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Hard-core topics include SEO Ranking Factors for 2009, Writing Killer PPC Ad Copy, Twisted Twitter Tactics, Video SEO and Extreme Local SEO Tactics.

For marketing and agency people, we also have topics such as See the Big and the Small Picture using Web Analytics, How to Measure Online Media Values, 20 Ways to Build Your Brand Online, and How to Run a Successful Internet Marketing Agency.

For webmasters and forum owners, we have topics on how to manage huge sites. Jedi Dancel will share the success story behind Tsikot.com.

Just like the previous two conferences, we will also have site clinics. The Macalua, RJ of Sulit.com.ph, Hans Koch and I will be in this panel giving delegates tons of tips and recommendations on how to improve and efficiently manage their sites.

If you want to register or learn more about the conference, please call Fiera de Manila at the following numbers: (02) 896.06.39, / 896.06.37 and 899.62.16 or email fiera@info.com.ph or semcon@imvsolutions.com. Venue is at the Hotel Intercontinental, Makati City.

Registration is Php9,500 for two days, inclusive of meals and conference kits but if you sign up before end of the month, we have a 10% discount (group discount is 4 + 1 free). For students, inquire about our academic discounts.

SemCon 2009 is brought to you by IMVSolutions, Fiera de Manila and YugaTech.

I’ll be giving away free tickets to this conference to several bloggers via a blog contest/giveaway. Watch out for that next week.

Follow us on Twitter: @SemConPH

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They’ve got this person leaving multiple comments on my travel blog with their keywords on it.

flowers philippines
http://www.flowersexpress.com.ph | bjdenise516@gmail.com | 124.158.44.240

Excellent entry! I’m been looking for topics as interesting as this. Looking forward to your next post.Good post. I never thought of it that way. Thanks for this entry.

-bjdenise-

From Baguio Flower Festival Blooms Anew, 2008/12/05 at 2:57 PM

I usually just flag them as spam but this one had about a dozen comments posted already — all the same comments — and I have this feeling it’s not going to be the last.

Update: MyOptimind, the SEO company doing the work for Flowers Express apologized and blogged about it.

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Take for example YouTube. When it was not yet bought by Google, you don’t see videos in the search results. But now, just look at the Google search results:

So, let’s just say that Youtube video for the keyword “thriller” is appropriate in the results. Why not put videos from Revver or Metacafe too? Why just YouTube? Does Google have a preferential bias towards its own? Looks like it.

How about Blogger? Just this afternoon, one of my workshop participants, Joaquin Vocos, used Blogger instead of WordPress.com for his blog. A few hours later (about 3 hours), he was already ranking in the Google search results for his name.

The other blog posts and pages that had his name published on an earlier date on WordPress.com are nowhere to be found. All of the results are coming from BlogSpot.

The lesson — if you wanna be indexed very quickly, use BlogSpot. Because Google loves its own. But don’t you think it’s a little unfair?

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Well, a lot of SEO people and bloggers have pointed out this page — Mini Customer Success Stories. How do you get listed on that PR7 page? Well, just get yourself a Google Appliance, and submit your testimonial and link on that page.

The Google Mini Search Appliance delivers Google search for your public website or internal search, including the ability to control how frequently your content is indexed and include both public and private content in search results. It starts at $1,995 for search across 50,000 documents.

The service costs a mere $1,995 a year or about $5 a day. Actually, the Google Custom Search Business Edition only costs $100 for 5,000 documents. That’s even cheaper. So anybody who wants a non-nofollowed PR7 link straight from Google just needs to show up with the cash and submit their links to be listed.

Of course, Google is not really into the paid links business (except for the AdWords/AdSense tandem) and the one mentioned above is an indirect benefit but hey, you still get that raw link juice from them right. But wait, aren’t marketplaces like TLA and ReviewMe also advertise that those links are for traffic and not to pass PageRank? And no, I don’t think Google should put a PageRank penalty on itself for those paid raw links.

Those who’ve expressed that all these is unfair and us smalltime publishers (bloggers creating quality content and making a small living on non-AdSense ads) are suffering from it will need to realize that like any other company Google is running a business. Services like TLA, TLB, PPP are somewhat directly competing with AdWords and the right way to legitimize Google’s foothold is to go back to the basics — desensitizing the SERPs. And yes, it’s far easier for them to do this hand-job than actually go and kill off comment spammers, webspam, scrapers and content thieves. Those aren’t as serious a threat (to their business) as link buying/selling.

This post was inspired by:

Aaron Wall: How To Buy A #1 Organic Search Ranking On Google.
Douglas Karr: What if Bloggers went on Strike?
Robert Clough: Composing the Perfect Letter of Surrender
Philipp Lenssen: Google Owns an SEO Company

And oh, Google is just getting started. Wait ’til it gets its hands on memes, link exchanges, seo contests, writing projects, link campaigns and anything that involves people making use of links for cash, prizes, gaining PageRank, and manipulating search engine results.

Yup, the operative word here is manipulation. And Google has just been granted that patent.

Disclosure: Ok, I admit. This post was partly influenced by the fact that starting next month, I would lose over $1,000 a month from link ads.

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According to the revised Webmaster Help Center, SEJ points us to this official Google statement:

Some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

* Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the tag
* Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such excessive link exchanges and purchased links that pass PageRank.

I’ve highlighted the part where Google mentions “selling links” and “can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results“.

So, we’re all sure now that it’s not gonna be just your PR that will be affected but your placements in the search results as well. Anybody remembered the -30 and -90 penalty before. Changes to this statement was first spotted by Blogoscoped.

This Google crusade for paid links is just getting crazier than ever. Brace yourselves for the next storm guys. Maybe it’s also time to drop AdSense?

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Here’s a long list of very popular and trusted sites been drastically affected by the recent PageRank update.

http://www.downloadsquad.com PR5 -> PR4
http://www.autoblog.com PR6 -> PR4
http://www.engadget.com PR7 -> PR5
http://www.problogger.net PR6 -> PR4
http://www.copyblogger.com PR6 -> PR4
http://www.joystiq.com PR6 -> PR4
http://www.tuaw.com PR6 -> PR4
http://www.searchengineguide.com PR7 -> PR4
http://www.searchenginejournal.com PR7 -> PR4
http://www.johnchow.com PR6 -> PR4
http://www.quickonlinetips.com PR6 -> PR3
http://weblogtoolscollection.com PR6 -> PR4
http://www.seroundtable.com PR7 -> PR4
http://www.blogherald.com PR6 -> PR4
http://www.washingtonpost.com PR7 -> PR5
http://www.washingtontimes.com PR6 -> PR4
http://www.forbes.com PR7 -> PR5
http://www.sfgate.com PR7 -> PR5
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com PR6 -> PR4

This is what Google has been announced recently — sites selling raw link for PR juice will be penalized.

So, did the recent update affected your blogs/websites?

It is also possible that this recent update is screwed in some way. If you remember some 6 months ago when that PR update was so screwed some sites easily get PR6 and even on blog I owned for 6 months got a PR8 page. Maybe this time, it’s the other way around.

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On the same note, I got a call from Michael Rogers (commonly known in the local SEO circles as seoluv) pointing me to a similar case he wrote on his blog accusing SEO World Champion Benj Arriola of willfully distributing WordPress themes with PHP codes that pulls out hidden links when search engines visit blogs that uses his free themes.

The infected WP themes include the Transformers Fans, among others. I have not checked all the other themes if there were other PHP codes inserted in them. These themes will spew out several hidden links to the goglobalwarmingawareness2007.com. On top of this, Michael Rogers is also accusing Aileen Apolo of conniving with Benjie Arriola to rank for the keyword “Google Country Consultant”. Here’s the screenshot of the codes with links to the respective keywords.

Janet Torral called me a while ago so I could explain to her what this fuss is all about. Apparently, she was also contacted by Michael Rogers to expose this story in her column in the newspaper (SunStar). He quoted Janet getting feedback about this story to Aileen, which the latter vehemently denied. It is still uncertain whether Aileen knows about this Black Hat SEO technique which Benj implemented for her blog using his freely distributed WordPress themes.

I believe this issue is more geared towards the WordPress community as WP Founder Matt Mulleweg announced on his blog earlier. As to the issue of black hat SEO, my take on it is that if you wanted backlinks in exchange for the free themes you are distributing, just put them right there for every theme user to see and let them decide to retain it or not. Putting them via hidden links so only the search engines can see (term used is cloaking) is just plain no-no. Benj might want to explain why he implemented this experiment.

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Only two days after I rebooted this blog with a new theme and change the permalink structure, I’m already seeing the results of the search engines re-indexing my blog. Now, I think I have the answer to this. See results after the jump.

I 301′ed the old links to the new custom permalinks using a WordPress plugin called Permalink Redirect by Scott Young. I also dug into the archives that cross-linked the other posts in the blog as well as other blogs/forums/websites I control that references specific URLS here.

This is what I’m seeing in the SERPs (search engine results page) now for Google:

I was also surprised that the SEs are also showing indented results (when Google finds multiple results from the same website, the most relevant result is listed first, with other relevant pages from that site indented below it) which I think is good. If you look closely, the same page are ranking in the search results, with the new permalinks taking the first listing followed by the old permalink as an indented result.

Yahoo is also showing the same behavior.

I reckon that the indented listings will disappear once the search engines have fully re-indexed the site and recognized the redirects to the new permalinks. What I failed to completely document thru the course of this migration is the effect in the page rankings. I could not be 100% certain that the new permalinks have contribute to higher search rankings but I think the one for “xbox 360 recall” had a bit of a boost. It used to be in the 5 or 6 a week ago but is now showing at #’s 3 & 4 (indented).

This will pan out in the coming days or weeks and I’ll hopefully see the overall effect in amount of traffic by next month. For the meantime, the blog is enjoying a slight increase in click-thru’s from the search engines because of the double listing.

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He shares (starts at 2:05 mins) that this guy got kicked-out from the company that he’s working for after they found out he had cancer. Considering that cancer treatments are very expensive, the company might have wanted to avoid such costly work benefits for this employee.

Out of work, out of luck and stuck at home, G Man went to the dark side and was able to recover from his illness after months of therapy and medication. Rand adds that this guy was earning somewhere in excess of $175,000 a year from his black hat activities.

An inspirational story to some people in the seo industry and a true testament that dark side has it’s benefits. *hehehe*

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I’ve been blogging since 2000, right after I learned how to code in basic HTML or how to resize or crop a picture in Photoshop. I discovered blogging out of passion to learn new and exciting stuff and everyday there was something new to discover. I wasn’t compensated for it. Even on my first job, I would sneak in a post or two during work hours and redesign my blog instead of re-designing the company website (yeah, it was one of the signs that I suck as an employee).

Every post was made for my personal consumption or some very select friends, but mostly for me alone. The hundreds or thousands of posts in those archives bring memories of youth and countless heartaches. Then, my mother discovered my blog (and she didn’t even know how to use a computer — darn those friendly net cafe watchers). That’s the time when I realized personal blogging (or online journals) is not good for me. Anyway, I digress.

Going back to the topic. I kept that archive online but hidden to most people. I moved it elsewhere. It’s still intact but I’d rather that I’m the only one who knows about it. It’s not password protected or anything but one could not find it if they searched far and wide. In short, I didn’t need SEO for it.

• I don’t need link-building. No other site or domain links to it.
• I don’t need good permalinks. The urls are in numerical format (domain.com/number/number/).
• No titles. The old Blogger didn’t support one so when I migrated to WP, they didn’t have any except for numerical fingerprints.
• I don’t use any analytics tools. Goodbye Google Analytics, Feedburner, etc.
• Quality content? Un-checked! 90% of those posts are pure rants and one-liners.
• Do I promote it? Un-checked. Except for very close and trusted friends who begged to see the archives, I’d be scared if someone else discovers it.

In short, I don’t want anybody else to know that blog. So, why do I need SEO again?

And I’m sure there’s a reason why some platforms like LJ are closed to the public and requires membership before a friend can read their entries.

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He used to run linkback contests such as the “Make Money Online” Googlebomb. Well, his link back promotion got him a Google penalty. Yep, that “review me and I’ll post a link back to your blog” has actually backfired. Now, if you search for the name “John Chow” on Google, his blog will not even show on the frontpage. See John’s explanation on this here.

So, a fair warning to fellow bloggers who join or are actually doing the same strategy. This example might have answered Andrew’s earlier post on link trains and such.

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However, the general knowledge is that if your web pages are in the Supplemental results, these pages are least likely to show on regular search results and thus will get you little to no traffic at all. So, imagine if you have 1,000 entries in your blog and 400 of them are in the supplemental results. That means only the other 600 pages will get to attract more traffic while they’re buried in your archives.

How do you know how much of your blog or website are in the supplemental results, then?

To check all of your pages indexed by Google, type “site:www.domain.com” in Google search.

To check all of the pages in the supplemental results of Google, type “site:www.domain.com *** -sjpked” in Google search

(Note: replace domain.com with your full blog URL, e.g. www.yugatech.com/blog/)

Here’s how it would look like in Google:

What could cause these pages to go into the supplemental results?

1.) Internal linking structure (not enough links pointing to these pages)
2.) Duplicate content (monthly archive pages, category pages, paged comments can cause duplicate contents). Same is true with duplicate content outside of your blog/website on another domain.
3.) Excessive link exchanges, especially with irrelevant websites/blogs

I also pointed out some canonical issues before and you can also check this tip on an SEO-friendly WordPress setup.

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Not only does Benj gets the bragging rights as a kick-ass SEO champ, he also gets to take home a brand new car — a Citroen C2. Read all about Benj’s thank you speech here. *hehe* The complete list of contest winners can be found here.

And that kick-ass Citroen C2 prize is not a brand of bottled ice tea but a car.

Benj has these 3 tips to share:

1. Content is still king! Good content keep people stay, comeback and spread the news in a natural manner.
2. Design is still important, not that is has to be really superb, but at least it does not look bad that people will not trust you nor the content of your website. Make it clean and presentable to help drive more traffic, world-of-mouth and more effective website link baiting.
3. And SEO is a pay-it-forward type of industry. The more help you give out to other people, the more help you receive when you need it.

Congratulations to Benj for uplifting the name of Philippines in the world of SEO. Hat tip to Abel for emailing me.

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Anyway, thanks to Eric Salas for emailing me this link from SEOMoz (didn’t have much time to check my feeds):

Top 10 Positive Factors

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Global Link Popularity of Site
3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
4. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
5. Age of Site
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site

The survey represents the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. You can read details and the comments here.

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PageRank is a link analysis algorithm which assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E). {source: wikipedia}

Evil Matt Cutts blogs and asks “Where does PageRank come from?“.

… assuming you must have PageRank to give it, where does the original first page rank come from? Does every site start out with a basic miniscule amount of page rank contributing to the entire Internet sum of PageRank?

Newton could have answered that with his 4th Law of Finite PageRank and it would have been stated this way:

“PageRank is neither created nor destroyed. It is only transfered from one web page to another, either given freely, traded or bought. PageRank is finite and it does not increase as the total volume of indexable pages grow.”

There’s a finite sum of PageRank, otherwise with the constant growth of the world wide web would spread the PR too thin. If every new site or webpage created had an initial non-zero PageRank value, one can artificially amass PageRank by registering new domains or generating more webpages.

But what about the theory of the Alpha Page Rank Site?

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Use regional and geographical domains in line with their purpose.

First, a sidenote for the Western webmasters: some Eastern European countries like Poland and Russia have so-called regional or geographical domains. Imagine that all the states in the U.S. had their official second level domain and if you wanted to open your webshop delivering to Kentucky, you could do it cheap or for free on eg. ky.us. This could help Google serve geographically relevant search results. In case you wish to sell organic soaps to people in Szczecin, do open your webshop on szczecin.pl. If you are from Kalmykia and would like to show the world the beauty of your area, go ahead and set up your Kalmyki travel site on kalmykia.ru. If you like a region, support it by hosting your site on the related regional or geographical domain. Be aware that webspam on these regional domains violates the correct use of them and prevents the development of your country’s web culture.

So, if all else being equal, a .com.ph will rank higher than the .com when the user/searcher is in the Philippines.

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Positive signals

* links from blogrolls (especially from high-quality blogrolls or blogrolls of “trusted bloggers”)
* links from other sources (mail, chats)
* using tags to categorize a post
* PageRank
* the number of feed subscriptions (from feed readers)
* clicks in search results

Negative signals (spam signals)

* posts added at a predictable time
* different content between the site and the feed
* the amount of duplicate content
* using words/n-grams that appear frequently in spam blogs
* posts that have identical size
* linking to a single web page
* a large number of ads
* the location of ads (“the presence of ads in the recent posts part of a blog”)

I’m surprised that feed subscription is part of the positive factors. Again, the number of ads that you put into your blog is also considered — now that’s a nice way of balancing content and advertising. We all know money is the single biggest reason why spam is still growing (could be a multi-million dollar industry).

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You’ll have to thank Marc for this one. He practically made SEO a household term in the Philippines in just less than a year.

Now that SEO awareness is locally taking shape, here are some tips to become an SEO specialist without even trying:

• Write an SEO blog. Do it on BlogSpot or WordPress.com. Better yet, make one on Friendster Blogs or LiveJournal.
• Link to big-names in the search industry like Matt Cutts, ShoeMoney, Danny Sullivan, John Battelle, Jeremy Zawodny, Dave Naylor, Michael Gray, Jim Boykin, Andy Beal, and Marc Macalua.
• Blog about them everyday and leave a comment on their blogs after every post. If you’re the first one to comment, the better.
• Talk about that super-secret SEO experiments you have but don’t give specifics or links to the project. The less details, the better. Mystery is a huge ingredient in doing experiments.
• Always talk and write in acronyms and codes — SERPs, PR, SEM, SMO, 301, SES, PPC, ROI, CPC, CPM, IBL, REP, Big Daddy, One Box, Sandbox, Trust Rank. Don’t bother explaining them at the footer of your entry.
• If you use WordPress, do a future post for each and every quarter from now until 2010 and title them “PR Update Coming up!”. In between those posts, you can also write “There’s a slight movement in the SERPs!”
• If asked for you recent consulting project, always say “Sorry, but I have a non-disclosure agreement with past clients” or “Our tools are proprietary and our methods are well-guarded secrets so I can’t share them with you”.
• In your about page/section, write the term SEO Consultant in big bold letters along with all other professions you have. This is the killer step actually. You can skip all the rest except this and get the same overall effect. Why, nobody would dare add those words if they don’t know their sh*t, right?

So, ok, I lied! Don’t listen to these advice. I posted them for fun after reading about Jason Calacanis’ keynote at SES Chicago saying, and I quote. “SEO is bull$#!t”. (Old news, I know.)

P.S.
Marc, pre, best man pa rin ako, ha?

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SEO Clinic is a new project we are now offering on Search Engine Journal for webmasters and site owners which are not experiencing their desired or potential Google, Yahoo, Ask.com and MSN rankings.

Every week our group of SEO experts will band together and lend our expertise to help one lucky selected site with their SEO. We will publish our tips for your site on each Tuesday.

SEO Clinic is a free service and our recommendations will include ideas and tips on link building, site navigation, usability, copywriting, social media optimization and other techniques which help web sites rank higher for desired terms in search engines. {Search Engine Journal}

Head on over there and have your site diagnosed.

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I just discovered that my blog has turned PR6. But it’s not the URL that I’ve always been using — i.e. http://www.yugatech.com/blog — that one is still PR5.

So which one is it? Check out the PR6 results for http://yugatech.com/blog/ here. All the rest — http://yugatech.com/blog and http://www.yugatech.com/blog/ remains at PR5 (mind the leading slashes). Now, how did that happen when is something I can’t understand myself.

So I say forget about PR.

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I blogged about the Wikipedia Issues with SPAM and the discussions about the use of NOFOLLOW for ALL external Links from Wikipedia. It was done, finally.

As of now are all outbound links from the english Wikipedia Site using the NOFOLLOW attribute, no exceptions.

No matter where you place it, Article Page, Talk Page, User Page, Project Page, whatever. No Link will get any credit at the major search engines.

What does this mean for you my fellow bloggers? Well, you still get that link if your site or blog has been added as an external source, along with it the referral traffic. That’s about it actually.

What does this mean to the SEO guys? Well, they could start by firing letting go everybody in the Wikipedia Contributor Department.

Does it matter? Not much really but if you (partly) live off PR juice and Wikipedia link loving, you’re basically screwed. Naah, just kidding. Besides, not all of the big search engines follow the nofollow tag.

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The Keyphrase to optimize for is “globalwarming awareness2007″. The target is to rank as high as possible on all three major search engines Google , Yahoo and MSN . Keyword was announced 2007-01-15 13.00 PM EST (Eastern Standard Time). With your help we will advance Search Engine Marketing technology and knowledge while using SEO as an educational tool. For every contestant that enrols Eastpoint Group will donate a specific sum to the Red Cross organization.

The grand prize for this contest is a brand new Citroen C2 (really nice car, IMO!). Now, that’s what I call a prize. Need I say more?

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• The amount of time, effort and money you spend on an SEO Contest may not actually compensate for whatever prizes you may win, if (and that’s a big IF) ever you’d win. What are the chances of that?
• Lost of productivity is directly proportional to how eager you want to win the competition. Good thing there’s SEOBunker to do the quick-check for you. (Nice tool, btw, dude!)
• You might end up getting a lot of attention, albeit negative, from SEO gurus all over. And you don’t ever wanna mess with those guys.
• If you’re an SEO Specialist, you’d have to hunt for 101 reasons why some newbie or blogger bested you 3 pages up the Google SERPs.
• You’d be forced to pay a link to some questionable sponsor before stepping into the door.

The last one really hits the sweet spot (as Migs originally points out). What better way to trigger the SE’s red flag than linking to a bad, totally unrelated neighborhood. One might even consider it as accessory to a link spamming.

So, you can still join the contest actually. You may not follow the *required* links and not really qualify but at least you learn something from the exercise.

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I did a little experiment on link baiting for the two and what better way to get other bloggers & regular readers to actively participate is by having a contest and giving away prizes. So the quest for more visitors started with the free tickets to the 2nd World Pyro Olympics.

I now have partial stats results of the contest on both blogs and the graphs showed great response:

The travel blog used to average 500 pageviews from around 200+ unique visitors. The last week, it saw 900+ pageviews from 400+ unique visitors. That’s almost 200% increase in traffic.

The urban blog used to average 200+ pageviews from 100+ unique visitors a day. That week, that number jumped to an average of 500+ pageviews from 200+ uniques, more than double IMO.

But those inflations will eventually slid back after the contest right, you might ask? We’ll the second and the more long term benefits involves the SEO part — getting more links from bloggers and eventually ranking much higher in the SERPs for the term world pyro olympics and all its permutations. We’ll learn more how this pans out weeks after the event.

Cost of running the contest: Php3,600 (tickets) Php1,120 (LBC)

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I look at it as an SEO challenge and here are some pretty obvious ones:

• Inq7.net is PR7 while Inquirer.net is PR0. They’ll probably catch up later.
• Inq7.net has 256,000 pages indexed by Google while Inquirer.net only has 33,000. That means a lot less traffic from organic search.
• Alexa ranking of Inq7.net is 3,911 while Inquirer.net is 16,492. My blog has an Alexa rank of 17,993 so you can only imagine how low the traffic ranking went down.
• From Yahoo Site Explorer, Inq7.net has 262,771 backlinks while Inquirer.net has 35,847. Direct link referral traffic would have also suffered.

If you check Alexa, you’d see that their reach has gone down by almost half by December in the last 6 months:

That dip in the curve on the first week of December was the time when they experimented with the domain transition. GMANews.tv has their own regular Adsense account and while Inquirer.net still looks like they’re a Premium Adsense Publisher, only time will tell if that 44 Millions a month will hold. (Note: To be a Premium Publisher, you must have at least 20M pageviews a month)

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I got some stats and dug a bit deeper on the exact date the traffic went down. It wasn’t gradual but a sudden drop. Here’s a screen shot during that week:

There are still residual referrals from Google but are few and far apart. It’s as if it lost all its juice and fell down the SERPs. It’s just Google though — traffic from other search engines are still coming in but you can see from the graph how much damage was done. PageRank is still intact.

The question is how did that happen?

Here’s the checklist that I gave and I thought I’d share it with everyone here too:

• Is your site functioning well, as in no page errors?
• Did you check your htaccess or robots.txt for any codes that might block being indexed by Google?
• Are you or have you been selling links?
• Are you or have you been buying links?
• Did you change web host or IP recently?
• Did you change your domain WHOIS info recently?
• Do you have Sitemaps installed?
• Summary feeds or full rss feeds?
• Did you check your error_log for relevant data that would suggest access errors?

Did I miss anything?

So, what to do now?

• Don’t panic. If you have a lot of regular readers, then it won’t hurt that much.
• Check for duplicate content. You could be delivering multiple instances of the same content on your domain (something like http://blog.domain.com and http://domain.com/blog and http://www.domain.com/blog).
• Check for backlinks. You might have lost a lot of really juicy links recently.
• Try and get some more nice links. When you’re used to get them for free before, this time be a little proactive.
• Continue building great, original content.

Hopefully, it will come back.

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Let’s delve into the practically of this incessant debate on link buying and selling by going inside the mind of your regular blogger or publisher.

• People sell scrap metal and old/used newspaper by the kilo. Why can’t I sell links ads on my site too?
• Free links. Paid links? Hmmm, which one will get my attention first?
• I might loose my PR5 tomorrow. Might as well make a few hundred bucks before I loose it for a nickel. It’s like having sex with a prostitute — get a taste of heaven before going to hell.
• Can I just go visit the priest, confess my sins and repent? Sell links now then remove them later when all hell breaks loose. (I didn’t know! I didn’t know!)
• What? You’ll pay me for what I’m just about to do for free? Where do I sign?
• This is the only way I can earn revenue without my visitors clicking away from my site and you’re gonna punish me for it? No wonder a lot of children in the world die of hunger.
• Ey everybody else is doing it, including the bug guys and the blog networks, so why can’t I?
• What penalty?

I guess if the danger is not imminent, then there’s nothing to worry about. Just observe those people who live beside Mount Mayon or some other really disaster prone area. They know something *might* happen but they still continue living there.

Reminds me of the Mayor Fred Lim approach against drug pushers in Manila. He’d go around and spray red paint on the doors of houses of suspected drug pushers. Guess what, they just change address.

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* Best SEO Blog
* Best SEM Blog
* Best Search Agency Resource Blog
* Best Link Building Blog
* Best Social Media Blog
* Best Search Engine Corporate Blog (owned by the search engines)
* Best Contextual Advertising Blog
* Best Affiliate Marketing Blog
* Best Search Engine Community/Forum Blog
* Best Web 2.0 Blog
* Best Search Linkbait of 2006

Head over there and nominate your favorite ones.

So, where do we put Marc’s blog as an entry?

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