Hello Sel,

I am confused if PageRank is really important. In your previous post, you said that Page Rank is not that really important because there are pages with low Page Rank yet ranked at the top of the SERP of Google and then there are pages with high Page Rank yet ranked lower at the SERP of Google.

However, I sense in your recent post that you’re quite happy to learn that your blog got the PR2 again.

Can you please explain why is it that you found it important to have higher Page Rank?

Newbie Blogger

Selboy’s Answer

In my article, “Why Does My Blog’s Page Rank Drop to Zero?” I did mention that the owner of the blog that has been slapped by Google with the PR of zero should not be worried. It’s because there are blogs with low page rank that are ranked high at the SERP of Google, and then there are also blogs with high page rank that are ranked low at the SERP of Google.

However, I couldn’t deny the fact that the Page Rank value showed by the Google toolbar is actually based on the actual Page Rank points of every webpage as calculated by Google.

That’s why I wrote this:

A Page Rank of zero (0) may mean that your link-building campaign is a failure, but it doesn’t mean that you’ll lose all the higher positions at SERP in a specific search.

So, if your blog got the PR of zero, then it is true that your link building campaign is a failure.

Please review my article, “Why does my blog’s page rank drop to zero?“. I mentioned few reasons why it happens.

High Page Rank, Ranked High at Google SERP

Now, since the Page Rank value showed by the Google toolbar is based on the actual Page Rank points of every webpage as calculated by Google, then it is also true that webpages with higher Page Rank are most likely be ranked high at the Google SERP, just like what the Google support posted:

Webpages with a higher PageRank are more likely to appear at the top of Google search results. (source)

What has been mentioned is that “higher pagerank are more likely to blah blah blah…” Which means, the webpage with high page rank has the possibility to be ranked high up at the Google SERP than those webpages with low page rank. But not at all the times those webpages with high page rank are actually ranked high up the Google SERP.

To understand what I am trying to tell you, please consider the example below:

Webpage A

• PageRank: 0
• Optimized with keywords: NDS Games, NDS Emulator, NDS Emulator Download

Webpage B

• PageRank: 5
• Optimized with keywords: Make Money Online, Make Money at Home

Webpage C

• PageRank: 2
• Optimized with keyword: Home Based Job, Make Money at Home

Question #1: From that given example, which of the webpages will be ranked at the top of the Google SERP when searching for “Make Money Online”?

My Answer #1: “Webpage B” got the Page Rank of 5. So with this fact, we can say that there is a big possibility that it will be ranked high up the Google SERP compared to the “Webpage A” and “Webpage C”. “Webpage B” and “Webpage C” are related to each other but “Webpage B” is optimized for the keyword “Make Money Online” compared to the “Webpage C”. Now since we are searching Google with the keywords “Make Money Online”, then Website B will be listed at the top of the SERP, next is the “Webpage C” and the last is “Webpage A”.

Question #2: What about if we will google “NDS Games”, how the webpages are being ranked?

My Answer #2: “Webpage B” and “Webpage C” have higher page rank than the “Webpage A“. However, only the “Webpage A” is optimized with the keyword “NDS Games“. Therefore, Webpage A is most likely at the top of the SERP.

Question #3: Which of the 3 webpages is most likely ranked number 1 if we will google “Make Money at Home”?

My Answer #3: “Webpage B” and “Webpage C” are both optimized with the keywords “Make Money at Home”. However, Webpage B has the PR of 5 compared to “Webpage C” which is only PR2. Thus, “Webpage B” is most likely ranked number 1 at the Google SERP.

Conclussion

To make this post short…

1. A webpage with higher Page Rank has the advantage over a webpage with low Page Rank especially when in a competition over a particular keywords or when they are both optimized on the same keywords.
2. Your blog’s ranking at the Google SERP is affected by the Page Rank and how your blog is being optimized.

When the new bloggers heard me saying during my lecture to them that they really need to learn how to market their blog, they immediately asked, “Is marketing part of blogging?” They thought that soon as their blog is already live, the only job they need to do is write articles and publish them into the blog and nothing else… and then they will just wait for the money to be sent to them by Google through the Google Adsense program.

Well, I couldn’t blame them for having that thought because there are other bloggers who said that blogging is the easiest way of making money online, without making it clear that only those bloggers who have blogs that are successfully marketed, are the ones who feel the ease in making money online by blogging.

If you just started blogging then you should strive hard first in optimizing your blogs, creating content, and then marketing them. Once you successfully done these things, then money will just flow in to your pocket.

In other words, your blogging job doesn’t end up in writing and publishing quality content into your blog. Remember what I already told you before, that a blog even if it contains the best articles in the internet if no one is reading your blog, it is considered dead. (You can read my old post, “5 reasons why traffic is money“)

Thus, you really need to market your blog to gain traffic for it.

Make Your Blog High Quality

Marketing can be defined as “the process of promoting, selling and distributing products. (source: princeton.edu)”

So, if we say “Marketing Your Blog“, it also means “promoting your blog and its content to the internet users.”

But your effort in promoting your blog will just be wasted if you failed to make those who are convinced to visit your blog to stay longer and make them revisit your blog again.

In other words, before you market your blog, you need to enhance your blog first and make it better. But how?

Here’s how:

Write Quality Content.

Everything starts in good and with high quality content. If you failed to write quality content then don’t expect that your marketing effort will be successful.

This is just similar when marketing a cola drink with a bad taste. Let’s say your marketing is good and you successfully made your target customers to buy your bad cola drink. But after they tasted it, did they buy again?

Now, imagine if your blog contains useless content. You might be successful in getting traffic for your blog, but for sure, those visitors would not visit your blog again.

That’s why you need to publish high quality content.

Make Your Blog’s Design Conducive for Learning.

It’s like you’re in a classroom. If the classroom is arranged disorderly pupils would feel sleepy during classes instead of learning the things that the teachers had imparted.

The same it true to a blog with a clutter design. Visitors would feel disinterested and would just exit from your blog without checking your content.

Make your Blog a Search Engines Friendly.

It might be true that your target visitors are human. But it is also true that your visitors are not just human. Search Engine’s spiders visit your blog too.

So, while you’re making your blog attractive and useful to your human visitors, don’t forget to consider your bots visitors.

What I mean is, make your blog a search engine friendly so that search engine’s spiders will visit your blog often, stay longer and in return, search engines will rank your blog at the top position in the SERP.

And you already know what happens next if your blog’s articles are always in the top position of the SERP at any particular but targeted searches.

Ways of Marketing a Blog

I already talked about the ways on how to promote your blog on my previous (old) posts like:

1. How to immediately get traffic for a fresh blog?
2. How to increase visitors of your blog?
3. How to decrease your blog’s bounce rate?
4. Write great content and gain more visitors, earn more money?
5. Drive Traffic to your Blog through Networking Websites?

And all the ways mentioned on those articles are the ones that I want to talk about here.

Now, just in case you feel lazy reading those old articles, here’s the means you need to try in marketing your blog.

1. Adword and other PPC advertising. Advertise your blog through any PPC advertising. You can use the Google Adwords, Adbrite, Kontera, Infolinks, etc..
2. Marketing at Social Networking websites. Make use of the social networking websites like Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook.
3. Bookmark your blog at Bookmarking Websites. I listed many bookmarking websites at my article, “Make Google Visit your Blog Often.” Make use of them.
4. Join and be Active on Forums. Share your knowledge by answering questions in forums or by joining the discussions in forums. With that, members of those forums will recognize you. And with the help of your “Profile” page and links in your signatures, other members of those forums can visit your blog.
5. Search Engine Optimization or SEO. This is the only technique that can bring thousands daily traffic into your blog. Read my articles about it:
   • What is SEO?
   • Off-site Search Engine Optimization
   • On-Site Search Engine Optimization
6. Commenting to other Blogs. Post useful and relevant comment at other blogs. It is like telling the owner of the blog and its visitors that you are blogger and you have blogs too.

And one more thing: You can post an announcement about the new posts you had in your blog at our Pinoy Blogger Update blog and add your blog at our Pinoy Bloggers Directory.

Conclusion

Once you learn how to market your blog that contains quality content, you’ll realize that “Marketing is the Queen” and “Content is the King“.

Hi Sel! I was observing my blog for several weeks already and I learned that Google is not visiting the blog anymore. My blog is already 3 years old and has more than 3,000 posts. My problem is, how can I direct Google’s spider into my blog so that all my new posts will be indexed and be included on the SERP. Can you please share your knowledge about it?

First of all, I want to thank you for asking this.

Actually, I wonder if Google really doesn’t visit your blog anymore.

Based on my experience, there are times that I thought Google did not visit my blog for the past minutes or hours, especially when the new posted article is not yet included on the main index. The only time that I realized that Google really visited my blog is when I noticed that the cached pages are already updated.

I suggest that you verify first whether Google did not visit your blog recently by checking the cached page of your blog by typing this: cache:www.selaplana.com (just change the www.selaplana.com with the URL of your own blog) on the Google search bar and search it. If the cached page contains the recent posts or recent changes of your blog, then Google really visited your blog.

So you’re real problem is not on how to make Google visit your blog but on how to make Google include your new posted articles into its main index.

I suggest you read my previous article, “Why Does Google Deindexed Some Webpages of My Blog?”

Make Google visit your blog often

If you’d notice that Google did not  visit your blog for several days already, then there something wrong with the impression of Google about your blog.

• Maybe, Google finds out that your blog is not updating at all. If this is the case then you need to tell Google that your blog is still updating and tell Google to visit your blog by making use of the sitemaps through the Google Webmasters Tools and by increasing the number links back to your blog from other websites.
• Maybe, Google considered your blog as “untrusted” website. If this is the case, you need to review the Webmasters Guidelines, correct anything that violated the guidelines, and then request for reconsideration of your blog from Google (check here how).

As far as I know, from time to time, Google will visit your blog for updates as long as your blog is still considered by Google as “trusted” one.

Remember that Google loves blog because blog updates frequently. Therefore, we expect that Google will visit your blog often. How often? It depends on (1) the size of your blog, (2) its Page Rank, (3) how often your blog is updating, and (4) the number of links back to your blog from other websites.

But factors 1, 2 and 3 are actually related to each other.Usually, a large blog has a better page rank and is updated often. Everytime you post new article, readers post new comments, and you edit previously published article, Google immediately visit your blog and updates its index.

Backlinks

The 4th factor, which is the number of links back to your blog from other websites, for me, is actually the best and effective way of directing Google to visit your blog.

Google doesn’t take a rest in finding information in the internet from websites to websites. Everytime it stumbles a valid link, it follows it. And everytime it follows a link, it counts the lead, check for updates, and updates its index.

For example, there are 100 websites that are linking back to your blog. If Google visits these 100 websites in just an hour, then Google will visit your blog a hundreds times in just an hour because it is possible that Google will follow the links from these 100 websites to your blog.

But your another problem is, how can you get backlinks from other websites?

There are actually lots of ways on how to get backlinks from other websites or blogs. But the best way of getting links is by linkbaiting. You can still exchange links from your mates’ blogs and other target blogs, just make sure that you do not over do it or else you’ll reap nothing from the links that your blog got.

Other sources of backlinks are:

1. Press Release. Writing Press Release featuring your product and then submit it into the Press Release directories.
2. Signature in Forums. There are forums that allow its members to establish a link back to any websites through their signatures on every posts they posted on the forums’ thread.
3. Classified Ads. Promote your site to Classified Ad Websites and get free backlinks and at the same time free traffic from classified ads surfers.
4. Guest Blogging. There are blog owners who are looking for guest blogger who can substitute them in blogging at their own blog. Be a guest blogger of them, write quality article for that blog and include link back to your blog. This can be a good source of relevant backlinks for your blog.
5. Profile at Networking Websites. Be a member of networking websites like friendster.com, myspace.com, and facebook.com and include a link from your profile page to your blog.
6. Bookmarking sites. Most of the popular bookmarking sites applied the “nofollow” tag in all their low-profiled outgoing links. But once the number of votes on certain bookmark reached the limit, the “nofollow” tag on the outbound links will be stripped off thus allowing the PR to pass from that page to the target webpage.

Below is the list of bookmarking sites you can use for your link-building campaign:

• PR 9 http://slashdot.org
• PR 98 http://www.bloglines.com
• PR 8 http://reddit.com
• PR 8 http://www.rojo.com
• PR 8 http://www.technorati.com
• PR 8 http://www.connotea.org PR
• PR 8 http://del.icio.us
• PR 8 http://stumbleupon.com
• PR 8 http://digg.com
• PR 7 http://www.bibsonomy.org
• PR 7 http://www.newsvine.com
• PR 7 http://www.nowpublic.com
• PR 7 http://www.linuxquestions.org
• PR 7 http://www.mister-wong.com
• PR 7 http://www.43things.com
• PR 7 http://www.squidoo.com
• PR 7 http://www.blogpulse.com
• PR 7 http://www.blinklist.com
• PR 7 http://www.librarything.com
• PR 6 http://www.feedmarker.com
• PR 6 http://www.blinkbits.com
• PR 6 http://www.clipmarks.com
• PR 6 http://unalog.com
• PR 6 http://www.indianpad.com
• PR 6 http://www.yoono.com
• PR 6 http://wists.com
• PR 6 http://segnalo.alice.it
• PR 6 http://www.linkagogo.com
• PR 6 http://www.rawsugar.com
• PR 6 http://www.kaboodle.com
• PR 6 http://linkfilter.net
• PR 6 http://tailrank.com
• PR 6 http://www.icerocket.com
• PR6 http://de.lirio.us
• PR  6 http://www.simpy.com
• PR 6 http://www.backflip.com
• PR 6 http://www.clipfire.com
• PR 6 http://www.kinja.com
• PR 6 http://popurls.com
• PR 6 http://www.netvouz.com
• PR 6 http://www.spurl.net
• PR 5 http://www.shoutwire.com
• PR 5 http://tweako.com
• PR 5 http://www.givealink.org
• PR 5 http://www.wurldbook.com
• PR5 http://www.beanrocket.com
• PR5 http://www.listible.com
• PR5 http://gibeo.net
• PR 4 http://www.blogmarks.net
• PR 4 http://www.fark.com
• PR 4 http://www.bmaccess.net
• PR 4 http://www.diigo.com
• PR 4 http://ma.gnolia.com
• PR 4 http://www.mecanbe.com
• PR 3 http://reader2.com
• PR 3 http://www.wazima.com
• PR 3 http://socialogs.com
• PR 3 http://www.rrove.com
• PR 3 http://www.plugim.com

Summary

To make it short… you can make Google visit your blog as often as you want by simply getting more websites or blogs linking back to your blog.

1. Why does my blog’s PR decreased?
2. How to top the Google SERP?

And a lot more.

I was still composing the article that would answer their queries or your queries as well, but I think it would be better if you just watch first the presentation of a Google’s  engineer, Matt Cutts, presented during the San Francisco Wordcamp ‘09.

Matt Cutts shared a lot of things that could help you make your blog better not only in the eyes of your visitors but also in the Google search engine.

Here’s the video:

If you’re reading this post through your email, and the video failed to show, you better visit the live version of this article here.

But most of the SEOptimizers who understand the power of link building abuse it. They try to manipulate the search engine result ranking by doing the three  popular SEO techniques. Google hates backlinks through these techniques which are:

1. Link Buying. Lots of bloggers, or webmasters buy links directly from other websites. These links do not wear link-condoms which is the “nofollow” tag. Other bloggers and webmasters use the middle man (broker like TLA, etc.) in getting link.
2. Exchange linking. This is the most common thing that bloggers and webmasters do. They find prospect websites for the exchange linking and then they establish links from their websites or blogs to the target website, then ask the owner of the target website to link back to their websites or blogs.
3. Link Farming. Those who couldn’t afford to buy links and don’t have the ability to ask other bloggers and webmasters for an exchange linking tend to link-farm. They create a fake network of blogs from a free-blogging service like that of Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, i.ph and similar service. Then from that fake network, they establish links to the target website.

But the algo of the search engines, especially Google, was modified so that those blogs and websites that are caught manipulating the search engine result ranking will be penalized, if not, they will never gain page rank points from the links detected as the result of manipulation.

However, SEO found a solution to this new change in search engine algo. They still use the three SEO techniques mentioned above in getting more backlinks for the websites and blogs they’re optimizing without being detected by the search engine, thus avoiding the penalty. They called it as “building links with natural profile.”

How can you build natural-profiled links?

Backlink is one of the criteria used by Google in ranking websites at the search engine result pages. It is considered as votes of other websites to your blog. The more votes your blog got, the higher is your blog’s ranking at the SERP in a particular search.

However, not all backlinks are considered by Google as valid votes to your blog or website. Only the “natural links” are accepted by Google.

Talking about Natural Links… Well, each of one of us has our own definition of the term “natural links”. You can define it as the links from other websites that are made by the websites’ authors not by the computer program. You can even consider the backlinks your blog got from the three techniques in building backlinks mentioned above as natural as long as those links are established by human not by bots.

However, Google and other search engine have their own definition to the term “natural links”.  Since we want Google and other search engines to rank our blogs high up the SERP, then we need to forget our own definition of that term and consider just the definition that the search engine give to that term.

For Google, “natural links” are links given by site’s owner to your blog or website not because they are paid to link to you or just requested to link back but because your blog is linkable. Your blog can be linkable if your blog has the authority over the topic.

For example… If an article of your blog talks about “How to Make Money Online by Blogging” and it really contains the information that everybody need to know, including techniques on how to do it and proofs that your techniques really work… then other bloggers will tend to talk about you at their own blog with links back to your blog.

This kind of links is considered as the best link. And according to Matt Cutts, best links are earned and given by choice.

However, getting a natural links is much difficult to obtain especially if you only have a limited knowledge in link-baiting or in writing articles with high authority. And because of that, you’ve got no choice but to do the link-exchange and other possible methods of getting links back to your blog.

So, to avoid getting any problems with the search engines and at the same time enjoying the benefits of the back-links that your blog got, you now need make your campaign looks natural in the eyes of the search engines.

Here’s how:

1. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Get backlinks from different blogs and websites with different PR rating but are relevant to the target webpage.
   Well, it might be true that backlinks from a high PR domain has the higher PR value for your targeted webpage, but getting tens or hundreds of backlinks from high PR websites will only raise the red flag.
   So to stay at the safe side, you better get back-links for your target webpage from websites, regardless of the domain’s PR rating, as long as the content is relevant to the target webpage.
2. Vary the anchor text. If I can get hundreds of backlinks to this blog with the anchor text “Make Money Online by Blogging” from different websites or blogs with different PR rating but are relevant to this blog, then I’m sure that this blog will stay on the top position of the SERP when searching “Make Money Online by Blogging”.
   However, having that huge number of backlinks with just one kind of anchor text will just raise again the red flag that might result to a search engine penalty.
   To stay on the safer side, you better vary the anchor text when linking back to the blog.
   For example, I can link back to this blog with the anchor texts: “SELaplana“, “Selboy“, “visit here“, “check the website“, “Earn Money Online“, “Make Money Online“, “Online Money Blogging“, “Make Money Online Through Blogging“, etc.
3. Build the backlinks over time. Just like what they’re always saying, “don’t go out and do all possible things at once for it might ruin you. Do the things as what you have planned and scheduled.“

While you can make your link-building campaign looks natural in the eyes of the search engine, but it is better if you will try to earn “natural links” through link-baiting and by writing quality and with authority articles.

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.

For example, if there are 100 visitors visit your site, and 80 of them leave the site without visiting other pages of that site, then the bounce rate is 80%.

The process can be expressed mathematically as:

Bounce rate = [ (no. of single visit) / (no. of total visit) ] x100

To make it clearer, bounce means the visitors exit the site from the landing page or entrance page itself. If the visitor visit the homepage of this blog and leaves the blog from this page without visiting other pages, then it is already a bounce.

There are actually several ways of leaving your blog that are considered as bounces. Few of these are:

• If your visitors leave your blog through the link from within your blog to the other blogs. For example the visitors click the links in your blogroll listed at the sidebar, or the links within the article to the other blogs or websites that are used as references.
• If your visitors leave your blog through the Adsense ads or any other ads displayed on your blog.
• If your visitors leave your blog by closing the tab or the browser’s window.
• If your visitors leave your blog by clicking the “Back” button of your browser.
• If the visitors open a new website by typing the new URL.
• If your visitors do nothing after landing on your blog. What I mean is that, your blog is opened for a long time.

But what does high bounce rate of my blog really mean to me?

Actually, having a high bounce rate means two things: Either you failed or you succeed. Whether having high bounce rate is good or not depends on your goal in blogging at a particular blog. For example:

1. If your blog is made for Adsense, having high bounce rate means two things: (1) your visitors click the Adsense ads; (2) your visitors leave your blog immediately after knowing that your blog is just made for Adsense.
2. If your blog is a marketing type, having high bounce rate means two things again: (1) maybe your visitors clicked the ads on your blog; (2) maybe your visitors were not interested in the content of the landing page.
3. If your blog has only 1 post, then you’ll be expecting that your blog has high bounce rate, from 80% to 100%. It’s because there’s no other post that your visitors could visit.

Bounce Rate and the SERP

It might be advantageous to you if your blog has high bounce rate especially if the visitors of your blog leave your blog by passing through the Adsense ads because it could mean huge Adsense income for you.

However, bounce rate is already considered by Google as a measure of quality visit and that the high bounce rate indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. And there was an speculations from SEO experts that bounce rate could greatly affect your blog’s ranking on the SERP.

What I mean is that if your blog has high bounce rate, especially in a certain googling or searching, your blog will be outranked by those blogs or websites or webpages that has low bounce rate.

It happens because the main goal of the search engines is to serve the internet users with the relevant search engine result. And one factor considered by the search engine in learning whether your blog is relevant to that certain googling or searching is the bounce rate.

So, how can you decrease the bounce rate of your blog?

Few of the ways that might decrease the bounce rate of your blog are:

1. Make your blog user friendly. Your blog should be clean, orderly and appealing to the visitors. The text should be readable and the downloading should be fast.
2. Write Quality and Relevant Contents. The articles published at your blog should be interesting and useful. Give your visitors the reason to stay longer at your blog.
3. Inter- linking articles. Offer your visitors more articles to read that are relevant to the landing page. This can be done by
   (1) linking to the other articles by using the relevant keywords within the article;
   (2) by listing few related articles at the bottom of the article.
4. Proper SEO. In optimizing your blog or every pages of your blog for the search engines, you need to target the keywords that are relevant to the page being optimized.
   For example, if your targeting the “Pinay Scandal” keyword, make sure that the landing page contains relevant content because if the content is not related to the keywords used to find a page of your blog, mostlikely your visitors will immediately click the “Back” button of the browser to check for another websites listed at the SERP.
5. Brother Mapiles added this: Make at least two parts for a long post. I usually do this to get at least two page visits on my post. I don’t put everything in one page. If I’m posting series of videos, the next videos could be found on the other page.

Other articles:

• How to track your blog’s visitors?
• How to make your Wordpress blog loads faster?
• How to increase your blog’s pageviews?

Since the start of this blog, I was already targeting important keywords that I believed would gave this blog a huge amount of traffic. Usually those keywords were not related to the topic of this blog. And I called that activity “Keyword Hacking”.

On the early months of 2007, I realized that the majority of the internet users were looking for porn materials like photos of the nude woman and photos or videos of couple performing sex. I also realized that most of the internet users who were looking for these materials were interested of the photos or videos of teens.

Then I immediately thought that this blog might gain traffic if I would write a blogpost related to the said materials and then I would SEO the blogpost. That’s the time that I launched my first experiment on Pinay Teen Sex. And in just 3 days after posting the said post, it already had snatched the first spot on the Google SERP (Philippines) when searching for the keywords “Pinay Teen Sex”. (Read my article, “Pinay Sex Experiment on its first stage of Success“)

And with that kind of success, hundreds of new visitors were directed by the search engines into this blog.

Keyword Hijacking

Did you know that the first blogger to call an activity in which a blogger targets a keyword which is not related to his blog’s niche as  “Keyword Hijacking” is a Filipino blogger? Yes and He’s Brother Marghil Macuha. (If not, then tell me who…)

Since the time when he introduced that activity through his blogposts as “Keyword Hijacking”, other bloggers who were following his blog adopted his strategy and its name too. As proof, there are lots of bloggers who participated his call to hijack the keyword, “Pinay Scandal“.

And that’s also the time when the  “Keyword Hijacking” became popular even to those who are simply bloggers and not SEO practitioner.

Keyword Research

Actually, that activity is already popular in the world of SEO since then because that kind of activity is really part of the SEO. SEO called that activity as “Keyword Research”.

In SEO, it is normal that SEO practitioner perform the “Keyword Research”. They research for the valuable keywords that they could target for their website so that one of the pages of their websites will top the SERP when searching for those keywords.

However, most of these SEO do not target keywords that are not related to the websites they are SEOing.

The “Keyword Research” is actually done not only by SEO professionals alone. Webmasters and bloggers were doing this activity also for the good of their websites and blogs. And not only that, they also tried to research for keywords that are valuable even if these keywords were not related to their existing websites, and then they would create new websites or blogs that would target those keywords.

Making Money by Keyword Hijacking

Most of the bloggers who hijack keywords are making money from Google Adsense and other PPC (Pay Per Click) and CPM ads publishing. These are the bloggers who realized already that traffic is money especially the traffic that are coming from the search engines.  For these bloggers, as long as their blogs have traffic, whether the traffic is targeted or not, they can earn money from it.

What is “Keyword Hijacking”?

Now, the term “Hijack” is defined by the Wikipedia as “taking over by force”. The Wiktionary defined it as:

1. To forcibly stop and seize control of some vehicle in order to rob it or to reach a destination (especially an airplane, truck or a boat).
2. (computing) To seize control of a networked computer by means of infecting it with a worm or other malware, thereby turning it into a zombie.
3. (computing) To change software settings without a user’s knowledge so as to force that user to visit a certain web site (to hijack a browser).

So, based on the given definition of the term “Hijack”, I will also define the terms “Keyword Hijacking” as “taking control of the valuable or important keywords of other blogs and websites“. “Keyword Hijacking” is a way to gain traffic through the search engines by making use of the keywords that other blogs and websites are getting traffic from.

Basically, “Keyword Hijacking” has these steps:

1) Search for the blog or website that has huge traffic

You need to pick websites that really have huge traffic. You can do it by checking their traffic stats and ranking in a ranking website like “Philippine Top Blogs” at topblogs.com.ph, etc.

2) Research for Keywords

Study the blogs or websites you picked from the step 1. Try to learn what keywords are bringing huge traffic into that blogs or websites and take note of them.

3) Verify the trend of those keywords

By using the Google Trends verify whether the trend of the searches on that particular keywords is steady or going up.

Most of the Keyword Hijackers are interested only to those keywords that have steady but high, or rising search trend.

4) Verify the Competition on the SERP

Google or search the internet using Google Search Engine each of the keywords. And take note of the number of the total pages on the result.

For example:

If you google “make money online” using the Google Philippines, you see this caption just below the search box: “Results 1 – 10 of about 186,000,000 for make money online. (0.19 seconds)“. This caption tells us that there are 186,000,000 pages in the result on search for “make money online“. Which means that there’s a huge competition on that particular keywords.

Keyword hijacker are actually interested only to the keywords that has less competition like less than 500,000 pages on the search result. The fewer the competition, the better.

5) Write a blogpost

You already have picked the keywords that have better search trend and low competition.

The next step is to write a blogpost that talks about the targeted keywords. And don’t forget to perform the on-site SEO for that particular post.

6) Perform Off-Site SEO

Gather backlinks for the blogpost you published through this keyword hijacking activity. The more backlinks and the better quality these backlinks, the better.

7) Follow up

Your goal is to continuously gain traffic from the SERP of the searches for the targeted keywords. So, from time to time, check the SERP and take note of the position of your blogpost. If your blogpost is not performing well on the SERP, then do the step 6.

Keyword Hijacking Effect

Once the blogpost you wrote through this hijacking activity will top the SERP, then I’m sure your blog will gain huge traffic directed by the SERP of the searches for the hijacked keywords.

Update: Nerd corrected me on how I understand the code of Bidvertiser.

From the Bidvertiser code that I posted below, it is true that the code has 2 parts: (1) The Script which is enclosed by the tags <script> and </script>; (2) The HTML which is enclosed by the tags <noscript> and </noscript>.

It is also true that the “script” part of the code pulls information from the bidvertiser servers about the ads that should be displayed on the site, then eventually displaying the ads. But the “HTML” part of the code will only be displayed when the browsers javascript is disabled.

So, from his explanation, we can say that there is no cloaking here.

Publishing Bidvertiser ads

I was successfully earning money from Bidvertiser. Just like my Kontera income, my income from Bidvertiser is not as high as my Adsense income.

Bidvertiser really is one of the best alternative to Google Adsense.

But last month (February 2008), I decided to stop publishing Bidvertiser ads because I noticed something from its code.

When I was reading the HTML codes of the theme of this blog, I found out that Bidvertiser’s code contains a link to the Bidvertiser’s homepage using the key-phrase “Internet Marketing” as anchor text. Take a look at the Bidvertiser code which I was using on this blog.

<!– Begin BidVertiser code –>
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=”JavaScript1.1″ SRC=”http://bdv.bidvertiser.com/BidVertiser.dbm?pid=####=####” type=”text/javascript”></SCRIPT>
<noscript><a href=”http://www.bidvertiser.com”>internet marketing</a></noscript>
<!– End BidVertiser code –>

If you’ll analyze the code, it has two parts:

1. Javascript code. This part is enclosed by the tag <script> and </script>. It is responsible in pulling advertisement information from the Bidvertiser’s servers and display them on your blog.
2. Noscript part. This part is enclosed by the tag <noscript> and </noscript>. It is actually an HTML, and it contains a valid link to Bidvertiser’s homepage using the “Internet Marketing” as the anchor text. (Nerd corrected me on this thought. Read the “Bidvertiser Code” part of this article.)

SEO by Cloaking

Actually, what the Bidvertiser did is a “Search Engine Optimization” by cloaking it’s because the link in the “noscript” part of the code is considered by the search engines as a valid link to the homepage of Bidvertiser using the “internet marketing” as the anchor text. However, this link is not displayed on the actual result of the code. In other words, only the search engine notice this link and it is considered as an SEO by Cloaking.

So, what’s the problem with this cloaking issue?

Actually, publishing the Bidvertiser code in your blog would led your blog to the risk of losing your blog’s ranking in the SERP. Your blog might be penalized by the search engine because of reasons:

1. Cloaking. It might be true that the codes is not your own but of the Bidvertiser. But since you posted it in your blog, so you’d be guilty of cloaking. And Cloaking is one of the SEO techniques that search engine especially Google hate so much.
2. Linking to bad websites. Websites that are using Black Hat SEO are considered bad websites. So, if search engines notice how Bidvertiser fool the search engines just to be ranked higher up at the SERP for a particular keyphrases, then Bidvertiser would be considered bad websites. And Google assured us that linking to bad website will cause  a penalty.

Penalty by the Search Engines

I previously published an article about the search engines and its penalty imposed to those websites that manipulates the PR and the position at the SERP. Read my article, “How to check if my blog is penalized by search engine?”

Why do search engines penalize websites?

Just like what I said already on my previous articles, the goal of the search engines is to provide relevant result on every queries made by the internet users. Engineers behind the search engines wrote algorithms which are responsible in indexing websites and returning the list of webpages as the result in every searches made through the search engine.

From time to time, search engines became more popular. (Should I say, search engine is now the most popular tool in finding information from the internet.)

Webmasters (including bloggers) on the other hand realized how important is the search engine in getting traffic for their websites or blogs. Almost all internet users use search engine in searching for the information they’re looking for. And those webpages listed at the top of the list at the result page are those that are most likely visited by the internet users.

So, webmasters studied how the search engines rank webpages at the search engine result pages. After learning the secrets of these search engines, they then optimized their websites or blogs so that the webpages of their websites or blogs will be listed at the top at the search engine result pages.

Because of the competition in getting the higher rank at the search engine result pages, some webmasters or bloggers use tricks to win the top position of the SERP. This trick is called as the “Black Hat SEO“.

Black Hat SEO really embarrass the engineers behind the search engines because people practicing Black Hat SEO are gaming the algorithm of the search engines. So, to retain the high quality and relevancy of the search engine results, the algorithm of the search engine has been modified so that those who gamed it would be penalized and would never be included on the SERP, if not, the page rank weight of the webpages of their websites or blogs would be lessen.

So, to make it short, search engines penalize websites that violates the existing policies and guidelines imposed by the search engines.

What are the techniques that can cause the penalty?

Among the search engines that I knew (ie Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc), I think only the Google search engine is strictly penalizing websites.

For example: John Chow’s blog is under the penalty imposed by Google search engine but it’s not penalized in Yahoo search engine.

So, we’ll focus our discussion here on Google search engine.

According to Matt Cutts, one of the engineers of Google, any techniques that manipulates the PageRank and the page rank at the search engine result will lead to being penalized by the search engine.

These technique are:

1. Link Exchange.
2. Link Buying without “nofollow” tag.
3. Link Selling without “nofollow” tag.
4. Creating Fake Network of Blogs. Some webmasters create several blogs from the free blogging hosts like blogger.com, wordpress.com, blogsome.com, etc. Then all these blogs are linking to the real blog.
5. Keyword Stuffing. Flooding each webpages with keywords.
6. Linking to Bad websites.
7. Cloaking. Configuring the webpage so that the content seen by the search engine is different to what the users have seen.
8. Hidden Texts and Hidden Links in your blog’s webpages.

Is there a way to check if your blog has been penalized by Google?

Actually, only Google knows which websites were penalized in their system.

You, as the webmaster of your website,  can only tell that your website or blog has been penalized already by Google if you know that you’re doing some techniques enumerated above and then your blog or website experienced big changes in its PageRank, page rank or position at the SERP, or anything related to SERanking.

There are actually several kinds of penalty imposed by Google to those websites that found by Google’s algorithm guilty of manipulating the PR.

1. Your blog will receive lesser weights to inbound links. So, your blog would have the hard time getting the higher rank at the SERP.
2. Your blog is totally deindexed. Before if you’ll use the “site:example.com” search, you’ll find pages being indexed by Google. But now, the search returns nothing.
3. The drop of PageRank (PR). Before, your blog has a site PR of 5, but now, the PR is only 2.
4. Your blog doesn’t rank well for its own keyword. For example, my blog is “SELaplana”. If I’ll google “selaplana”, my blog is listed on the top of the SERP. Once it is penalized, this blog will never be found at SERP.
5. Your blog’s outbound link has no weight at all.

For me, it’s just fine if your blog will experience the 1st, 3rd and 5th mentioned penalty because at least your blog has still the chance to top the ranking at the SERP.

The real problem is when your blog will receive the 2nd and 4th penalty because it only means that your blog is already banned from the Google SERP.

So, how do you check if your blog is penalized by Google?

We can check your blog at the Google SERP in few ways:

1) “site:” search

Search Google using “site:example.com”. Replace “example.com” with your blog’s domain.

By doing this search, Google will return in the SERP the list of webpages of your blog that have been indexed by Google.

However, we couldn’t say that your blog was penalized by Google if your blog is new and you don’t know if it was already included in the SERP before.

2) PR checking

Check the PR of your blog if it drops. For example, the PR of this blog before is PR5, but now it’s only PR 2. So, my blog experience a drop of PR.

3) SEO Experiment

You have to do an experiment or an SEO campaign by following the steps below. But it will work only if your blog is not yet banned by the Google.

step 1: Think of the words in which if you google it Google will return nothing at its result page.

For example: My name is “Sustines Laplana“. Before if you’ll google my name the search engine will return no result. But now, if you google my name, the first webpage on the SERP is the About Page of this blog. (view screenshot)

So, why not use your name? But if you think you name is very common, so why not use the name of your father, mother or siblings? You can also invent any words. Just make sure that if you google that term the result returns nothing.

step 2: Write a short article about the term you picked from the step 1.

step 3: Establish a link from your blog’s sidebar to the article you wrote in the step 2 using the term you picked from the step 1.

For example: In step 1, I picked my name “Sustines Laplana”. Then in step 2, I wrote an article and published it here in my blog with the title “About Me”. And on this 3rd step, I put a link at the sidebar of my blog with the anchor text “Sustines Laplana” and it is linking to my article “About Me”.

step 4. After 1 month, google the term you used as the anchor text on the link you did in step 3. If your article is not included at the SERP, then there might be some penalty imposed against your blog.

Old Related Articles

This article is my answer to the request post at the comment section of my article, “Duplicate Contents and Canonicalization“.

And by the way, I wrote articles before that are related to this topic. These are:

1. Is My Blog Penalized by Google?
2. About Supplemental Index
3. Text Link Ads is Banned
4. Google Banned John Chow
5. PR is now useless