Posts tagged ‘search engines’

AdSense – 10 years on

It was probably entirely predictable that the 10th anniversary of AdSense should have caused a surge of interest among webmasters. Yesterday I received a few emails alerting me to new blog posts on the subject.

The first to come in was Ophelie Lechat’s Flippa newsletter. In it she mentioned that Flippa had carried out a survey of their users in May and found that 24% of their survey respondents claimed that their AdSense revenue had increased over the last year.

This didn’t seem to match the experience of most people I know, so I started a discussion about it on the Experienced People forum.

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Long-Tail Keyword Strategy – some thoughts of a sceptic

Someone mentioned long-tail keyword strategy to me recently and I expressed scepticism as to whether it still worked these days. Quite reasonably, he asked me why I had that opinion, and “Er, just because that’s what I think” didn’t seem like a good enough answer. I had to justify my views somehow. Thus I spent the next few days reading everything up-to-date I could get my hands on about the subject, plus asking a lot of questions on various forums. Some of the discussions are behind paywalls so I can’t link to all my sources. Let’s see how I got on in my quest to discover if targeting the long tail is a good strategy or not in 2013.

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What’s all this about link building?

I’m always on my soap box complaining about link builders, and some people have asked me why I have such a hive of bees in my bonnet about them. This posting is an attempt to explain my take on the issue. As always, if I’ve got it wrong, feel to use the comments box below to correct me or to give your own views on the matter. This is just how I see it.

Several years ago, there was a simple recipe for success on the Internet for those who didn’t have the skills to create their own products or even to add anything useful to the Internet. The simple recipe was to do keyword research, find high value keywords, provide ‘good enough’ content, do a link building campaign, rank high in Google, and rake the money in. What most of these things had in common was that they relied on having a high rank in Google to get the free traffic. Most Internet-savvy people know that this doesn’t work any more.

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"Do not feed the Internet" by John Atkinson of Wrong Hands

How spammy forum posts can hurt you

I have a friend who runs a nice little community forum. After several years of friends just ‘chatting’ online, the forum has suddenly started to become something of a spam magnet. Actually, I think they’re lucky to have been able to avoid the vermin for so long. I could immediately see several ways how the forum could be improved to keep the spam down, and suggested them.

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