I think, Google updated the PageRank of websites while we are celebrating the 2010 new year. This blog haven’t experienced any PR changes but my other blogs’ PR dropped from PR5 to PR4 and from PR2 to PR0.

My link building campaign is really bad. And it’s all my fault. For the past months, I did not bother getting links back from other websites and blogs. I was just staying at home playing my son.

I found a video that talks about someone who said to be fired by Ballmer from Microsoft just because he did not say “Bing” enthusiastically.

I just couldn’t believe that it’s true. It could have been a video for viral marketing or what ever… But it’s funny.

Question:

I read from the “Official Google Webmaster Central Blog” regarding spam comments which goes:

Comments can be a really good source of information and an efficient way of engaging a site’s users in discussions. This valuable content should not be replaced by gibberish nonsense keywords and links. For this reason there are many ways of securing your application and disincentivizing spammers.

* Disallow anonymous posting.
* Use CAPTCHAs and other methods to prevent automated comment spamming.
* Turn on comment moderation.
* Use the “nofollow” attribute for links in the comment field.
* Disallow hyperlinks in comments.
* Block comment pages using robots.txt or meta tags.

Does it mean that spam comments posted by spammers into our blog bring h harm to our blog?

Answer:

Google simply wants to warn us that spam comments posted by spammers into our blog, especially those containing irrelevant lists of keywords can really harm our blog in the ranking at the search engine result pages or SERP.

That’s the reason why Google taught us how to secure our blog from these spammers.

At the same time, Google wants to tell us that spamming blogs just to earn link juices from other blogs will only bring no good to your blog. Here’s part of the post of the mentioned blog:

If you used this approach in the past and you want to solve this issue, you should have a look at your incoming links in Webmaster Tools. To do so, go to the Your site on the web section and click on Links to your site. If you see suspicious links coming from blogs or other platforms allowing comments, you should check these URLs. If you see a spammy link you created, try to delete it, else contact the webmaster to ask to remove the link. Once you’ve cleared the spammy inbound links you made, you can file a reconsideration request.

By the way, you can ask us any questions and we will try to answer them all. Send us your questions. Use this form.

Checking the number of webpages of this blog that are indexed by Google is one of my daily activities. It’s like I’m already addicted on seeing the result when “site:”- searching Google. And I am really happy upon learning that there are more or less 11,000 webpages of this blog, “I Make Money by Blogging” that are already indexed by Google.

You know, I am always working hard so that Google will index every webpage of this blog. And having more than a ten thousand of webpages that are already indexed by Google is quite a success.

But why am I doing this? Why am I trying to let Google index every webpage of this blog?

I’ve been thinking these past days and I realized that the more webpages of this blog are indexed by Google, the more chances that my blog has to top the SERP of Google.

Just imagine if your blog has 100 posts but only 10 of them are indexed by Google. This only means that only 10 posts of your blog have the capability to bring traffic into your blog from the Google SERPs and the other 90 posts are useless.

Now, what if all the 100 posts of your blog are indexed? If your blog’s 10 posts bring 1000 visitors into your blog from the Google SERP, then how much more if all the 100 posts are indexed by Google?

Getting high ranking in SERP of Google is really a competition between webpages of the indexed blogs and websites. And I understand that those webpages that are better SEOed are the ones that will be ranked at top position of the SERP.

To let you know, I targeted a lot of keywords that have large volume of searches. At first I successfully got the top position of the SERP of Google, but as time goes by the competition in getting the top SERP is also getting higher and my blogposts failed to stay on the top position of the SERP.

I haven’t lost hope. I continue SEOing those important posts hoping that one day, they will be ranked high up of the SERP again.

Webpages are deindexed by Google

But the problem is, as I am doing the SEO, other webpages of the blog are being dropped by Google from its index.

There were times that Google revealed that there were 12,000 webpages of the blog that are already in the index. However, this June 2009 I noticed that there were only more or less 8,000 pages of this blog that remained in the Google index.

SEO experts suggested that the possible causes why Google deindex webpages are:

1. Duplicate content within the blog. Google found several pages and indexed them even if in reality those pages were just duplicate contents. That’s the reason why the number of webpages in the index was high. But after Google realized that those are duplicate content, Google immediately dropped those pages from the index.
2. Google Penalty. SEOing a certain webpage should be done in moderation because over-SEOing them will only lead to deindexing of the affected webpages, or the entire website or blog.
3. Google consider those pages untrusted. There are lots of websites and blogs out there that contains malicious codes in which everytime you visit one of them, the code is automatically downloaded and installed into your computer. There are other websites and blogs that are used by blackhat SEOptimizer in linkfarming for their websites being optimized.
   Now, if one of the webpages of your blog looks similar to the mentioned websites, then there is a possibility that Google will deindex the webpages of your blog, or the entire website or blog.
4. Server problem. Some experts said that when Google tried to access a certain webpages of your blog but then failed to access them because of server problem, those webpages will be dropped from the index and consider them “unreachable”.
   This is what I actually noticed too.
   In the Google Webmasters tools, webpages of my blog that are included on the “Unreachable” section are not also included on the index.

Now, our problem is how could we avoided the deindexing process of Google? And how could we made Google index all the the webpages of our blog or website?

Here’s what we need to do:

1. Install a sitemap into your site and make use of the Google Webmaster’s tools. Errors in indexing webpages of your blog are reported once Google finds them, so it can help you a lot in fixing the problems.
2. Make your content unique even if the topic you’re talking in every webpages of your blog is common. The title and meta tags of every webpage should be unique too. This is to avoid being considered by Google as duplicate contents.
3. Avoid being penalized by Google. Make your own linking strategy natural and don’t over SEO your blog. You’ll never succeed in blogging and making money online once your blog is penalized already by a search engine, except of course if you can duplicate the ability of John Chow.
4. Get more quality backlinks and avoid getting links from a linkfarm. Getting backlinks from a relevant webpage and from a high PR domain is considered the best thing for a blog. But links from a link -farm will only harm your blog.
5. Find a better webhost which will host your blog. This is to make sure that every time Google visits your blog and every webpage of your blog, Google can access them, and avoiding the possibility that any webpages of your blog will be included on the “Unreachable” pages.

I think, these five steps can help us a lot so that Google will index 1,000% of the total webpages of our blog. If that happens, then I’m pretty sure that our blog’s webpages will have a better chance in ranking well at the Google SERP in various searches.

And just like what I am always saying… the more webpages of your blog that are ranked well on Google SERP, the more visitors your blog will get…. the more income you’ll gain from your blog.

Just a little update regarding the Adsense Policies.

It was posted at the Official Adsense blog that the Adsense Policies have been updated.  The update are related to:

• Google brand violations. Adsene ads or Search boxes should not be placed on pages that “misuse Google logos, trademarks, or other brand features in the page content or URL, and which could mislead users into thinking the page is associated with Google”.
• Deceptive implementations. It’s just made clear that “ads may not be formatted in a way that makes them indistinguishable from other content on the page where they appear“.
• Ad placement in emails and email programs. This updated policy clarifies that Google ads , search boxes, and search results may not be placed in emails, as well as alongside emails.
• Other Google products’ policies. Adsense ads, search boxes, or search results should not be placed on, within, or alongside other Google products in a way that violates the policies of other products. The given example is: Placing adsense ads on site of pages that promotes the downloading of Youtube video.

For more info, visit the Adsense Program Policy page and the Adsense blog.

As fools celebrated their feasts on April 1, 2009, Google on the other hand was hurting lots of bloggers and webmasters for losing the PR (Page Rank) of their blogs and websites.

But should you get embarrassed if your blog’s PR dropped?

In my case, I don’t care if this blog’s PR5 (2007)  dropped to PR2 (2008). And  now the blog’s PR dropped again to PR0. And why should I be embarrassed if it doesn’t affect my blog’s income. I am not earning money from this blog through the Google PR rating. All my blogs are earning money from the traffic brought by the search engines.

Isn’t it the blog’s PR rating affects the actual page rank of the blog’s pages at the Google SERP?

If you’ll observe the Google search result, there are low PR blogs or pages that are ranked high up on the Google SERP. There are also high PR blogs or pages that are not listed on the top pages of the Google SERP.

In fact, even if the PR rating of this blog is already zero (0), it is still considered the authority especially if you’ll search Google using the keywords “selaplana”.

How did you know that your blog has the authority on certain googling?

If you’ll search the Google using the term “selaplana”, you’ll find out that this blog “Make Money Online by Blogging” is ranked number 1. And not only that, some internal pages are listed on the SERP too. Take a look at the screenshot below:

Who are those bloggers who are affected by the drop of PR?

Bloggers who are affected by the recent Google PR updates are:

1. Bloggers who write sponsored blogposts. Most of the sponsored posts brokers accept blogs that have high PR rating and the price of every post depends on the PR rating of the blog. The higher PR means the higher price.
2. Bloggers who are selling links for PR. There are blogs who joined the TLA networks and similar networks just to earn money from the links sold. And one of the bases in pricing a text link is the Google PR rating of the blog.

However, participating on these kind of making money online by blogging will also lead to the drop of your blog’s PR rating.

So, what should you do to get higher PR rating for your blog?

I think, you should not work hard for the increase of the PR rating of your blog. What you need to do is to work hard to get high page rank on the Google SERP because being ranked high on the SERP means more traffic will be brought into your blog. And just like what I am always telling you, … more traffic means more money because traffic is money.

So, what should you do to get high page rank on the SERP? It’s simple to say but hard to get it… Gain more backlinks to your articles or posts using the preferred “anchor text”.

Forget the PR rating but never forget gaining more backlinks to get the higher rank on the SERP.

PageRank vs Page Rank

You might wonder what’s the difference of PageRank and page rank.

Often times PageRank is written as Page Rank. Take note of the capitalization of the letter P and R.

To understand what’s PageRank and its difference if compared to page rank, please read my article, “PageRank and Page Rank“.

We already had discussed few important things related to On-Site Search Engine Optimization which is one of the two SEO techniques that should be done so that your blog will be ranked higher up in the Search Engine Result Pages or SERP.

There are still lots of things that we need to talk about on On-Site SEO, but I think, it would be better if we can talk now about the Off-Site Search Engine Optimization technique, so that you can start doing it into your blog.

What is Off-Site SEO?

Off-site SEO refers to the search engine optimization techniques that are performed outside your blog. Some SEO experts consider it as the most effective tactic or way of gaining higher rank in the SERP.

But of course, off-site SEO would not be effective without the On-Site SEO especially on the very competitive niche. If you really want to get successful in blogging, you need to perform both, On-Site and Off-Site SEO.

Basically, Off-Site SEO is all about getting incoming links from other website to your blog.

What is Incoming Links?

Incoming links is also called, backlinks, inlinks, inbound links, or inward links in which all these terms means links coming from other website to your blog.

Why is Incoming Link important?

First of all, incoming links help search engines find your blog so that it will be included on the list of websites and blogs that should be crawled by the search engines spider. And of course, those blogs and websites that are included on the search engines result pages are only those websites or blogs that are crawled by the search engines’ spiders.

But the most important role of incoming links is that it is used to measure the popularity of your blog, and the authority of your blog in a particular searches. The more incoming links your blog gained, the more chances that your blog will be ranked higher in the search engine result pages. And the higher is the position of your blog in the search engine result pages means the more visitors will be directed to your blog. And didn’t I tell you already that traffic is money?

To make it clear … Search Engines consider incoming links to your blog as the votes or the support that your blog gained from other websites. A website linking back to your blog is like suggesting or telling the search engines that your blog has more authority on that particular niche.

For example: In the real government official election, your personal votes to politicians during election helps politicians to win over their rivals. In the world of SE, the backlinks help a blog or website to win for the top ranking in the search engine result pages.

Characteristics of Incoming Links

There are three characteristics of the incoming links that search engines consider in giving weight of every incoming links that your blog received. These are: (1) Quality of incoming links; (2) Quantity of incoming links; and (3) The Anchor Text used by the incoming links.

1) Quality of incoming links

Search Engines are constantly evolving to maintain the high quality of the search results. Engineers behind them are vigilant against those gamers of the ranking in the SERP. Once they noticed some ways of SERanking manipulation, they immediately modify the algo of the search engines to make sure that those gamers will be penalized and the search results will remain in high quality.

Today, search engines already have the ability to identify the quality of the incoming links.

When I mention quality of the incoming links, I am referring to:

1. Relevance of the incoming links. Relevant backlinks are links that are coming from the webpages with relevant content to your blog.
2. The type of the incoming links. There are actually two types of incoming links: (1) Incoming Links as a result of exchange linking; (2) The one way link. Search Engines give more weights to 1-way links type of incoming links than those links resulted from the exchange linking.
3. The reputation of the source of the incoming links. The reputation of a webpage refers to the PR value of it. The PR has the value from 0 to 10 and is also based on the quality and quantity of incoming links.

2) Quantity of incoming links

Search Engines consider also the number of backlinks to a webpage when ranking webpages in the SERP. Those webpages with greater number of backlinks are most likely ranked higher up in the search result pages.

But of course, it’s not always the case. 1000 poor quality backlinks is not equal but is lower than the 1000 high quality backlinks. After all, quantity of the backlinks is not the only thing considered by the Search Engines in ranking webpages at the SERP.

3) The Anchor Text used by the incoming links

The anchor texts used in linking back to your blog served as the category of the votes casted by the websites linking to your blog.

For example, if other website or blog established a link to my blog with the anchor text, “Getting Higher rank at SERP“, search engines consider that link as votes to my blog for the searches on “Getting Higher rank at SERP”. So, if my blog earned the highest weight for that, then every time internet users search the search engines for the keywords “getting higher rank at serp”, my blog would be listed at the top of the SERP.

More on Incoming Links

For now, I will end this article here. But I will be writing more articles related to SEO, especially on how to gain more incoming links for your blog.

If you have questions, please feel free to reply this email. You can also visit the live version of it, “Off-Site SEO” , then drop your questions, comments, or suggestions at our comment section of our blog.

And here’s the list of our previous articles related to SEO:

1. SEO?
2. On-Site SEO?
3. Optimizing Domain and URL for the Search Engines?
4. Optimizing URL of Wordpress Blog?

Checking the traffic information of my blog is one of my daily activities. I always check:

1. How many visitors visited my blog?
2. How many pageviews does the blog generated?
3. What webpages of my blog that are most visited?
4. What are the keywords used by internet users in searching the search engines that lead them to my blog?
5. What are those webpages of my blog that earns money through Adsense and how much is the income of each of the webpage?

And there are lots of things that I need to know about the performance of my blog.

There are bloggers who consider this task as useless and for them it is just taking the time that should be spent in writing articles for the blog and optimizing the blogs. But in reality, tracking and checking the performance, the traffic, or the visitors of your blog should be performed by bloggers who want to succed in blogging. You, as blogger, should learn the strength and weakness of your blog so that you can optimize well your blog for the search engines and for your money making schemes.

How do I track the performance of my blog?

There are lots of free “traffic stat tracking services” available in the internet. But I highly recomment using the free analytics of Google.

Don’t have Google Analytics account

First you need to have Google Analytics Account. Click here to sign-up an account. What you need in signing-up an account are valid email address and password. These information will be used to log-in your Google Analytics account.

Already have Google Analytics account

Now, if you already have Google account like in email or other Google products, what you need to do is just activate Google Analytics account for your Google account.

So, click here to log-in to Google Analytics using your existing “Google account log-in information”.

Then at the bottom of the page, you’ll find the “Add a Website Profile“. Click on it. In the “Create Your Website Profile” page, find the section, “Add a Profile for a New Domain” and enter the domain of your blog on the blank field, then click “Submit” button.

Then get the Google Analytics tracking code and paste it on your blog’s template or theme. If your blog is hosted by Google’s Blogger, just open the template’s HTML and insert the code just before line that contains the tag “</body>”. But if your blog is self-hosted using Wordpress platform, just edit the footer.php through your Blog Admin – Theme Editor and insert the code before the line that contains the tag </body>.

The Information Tracked by Google Analytics

What are the information that are being tracked by Google Analytics?

Well… Actually, there are lots of things that Google Analytics has been tracking about your website. Few of these things are:

1) About the Visitors

1. Browser used by the visitors and the speed of their connections;
2. The Countries or region these visitors are coming from;
3. The number of new visitors over the returning visitors;
4. The visitors’ languages;
5. etc.

2) Traffic Source

1. Direct Traffic;
2. Referring sites;
3. Search engines;
4. Keywords used in the search engines that lead to your blog;
5. Adwords and other campaigns;
6. etc.

3) Content

1. Top Content;
2. Top Landing Pages;
3. Top Exit Pages;
4. etc.

4) Other information

1. Pageviews
2. Unique Pageviews
3. Bounce rate
4. Adsense income
5. etc.

More on Analytics

From time to time, I will be writing articles related to Traffic, Analytics, SEO that are related to the use of Google Analytics.

For now, just install the Google analytics code into your blog’s template or theme and start tracking the traffic information of your blog.

In my article, “How to Increase Adsense CTR“, the 4th tip I gave you in increasing the Adsense CTR is to format the Adsense ads for them to look like the content of your blog. Other bloggers called it “Blending”, or blending the Adsense ads to the content of your blog.

I also mentioned it in my article, “How to reduce Adsense Ad Blindness“, as one of the ways in reducing Adsense blindness.

How to Blend Adsense Ads and Blog Content?

Actually, there are two ways in blending Adsense ads and Blog content. (1) Configuring the Adsense format to look like the content of your blog; (2) Formatting the content to look like the Adsense ads.

1) Blending Adsense ads to the Blog Content

“Blending Adsense ads to the blog content” means formatting the Adsense for it to look like the content of your blog. You have 3 things in Adsense where you can change. These are:

a) Color of the text in Adsense

In configuring the Adsense ads, you’ll find the “Color” section where you can change the color of the border, title, background, text, and URL.

Change the color of the”Title” into the color used by the text with link in your content. And then change the color of the “Text” and “URL” into the color used by the regular texts in your content.

b) Color of the Adsense background and border

The color of the background and border of the Adsense can be set to any color you want. But, you can fully blend the Adsense to your blog’s content if you’ll use the background color of your blog as the background color and border color of the Adsense.

c) The Font Family of the text in Adsense ads

Just recently, Google offer a new feature in setting up Google Adsense ads, and it is the “Font Family”. You can now choose a custom font, which will be applied to ad units on pages displayed in Latin-character languages.

Currently, there are 4 options in configuring the font style of the Adsense ads.

1. Standard Adsense Font Family. This is the default Font used by Google Adsense.
2. Arial
3. Times
4. Verdana

If the content of your blog is using the Font Family “Verdana” then you can change the “Font Family” of Adsense ads to “Verdana”.

2) Blending Your Blog Content to the Adsense Ads

The first method that I mentioned above in making Adsense ads and your blog’s content  to blend to each other is  “blending the Adsense ads to your blog’s content”.

On this 2nd method, the process is the opposite of the first method. What we need to configure on this method is the content of your blog for it too look like the Adsense ads.

However, this process is good only to those who knew how to design a blog. So, if you are new to blogging and don’t have enough knowledge in designing, then just forget this method and just do the first method I already menthioned above.

One of the celebrated news today about Technology is the “Voice Recognition” feature introduced by Google to Apple iPhone.

iPhone users like you can now search and request Google result by just placing the phone to your ear and then ask verbally, … speaking to the phone with any questions, like: “Who is the lone professional blogger in Southern Leyte?” Then the iPhone system will convert the voice to digital file and immediately sent to the Google servers. Google on the other hand, upon receiving the digital form of your request try to identify your request and then send the info to the search engine to search for possible answer on your question. Then after that, Google will send the result right into your iPhone screen. Since, Google system is smarter than those of its competitors, so Google will give you my website or other articles that mention me as the “first and lone professional blogger in Southern Leyte.”

Maybe, you already had heard the story or news or probably read articles about Voice Recognition system. Maybe you already had experienced interacting verbally with a device or probably a phone answering machine without pressing the keys of your phone. But I am sure that those devices were equipt with a Voice Recognition system that has limited functionality or limited responses.

Google’s Voice Recognition system is more advanced than those other Voice Recognition system. It tries to understand you even how you speak your queries. It’s like a human listening to what you are saying. It’s far way better than your favorite GMA7’s character, “ASERO” (joke)

Have you tried using Google Search as calculator? If not, then you missed something in your life (just kidding).

Actually, Google Search can be used as calculator. You type “1000 + 1000″ without quote on the Google Search box and click the “Search button”, Google will give you the result which is “2000″. Now, if you have an iPhone which is equipt with the Voice Recognition system of Google, then you don’t have to type “1000 + 1000″ without qoute into your phone. What you need to do is just ask the iPhone verbally by this question: “out thousand plus one thousand”. I know, Google will answer you with “two thousand”.

But I am still wondering if Google could answer my question: “What will be the sex of my baby inside my wife’s womb?” Well, my baby is still a three month old fetus. Our ObGyne couldn’t determine yet the sex of our baby. And I’m sure Google is already ignorant about it, unless I will write article about the sex of my baby and publish it on the internet.

Other articles about Google’s Voice Recognition sytem via iPhone:

• Google Is Taking Questions (Spoken, via iPhone)
• Google Voice Search Comes to Apple’s iPhone, Not Android G1 First

Update:

Apple seems hesitant to release new iPods with Voice Recognition feature that Google created for iPhone. These iPhones should be on the US stores’s shielves but Friday passed without the iPhone with Voice Recognition on them.

Talks about it:

• Update On Google iPhone Voice Recognition App: Look For It On Monday