This is an interesting article and funny too.

Please click on the link to this article, it is very interesting to read and may make you laugh.

http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

The SPAM problem just keeps getting Worse

I really hate Spammers, I find they are generally frustrated and unsuccessful people, venting out in a sick way at the world.

Anyway I had to delete and turn off the comments on this Blog for a while, because of problems with Spammers leaving a bunch of garbage in the comments.

Please email me at: tomforrest@htpcompany.com if you want to send me any comments. I use www.cloudmark.com as a SPAM filter and it works well and reports the Spammers to a database, so that is why I can give out my email and not worry about SPAM.

54% of all emails sent today are SPAM, and unfortunately it seems to be getting worse not better over time.

Learn about SEO and Internet Advertising.

Below is an email we sent to one of our clients to explain the pros and cons of Paid Google ads (PPC - sponsored links on Google) VS. Google approved methods for building natural or organic rankings in Google.
Hello Steven,

We set a limit on how much we spend on Google ads per day. This is for several reasons. First we are limited by your budget, and we also need to place ads on authority web sites to build up your natural rankings (non paid). So after the Google ads reach the daily limit then they turn off for the day and then start the next day. So if you check early in the day USA time you will see the Google ads we put up for your sites.

We suggest we check and monitor your bookings as there are different types of Google ads. There are ads only on the Google search engine, ads on other search engines Google provides search results for like AOL, etc. Then there are ads on travel related sites in the Google network (content ads). We try all of these and monitor your results and see which type has the best conversion ratios, this is an ongoing process and takes many months to optimize.

The best results come from achieving top natural rankings. This will happen faster on the Chicago site as it is older and has a good PageRank already. It takes many months to build up on new sites as Google does not let knew sites rank highly quickly. We have some proprietary methods to work around this.

Regarding your budget question:

Yes giving us a bigger budget will increase your traffic even more, we suggest you think long term and plan on keeping all the SEO services.These are for building the natural rankings, the longer we build and keep the links up the better the results will become. It is like wine and diamonds for the links. Links are like wine because the longer they are aged the better (more effective they are). Also once you lose them you have to start the aging process all over again.

This is not the case with the sponsored PPC links (paid Google ads).

SEO link building: are like diamonds, because links can vary greatly in value and quality just like diamonds vary greatly in value and quality.

Please click here and read this article for more details and technical background information regarding text link ads.


So while we would like you to increase your budget with us, we would to be careful and monitor the results and make sure you stay with this long term.

The biggest mistake we see people make is to do SEO (non PPC ads) and then run out of funding before they achieve the best results.

We do not know how much knowledge you have regarding these topics, so if we are explaining things you already know please understand we are trying our best to help you.

So the benefit of the paid Google ads (PPC = Pay Per Click) is that we can turn them on and off quickly. The disadvantage is they can be expensive and they are not as powerful as the natural or organic listings. Natural or organic are terms used for the non PPC ads.

Perhaps the best way to explain this to you is by example.

Let’s use htpcompany and htp company as the examples.

So if you type htpcompany on Google you see us on the left (natural listing) and on the right side of the page under sponsored links (sponsored links equals PPC).

Being on the left is much more powerful (5 to 30 times more valuable than the PPC listings on the right) , however it is still good and useful to have both. That is why we do both for our own sites and our client sites.

If you do not understand some of this let us know and we will try to explain better. Sometimes it is more difficult to explain via email, we know this is the best way for you, however it can be more difficult to explain sometimes.

Now if you type htp company with a space on Google you see another example of being on the left and righ side of the page.

HTP Company

HTP Company ( Phone: 805-493-4450 ) provides the best Internet marketing company, Internet advertising and SEO services in the world.
www.htpcompany.com/ - 26k - Cached - Similar pages


Any way this email is getting to long and the bottom line is we are happy to have you increase your budget as long as you can afford to stay with this long term. We do not want you to spend too much too fast and run out of funding. Again we are trying to give you good advice and help you.

Apple Computer's SEO ranking - funny story

For years SEO experts including myself have used the keyword computers as an example when teaching classes about search engine optimization. Apple's title tag was just Apple and they were # 1 on Google for the keyword computers.

This is an example to use to show how powerful text links and PageRank are. Not having the keyword in the title tag and still being #1 for such a competive keyword. Then about 6-12 months ago I saw Apple drop down to #2 or #3.

Meanwhile Google has been adding multiple title tags for web sites in their search engine. They do this for HTPcompany.com also. I can find our true title tag showing in the Google index sometimes and the one Google assigned us for other searches. Now Google is doing the same thing for Apple. Search for computers on Google to see what I mean. So now Apple is #1 for computers on a Google search.

The funny part to me is that when you search for computers and click on the first listing (Apple), you do not see anything about computers, it is all about selling you an ipod.

It seems like Google should also question why is our #1 listing for computers, not about computers, however it is all about selling you an ipod :) .

Can one link still make your site a PR9 ?

Google is currently doing a PageRank (PR) update. I found some very interesting data from this current PR update. Google has blocked so many web sites from passing on link juice (see post below); that I wondered if it would even be possible to get a PR10 or PR9 link that even worked today.

First there are not many PR9 or PR10 sites. Most of which would not give out any links to anyone. E.g. try to get a link on www.msn.com ...etc.

Then there are all the high PR blocked sites like counter sites, weather sites, newspaper sites, television sites, etc. that have been blocked from working by Google for years. Look at www.webstat.com as an example of a site that has been blocked for years. If you see the 20 footer links at the bottom, you see just how many people do not know what they are doing and are just wasting their money buying worthless text links.

Back to the title question - Can one link still make your site a PR9 ?

Yes.

I have seen people purchase ads on a web designer site in the past and I track thousands of sites long term to see how they are doing. This site just went from a PR7 to a PR9. Extremely unusual and rare today. So I studied the sites backlinks and found a PR10 site linking to this web designer site making it a PR9 and 5 other sites a PR9. Wow, a PR10 link that works. Now we will track it and see how long it works. We also noticed one of the newly created PR9 sites can also pass PR and make a sponsored office products and photocopier sites PR8 home pages. Finding this is to an SEO, is like an archeologist finding a rare fossil, a true feeling of excitement.

Now we will track and report back to you about how this plays out. The PR9 site is for sale if anyone is interested let me know. The site was a PR7 site until this recent update and it is a nice site with thousands of natural links, not just the PR10 link.

Google has changed a lot in the last few months.

I am generating SEO and back link reports for one of our long term clients that owns multiple web sites.

Now a days it is more difficult for even the best SEO experts, because Google has recently made this even more complex.

If a clients web site is penalized by Google it may still rank very well on Yahoo or MSN. The tough part is what causes Google to penalize a site is the exact reason that Yahoo and / or MSN may rank the site highly. Within the last two months Google has made many big changes. They completed the move to the Big Daddy database and implemented several new algorithms to:

1. Delete millions of pages from the Google database (cache). This has many ramifications to Google and to non Google webmasters. If a small webmaster has developed a newer site and has invested a lot of time developing good quality content and also has Google AdWords on these pages, it not only knocks the wind out of the smaller webmaster, it also hurts Google. Google loses ad revenue and losses its stature as the premiere search engine that indexes all excellent unique quality content.

The important factor to consider for my clients is:
if Google deleted a page or many pages on different urls that they have text links on...how does this effect them?

I believe Google analyzes your back link ratio and decides if your back links come from "good" or "bad" sites however complex the methods are Google chooses to define this. If you have too many back links from sites Google does not like you may be penalized. We can say you have a bad link ratio in Google's eyes. How can we know what Google likes or does not like?
Well if within the last 2 months pages that show up with having PR on the Google PR meter and are not in the Google cache. This means Google recently took these pages out of the Google database. They took them out either because they have to few back links or bad back links Google does not like. Either way you do not want links from these pages because they either do not help you with Google or may even penalize you with Google. Again here is the catch, if you get rid of these you lose the benefit they are giving you with MSN and Yahoo.

2. Even if a page is in the Google cache not all links are created equal. We have a database of over 2,000 high PR web sites that are in the Google cache and have been blocked from passing PageRank for over 2 years. This include most counter sites, major newspaper sites, major radio sites, etc. etc.

So what is a good link and what is a natural link?
How would Google define this?

We really do not know for sure, however it is wise SEO practice to consider these concepts. E.g. One would hope that if the whitehouse.gov placed a link to this web site it would count for maximum value with Google. We also know / believe Google breaks the values up on a scale to rate:

i) can a site pass PageRank? Does Google trust this sites "reputation"? also some sites appear to be able to pass partial PageRank. It used to be 6 months ago that a site either could pass PageRank or Not (binary), that is no longer the case.

ii) Google also looks at a sites "reputation" as being able to pass anchor text value.

So let's use a hypothetical extreme example to make this clear.

Apple.com a PR10 site links to your computer business and also to your friends pizza business web site.

We believe apple is not blocked from passing PageRank as they do not sell links and it would be extremely difficult and rare for apple to link to any site. We are just trying to illustrate our point here not debate the facts on every site. Anyway based on the points above would both the pizza site and the computer site receive the maximum PageRank power and full anchor text ranking power from Google?

We do not think so, of course we may be wrong.

We believe the computer business web site would receive maximum points from Google on both PageRank and anchor text values being passed.

We believe the pizza business web site would only receive partial value for PageRank being passed and little or no value for anchor text power being passed.

So the above is want our testing shows us to be the way Google works today. I hope this helps people understand and realize how amazingly complex Google is getting with this SEO stuff.

search engine optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing a website to perform better or rank higher in search engine results pages. Web sites that rank high in search engines generate tremendous business from those searching for services, products, and/or companies to do business with.

Every business online needs to be visible where their customers are searching. This need sparks an entire industry of professionals who study search engine results and search engine algorithms to better predict how to optimize web pages to appear near or at the top. This industry is referred to as "SEO" or search engine optimization.

Some believe that as the actual "optimization" process becomes increasingly difficult, that the optimization aspect of the business deteriorates and leaves only the process of an overall understanding of how search engines work and making educated guesses at how to use search engine marketing techniques in general to increase visibility.



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