Omission From Search Listings

There is something that frequently happens in Google search results, that perhaps could be misinterpreted as some sort of penalty. As an example, I just did a quick search on Google for the name of this blog and “Best Spinner”. The reason I did this is because I know that I have referenced to the program called The Best Spinner in several posts already, so there’s bound to be a whole bunch of listings – some of them from posts, at least one of them on the homepage (at the time of this writing) and so on.

Here is what Google returned:

As you can see, there’s a double listing of results on this domain. After that, however, results from other places around the web are displayed. As I’ve marked with the arrow, there’s a “Show more results from richquickreview.com” option. Let’s see what happens when I click it:

Now, I get seven listings and there’s a new option at the bottom for showing all of the listings on richquickreview, for this search term.

Oh no! All of my Best Spinner posts, save for two, have been penalized by Google and they aren’t showing up in the search results! Time to PANIC!

Of course, what’s going on here is not a penalty of any kind. Google generally don’t show more than two results for one and the same domain. And they generally don’t show more than two results from different domains, if the content is identical.

If you write an article and submit it to a dozen different article directories, unchanged, you’ll get a similar result when you do a search for it: The results will typically list your article on one or two directories, followed by the option to show more of the results that are hidden, because they are identical.

The important point here is that this is not a penalty. The omitted pages are all indexed by Google, they are all flowing pagerank and no one is getting their sites “sandboxed” because of duplicate content.

Obviously, the pages won’t all get listed in the results, because who would want to find several pages of the same article as a result for a search query?

Chasing (Long) Tail

This is where article spinning comes in. The point of spinning articles is not to “avoid the duplicate content penalty” as way too many sales-pitches for spinning tools would have you believe, the point is to grab more long-tail traffic. If you write an article, spin it’s content and then distribute it to a few dozen or even a few hundred online properties, it’s a bit like casting a wide net out into unknown waters: You don’t know where the fish are, but by pure chance you’re bound to catch a few.

All of your spun articles will consist of different sequences of words and every time someone “out there” on the Internet happens to search for a string of words that are present in one of your article variations, it’s likely that that variation will show up in the search results. And thus, you catch another fish.

I hope this clarifies the whole dupe-content subject a bit. If you have any further questions, please leave a comment and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Cheers,

Here it finally is: My extensive Google Sniper review. If you are already involved in Internet marketing, then you have very likely heard of Google Sniper. There is a lot of hype surrounding this program and it was promoted and discussed by many in the make money online business. I have been testing this system for about two months now and in this review, you will get the complete run-down of every feature, every strength and every weakness in Google Sniper.

Overview

The Google Sniper package consists of one main, 99 page manual, eight training videos as well as a document with process maps laid out for you, so you can easily follow the system step-by-step. There’s also a short introduction ebooklet, but it’s pure fluff. You can just ignore it and get started with the manual right away.

The premise of the system is as follows: George Brown says he can teach you how to build simple, small WordPress websites in just a few hours and get them ranked on page one in Google without having to build any backlinks.

So, the idea is that you can do some keyword research, build a site like this in a very short time and then move right on to the next site because you don’t need to do any article writing, backlink building, social bookmarking or anything else like that, once the site is built. A pretty bold claim, to say the least. Of course, these sites ranking on page one for their keywords can then be easily monetized by promoting some kind of affiliate program.

–

Hard Selling

Let me get one thing right out of the way: GSniper is very sales-heavy. Right after the purchase, you’ll encounter two upsells, the first one for $97 and the second one for $77. As per my reviewing guidelines, I didn’t buy or test either, but especially the first one looks really scammy to me. The reason being that it’s a “niche marketing course” that will teach you how to make lots of money online. This begs the question: Isn’t that what the product I just bought is supposed to be?

In addition to this, you are signed up to a $37 monthly membership when you purchase GSniper. If you don’t want to be part of this membership site, you have to opt out of it after the fact. To be fair, the first month is free, which is a good thing. But I’d still rather opt in to something like this than have to opt out of it.
I was only a member for about six weeks, but in that time, I didn’t see anything in the membership section that warranted $37 a month. It was very early on, right after the launch, so maybe things will improve over time.

Finally, the keyword research tool Keyword Elite 2 is promoted/recommended within the Google Sniper course and the membership and download areas contain advertisements and affiliate-promotions.

In short, there will be a lot of product pushed your way once you sign up for GSniper.

–

What’s it About?

As already outlined above, the system will teach you how to build a WordPress powered site in a very specific manner. The final site will only consist of around 5 to 10 pages of content and all of it will be focused on one keyword that you pick beforehand. The site will be promoting one product and one product only (no Adsense ads or multiple products) and the goal is to get this site to rank on page one in the Google results for the targeted keyword and convince as many visitors as possible to buy the promoted product through your affiliate link.

The system covers a wide range of topics starting from how to set up the website and what kind of content to add, how to find the right kind of keywords to target and walking you all the way through the process until you have one completed GSniper site. The detail in the instructions is usually very good and easy to follow. The videos support what’s written in the manual quite well, although some of them are pretty redundant after having read the text.

I particularly liked how much emphasis was put on how to create content, how and where to place affiliate links within your site, and how to test for optimal conversions.

Something I noticed is that the manual often contains a piece of advice followed by something along the lines of “…this is only a guess” or “…not sure but it works for me”. It would have been nice of George Brown had actually run some tests instead of including a bit of guessing and unfounded claims in the ebook. On the other hand, I think it’s great that he is honest about the things he doesn’t know and didn’t test instead of just pretending like they’re all rock-solid facts.

–

Pros and Cons

Google Sniper does many things right and gets some things wrong. Here, I want to lay it all out for you, so you can decide whether this product is worth your money or not.

One thing that needs to be mentioned is this: Yes, it really works.
You can get a simple little WordPress blog listed on page one, getting free traffic and making sales. So, fundamentally, the system works and you can and will make money if you follow through on it.

The greatest strength of the course lies in how the creation of the website is laid out. The manual and the videos give you a very clear idea of what the final website should look like and what it should contain. There’s also a lot of thought put into what kind of theme you should use and what kind of story you should tell about yourself on the website, all carefully tailored towards getting more sales.

One part where George completely drops the ball, however, is when it comes to choosing a product to promote. There is no really useful information about what criteria to choose products by and the video on this subject consist of George browsing CBengine, seemingly at random, and basically saying: Pick a ClickBank product with high gravity. I bet you couldn’t have guessed that by yourself.

Another little issues comes up with the keyword research component: Finding the right keyword is absolutely essential for making this system work. You have to find a very particular kind of keyword if you want to stand any chance at all of getting a page ranked for it without any backlinks.

Google Sniper contains detailed information on what kind of traffic volume, number of competing pages and criteria in the pages already ranking for the keyword to look for. You will also be presented with three suggestions for picking keywords:

1. Find a keyword using the free Google Keyword tool and spreadsheets.
   This method is free but requires quite a bit of work with copying data into spreadsheets and manually sorting and filtering it.
2. Find a keyword using Keyword Elite 2.
   Makes it a lot easier to find good keywords, filter them and analyze the competition for each one of them, but the program is quite costly.
3. Simply use the product name as your keyword.

The third method, using the product’s name as your keyword, is presented as the quickest and easiest way to pick a good keyword. It’s true that a product name is generally a good keyword since people who search of a product name already know what they want and are quite likely to buy.

But, and this is a big BUT, in combination with the product selection advice from before, this becomes absolutely terrible advice for Google Sniper sites. Why? Because you can bet that for any ClickBank product with a high gravity, there will be tons of marketers out there, targeting the product name and building search engine optimized sites, creating backlinks to them, bookmarking them and so on. In this kind of environment, a Sniper site with zero backlinks doesn’t stand a chance to get a permanent listing on page one.

–

What You Need to Know

I realize that I’ve been very critical of this product so far. It remains, however, that the system fundamentally works and that you can make money using it. I don’t mean to bash this product or George Brown in any way.

There are two things you absolutely need to know if you decide to try Google Sniper and these things are:

1. Finding the right keyword is the most important part.
   Needless to say, you won’t be able to rank for highly competitive keywords with a zero-backlink site. Therefore, it’s absolutely essential that you find the right kind of keyword: A keyword that gets a good amount of traffic, consisting of potential buyers, but that has the kind of profile that will still enable a Sniper site to be listed in the top spots in a Google search.
   Since using product names won’t work for very popular products, you either need a way to find ClickBank products (or other products) that can get good sales, but that you can still compete for, or you need to do the keyword research. And be warned: Finding a keyword that matches all the criteria outlined in the course can be very difficult. Even using a tool like Keyword Elite or Market Samurai, you can easily spend an afternoon sifting through results before you find a usable keyword.
   –
2. It’s a numbers-game.
   If you start with the GSniper system, plan to build at least five sites before drawing any conclusions. Some will work, some won’t and you can’t always tell beforehand whether a site will stick or not. Google moves in mysterious ways, after all.
   If you stick to the system and build five sites according to it, you will definitely have at least one or two winners in there. And for the sites that don’t quite make it to page one, it’s worth considering biting the bullet and building some good old-fashioned backlinks to them anyway.

–

Ratings

Fluff-o-Meter

There are some fluffy bits and pieces in Google Sniper. Apart from the completely useless introduction manual (clearly just padding to make the feature list a bit longer) and the almost non-existent advice about selecting products to promote, the course is very action-oriented, though. The system is laid out quite well and the process maps are a very good addition.

A solid system surrounded by a bit of fluff.

–

Spam-Factor

Quite bearable with around one or two e-mails a week. The mails are mostly sales-pitches/product promotions, so it’s not really an information newsletter that you get signed up for. But, as long as the volume isn’t too high, I personally don’t mind.

Sales-pitches at a non-annoying frequency.

–

Scam Scale

Two instant “one-time-only” upsells that seem to devalue the purchase just made and a thin, paid monthly membership that you are signed up for without any real choice and have to opt out of if you aren’t interested certainly get the scam-bells ringing. That, plus the advertisement and promotions in the member section.
On the other hand, the product-pushing is the only scammy aspect of Google Sniper. The system itself delivers on it’s promise and that counts for a lot, on the Scam Scale. Overall, I rate GSniper a 3 out of 5 scams.

Product-pushing par excellence, but otherwise solid.

–

Overall Rating

I give Google Sniper an overall rating of 3 out of five. That might seem a bit harsh for such a comprehensive system, especially since I’ve emphasized that it does, in fact, work.
What keeps this product from getting a higher rating is simply that it’s unpolished here and there. It could have been a lot better and more newbie-friendly if some blunders in regards to keyword research and product selection would have been avoided. I also feel that the content and delivery of the videos could be quite a bit better.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t recommend this system. 3/5 is a pretty good score, after all and there is a lot you can get out of GSniper if you really follow through with it.

This is for you if:

• You are looking to build several, smaller sites (not one authority site)
• You are relatively new to affiliate marketing and need a system to start out with
• You already have some idea (or other sources of information) about keyword research and product selection, so that the weaknesses in the system don’t become huge stumbling blocks for you.
• You hate building backlinks

This is not for you if:

• You are a seasoned marketer and are already proficient at creating and promoting mini-sites
• You are mainly interested in building Adsense or Amazon sites (GSniper’s focus is squarely on ClickBank products)
• You are not willing to put in the time for keyword research

Click on the banner below to see the official Google Sniper product page.

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• If you want more money - Make a new Google Sniper site Then move on to the next Google Sniper site And the next and the next Google Sniper is that EASY   Want to try it? Check it out here - Google Sniper website Here is a quick rundown of what this new co

Today’s post features the most simple, easy to understand and straight-forward explanation of Broad Match, Phrase Match and Exact Match you’ll ever find. Plus, it’s presented in text as well as in a video. This post will clear up any questions about this important subject you may have.

Throughout the text, I will be using “blue vintage car” as an example for a search term. I picked this at random and you can choose any search term if you want to follow along and experiment with some Google searches. I recommend using a search term with three or four words to get results that best illustrate what the match types are all about.

Broad Match

The broad match is the most common type of search result. It is what you get when you type in a search term into Google as you normally would.

What does it do?
Broad match results are any websites that contain the words you typed in, in any order and any distribution.

So, while a site that contains the exact sequence of words “blue vintage car” is likely to show up in the results, other possibilities include:

• Vintage car: blue
• Vintage car with blue leather interior
• Blue skies, vintage comics and car models.

Of course, a page featuring the words in the exact order you typed them in is likely to show up first in the results. If you take a look at pages ten and beyond in the results, you’ll see the words you typed spread ever further apart on the resulting pages. Here’s an example:

As you can see, the words are not in sequence and neither are they next to each other in this resulting page. But since all the words are present on the page, it’s still a broad match result.

Phrase Match

To see phrase match results, type in your search term in quotes:

What does this one do?
Phrase match results display websites that feature those exact words you typed, in the order you typed them in. As you can see on the picture above, this returns drastically fewer results than the broad search (almost 5 million results broad and fewer than 30’000 results phrase).

There can still be punctuation marks or symbols like brackets or slashes in between the words in the results-pages. Here’s an example result:

As you can see, even though there is a hyphen before the word “blue” and a comma afterwards, this is still a valid phrase match result for our search term.

One great use for typing your search term in quotes is when you remember part of a text but you can’t remember where you read it. If you can remember the exact sequence of five or more words you read on that page, a phrase match search will very likely return the page you are looking for.

Keyword Research/Advertiser Perspective

Here’s where most people seem to get confused with the whole match-type thing: The meaning of the match types differs depending on whether you are looking at them from the perspective of a regular search engine user or that of a keyword researcher or AdWords advertiser.

In this next section, let’s look at the significance of the match types have to you as an Internet marketer.

To follow along, fire up Google’s keyword research tool.
A very crucial factor in keyword research (and online marketing in general) is how often your chosen keyword is actually searched for. After all, it’s not much use to rank well for a term no one ever looks for. This is where the keyword tool can help us out. Let’s take a look at the search volume we get for our example term “blue vintage car” as well as the more popular term “vintage car”:

As we can see, there are roughly 320 broad searches for “blue vintage car” and over 200’000 monthly searches for “vintage car”.

Now, these are broad match results. This means that among those 320 searches could be examples like:

• bright blue vintage car
• vintage model car, blue
• where to buy vintage models of a blue car

In other words, any search containing the three words “blue”, “vintage” and “car” is included in this count.

Now, let’s look at the phrase match results for the searches:

As you can see, there are now significantly less results listed. This is because the phrase match count only includes searches that contain the exact sequence of words typed in. There can still be additional words in a search, however. The following example searches would be included in the phrase match count:

• buy blue vintage car
• blue vintage car picture
• more information about a blue vintage car

Finally, we have the option to search for exact matches:

Now, the numbers have shrunk even further. The reason is that the exact match only counts searches that are exactly, word for word, what you signify. So, in the above example, 18’100 is an estimate of the amount of times the exact words “vintage car” are typed into Google, each month. If someone types the words in a different order or ads another word (e.g. “bright blue vintage car”) that search is not counted.

As an advertiser, this can be very significant, since you might want your ads to display only when very specific terms are searched for. I don’t want to get into the whole AdWords research thing in this article.

Instead, I want to clarify a very common cause for confusion when it comes to keyword research:

Evaluating Competition Strength

I’m sure you’ve seen this as a simple piece of advice on how to find out how much competition you are up against: Type the keyword you want to target in quotation marks, i.e. do a phrase match search for it. This will return a number of results pages that is significantly lower than for the broad match term (see above).

“But,” the argument goes, “nobody searches for anything with quotes!”
True. Most searches are broad searches with the search term just typed in without any quotes or brackets. However, looking at the number phrase match results really is an indicator of competition strength. Why? Because the pages excluded from the phrase match results will be very, very easy to outrank with an optimized page.

If you make a page that features “blue vintage car” in the title and that exact combination again in the text, you’re already outranking all of those pages that have the three words spread all over the place.

That’s it. There’s the explanation for the whole “why phrase match?” question.

Having said that, the argument can be made that it doesn’t bloody well matter how many pages are listed in the results. What really matters is how strong the actual pages showing up on the first page for a broad search are. Lest I digress, I will write about this in a separate article.

For all your audio-visual learners, here’s a short video where I explain the concept of using phrase match for competition evaluation:

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For Internet marketers, especially those who rely heavily on article marketing, Google rank can mean the world. The Google rank of your affiliate website or your article can be the deciding factor in how much income your campaign generates. There is a certain tension between Internet marketers/SEO experts/webmasters and Google and both sides are faced with a dilemma. Read on to see how this is relevant to you, as an Internet marketer.

Cashcow vs. Spammer

How far do you go with SEO? SEO can be a harmless and sensible method for making you website more visible to people who are looking for related content. It can also be an attempt to “cheat” search engines and get high rankings even though the whole website is only a sales-pitch. Since so many pageviews and so much money ride on that number one spot on Google for your target keyword, the temptation to go grey- or even black-hat to get there can be strong. Most marketers don’t go to extremes, but most of them go at least mildly grayish-hat in their SEO attempts. Dropping less-than relevant links in a few forums, comment-spamming some blogs, writing articles for the sole purpose of linking to a sales-page and maybe stuffing a few too many keywords into that paragraph – I suspect that most online marketers are “guilty” of this kind of SEO.

Let’s look at this from Google’s perspective: They want to make their users happy. In order to achieve this, their goal is to produce the best possible matching websites for what the user is looking for. Squeeze pages, spammy sales-pitches and websites that are monetized first and feature some content as an afterthought are rarely what the user is looking for. So, Google need to make sure they can somehow exclude all of the spammy material – the sites stuffed with targeted keywords, hollow sites without real content and full of sales-pitches, and generally all attempts by marketers to game the system.

So Where’s the Dilemma?

Here’s the simple one: Google make a lot of money thanks to online marketers. Practically everyone who is using Google Adsense is an online marketer of some kind. Google can’t just completely clamp down on people’s marketing attempts; they have to carefully sort the better kind of marketing from the worse kind. Also, people online often are looking for products to buy. Google have to make sure that they can connect buyers to marketers in a positive way, without connecting too many non-buyers with spammy sales-pitch ridden sites.

Here’s where it gets more complicated: Google is judge, jury and executioner when it comes to search engine ranking. They are the ones making the rules that determine what makes sites rank and what makes them drop. They are also the ones handing out a lot of cash (Adwords) and being the catalyst for a lot of cash being handed around elsewhere (sending traffic to sales-pages and online stores). See the problem here?

On the one hand, you’ve got Google, offering free and paid services, being completely dominant in their market and basically being in a position where they have the financial fates of many Internet marketers in their hands. They have to make sure to serve up good, relevant content to their users and have to fight spam but make sure they never overdo it.
On the other hand, you have thousands of Internet marketers clamouring for good spots in the search results, being tempted to make use of loopholes and try to “fly under the radar” with some of the stuff they do to get there. By working the system, SEOs strive to take the “organic” out of organic traffic, which is very much contrary to the whole point of organic search engine results.

In many cases, Google is the hand that feeds you as an online marketer, but to get good treatment from it, to get to those first pages and to get all that tasty traffic, you almost have to bite that hand a little bit.

I have to be honest with you: I have no grand conclusion for this article. I just see this weird situation between Google and Internet marketers (or article directories and Internet marketers, for that matter) and wonder what it’s going to lead to.

That’s it for now,

In this article, you’ll find all the basic information concerning SEO or Search Engine Optimization. If you are new to this subject, you might have noticed that there is a huge wealth of information of SEO available online and it can be quite overwhelming. In this article, I explain only the most essential, bare-bones factors for optimizing web-pages. In other words: Everything you need to know to start out and nothing more.

What’s All The Fuss About?

SEO is such a hot topic for one simple reason: More visitors means more money for almost every online business. And many, many visitors find online businesses and websites in general via search engines. This is why everyone who is selling something (even if it’s just ad-space on a blog) is scrambling to rank well in search engine results. If you have ads on a website, being on the first page of results for a popular search term or being on the second page can mean the difference between making good money and making nothing at all. [Google Dilemma, link coming soon]

Search engine optimization is the term used to describe all methods that you can use for your website to make sure it gets better rankings in SERP (search engine results pages).

How Does Google Decide What Websites to List First?

Google, and every other search engine for that matter, works with a complex algorithm to determine what sites to show and in which order. The exact algorithm is kept under wraps to minimize abuse, but many important factors in search engine ranking are known.

When reading about SEO, just make sure you don’t lose sight of the most fundamental principle underlying every search-engine: The goal of every search engine is to serve up the most relevant and interesting results, matching what the user is looking for as perfectly as possible.

For this reason, SEO lesson number one is: Real content always has the best chances with search engines. If you have a hollow shell of a site, offering nothing of interest, you can SEO the crap out of it, but you’ll never get many visitors and the visitors you do get won’t stay.

With that out of the way, here are the most important SEO factors to consider:

• Keywords
  If your site contains text that matches the search term entered by the user, then that’s a good basis for getting listed in the results. You can optimize your site for this factor by using descriptive titles and clearly stating what each page or article is about. For example, on a movie review blog, call your new post “Citizen Kane Movie Review” instead of just “Citizen Kane” and title the summary within the article “Citizen Kane – Summary” rather than just “Summary”. You get the idea. You want to give the search engine something to clearly recognize what the article is about. Obviously, neither should you overdo it. Don’t write “Citizen Kane review” twice in every sentence, this will be noticed as keyword spamming by the search engines and readers will leave your site in a hurry because it’s unreadable.
• Backlinks
  One of the most important SEO factors is the amount of links pointing to your domain and each of the individual websites. If your content is interesting and relevant, many people will link to it, recommending it to others via social bookmarking sites, on forums, on their own blogs etc. If your content is original, it might be mentioned (and linked to) as a reference by others. Many incoming links indicate good content and search engines pay attention to that.
  You can optimize for this by submitting your pages to social bookmarking sites yourself, linking to your pages from fora etc. In other words, you can try to do all the link-building by yourself. If your content is any good, it will soon be picked up by others and they will add to your backlink count by recommending your site.
• Page Title and Meta Description
  What you see in the SERP are the page title and the meta description. A good content management system should always make it easy for you to add a title and meta description for each of your pages, so that you can make sure what shows up in the SERP is interesting, descriptive and representative of your page contents.
• Domain Age
  Another important factor, one that is often overlooked, is the age of your website. It’s reasonable to assume that a website that has been around for years must be offering something or other of value. For this reason, search engines prefer pages from websites that have been online for several years over pages from websites that were created yesterday.
  There’s nothing you can do to actively optimize for this, other than build a good website and stick with it for years.

Where To Learn More

Admittedly, the above list is barely scratching the surface of all the SEO possibilities open to you. There are many more factors playing into search engine ranking and there is much more to learn. However, the four factors listed are, broadly, the most important that you need to consider if you want to give your website a chance to get listed near the front of any results-page.

I will be addressing many of the further details of SEO in future posts. Until then, check out these useful resources on SEO:

SEObook – The classic. Check out their Firefox toolbar.
Matt Cutts – Google info straight from the horse’s mouth.
SEO 2.0 – Lot’s of SEO info from all angles. Entertaining read, too.
Wolf-Howl – My other favourite, next to SEO 2.0.

Happy researching!

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