Indexing Search Engines?

Following on from that last post A Writer's Incredible Means to Make Money from the Internet, which was a bit of a mouthful, but typical of a freelance writer's way with words, it's time to tun my attention once again to gathering links to boost a site's SERPs authority.

It seems that a certain search engine is tinkering with their algorithms so much that the index is in a constant state of flux. This is probably fine for a casual surfer looking for some information on whatever, but a veritable pain the the rear for a more serious surfer who found a great site yesterday and wants to go back there today but forgot to bookmark it. They go back to the same search engine, type in the same keyword phrase but the site they found yesterday has disappeared!

How annoying must that be!

Well from a marketer's point of view its equally annoying especially if it was your site that particular surfer wants to visit again, maybe to buy something they saw on your site! I can see how that would be a tad annoying!

So for the one part, the search engines fluctuating index might be a good way to deal with spammers who are for ever trying to flood their index with crap sites that are full of ads and nothing else of value. For another part it can frustrate surfers looking to re-visit sites they found one day that are gone the next for no good reason other than the index is more fluid to frustrate spammers.

And of course for the other part it frustrates honest website owners who are trying to build up a legitimate commercial business online with websites that sell merchandise and provide useful information as well.

While there is no definite proof as to what makes the SE indexes tick exactly, it does appear that older, more established sites are left well and truly alone, while newer sites that are trying to carve out their own equally legitimate businesses are being thrown all over the place like they were no better than spammers themselves!

I would have thought that with the technical expertise and sheer weight of experience and ability available to that certain search engine that they'd have their index fixed to provide both information and commercial sites of legitimacy an equal standing in their index while actually dealing with the thin affiliate or MFA sites accordingly.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

Domains vs Free Blogs

Following on from my last post here Alexa Gaming, where I spoofed the holy grail of gaming your Alexa rank in order to draw advertisers to your blog, I'd like to draw attention to a post I made over at another blog as it is a poignant view on blogging.

Here is the first paragraph:

There are many people who like to use free blogs not just for the enjoyment and personal satisfaction of writing down their thoughts and publishing them on the web, but also for Internet Marketing purposes in the pursuit of making money. Likewise, there are many people who prefer to buy their own domains and host them on a professional server, for much the same purpose...

Read the full article here: Domains vs Free Blogs

You may be thinking to yourself, hey, wait a minute, isn't he doing what he hates being done to himself in stealing content?

Nope.

As I'm the author of the article, I reserve the right to promote my own work by publishing small snippets of it on other websites and blogs that I own. That way, I not only widen the viewer base of that work, I can also legitimately give it a link to boost its own authority on the page it lives on. Better for the blog owner where its published and better for me by giving it a wider audience.

Win-win is the term, I believe...

Terry Didcott
Freedom Writers
The Honest Way

Honest Work

Well, it seems I'm approaching the 100 mark for my assortment of self hosted websites and blogs, free blogs and Squidoo lenses so things are rather hectic as I try to keep on top of them all!

Anyone still reading this blog may notice that I don't get to post in ANY of my blogs with the frequency that I used to, which is a knock-on effect of building up my portfolio and working them all into well stocked sites and blogs.

I've been moving into several different niches in the endless quest for money online, which to be honest is a tough target to hit with so much competition out there. But patience and toil are the two main virtues that will see this honest project through to its logical conclusion.

So stick around and visit my other, more worked on sites and see what's going on these days!

Terry Didcott
Freedom Writer
The Honest Way

First of the New Make Money Blogs

I've been busy just lately with the creation of some new blogs and websites. I'll concentrate on the first of my new "Make Money" blogs, called unsurprisingly, Make Money!

I built it as a subdomain of my Honest Way site to prove an SEO theory that I have, that having your main keywords in your domain name count plenty in your favour when fighting the "Battle of the Search Engines". So it was originally put together as a new website with an articles page, a resource page, sitemap etc, but while all the work to create it was going on, I made a further discovery that changed everything.

It was nothing really new or unknown, just something I hadn't really thought about or put into practice, but that blogs were the new thing with Google et al and they love them because they are a natural source of constantly updated and relevant content.

Add to that the business of Page Rank (or PR).

Take any website, and in the webmaster's efforts to gain a decent page rank, he will do a lot of off-site SEO as well as on-site SEO. The off-site SEO consists of gaining popularity through links from other relevant sites. But the thing about this is, that most sites, when they put up a link to your site, will naturally point those links to your homepage. All well and good, and in good time the page rank of that homepage will increase as Google sees fit.

But what about your blog? It is common with websites to have a corresponding blog - often hosted on a sub-page of the main site, like all the other sub-pages. These are generally not linked to from other websites, so their PR remains low or non-existent.

So if you want a decent page rank for your blog, you either have to do all that off-site SEO again for the blog page, or make the blog the homepage of the website in the first place. That way, visitors to your site hit the blog first and read all your new and constantly updated content. Then they can browse through your site's other pages as well if they want.

What has happened is that visitors to your site have made a mental note that the blog is of interest and will bookmark it or make a point of returning often to see what is new. Better for your site's traffic stats and better for your site's readers, as they are getting new content every time they visit. You get the page rank your blog deserves.

Win-win!

Terry Didcott
THE HONEST WAY

The Scaling Down

This new post is actually an announcement of the arrival of the all new Honest Way Blog.

It can be found living on The Honest Way server at http//www.thehonestway.com/blog/. I've posted its first instalment and will be making all the major posts regarding the website there instead of here.

Having said that, I haven't gone to all the trouble of promoting this blog only to let it fall by the wayside. Oh no.

I'll be posting here too in tandem with the live blog so as to keep up the link structure that I have been slowly building over the past few weeks. How I shall use this blog from now on will be more of a pointer to things happening over at The Honest Way and elaborating in more detail on the new blog.

So keep looking in here, because the content will be different to that on the new blog and I'll probably keep things separate and distinct, so there will be two different sources of information and content pertaining to the day to day life of The Honest Way.

Thanks for calling in and keeping up with events
Call back again soon, won't you!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way