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Google Panda and Content Farms

By Writer Fox in Featured

Web content was the main buzz in the SEO world in 2011, mostly due to changes in the Google algorithm updates known as ‘Panda.’

When these changes began on February 24, 2011, many website owners woke up to find their Google search engine rankings had
nose-dived and their traffic from Google had ceased. Loss in traffic means loss in income.

Panda was originally known as the “Farmer” algorithm change because significant Google ranking changes occurred in so-called ‘content-farm’ sites. Famous URL’s such as Suite 101, eHow, DemandMedia, EzineArticles, Squidoo, HubPages, and Yahoo’s AssociatedContent were hit hard by Panda.

Google’s Panda evaluates the quality of the content found on all pages of a website. Because content farms are notorious free-for -alls which attract many amateur writers, those sites were hit the hardest.

Google engineer Amit Singhal posted this advice on the Google blog:

“One other specific piece of guidance we’ve offered is that low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content.”

Content farms scrambled to react to their changes in search engine ranking throughout 2011, as Google made more than a dozen adjustments to Panda.

The notorious site, eHow.com, has made no recovery in Google rankings and traffic as 2012 begins. Suite101, EzineArticles and DemandMedia are still on a downward spiral since the first Panda rollout. Squidoo.com has recovered about half of the traffic it lost when Panda began.

AssociatedContent, acquired by Yahoo in mid-2010 for over $100 million, has taken the drastic measure of taking down the website and launching a revamp as Voices.Yahoo.com. The new site was launched on December 1, 2011, by uploading content from the original site, minus 75,000 pages of culled content. The URL change was made with this announcement from Yahoo: “Only content that meets our revised submission guidelines will be accepted moving forward.”

HubPages.com reacted to Panda by putting its authors on individual subdomains. This suggestion was actually recommended to the company by a Google employee. The subdomain concept puts the onus of poor quality content on the individual author. According to Alexa traffic graphs, HubPages has only recovered about a third of its pre-Panda traffic with this tactic.

Google sought to increase the quality of its search results by implementing Panda. And there are websites that have benefited from Google Panda. The mega article site Wikipedia, for instance, has experienced a marked increase in traffic.

As 2012 begins, Google Panda is still on the radar of website owners and internet marketers in the daily quest for high rankings on Google search engine results.

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Writer Fox is a Web Content Writer, providing Web copywriting information, services, and SEO help for writers and for webmasters. Writer Fox writes content to engage, secure trust, convince and push to the desired action. Read more about Google Panda and steps to take.

5 Surefire Tips To Increase Website Authority & Make Money Doing It!

By Joel McLaughlin in Featured

After a while, building links on an ongoing basis is very tedious work and some times the feeling of incentive is lost when working on your own websites. My main purpose for writing this article is to show options that are available for improving your websites authority while obtaining high quality links that really make a positive impact for your website. Website marketing needs to be fun, and you need to think of new ideas to lower the amount of time spent to earn a dollar. Working smarter than harder should be on everyones mind.

First off, I recommend that people consider becoming an author for About.com. Did you guys know that many authors on About can make anywhere from $650 per month and up in to the thousands, simply by being an expert in your industry and providing valuable information that increases About’s website traffic and page views?

The big benefit to working on About’s website as an author is that you are also building up your main websites authority, because they are more than happy to link to your website from pages that you create. About is one of the leading web power houses when it comes to information pertaining to thousands of topics. About is more of a basic version of Wikipedia that is compiled by thousands of authors. Ultimately, to become an authority on their website you need to have some industry recognition and great writing abilities, but if you need an extra few links to monopolize your niche online – this would be a great place to start!

Next, we need to talk about Squidoo. Squidoo is a beautiful place to really make some money, and it can be relatively easy if you are a talented writer that creates compelling information about your specialty online. The biggest part to succeeding on Squidoo is creating compelling information, interacting in the community with other Squi Doers and more. You can promote your product within Squidoo, you can make money from Adsense and Amazon as well as a few other affiliates and best of all; Build your authority!

Another great option is to create a compelling Ebook to offer from your website, and if it is extremely high in quality and well researched – you will be able to make some money from selling your Ebook and also generate some link bait because of the valuable information that others will likely link to. In order to increase link bait or authority, consider giving away the Ebook for 2-3 months for free, and tell people to act fast since the price will increase soon. Many websites such as John Chow have really seen link building success with giving away free Ebooks, that is something to think about.

Fourth, why not create external blogs and link to them from your main website so that they gain some trust from the search engines. Then constantly create posts that offer value to website users, and then either promote your product or implement affiliates like Commission Junction, Adsense or pull from one of the many advertisement firms that will allow you to serve ads on your website for a profit.

Fifth, you can always allow guests to post on your own blog and websites that are high in authority to improve your website traffic. As long as the article provided by guest posts is unique in nature and high in quality, you will drum up extra traffic for your website and encourage inbound links to the new content on your website. Some people get very conservative when it comes to allowing others to utilize their own website because people often times don’t want to help others, but if you open up this opportunity you will succeed. How do you think that WebProNews succeeded? They allowed quality publishers to really provide value on their own website.

When building links to your website, don’t always think about this moment. Think about opportunities to create a website that invites inbound links easily, because that is where the true search engine optimization experts succeed in the long term. The sites that perform the best in the search engines are often times not the ones that actively link build, they are the ones that add value to their website visitors and create an environment that obtains a plethora of inbound links.

I am sure there are a lot of additional ways to monetize while building up your websites popularity, and these are just a few. I am excited to hear from others about more ideas to build up website popularity while making a little “ching ching” at the same time.

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Article by Joel McLaughlin, Founder of Dataflurry search engine optimization. Dataflurry was founded in 2008 and has seen some tremendous growth in the past 6 months. Joel McLaughlin started on the internet making money with ecommerce websites and collecting checks from Google Adsense. He resides in Gilbert, Arizona and has employees in California, Hawaii, Arkansas and Arizona.

HubPages Equals Free Traffic

By Jack Humphrey in Featured

Many of you may have heard of Squidoo which is a competitor of Hubpages.com. Basically both of them are a “free-hosted community of content producers”. Both Squidoo and Hubpages can be “grouped” into the Web 2.0 movement – where user generated content rules.

If you are already familiar with Squidoo, the your entrance into working with Hubpages will be very straightforward. Both Squidoo and Hubpages SHARE REVENUE with their content creators.

What Makes Them Similar, Yet Different?

From HubPages.com: “Hubpages purpose is to provide easy-to-use tools and traffic to help anyone to produce content and monetize their knowledge by creating webpages. There will be monetization programs to choose from consisting of products, advertisements and lead generation tools that each person can easily incorporate into their pages.

Hubpages will split revenue with the content creator. The pages are organized in the Hubpages website based on algorithmic quality index that promotes the best pages throughout the hierarchy (based on tags) of the website.

Each author will earn a reputation score called a HubScore that can be referenced to meter the quality of the content by an author. Hubpages will be positioned to take advantage of the significant numbers of new web content providers that want to supplement their income through content like many people do on eBay by selling goods.”

From Squidoo: “We divide up the money we receive in a very public way. First, we pay our bills. That’s direct out of pocket expenses like rent and servers and salary and benefits expenses (our CEO doesn’t take a salary, and neither does our board of directors).

Then, with no other deductions, we pay 5% of our post-expense revenue directly to the charity pool, 50% directly to our lensmasters and retain the rest to pay off investors and employees.”

So, other than the obvious revenue sharing, is there any other reason to consider using Hubpages? YES! As Hubpages is considered an authority by Google, you are able to make money with the Google Adsense that is on your hubpage.

Developing content on Hubpages should become an important part of your overall web marketing / promotional strategies.

In addition to your actual ‘hubs’ ranking on the various search engines, you can link directly to your other websites! And guess what? These backlinks are being ‘counted’.

So Hubpages can help you strengthen your entire marketing presence and ‘network of sites’. One of the best things about creating Hubpages and Squidoo lenses is that it can be outsourced.

Outsource the writing, and by doing so, you free up your time to create more Hubpages. Another great aspect of any free content hosting site, is that they have already built-in traffic from other members, and if you are applying your linking knowledge to this, you will be creating tons of back links…Power Linking!

Web 2.0 properties such as Hubpages and Squidoo have become an important part of our overall traffic strategy and works well in any niche market.

Remember, your competitors are most likely NOT on Hubpages so it is still a ‘land grab’.

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Jack Humphrey is one of the web’s leading social marketing experts. He teaches his social media marketing tactics at Social Power Linking and blogs about social marketing and blog marketing at the Friday Traffic Report.

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