen
4. Something I linked gets indexed

This brings me to today’s point.

It turns out that as far as regular, no tricks, no effort, indexing goes, the fastest Google index spider that triggers my alerts is the one that indexes Digg.com.

For example, I posted an article on my freelance writing blog not too long ago. I post every-other-day-ish over there, so it is no surprise that Google doesn’t crawl my site every hour. Some days, it takes 36 hours or more to get a new post indexed. It’s not a “news” site, so that doesn’t really bother me.

When I post, I do the usual. I ping the proper servers, my feed goes out, and I bookmark, Like, and Digg my article. Less than an hour later, almost every time, the Digg of my article triggers a Google alert, which means that the webpage corresponding to that Digg, has been indexed and my information found. At that point, if I search, I can find the Digg in the index.

Interestingly, it seems, in my case at least, that while Google does index Digg in near real-time, the spider does not follow those links. In other words, even though the Digg for my latest article shows up right away, the spider doesn’t follow the link and index my page. Instead, my page gets indexed when the Googlebot rolls by of its own accord, or by following a different link.

So, if you want to get something indexed about your post right away, Digg it. It won’t help you get the actual post indexed, but if someone clicks on the Digg result, they’ll be just one click away from getting to your website.

Fastest Google Indexing originally published at Make Money Writing Online

The most common way to track users is with cookies. Cookies are small files stored within your browser that can store things like your account information so that you don’t have to keep logging in to your account. However, websites do much more than just what helps YOU with your cookies. Deleting your cookies helps to protect your privacy.

Unfortunately, there are some websites you would rather keep the cookies on your computer. For example, most banking sites require you to answer an additional security question whenever your logon from an unregistered computer. By answering the question and then registering the computer as one of the ones that you authorize for access, you can keep from having to answer the extra question each time you login. However, that registration is stored as a cookie on your computer, so if you delete all of your cookies, then you delete your registration as well. It’s also a pain to remember to constantly delete your cookies.

Fortunately, there is an easy solution for Google Chrome users. The Vanilla Cookie Manager extension for Chrome allows you to set up a whitelist of protected cookies. Everything else is deleted when you start (or shutdown, depending upon how you configure it) Chrome. That way, you can log into Facebook, for example, and stay logged in as long as Chrome is open. Once you close Chrome, your Facebook cookie is hammered and won’t come back until you log in again. That means, no more Facebook Open Graph following you around as you read your news, update your blogs, or whatever. With your bank registration cookies, you can mark them as whitelisted and they will not get deleted.

Read my latest Credit Check Total review at Finance Gourmet.

It’s the best of both worlds. Your tracking cookies get deleted regularly (rendering them useless) automatically, but the cookies you actually want to keep are kept safe and sound.

Deleting Tracking Cookies is Not Enough

As it turns out, some companies just don’t want to take no for an answer. Even if you delete your cookies, they will still track you and log information about you based on your IP address. Then, they will match up your cookies and IP address and still get a pretty good picture of what you are doing whether your delete your cookies or not.

To get around this, you can take advantage of a wrinkle in the way most internet service providers work. Back in the day, getting a fixed IP address was a big deal. You can’t host your own website without one, for example, and there were only so many addresses available. These days, most ISPs use IPv6, which has plenty of available addresses, but it still is a pain to manage fixed addresses. Besides, they have gotten used to charging extra for a fixed IP.

That means that most internet service that is either DSL or cable internet does not have a fixed IP address. Instead, IP addresses are assigned dynamically. You can use this to your advantage by disconnecting your connection and getting a new IP address. However, most dynamic addressing keeps the address assigned to you for a period of time after you disconnect. It keeps things smooth in case your connection just drops for a few seconds or minutes. That means you need a long enough disconnect so that your ISP releases your IP address, assigns it to someone else, and then has to assign you a new one. This can take a few hours depending upon your service.

With my Comcast cable internet, it takes at least two hours to be sure I get a new IP address. Unfortunately, I use the internet extensively for my freelance writing business and I don’t want to try and use the connection only to remember that I had disconnected it earlier, go and reconnect it, and then wait to get online. Instead, I stole my outlet timer from the Christmas tree. Now, each night between 3:00 am (sometimes I work late) and 6:00 am (sometimes I work early) the power gets cut to my cable modem. That three hours of disconnection usually results in a new IP address each morning.

First thing each morning I use the tools that get bogged down if there is too much activity from one IP address, like when Google starts showing you a captcha for everything you do. With a clean, new IP address, and no cookies still stored, all of those interactions take place with whatever counters are out there set to zero, and I don’t have to worry about getting tainted results that are “personalized” for me.

What tips do you use to keep your online activities private and untracked?

Get New IP for Fresh Results originally published at Make Money Writing Online

Bing Search Rankings Accurate Sooner?

Here is what I mean.

Imagine a website that is a well respected authority site for something like dog clothing. (I have no idea how this does or does not end up working out for thin, affiliate, type websites where the goal is to rank for a single keyword. I don’t have any of those sites to try it out on.)

Now, imagine that the website publishes a new article about ascots for dogs. Let’s assume that the goal was to rank well for the term plaid dog ascots. Furthermore, let’s assume that the page is reasonably well optimized for search and that a regular, non-automated, amount of links has been built to the content in question. Finally, assume that while this may be a competitive keyword, it is not highly competitive and that the top ranking results are not giant, authoritative, well linked pages of PageRank 7 websites, but rather regular, middle of the road, webpages for longer-tail keywords.

Continuing our example based on this scenario, after five to 10 days, Bing starts ranking this webpage for the keyword plaid dog ascots at #5. Google starts the ranking for the same page for the same key phrase at 28. Most website owners fixate on the Google ranking and consider their efforts to be a success or failure based upon that number.

However, what I have noticed a few times now is that without doing anything more than maintaining the existing site that over a matter of two to three weeks, the webpage in question will slowly, but surely (though not linearly) make its way up Google’s SERPs until it comes to rest within one or two rankings of the original Bing ranking.

This suggests a few things. One, that Bing, unlike widely reported on Google, may not limit or “sandbox” new content, allowing it to rank naturally almost immediately. Google, on the other hand, seems to almost require that an article be at least two or three weeks old before it can rank in the top 10, assuming that it is not given “hot news” treatment. Two, it seems that Bing might be a good predictor of the final ranking position for long-tail keyword webpages that are not hyper-competitive. Three, if that is all true, then observing one’s Bing ranking for a given keyword offers some insight into how effective the webpage was constructed and linked.

I’ll keep you posted as I work. Maybe this is a fluke that only happened a couple of times. Maybe, this is a very useful insight into SEO for writers.

Bing Faster Than Google? originally published at Make Money Writing Online

Finally, in May of this year, I enabled all third-party ad networks for AdSense and since disaster never struck, I just went with it.

AdSense Performance Metrics

I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but Google recently added an “Ad networks” report to the Performance Reports section of the Google AdSense online tool for webmasters and publishers. The results show that it may all have been much to do about nothing.

According to my Performance Reports, Google AdWords network serves the overwhelming majority of ads across all of my websites including my freelance writing blog and personal finance blog.

The November report shows that 92.6 percent of all the Ad requests served on my websites were filled by Google AdWords. The second biggest ad network serving ads for my sites was Adnetik US, which accounted for just 2.8 percent of all ads. In third place is the Google: Invite Media ad network followed by Rocket Fuel, both with about 0.5 percent of ad requests. A partial report for the first 12 days of December shows approximately the same thing.

In other words, despite enabling all of the Google approved third-party ad networks out there, less than 8 percent of all my ads were served by ANY third-party ad network. Furthermore, no single non-Google ad-network accounts for even 1 percent of ads, so adding and removing those networks onesie-twosie really is not a good use of my time.

Unblock Third-Party AdSense Networks

As it turns out, I was blocking 163 AdSense ad networks because I did not enable new ad networks to be permitted automatically on my websites as they were approved. Based on the statistics outlined above, I have changed to allow all third-party ad networks and to automatically allow all of the new ones as they come online as well.

With the new Performance Reports “Ad networks” option, I should be able to see hard data about whether any 3rd-party ad network is showing up enough to have any effect, and if so, whether that effect is good or bad.

Ironically, Google was rather secretive and guarded with information regarding the third-party ad networks when it rolled out the program originally leaving many writers, such as myself, worried about how their inclusion in our AdSense enabled websites would affect our advertising income. Many, just like me, chose to be overly cautious despite Google’s numerous statements, both official and unofficial, that the new third-party AdSense networks would have a minimal, beneficial effect on our AdSense income. Now, with more, instead of less, disclosure, Google is getting what it wanted from web publishers like me with full implementation of the new ad networks.

They could have saved themselves, and me, a lot of hassle by being more open up front.

Third-Party Ad Networks Data in AdSense originally published at Make Money Writing Online

Recently, a comment reference Skimlinks and using the company to get around being kicked out of Amazon’s affiliate program by California. As it turns out, California and Amazon cut a deal and California affiliates are back in. Sadly, those of us Colorado Amazon associates are still out.

What Is Skimlinks?

Skimlinks is a company that allows web publishers and writers to generate affiliate links automatically without signing up for a bunch of different programs. Basically, the company itself goes out and signs up affiliate relationships with merchants and online shopping websites. Us publishers use the company’s relationships to send affiliate links to those retailers instead of setting up our own.

Of course, the company keeps a cut of the revenue generated. Skim links keeps 25 percent of each commission generated. The publisher earns 75 percent of the commission. According to the company, a lot of website owners will come out ahead anyway by using the company. The higher volume of traffic Skimlinks offers allows the company to negotiate a higher commission percentage from the merchant. The idea is that if they get an eight percent commission where you would get a five percent commission, then you will make more money off each sale even if they keep 25 percent.

This is all according to the company’s materials. I have no first hand knowledge yet.

How Does Skimlinks Work?

Skimlinks works like Google AdSense by inserting a piece of JavaScript code on your website. Unlike AdSense the Skimlinks code doesn’t generate an ad, rather it monitors clicks on links to stores and other online retailers. If the click can be monetized, that is if Skimlinks has an affiliate relationship with where the link goes, then they redirect that click (silently) through Skimlinks to add the necessary code and make it an affiliate click. If a commission is generated, they split it 25 / 75 with the website owner.

An example, makes it easier to understand.

Suppose you really like makeup from Sephora and recommend it on your website. Without Skimlinks, you would sign up for Sephora’s affiliate program, and then manually link to Sephora products from your website. Sephora would pay you directly and you get 100 percent of your commissions. With Skimlinks, you don’t need to sign up for Sephora’s affiliate program. You link directly to the product on Sephora’s website without any sort of affiliate code, just a regular link. When someone clicks that link, the Skimlinks JavaScript intercepts the outgoing link, adds the Skimlink company affiliate code (and presumably some sort of tracking that identifies where the link came from) before sending the user on. If a commission is generated, Skimlinks keeps 25 percent and you get the rest.

This make Skimlinks a good way to get around Amazon Associate bans in your state. For example, I live in Colorado and my legislature decided to tax Amazon, so Amazon said, “Screw you guys, I’m going home.” (They probably even used a Cartman voice.) So, all of my Amazon affiliate links are worthless and generate no money for me. However, if I use Skimlinks, it is their affiliate code and not mine that shows up on Amazon’s system and since they are not kicked out of the Amazon associates program, a commission is generated and I get 75 percent of it.

Is Skimlinks Worth It?

The webmaster who recommended Skimlinks did so with some reservations. Like me, he had heard negative things before but has had no trouble with them personally.

Apparently one of the common complaints was that Skimlinks had a high payout threshold. I don’t know what it used to be, but it’s $10 now. If you can’t generate $10 worth of commissions, the money sits in an account until it adds up to $10. If it takes you a long time to generate that much, your websites probably need to focus on building instead of monetizing. In the meantime, I wouldn’t complain too much that someone owes me $4.35, but if that sort of thing bothers you, look elsewhere.

Also, if you are willing and able to manage your own affiliate relationships directly, you’ll get more control, better reporting, and maybe higher payouts. If, like me, you spend enough time just writing websites and don’t have more time to do anything beyond using Google AdSense to make money, then Skimlinks might be a good alternative to signing up for a bunch of affiliate programs.

I went ahead and signed up for Skimlinks. It took one day for my site to be approved. I am added some others today, we’ll see how long that takes.

If you want to try Skimlinks too, use this referal link: Skimlinks

Keep an eye out, or grab the RSS Feed for further updates and reviews.

Skimlinks Scam or Great Program? originally published at Make Money Writing Online

Way back in the day, there was a sort of consensus among search engine researchers that followed Google and used their knowledge to instruct website owners in the practice of search engine optimization that Google only indexed the first 300 words on a webpage. More to the point, it was said that only the first 300 words were used by Google to determine a webpage ranking in its search results. Thus, anything you wrote after 300 words was "wasted."

That may have been true at one time, but it has long since ceased to be the case with Google’s determination to index more of the web. Still, this time honored SEO advice was repeated constantly over the years.

Worse, a 300 word post is seldom sufficient for covering almost any topic in enough depth to make it valuable to a reader. Most web publishers were well aware of this, but they chose optimizing for search engines over writing for their readers.

Google’s recent search ranking updates have slaughtered those who were slaves to the 300 word article rule.

Google Website Rankings Update

As more information about Google’s new search rankings algorithm has emerged, the consensus now is that a plethora of 300-word posts will actually hurt your website rather than improve your search rankings.

Google has stated that it has improved its search rankings by downgrading websites with thin or limited content. In fact, even the good webpages of a website can be penalized if they are on a domain with too much junk content. Those highly ranked, well-written articles are now dragged down by all of those keyword stuffed 300 word posts used before to prop them up.

This is all good news for writers making money online by writing. No longer is it advantageous to pay $1 for fifty 300 word articles from the cheapest freelancer you can find on elance.com. Such thin content actually hurts your website and makes your webpages rank worse. Websites looking to improve their traffic and even those looking to recover from a Panda hit that they took will be better off actually generating or commissioning worthwhile, informative, and yes, longer articles.

This website was started with the writer in mind. Instead of advice of how to make money with websites using tricks and techniques that gamed Google’s search engines, the idea is to show someone who can (and does) write well and publishes useful content how to turn that content into a way to make money writing online.

Make no mistake. The content mills and affiliate marketing scammers are hard at work on finding the next bare-minimum they can get away with.

Don’t fall into that trap. Keep writing the good stuff. Keep using the techniques to link it, index it, build it and monetize it, but keep making it good.

Google is said to be updating the Panda algorithm on a monthly basis now. Whatever garbage method the junk publishers come up with next might work for a month or two, but as soon as it becomes known, Google will be looking for a way to knock it down.

Content to Advertising Ratio

One recent metric to emerge from the AdWords / AdSense world is that of ads to content. It seems that in some cases, Google measures how much content there is relative to how much advertising there is.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that longer articles will fair better in this ratio. A 300 word article, for example, is 10 percent ads with just 30 words of advertising, versus a 1,000 word article offering up to 100 words of advertising for the same ad ratio.

In other words, if your blog is monetized with Google AdSense, those longer articles you have been writing are paying off for you right now.

Death of the 300 Word Post originally published at Make Money Writing Online

Google mentioned that only a small percentage of rankings were affected with each update. That’s small comfort to those website owners that go hammered. On the other hand, many web developers found themselves only minimally affected. The key questions moving forward, is what to do to help your websites rank higher and what to not do to keep from hurting your website’s search rankings.

Google Search Results Quality

Everyone always says that content is king and that quality is the way to a top Google search ranking, but everyone knows that isn’t really true. The "if you build it, they will link" theory of search engine rankings is based upon the naïve assumption that everyone who publishes webpages and online content link based solely on how much they value the pages and information that they are linking to. That may have been true a decade ago, but it hasn’t been true in years.

These days, website owners routinely link based upon self-interest. Content mills, for example, add the nofollow tag to any link pointing offsite. One example, eHow.com, has links to "references" at the bottom of every article it publishes. It is these references that, supposedly, validate the information provided and prove that the data within is quality information. However, every one of those links is nofollowed. If the content being linked is useful enough to be the validating reference, how can it possibly be unworthy of a full follow link?

The answer, of course, is that no one in the world uses the nofollow tag the way it is intended. Rather, websites and SEO experts use the no follow tag to enhance the links that they want to power up for their own benefit and to downgrade all other links regardless of value.

The other reason that Google search results are broken is that they over-emphasize the title tag, ranking websites of lower quality higher than better quality websites because the lower quality site matches the wording entered into the query box slightly better than the better quality article.

Content Mills Punished

It seems that neither Google, nor any of the search experts out there, seem to think that Google has changed its link counting ways or its text pattern matching algorithm. Instead, the focus is on the concept that there is a "penalty" for low-quality content that extends to the entire website.

The idea is that if there are 200 low-quality pages (that is, low-ranking pages) and 100 higher-quality (higher-ranking) pages, then the 100 good pages are dragged down by a penalty from the low pages. That is why content mills (and other websites) are now frantically pulling their "junk" content down in hopes that their rankings will improve for their better quality content. Demand Studios, publisher of eHow, for example, is decommissioning all of their unmoderated user-generated content in hopes that their better, editor approved, content will regain some of its luster in Google’s eyes.

Of course, this may all be moot as recent actions by various flower selling websites demonstrated recently. It seems that all of the major online florists were buying links in the run up to Mother’s Day to ensure that they would rank high (or not lose their high rankings) for the big flower buying holiday.

Google’s response was essentially that it is fine to break the Google Webmaster Guidelines as long as it doesn’t affect the final rankings. The stupidity of this concept is staggering considering there is no way for Google, or anyone else, to know whether or not the forbidden link buying campaigns affect EVERY search made. The link buying may not have affected the rankings for "Mother’s Day flowers" but could have made a big difference for "mothers day flower specials cleveland".

If you want to make money writing online, you can naively write quality content and hope for the best, or you can write quality content and then get out there an build some links. You’ll never outspend 1-800 flowers on a link-buying campaign for Valentine’s Day, but your top-notch article on how to pick good roses at the flower store might just make it into the Top 10 Google search results if you build out some links, and then hope for the best.

Google Panda Update 1 and 2 Shaking Out originally published at Make Money Writing Online