Archives

OK, so I tried to come up with an interesting name for a phenomenon I’ve seen quite a few times now.

The backlink bungy effect is my term when your (or your competitors) search engine rankings get a huge boost and then come bouncing right back soon after.

So what is the cause for this effect?

Well, I first have to mention that search engines can be a law unto themselves and drastically affect your rankings without you touching your website or doing any off-site SEO.

This is most commonly seen in the so called Google Dance, where your site (particularly if it is new) can dance up and down in the Google rankings until it more or less settles down.

Backlink Bungy Effect Causes

The Backlink Bungy Effect is a direct result of two factors:

1.  A particular type of blog comment.

2. The timing of search engines.

Blog Comments On Multiple Pages

One of the most common ways to get a big boost (albeit temporary) in rankings is by placing a comment on a blog that has the “recent comments” widget enabled on the sidebar.

What this effectively means is that if you make one blog comment, it will appear on every single page on the blog.  For some blogs that can run into hundreds of pages.

Even better is when the home page has a good PR, so you get a double whammy from the one comment.

Of course, the effectiveness of the blog comment depends on three factors:

1.  Infrequent comments.  Typically, the list of recent comments in the sidebar is usually limited to the last five or ten comments.  If the blog is very active and there are a lot of comments being made, then your comment will quickly fall off the list.

2.  While a nofollow link is still counted, a dofollow link is going to have a greater impact.

3.  The other critical factor is timing of when a search engine indexes the blog.  If it happens to index the site while your comment is still in the recent comments list, then you’ll get the backlink boost, otherwise there’s no real change.

Don’t Despair

It can sometimes be very perplexing and frustrating when you see your site go up and then right back down again in the rankings, or seeing a competitor shoot above you for no apparent reason.

If you find that happening, it pays to check if you have fallen victim to the Backlink Bungy Effect.

Getting Accurate Search Results

UPDATE MAY 2012 – Scroogle was shutdown in early 2012.   I’ve kept this article for historical reference.

For an updated post with an alternative solution to Scroogle, click here

You’d think that it would be pretty simple to get accurate results for a search query, wouldn’t you?  Put simply, the answer is “no”.

In reality you could be relying on very biased results and getting a false impression of how well your site, or competitors sites are ranking.  You see, every time you do a Google search, Google uses your IP address and cookies and your Google account (if you have one) to customize your search results to make them more “relevant”.  It will return you results based on your previous searches.

If you are doing casual searching, then this isn’t too bad as you’ll generally get results that are more targeted to your profile.  However, if you are trying to get an accurate view on a particular website you are promoting or checking out a competition website, then you may find you’ll be getting misleading results.

The problem is particularly apparent if you are located outside the US as Google will redirect to the Google page for your country and you will get results biased to your country of origin.

How Does Scroogle Help?

Scroogle is a site that allows you to perform unbiased Google searches.   Essentially it does this by ensuring Google can’t set any cookies and randomizes the IP address it uses.  No search terms are stored and logs are deleted within 48 hours.

What this means is that you can perform the same search query over and over and Google will be seeing that query as a unique query and therefore won’t “customize” the search results.

Additionally, Scroogle displays just the search results.  There are no ads, no suggestions etc, just the pure results.

If have privacy concerns, you can use the SSL version of Scroogle to ensure your query and results are encrypted.

If you use Firefox, then you can use the  Scroogle SSL Search plugin to add Scroogle to your Firefox search box.

Search Results

Try the following search test.  From your standard browser, use a search term that you’ve previously searched on.  Then enter the same search term into the Scroogle search box below and compare the results.

Socrates

There’s a new WordPress theme on the block called Socrates.  I’ve been checking out Socrates over the last few days and I have to say that it has some really cool features specifically designed for anyone in Internet Marketing.  In fact, I liked it so much that I installed it on this site.

It’s incredibly flexible and has very easy to use menus to set up all the various monetization features you are likely to need.

This theme was designed specifically towards online marketers, so you find it covers all the areas you need without having to resort to multiple plugins and customizing PHP or CSS code.

Socrates Features

Some of the features include:

• Custom Header Design System
• 160 + Niche Headers
• 1000’s of Design Combinations
• Built in Clickbank Monetization
• Built in Social Media Slider
• WordPress Tutorials and Training
• Internet Marketing Training videos

Out of all those features, the one I like best is the collection of headers available.  There are header images for all the major niches and it has a really cool feature where you can overlay your title (as well as change the font and size) over the image.

See the short video below for a brief summary of some of the features.

What is Caching and Why Does it Matter?

Caching is a facility where data is stored so that subsequent requests  can be served faster.

WordPress pages use PHP (a web programming language).  Every time a page from your WordPress site is viewed by a user, there are all sorts of overheads from having all the PHP code generate the HTML and database calls.  The more users you have hitting your site, the slower the page responses will be.  A cache keeps a static HTML version of the pages, so that if a user requests a page that has already been viewed, they get the cached version and the website doesn’t need to suffer all overheads of generating the page.

In terms of SEO,  Google announced that that page speed will be a factor in search rankings.   The following quote is taken from the Google Webmaster Central Blog:

“Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.“

I’ve emphasised the last part in bold as I think it is a very important point.

While Google only implemented this change in April 2010, and they state that speed doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page, you can be assured that page speed will become a much more important factor as time goes on.

Watch the video below to see what Google have to say about page speed.

WordPress Cache Plugins

There are quite a few WordPress cache plugins.  Some are very specific like “del.icio.us cached++” which caches del.icio.us bookmarks from its RSS feed, but most of the caching plugins are designed to make your WordPress site serve pages faster.

Probably the two most popular caching plugins are WP-Cache and WP Super Cache.  I’ve been using WP Super Cache on all my WordPress sites, but I built a new site today and decided to revisit the plugins.  One cache plugin that caught my eye was Quick Cache.  While I have no specific complaints with WP Super Cache, I decided to give Quick Cache a go.

Main Differences Between Quick Cache & WP Super Cache

The following summary comes from the Quick Cache documentation:

Conclusion

If you have a WordPress site, then enabling caching should be one of the essential tasks you perform.  Make sure you add it to your default list of plugins to be installed.

If you use Firefox, then the Google Page Speed plugin is a very handy tool for measuring the response times of pages.

There are so many article directories available that you could spend a lifetime trying to post to all of them.  However, that would be a monumental waste of time and effort as not all article directories are created equal.  What you really want to do is target your articles to the directories that are going to have the most authority.

In general, this means posting to article directories that have a high PR and have dofollow links.  That last point is very important.  There’s not much point in posting your article to a directory that has nofollow links as that will have minimal/no effect on your search engine rankings.

I’ve put together the following list of what I consider to be the best directories to post to.  If you’ve discovered any others that are valuable, please let me know.

Also, if you are serious about writing articles, you should read my The Best Spinner Review.

There’s a lot of information, misinformation and myths regarding nofollow/dofollow links, so I thought I write a short summary to hopefully clear up some of the confusion.

Firstly, some background.  The ‘nofollow’ HTML attribute was designed by Google in 2005.  The original intent of the design was to prevent all the comment spam that were being posted to blogs from actually being counted as a valid backlink.  I’m sure you’ve seen your blog or forum being blasted with all sorts of spam comments with links to pretty much any type of product/service you can imagine.

So what does ‘nofollow’ actually mean?

A ‘nofollow’ link tells some (mostly Google) search engines that the link should not be counted in the search engine rankings for the site the link points to.

Note that there is no definitive guide as to exactly how each major search engine treats nofollow links as they don’t actively publish the information and sometimes the information they do publish can be contradicted by results obtained via experimental testing.

That said, the following table based on information from Wikipedia, should be accurate enough for most purposes:

Here’s a short video from the horses mouth (so to speak), that talks about how Google treats nofollow links:

What is a dofollow link?

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a dofollow link.  The term dofollow was coined as a way of referring to a link that wasn’t a nofollow link.  Another way of putting it is that any link that doesn’t have the nofollow HTML attribute is treated as a standard link and is followed by search engines.

A dofollow link is a lot more valuable in terms of SEO than a nofollow link.  That’s not to say a nofollow link is worthless, but you are much better spending your time getting dofollow links.

If you do a Google search for “dofollow blog”, you’ll find plenty of resources to add your links to.

A while ago,  Free Traffic System users were asked to send niches where they need established sites with targeted traffic from search engines. The information was gathered in a Request a Niche poll.

Below you can see a table with the results of the most demanded niches.

This information is very useful if you are planning on creating a niche site with the intention of building traffic and ranking and then selling the domain.  It is also useful for knowing what niches people are wanting to most be involved with.