SE Conspiracy

*Things change quickly, so for relevance, please note the date of this article.

I’ve been noticing around the Internet lately that top rankings only seem to pay off for extremely popular phrases such as “Credit Cards” and “Health Insurance.” I guess those phrases will be popular even within a small search engine. But, what about phrases like “Platinum Credit Cards” and “Health Insurance Quotes?” Do they actually generate worthwhile traffic?

Let’s take a look, shall we?

I was going to break this down by each of the three major search engines, but they all seem to have basically the same result. So, I’ll summarize them as a whole and pick out the slight differences. I’m searching for “Platinum Credit Cards” and I’m only counting what’s on the front page. It is not easy to rank well for this phrase, so you have to know you will be spending some money to get there.

Now, I’m seeing that there are mostly actual credit card companies as the bulk of the results -which is expected. All three major search engines have done a good job of weeding out the affiliate-only or ads-heavy sites and replaced them with actual, legitimate results (i.e. the companies themselves and only a couple of high-end referral directories).

The actual companies have high traffic -which is also expected, but there are a couple of sites in the results (across all three engines) that have little to no traffic at all. In fact, in MSN, the number #1 result (as of this posting) has absolutely no Alexa rank and probably fewer than 10 actual visitors per month!

One of the sites with very little traffic is in the top #10 across all three major search engines, and yet it has so little traffic. If that particular site earns enough in credit card referrals to cover the cost of its SEO campaign, I would be very surprised.

The remainder of the sites all have very high traffic -which we can now deduce did not come from the SE’s- and heavy advertising is the reason for their success.

So, is it better to spend your marketing dollars on SEO or on direct advertising?

Now, let’s check out the next phrase. I am now searching for “Health Insurance Quotes” and here’s what I found:

We have basically the same mixture as before with a good concentration of the actual insurance companies and only a small portion of directory or review sites. This is a major improvement over the results from 2005 and 2006.

On a side note: During 2005 and 2006, I was beginning to think there was a conspiracy whereby Google was sending traffic to only sites that couldn’t possibly make any money. But, since their results have improved drastically, I suppose I’ll put that conspiracy theory on the back-burner.

So, back to the results, I see the same thing as before. We have several sites that have high traffic but they are the actual companies who receive quite a bit of type-in traffic and they have high budget marketing campaigns. However, there are even more sites in these results -across all the major search engines- that are review sites, and all of them have pitiful traffic. Most of them are found in the top 10 across all three search engines, but they are either “decent traffic” or so little traffic it doesn’t matter. Since there is a site with no traffic at all but is at the top of two search engine results, I can only feel that the “decent traffic” sites must have more advertising besides just search engine optimization.

At any rate, I feel that we can conclude from these findings that the search engines do not really send that much traffic -even for quality terms- if you are not ranking for the most generic and high traffic terms. It’s either that or the sites with little to no traffic are being overlooked by searchers in lieu of more “recognizable” names.

Could it be that searchers have matured to the point that they are better judges of relevance on their own? Could it be that marketing and brand awareness is having an effect on which links a user clicks when they are searching?

You tell me.

I can understand why webmasters would want to try using social bookmarking as a form of advertising their site. I mean, there’s a lot of traffic being funneled through StumbleUpon, Digg, Del.icio.us, and others.

So, why doesn’t it work well for the SEO gurus?

The answer is simple, actually, and you probably already know why (if you use those services) or you might have already guessed it (if you’ve done your homework). In a nutshell, straight advertising on social bookmarks doesn’t work because the mindset of the people there is dead set against being advertised to.

Who wants to see a bunch of ads after they just got home from work or they just got done washing clothes and taking care of the kids. People join social services like StumbleUpon (visit site) to “veg out“; not to “buy now” or “learn how to market online.”

StumbleUpon is a very addictive social bookmarking site -i.e. a site that allows users to share sites they like and weed out those they don’t. This particular site allows you to “Stumble” upon new sites that you haven’t seen but others wanted to share. Lots of fun.

In all actuality, the social bookmarking sites are gaining a share of television’s audience. There is a growing number of people who trade off some time being a couch potato for being entertained online. And therein lies the key. They go there to be entertained. So, if a site or article pops up that looks like an advertisement, the community as a whole will move quickly to weed it out.

I can appreciate their pain, and I saw it verbalized on an article on Digg (visit site) recently that was titled “SEO Spammers: Leave Social Media Sites Alone” (view submission). If you take a moment to look at the comments for that article, you’ll very quickly see the strong feelings on the subject. And, I can understand. When you’re on a social networking or bookmarking site, you’re there to chill. You’re there to relax. You want to let loose and let your guard down. You can’t do that if you bombarded with offers, ads, and spam.

From my own experience, I know that traffic from StumbleUpon and Digg can be rewarding but it’s not really the kind of traffic that an SEO (search engine optimizer) should be targeting. Ultimately, that audience won’t buy. It seems that -as is backed up in the Digg article mentioned earlier- SEO spammers don’t care about the direct traffic anyway. They only care about spamming the search engines for higher rankings. This type of spamming is less than 1% effective, but -as with spam- that’s all a spammer may need to be successful!

I just started this blog recently, and one of the first articles I wrote was an article about the mess that Google is creating. I had been writing that article in my head for months, and when I finally got it published on here; I showed it to a bunch of my friends online and in real life. I got a lot of kudos and great feedback and I even got quite a few people to join Digg and StumbleUpon after I told them what it was all about. Now, they’re hooked! But, the point was that my friends alone helped get my article placed fairly high within Digg but it ultimately got “buried” because it’s just not “pure entertainment” and didn’t “fit” there.

My article was a great piece to make you think, but I know when I’m “digg’ing” or “stumbling”, I don’t *want* to think! I want to relax. So, I cannot blame anyone for the article getting buried. That just tells me that isn’t my audience. Surprisingly, though, StumbleUpon also sent quite a bit of traffic and it seems that a good many more people from there actually were interested. I think that maybe users of StumbleUpon are more webmaster-related than users of Digg. I see Digg as more of a media company that is more of a threat to news and other media companies than a threat to other social bookmarking sites.

To me, Digg seems like the kind of site to compliment YouTube and may one day get bought out for that purpose. StumbleUpon is more based on the old “Paid to Surf” websites but with the twist of viewing stuff you want to view. They will be around for awhile. It will be interesting to see where they go. In the meantime, check out these sites. If you’re not a member, you might just be surprised and get hooked!

What do you think?

Do you use a social bookmarking site? Are you a webmaster?

I love to hear your feedback!

Update: Previously, I did not have a chance to really look into Sphinn, but it appears to be relevant to this blog. So, perhaps that is a market I can cater to. We shall see if my submissions are “hot” or “not”.. lol

I was just searching through my statistics logs on several of my sites tonight, and I discovered something interesting. I noticed that my traffic hasn’t gone down on any of my sites over the past year. In fact, traffic has mostly increased while my Alexa ranks have tanked. Why does that surprise me? It surprises me because my income has tanked along with my Alexa rank and I assumed that my traffic must’ve died. So, what happened?

I have been so busy and involved with developing “Shrink The Web”, “LinkSmile”, and “jAvVy” that I haven’t even bothered keeping up with my traffic versus conversions versus income. Now that I’m done with those projects and analyzing things again, it seems to me that I’m getting as much -if not more- traffic than last year but the conversions are down. Could it be that my newer content is so poor that it no longer converts? Or, is it more likely that the quality of traffic has gone downhill?

To answer that question, I’ve asked for feedback from several fellow webmasters and really pushed them to take a quick look at their stats versus their income. Can you guess what we found? They have several top rankings for some key phrases and those yield less traffic than before (in some cases the same) , yet their income has been declining for years.

Has the struggle for “high rankings” become a quest for fool’s gold?

This income depression seems to affect sales as well as clicks on advertisements (such as Google Ads, Yahoo! Ads, etc). In general, everyone reported the same click-through on advertisements but only 1/3 of the income year over year. It would seem that it is not our content that is failing us; it is the search engines.

Could it actually be possible that the quality (and possibly the amount) of traffic coming through Google, Yahoo, and MSN is really quite a bit less than last year or the year before?

I did notice a direct correlation between my recent increase in advertising and a noticeable increase in conversions. So, I know my direct advertising is working. How then is it that my other traffic seems so worthless?

How’s this for a conspiracy theory: “What if the major search engines are no longer moving the traffic they once were and they are filling the gap with massive parked traffic or bought visitors?”

Would that then explain this low quality of traffic that still floods some of my sites?

Would that explain why I’m seeing conversions as low as when I used to bid for placement in excite, goclick, and looksmart?

Would that help to explain why Google is distracting us all with this PageRank versus traffic versus text links mumbo-jumbo? I’m sure any truth to a massive drop in traffic wouldn’t help their over-inflated stock price …or their ego for that matter.

The site statistics shown below were taken from one of our sites that employed no SEO “techniques” except for on-page optimization (not too much though). We advertised in related spaces to drive traffic and the site also did well from more than 5,000 natural backlinks.

First, let’s paint the picture of the traffic and revenue losses:

1. In 2005, I saw a HUGE dip in traffic across all of my sites. There were no bans and no other reasons to explain the loss in traffic. This site held Top 1 to Top 5 rankings for years.



2. The Google traffic dropped by 79.3% and conversions dropped by 31.8%. The Google traffic did pick back up at one point and surpassed Jan figures but it tanked by November 2005 -appearing to be a complete “de-listing.”

Stats for Jan 2005	Stats for Feb 2005

3. Yahoo and MSN continued to send quality traffic throughout most of the year but when that traffic dropped off in Nov and Dec, I saw a 47.4% decline in overall traffic from the January drop and another 68% decline in revenue! Google traffic nearly ceased altogether and represented 17.8% of the overall traffic lost from Feb to Dec.

Stats for Nov 2005	Stats for Dec 2005

From that period on, a search in the specific niche this website served would return nothing but absolutely spammy, affiliate, or made-for-adsense sites. The results were absolutely useless in this niche until earlier this year!

In mid-2007, this site was re-listed and regained its former top 5 ranking in this niche area. So, how many visitors do you think we get from Google, Yahoo, and MSN?

Let’s take a look at our visitors so far in December (13 full days), shall we?

Now that is a pathetic amount of traffic for having such high rankings. If that weren’t bad enough, the “doubled” traffic (yes, 100% increase from October 2007) has prompted our income to increase only marginally (something like 5%) as a result of our newly re-acquired high rankings for key terms.

So, after reviewing all of this data, two thoughts stand out in my mind:

1. “high rankings” generate a small fraction of pre-2005 rankings, and
2. boosts in visitors are comprised of 95% worthless traffic

This is precisely why I haven’t cared much about PageRank, Rankings, or SEO over the past couple of years. I no longer see the point. Perhaps certain industries still prosper and profit from this traffic but not mine -and my companies serve a wide range of niche markets.

Anyone else feel like search engine optimization isn’t worth the investment in time and money anymore?

The only things that seem to work for me are buying quality advertising on related websites willing to place banners or links in premium locations -whether they be direct links, nofollow, or javascript. Sponsored email campaigns can also be effective and we see some “light” benefit to pay-per-click campaigns in certain niches.

Perhaps link buying and selling has gotten so much attention lately because it is actually hurting search engines more in the pocket than anything. Perhaps visitors are finding sites through links, banners, and social bookmarking sites instead of by searching.

To help shed some light on the 2005 drop -which a couple of my webmaster friends also identified as a critical point, I decided to do some more research. The most relevant articles that might hint to the root of the problem and related closely to today’s issues are:

1. Google “Backlink Update” (Jan 1, 2005)
   http://www.prweaver.com/blog/2005/01/02/81-google-dance-alert
2. Google, Yahoo, and MSN Unite on NoFollow (Jan 18, 2005)
   http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050118-204728

Anyone else find that interesting?

Would it be safe to assume that this depression of traffic many of us see today has anything at all to do with the big push for rel=nofollow?

All I know is that if my conspiracy theory is true, then Google is doing a fantastic job at distracting webmasters (and therefore investors) from the truth. It also makes me wonder, “Who will have the power position in five (5) years, if all the traffic is dispersing again?”

Has anyone else felt that Google is coming off like an overbearing tyrant lately?

If you are not a webmaster, you probably think, “What? Google? Don’t they just help people find things on the web?” But, for us webmasters, it’s a bit of a different story. Behind that red curtain is a little man pulling some BIG strings.

The Internet has been maturing quickly over the past few years and it’s users have matured with it. In turn, webmasters have seen increasing competition and strive to draw attention in a burgeoning marketplace that somehow seems to grow more crowded each and every day. Competition is fierce and low-cost advertising has become all but extinct.

So, what’s an eager entrepreneur to do to advertise their site?

Basically, you have a few advertising options but most are ineffective. It would seem that resorting back to buying links and banners on websites is the grass roots of the Internet. I mean, in the beginning long before Google (hard to believe there was a time before Google, isn’t it?), the only thing we had were links and banners. In fact, they are the ultimate foundation for all things Internet.

Quite a commotion, however, has been stirred recently due to a rash of “de-listings” related to businesses buying and selling text links. Who’s place is it to tell people how they can or can not advertise their businesses? Google was founded on the idea of “Link Popularity”, but it sounds like they are unable to cope with “Purchased Link Popularity” to the point that they are just grabbing at straws now.

Realistically, it is up to the Search Engines to write an algorithm that takes into account things like purchased links and advertisements. It is not up to the Internet to bend to Google’s will or any other search engine’s will for that matter. I keep getting this overwhelming impression that webmasters are supposed to believe that “whatever is good for Google is good for the Internet.” It is arguable that people should not sell “PageRank”, because it is not a reliable indicator of true importance and because it can be manipulated. However, if you take away the “PageRank” or any other indicator of importance, what do you have left? Is the page then more or less important than it was before? No, not at all.

It is nice to be able to glance at some sort of indicator and get an idea of how important a website is considered, because that could help decide whether or not to advertise on it. But, uh-oh, that means we might be tempted to buy a text link or a banner on an important site. Is that bad?

Back in the day, Sergey Brin and Larry Page had the epiphany that links were a trustworthy judge of importance. As with everything, things change. People adapt, and so the webmasters adapted. As webmasters matured in knowledge of marketing, they began to realize the importance of the most basic forms of advertising. Perhaps a good many have tried to take the easy road to success and manipulate their way to the top, but the root of the problem is that -like all things- search engines and their algorithms must evolve.

Continuing on the current path will simply cause millions of webmasters to stop outbound linking to sites (at least not without rel=nofollow or using some other tricks), and that could potentially lead to a lot bigger problems than we have now.

The bottom line is that search engines must evolve and adapt or simply become obsolete. If that happens, who will be there to clean up Google’s mess?

In response to the recent rash “de-listings” against sites listed in the Text Link Ads inventory, I decided to launch a new niche marketplace that specifically highlights “Search Engine Safe” advertising.

Ultimately, that means it allows advertisers who will be using our automated code or be placing advertisements with a rel=nofollow tag.

It is interesting to note that I do not agree that rel=nofollow is something that webmasters should be forced to do, but I saw an opportunity and designed this marketplace around it.

Take a look at: http://www.javvy.com/

We will be updating and adding many listings over the next month or so. So, stay tuned!

I am a bit of an entrepreneur, some might say. I’ve started numerous companies and built most of them from the ground up. Many companies I built simply because I was told it was “impossible” to do because of technology limitations. I love overcoming those barriers and experiencing the thrill of achieving something that no one else has been able to do yet.

Some of the niches I’ve built companies within include:

• Web Hosting - http://www.imagion.com
• Web Design - http://www.imagion.com/web_design.htm
• Travel - http://www.costaricabeachvacation.com
• Expired Domains - http://www.namecart.com
• Ad Marketplaces - http://www.javvy.com and http://www.linksmile.com
• Technology Consulting - http://www.neosys.net (my bread and butter)
• Search Engine - http://www.neobus.com (crawler and algorithm)
• Shrink The Web - http://www.shrinktheweb.com
• Affiliate Marketing - various niche websites (cash cow)

Doing the Impossible

I built a proprietary technology using Cold Fusion that allowed me to really make a dent in the travel agency web design business by offering low-cost websites with a ton of updated content and services using just one line of code in the page. It was a service ahead of its time. That was the one company that almost made me very wealthy but I had to leave the country (my short bio) and lost everything.

Doing the Impossible Again

Then, I built a proprietary technology to manage text link advertisements -even in HTML pages. It -too- was ahead of its time. Now, Google is trying to stifle competition by “outlawing” text link ad sales. It’s arguable about whether they are being effective or not. From my perspective, it seems all they are doing is changing a little color bar from blue to white (i.e. PageRank isn’t even close to being a reliable indicator of importance). I cover that a little more in another article about my NoFollow Marketplace.

Technology Barriers are Old Hat by Now

Perhaps my own personal crowning achievement was getting Shrink The Web to work. This service is a website thumbnail generator service much like Alexa thumbnails. One difference is that it is free and will remain so. There are now a good many sites popping up and offering thumbnail services. However, I wanted a service that I knew would always be free and I could integrate into Flash, PHP, HTML, or anything I want. I also needed to be sure that the service didn’t disappear like so many other failed attempt fly-by-nights on the Internet. The only solution was to create it myself.

The difficulty in that, though, was that nearly all code written to support such a venture is made to run on the Windows platform. Since I have all Linux servers, that posed a bit of a problem. I also didn’t have the financial means to pay for an expensive Windows server when I have half a dozen dedicated servers sitting around at 2% utilization.

So, I began my quest. I ended up finding a nifty little open source utility called “WebThumb” that is offered for free at boutell.com. The address (to learn more) is: http://www.boutell.com/webthumb/

It didn’t work on my RedHat 4 installation for some reason -even after I installed every requirement. It would almost work but would crash constantly. I don’t know Perl code, but I’m a quick learner and that kind of stuff comes naturally to me. So, after a day or two, I did manage to get it working. The problem was that it kept crashing and seemed to have a memory leak. Now, I’m not saying the code isn’t well-written. It probably is well-written, but I honestly wouldn’t know. As in most cases, the problem most likely is simply the limitless variety of server configurations.

In the end, I decided to write my own variation from scratch. I know PHP really well now that I’ve built so many sites around it, so I chose to write it in that code. After fourteen (14) intense days of coding, I got a working prototype. I must say, I almost gave up on this project. It would’ve been the first project I ever failed to accomplish in all my years of consulting and developing technologies. I thought I had been beaten, but then I had a little breakthrough and the rest -as they say- is history. Once I got it working, I also had the same problems with firefox eating up memory and then crashing the server.

Now that I think about it, I figure that was the original problem -some bug or memory leak with the firefox version; not with WebThumb itself.

In any case, I spent the next several days coding in routines to monitor server health and firefox resources and eventually got a very stable, working version of “ShrinkWeb.” Surprisingly, it not only worked, but my server is running so much better than ever! lol.

My Bread and Butter

For years before I left the US for personal reasons, I made my living off of security and network consulting. I completed projects for bio-pharmaceutical, large telecom, cellular, software, and banking organizations. I was literally at the top of my game. I had achieved certifications such as: CISSP, CCNA, MCSE, MCP+I, MCT, and A+. I won’t go into what those mean, because you might already be drifting off to sleep from this long post! haha.

Suffice it to say that I did very well for myself with consulting and it funded all of my other ventures and developments. Here is my resume‘. Unfortunately, the government has unfairly “branded me” with a scarlett letter otherwise known as a felony. As ridiculous as the charges against me were, they went to great lengths to coerce me and force me to plead guilty. Now, that little piece of paper serves as my death sentence. I am fighting against all odds now in an attempt to change the fate that two crooked cops have given me (my bio).

My Affiliate Marketing Cash Cow

In the end, it was affiliate marketing that got me through the hard times when I was unable -through no fault of my own- to generate a normal income. Like so many others, I turned to the Internet and discovered Internet Marketing. But, unlike so many others, the veil had already been lifted from my eyes and I could see through the lies and deceit surrounding the BIG money claims.

So, I knew who to avoid and I would only buy a program, if I couldn’t figure out what was the gimmick. My sole purpose in buying any program is always to tear it apart and find the flaw or catch. I haven’t looked lately at what’s available, but back in 2003-2004, I know there wasn’t much in the way of honest ebooks/services to help you make money. Mostly, people on the Internet get rich by telling other people “how to get rich”. Hmm.. where have I seen that before??

I started up a couple of websites and spent a lot of time writing quality content to help people decide which insurance to choose, how to fix and build their credit, how to take paid surveys, etc. I employed a variety of marketing tactics to generate traffic (no black hat SEO, though) and I found that the most successful was buying expired domains with existing backlinks (i.e. existing traffic) and also buying links (hard-coded or javascript) in premium spots on related sites.

I went from $0/month income and spending $500/month in advertising to generate more than $10,000/month (i.e. sometimes $700+ per day) in just 3-4 months time! That lasted for about two (2) years, but after more hardship had befallen me, I was unable to manage or maintain my companies for seven (7) months. My companies eventually began to fail. For most of last year, I saw my income drop to just under $1,000 per month. Now after three (3) solid months of rebuilding efforts, my income from affiliate marketing is up to but still only $2,000/month (as of this month) and although that sounds great to many people, it barely covers my business expenses. I still have living expenses to pay, so it’s not really that great.

But, the point of telling you all of that is to let you know that there is potential and there is money out there. You just have to be careful who you choose to listen to and trust before you lose all your money. You gotta find your niche and make your money before you run out. Spending all your dollars, euros, or whatever currency on worthless ebooks or promoted programs will quickly put you in the poor-house.