Hello All, I've just entered some new European SEO contest for ranking on top of Google for the keyword eurodipity . This is going to be really exciting because this is the first European tournament I've been competing in since last year's world seo championships.

Very soon I'll be able to give you some insides on what's going on with the competition but first I'll have to get my sites indexed and we'll see... read more..

During the last few months I've been noticing serious changes in search engine behaviors especially on my large websites having more than 100k pages. Some of them have been sitting on my HostGator account who's well know as being one of the largest shared hosting overseller offering unlimited domains hosting. When I moved those sites to new dedicated server that I've purchased for my own needs, I've noticed sudden surge of search engine bot activities. The site got crawled by tons of search engines and less than a week later there was more than 600k indexed pages in Google while previously there were around 40k to 60k pages.

My findings confirm that search engine crawlers count the number of domains per IP address and divide the approximate time spent on each one therefore if there are a lot of domains hosted on the same ip address your index time allocation is divided by the number of domains hosted. This immediately results in poor/slow indexing especially on large websites.

The best way to find how many other pages is to run a http://whois.domaintools.com/yourdomain.com and find out your particular name server domains usage. NOTE: This does not work for some hosting companies that use centralized DNS management. If you see more than 2k websites then most definitely that's not accurate and you must find some other way of detecting the domains usage on your shared server. This tool works fine when the name servers are independent for each hosting server. If you see that you account's name servers are something like ns1.hostserv3.com and ns2.hostserv3.com then its most definitely OK and the number should be accurate... read more..

As you may already know I‘m a big fan of the Domain Aftermarket and during the last few years I‘ve collected pretty good domain portfolio. Unfortunately not all domains are as good as they should be and this case is one of them.

Nearly six months ago I‘ve purchased the domain "usemortgages dot com" and I‘ve immediately developed DB Directory with some mortgage related stuff on it. A month later I‘ve noticed that all search engines are still trying to crawl non-existed/out-dated folders and they don‘t want to collect the new information. Google had very low crawling activity (within 1% of the total number content pages) and my site was not indexed on it (not showing any search results). I thought this was due to the large number of 404‘s (page not found) that was generated from the content switching, but this was not the case.

Eventually after more than 5 months of waiting I finally gave up and considered the domain as "blacklisted domain". This ment that I spent all that time for nothing.... read more..

I feel like the King of the Web! Today I found out that I got one of our company websites included in the DMOZ! That‘s a groundbreaking event that is really amazing both to me and my partners. The thing is that we were trying to get DMOZ listing for the last 6 years and after applying so many times we finally got one listing up.

I was about to say that the DMOZ is dead and now they proved me kidn‘a wrong. Its still breathing (from time to time) but its far from being really successful project. The fact that it took me 6 years to get one website up is really weird and I‘m not sure what this means. Now I know that most of my websites are not that high quality but still some of them are proven to be really good and deserve to be listed.... read more..

I‘ve just started working on one quite large and very interesting article labeled "The Online Money Making Machine Guide". As the title describes, I‘m trying to put down one quite comprehensive article or maybe a bit more like a guide on how to build money making machines a sort of MFA but a bit more user and search engine friendlier that regular MFAs

I‘ve been working on this type of websites for quite a while and I‘ve finally managed to make a good scheme to make few bucks on the site by building website blogs with AdSense in mind. This type of websites do not make a lot of money - few dollars a day, but they don‘t really require any time or work, because the setup and initial articles can be done in less than 4 hours and after that you just watch you AdSense drinking your beer.

For this article I wanted to use some actual data as reference points and I‘ve decided to build a brand new website (blog actually) and describe in details how I did it and what happened in each point in time until I start earning money and later on. I guess that‘s going to take few weeks and even maybe a month until I get the whole thing earning money but I‘m not in a hurry and this data is going to help quite a lot as evidence not like other similar articles where the data is totally artificial..... read more..

First I‘d like to say that this has nothing to do with the Sub-Directory Experiment that I‘m currently running, because this is only for directory type of websites. I‘ve noticed that nowadays only directory-directory websites are dying and the chances to get some actual visitors are quite low (we don‘t count the huge number of submitters who don‘t do anything else than submitting more and more listings) we are talking about actual people that visit those directories and use them. Isn‘t that the basic idea behind directories to be used as guides for Internet visitors?

Basically my SEO Experiment on Website Directories is made of two parts. The first part is to check how much PageRank will one directory get if I submit it in 1000 directories. I suppose that if I‘m lucky enough I‘ll get around 40%-50% acceptance rates and with about 400-500 backlinks I should be able to get pr 4 on that particular directory.

On the second directory I will do only blog posts, somewhere around 100-200, and I should get some good backlinks. I‘m assuming that those blog posts will be enough to boost me up to pr 4 and maybe even more (I‘m not sure about that but that‘s why it‘s experiment).... read more..

On top of all the problems that I had recently I’ve just learned that Google is taking serious considerations on websites with high bounce rates and this got me really worried because most of my websites are made in first-page-all content structure and most people don’t bother to click-thru the website as its not mandatory. This website structure generates massive amount of bounce-rates because by definition page bounce rate is the number of people that land on one page and exit from the same. This issue is very bad for my websites because when one person lands on the main/home page about 70% don’t go any further and that generates 70% bounce rate which is quite high.

The other issue that I’ve been observing for quite a while now is that some of my websites rank quite well for irrelevant keywords to my topic/theme and this also generates a lot of bounces since people leave the website quite quickly since they don’t find the content that they were looking for. That issue got really serious in our SEO News Blog where we started the weekly top paying AdSense keywords and due to the high quality of that website we ranked quite high for those keywords and immediately started receiving traffic for them which is 100% irrelevant to our targeted niche. Based on the Google Analytics issue we should lose our ranking for those keywords pretty quickly and more useful website will take our place, but what I’m most afraid is not to get the overall ranking for the relevant/targeted keywords punished because of this issue. I hope the Google engineers are smart enough to figure this out and protect webmasters like me.... read more..

I‘m currently at that point in my SEO career that I‘m really wondering where I‘m heading. Until now I’ve been so obsessed with Google and Google Search Ranking that I merely forgot about the other search engines and I have absolutely no idea where I’m ranking on Yahoo and MSN.

Yesterday I got really curious on the recent tendencies on where search engine traffic comes from and which search engine is the most popular one. The formula is very simple. Popular Search Engine = tons of traffic which on the other hand requires a lot of SEO Optimization in order to rank well and actually get your fair share of this traffic for your targeted keywords. The thing that really amazed me was my finding from Alexa – the website statistics company – showed up on the search engine reach on both Google, Yahoo and MSN/LIVE which totally made me fall of my chair.

As you can clearly see on the graphic above plotting the search reach tendancies for Google, Yahoo and MSN/LIVE for the last five years we can clearly note that there are some serious, somehow weird, changes that I wasn’t aware of. For example we all know that Google was becoming more and more popular from 2001 to 2006, but nobody knew that from the beginning of this year its loosing grounds to Microsoft Search. The thing is that Microsoft search is both MSN and Live as they are virtually the same search engine but with different names and we can clearly see that if we combine the daily reach of both MSN and LIVE it combines to 1.5 times the reach of Google and that’s really amazing amount of traffic.... read more..

I‘ve just completed the first part of the ImWebGuru.com project. The first article series for basic search engine optimizations now cover the topics from jump starting websites to high-end SEO. I‘ve covered all topics on content optimization as well as search engine friendliness and successful website architecture. In my next cycle I‘ll try to cover the Web 2.0 stuff and help our webmaster community take maximum advantage of the hidden capabilities of social bookmarking websites for boosting their backlink counts and get some deep-links.

I‘m really happy that I was able to finish that on time as this website is my pilot project for a larger website community targeted page that I‘m going to build up in few months or so. ImWebGuru.com is fifth website on SEO and Web Development which happened to be quite interesting topics for me as I‘m trying to make full range of topics websites/blogs that will help me promote both the SEO website CMS and the other projects that I‘m trying to run around the web..... read more..

If you check out my previous post on Praying to Google for Higher Pagerank, you can note that I’m trying to figure out a nice cost-effective scheme to boost website pagerank. I’ve been thinking all day long on how much money it will cost me to open 23 web directories and make full scale web promotion with directory submissions and paid blogging in order to make them reach PR4. The basic idea was that when they reach pr4 I’m going to offer paid directory submissions to all the directories until I return my investment and then sell them to cover the expenses for their development, but now I turned my head to one other possibility which seems more flexible and could earn quite more money than by selling directories.

My primary calculations for the promotion costs on each directory in order to reach pr4 was around $90 to $120 UDS, but in reality when I sell them I won’t get better price than $200 for each and that’s not very nice return of investment. Therefore I’m going to make one interesting experiment to see if this will bring more pr and help me earn double, and maybe even triple.

Instead of opening 23 directories, I will open 23 blogs. Those blogs will cost me around $90-$120 (same as directory) to promote to PR4, but a blog can have also a directory as Sub-Domain, and therefore I will spend another $90-$120 in promotion of the Sub-Directory. This will total in around $180-$240 per blog... read more..

Earlier this year when Google purchased the SEO Company Performics it was evident that Google is aiming total Internet search monopoly. When I read that news, I predicted (as a joke actually) that the next company that they will try to acquire will be FeedBurner as FB is the biggest online RSS Feeds distributor and that will complete the picture. In my oppinion Google is trying to get as much as possible information related to Internet website quality and consumption.

FeedBurner is the largest RSS feeds distributor network and has more than 500,000 publishers and accordingly millions of daily readers. Having such data in hand, Google will be able to determine which websites/blogs have a lot of readers and which don‘t and therefore adjust accordingly their rankings in the search results. Currently there was no way for Google to monitor the readership of Internet blogs and the blog ranking was more like blind game. Now I‘m predicting that Google will take all that data and trow out in the garbage the numerous fake/made-up blogs that are out there only for posting website reviews and link farming. This is a great addition after we all know what Google did with Link Buying and that‘s one step higher to achieving its ultimate going in cleansing its index from MFA and Spam websites!.... read more..

Nowadays all Search Engines are getting smarter and smarter and their capabilities to collect/crawl billions of websites and store/cache most of the content is bringing up serious issues for webmasters. As you may know Search Engines are not able to store the all the content and therefore they store vector snapshots of non-common/non-repetitive words that have some meaning in order to decrease the storage space and make it easy for analysis and ranking. If you noticed that when you search in Google (for example) and you type in the wild roses are red the search engine marks up only wild roses and red and had neglected "the" and "and".

When you remove the most-common and junk-words then there are only quite a few words left, and the chances that those word-combinations are not already used by one or few of the billion pages online is quite low and this causes numerous unique content websites to get listed in the supplemental results....... read more..

Yes, Its true that many webmasters that used some not really ethical money-making-techniques did get the warning "your AdSense account will be closed" email. That is simply one of the many efforts for increasing the web quality by Google.

The main reason for banning so many people is the sole reason that MFA Websites with Google AdSense Arbitrage are driving mass amounts of traffic and the low quality MFA websites are generating very high CTR (Clickthru Rate) and this is causing very low ROI (Return of Investment) for the AdWords Advertisers. The sole action of closing such sites is one of the biggest efforts from Google to increase the quality of their AdWords advertising program and lower the advertising costs for many advertising clients and therefore try to attract many new advertisers for their network.

Now the question is should I be afraid of this? Yes I do run some MFA websites but I don‘t do any AdSense Arbitrage and all my traffic comes from organic listings or banner ads which is totally natural and the people that come to my websites are not forced in any way to click on the ads (yes the low amount of content is a reason for high CTR but my statistics show that I don‘t have higher CTR than 40% and average of $30% which is pretty much flag for MFA)..... read more..

In the webmasters business links are gold. Having more links means that the website will be receive a lot of traffic and most probably will high rank on the search engines. Yes, that's what I thought also when I started a experiment campaign with WordPress Theme Sponsorships. I purchased/sponsored 3-4 theme designers to make some very nice themes and distribute them to the wordpress theme download sites. This cost me about $500 and it was supposed to bring so much link-juice that I can finally push my blog to PR5.

But what happened in reality? Yeah, as always, reality is quite different. Search Engine Spam Algorithms are detecting such mass linking campaigns and marking them as Search Engine Spam - they decrease their value to a very small value or nearly zero and basically they become nearly worthless. You can check out this thread in DP discussing Matt Cutts and the Paid Links..... read more..

Many website owners, webmasters and developers don‘t really invest the proper time and resources to increase their website quality and most of them are asking SEM people like me to help them find a reasonable solution.

Today (actually yesterday) I‘ve made my mind to invest a little effort and make a website dedicated to webmasters with the high hopes that they will actually read it and improve the quality of your website. After so many years of website development experience I had learned that some simple strategies and optimization tips are proven to be extremely useful and bring very nice outcome if followed... read more..

Today I found a thread on DB that somebody while digging up the web and looking for new posts by Matt Cutts (the chief engineer of Search Quality at Google) accidentally stumbled at something quite interesting. He found a new patent application filed by Matt Cutts for the new Google raking algorithms that are surprisingly the secret weapon if fighting spam and paid links. That topic is really hot in my point of view and I couldn‘t wait to digg into that.

After few hours of reading and analysing what the patent text was really about I was able to compose a short (2 page) compilation with my own comments on the Google ranking algorithm and what it really means. That article was posted on my newly acquired website SEONewsBlog.com. To read the article please click The new Google Patent and the new quality guidelines . This article should help webmasters understand the new trends that Google is heading. Most of this things I had predicted long time ago by simply investigating the Google search interface, but at that point nobody really listened to me ... read more..

The last few weeks I was very busy doing some SEO/SEM for a client and I really got on the topic. It is very funny that so many people contact my company asking us to develop websites for their companies or whatever, but their knowledge is limited to using them only as Business Cards.

Websites are much more powerful marketing tool but there are not too many people out there that know how to take the full advantages of the Internet. As you know the Internet is the biggest media out there and having a website increases your business‘s visibility drastically. The problem is that most of the people I meet think that by owning a website they will get all that benefits without any effort, but that‘s totally wrong!.... read more..

Finally we were able to make a good stable version of the SEO website cms that works well and satisfies most of our website needs. Now we can finally pour in all content and make our website really popular.

I know I‘ve been promising to update the website more often but never had the chance to actually do it, but now I‘m really serious in getting the whole thing done. I guess I‘m working too hard and there is not so much time left to write anything about myself but I‘m really hoping that I‘ll be able to keep it up to day from now on, especially after the fact that now my website is so easy to manage and add more content.

The only thing I have to figure out is how to put my photo gallery online again because I really hate the old way of putting each picture one by one. That will be something on my to-do list.... read more..