Seriously Google WTF is a Content Farm?

March 24, 2011 by

The Google Farmer Update has been in effect for a few weeks now. Many new and relatively unknown sites seemed to have seen an increase in traffic while a good percentage of sites that are older and established (aka more broad) actually lost traffic.

This update was apparently designed to penalize content farms – the problem is that the web is one giant content farm according to the current definition. One could argue that AOL, CNN, Yahoo and many authority bloggers pump out just as much low quality content as Demand Media.

I’m sure that Google understands this, which is probably why they’ve avoided using the phrase content farm to officially describe this update. Considering the catastrophic amount of collateral damage that has been done to many prominent blogs I expected that the big G would have had some more information for those effected by now.

Instead however many site owners are left scratching their heads. I think it’s fairly obvious by now that the “quality” of a sites content actually had very little to do with this recent update. Just look at askthebuilder.com, a site that was hit very hard by the farmer update. Tim Carter has built a phenomenal site, and become an authority in his niche.

AskTheBuilder has even been featured on the official Google Adsense site as a case study and example of how to build a quality site and monetize it with Adsense correctly.

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Save Time Monitoring Your Site Traffic With Google Intelligence

March 23, 2011 by

Many website owners get in the habit of checking their stats religiously hoping for a big spike in traffic. The amount of time wasted checking stats collectively could probably put a man on the moon 5 times over.

The solution to this major time sink is a fairly unknown feature of Google Analytics currently in beta called “Intelligence” Google Intelligence allows you to set up alerts that will automatically notify you via email or text message when you have a spike in traffic (or a major decrease) as well as changes in visitors, bounce rate, etc..

If you have an e-commerce site you can automatically receive alerts for an increase or decrease in sales, and if you have Google Adsense linked to your Analytics account you can set up alerts to monitor changes in revenue.

Setting up custom alerts with Google Analytics only takes a few minutes and will free up many hours over the course of a year.

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The Complete Guide To Google’s New Search Algorithm

February 25, 2011 by

This story is still breaking and we will be continuing to update this article with new information when it becomes available.

Google’s war on content farms and low quality websites has officially been launched in the form of a major update to the search engine’s algorithm. The changes, which went live this week, impact 11.8 percent of all search results, meaning that this will have an impact on most site owners, for better or worse.

The blogosphere was buzzing this morning with many site owners complaining about a major decrease in traffic from Google search. Some have seen search traffic decrease over 50 percent, essentially overnight. When Google first announced their war on content farms I suspected that the changes would have a negative effect on many bloggers as well. However I did not expect the changes to hit authoritative sources as hard as they have.

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Why I’m Removing Twitter From All of My Sites

December 14, 2010 by

A few days ago I decided to take some time and focus on increasing the speed and load time of my sites. To accomplish this I used the popular Firebug addon for Firefox alongside of the Google Page Speed addon which analyzes every element of a webpage and gives you performance recommendations.

Even though my sites are on dedicated hosting and I have spent a lot of time on optimization after I ran the test my pages would only score 75 / 100 at BEST.

This bothered me because my competitors were scoring much higher than that, and Google is now factoring in site speed to some degree so it’s more important than ever to have a quick site.

After adding W3 Total Cache and doing more optimization I raised my score 7 points to 82/100, however this was still lower than many of my competitors so I decided to dig a little deeper. I noticed that the “tweet this” button at the top of each post (you can see an example at the top of this post because I haven’t removed it on this site yet) was having a fairly dramatic impact on my sites speed so I wanted to see what would happen if I removed it.

Once I removed the tweet button from the equation my score jumped from 82/100 to 89/100 and my pages loaded 25% faster!

Going forward I’m just going to have a self hosted static Twitter button on all of my sites, so technically I’m removing Twitter but still linking out to it. Hopefully one day, when the fail whale is an endangered species the fully functioning Twitter button and widgets can return – but until then – good riddance.

Has Twitter (or other third party services) impacted your site’s performance? If so what have you done about it?

Become a Master At Monetizing Your Existing Traffic

October 8, 2010 by

Some of you may already be sitting on a gold mine, you just don’t know it yet.

Most people are constantly trying to build traffic to their site because in general more traffic equals more revenue. I think that many of us get caught up in this endless process and don’t even realize that it’s possible to dramatically increase a sites revenue without any increase in traffic, simply by optimizing pages and testing various ads, new products, and new affiliate offers.

John Chow (who I enjoyed hanging out with on the beach a few weeks ago, great guy) is probably the most well known master of monetization and claims to make over $40,000 a month from his blog simply by continuing to better optimize ads and affiliate offers for his existing traffic. This may seem like a lot, especially when you look at his traffic numbers however I actually know a few people who are making more than that per month with half of the traffic.

Let me show you how you can start optimizing your site. By using these methods you will generate more revenue almost overnight. This method works really well with blogs, but you can easily see how it could be applied to an e-commerce site as well.

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How To Make $100,000 A Year Blogging – For Real

September 27, 2010 by

In this series of posts I will walk you through the methods I have used to create multiple blogs generating over $100,000 a year each.

When I first started out blogging, I was hoping to make a few hundred dollars a month to spend in college. However as I starting to put more and more time into building my site I soon realized that the potential was much greater than that.

If you’ve read my other posts, you’ve probably noticed that I like to talk about building a sustainable online business. To quit your job you must have a sustainable business that is going to continue to bring in revenue month after month. I’ve found that the best way to achieve consistency with online revenue is through blogs and organic sites that continue to grow each month. Every now and then I will make more from doing media buys and other forms of online marketing, however blogging has been my number one money maker in the long run.

Many people would probably just love to quit their day job and start making a full time living from blogging overnight – and this is what many ebooks and make money online scams out there will promise.

However my business was not an overnight sensation, and you will find that almost everyone with a legitimate online business will tell you the same thing. It requires hard work and a lot of persistance (that may be an understatement).

I love to talk about mindset because in the end the people who make it in this industry all have a similar mindset. For me this wasn’t a problem because I never had a “real job” working for someone else. For those of you who have been an employee for a long time, it can be a bit more difficult.

Once you have the right mindset you are ready to build out some sites.

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