A Level Playing Field?

You have heard it so many times from countless internet marketing gurus: the internet allows regular people to start a business online and compete with the big guys, hence what they describe “a level playing field“. They have been preaching this mantra for the last 15 years, and while that may have been true in the early days of the internet, come 2010 things certainly don’t look so glamorous anymore.

Anybody who starts a business online faces numerous challenges such as stiff competition, picking the wrong niche in the market place, pay-per-click ads that are overpriced, spam, website attacks, black hat SEO techniques to bring down your site, malicious code placed on your site through vulnerabilities in software you site is running (such as Wordpress) etc.

Many people still (wrongly) believe that all they need is traffic. Work on SEO, rise in the search engines and you’ll make money guaranteed. Of course, many internet marketing gurus claim that SEO is the most important piece to success on the internet (just watch a few videos and see how THEY are getting top rankings in Google and making big bucks in their affiliate accounts, it’s like making money on autopilot while you’re sleeping). But SEO should only be a small portion of your entire marketing scheme. What is almost equally important these days, is security. Security as in securing your webserver.

I have been dealing with some security issues myself and will write about them in upcoming posts. There is so much money to be made on the internet these days that crooks, parasites and con artists are constantly finding new clever ways to rip people off (both your customers and you, the business owner). Right now, I would like to mention 2 excellent blogs (about security) that will give everyone who owns a website an idea what they’re up against:

• Dancho Danchev’s blog Very detailed and entertaining blog with frequent posts about the scum of the internet. See how cyber criminals and internet parasites find security holes in almost everything to lure/force people in buying fake security scanners for their PC and other rip-off schemes.
• Unmask Parasites blog Read about obfuscated javascripts, twitter exploits, worms, viruses, Wordpress hacks and more. If you weren’t paranoid before, you might as well be. Unmask Parasites also offers a free vulnerability scan for you site: you need to scan every page separately, but I would start with your homepage and some of your blog pages.

So it may well be that you are doing everything right in one area (SEO) and the reason that your site is lacking in the SERPs is because of exploits on your server or nasty black hat SEO attacks by your competition.

Some people don’t believe in internet marketing anymore. On the following blog, you can read some entertaining posts about why internet marketing sucks…

OnlyWire Review: A Powerful Button?

As many webmasters are always on the lookout for new and easy applications that will make their search engine optimization efforts more ‘productive’, SEO services such as OnlyWire quickly become popular.

OnlyWire is a service that let you place multiple bookmarks across social bookmark sites with just a click of a button. The advertising hook they use is that with “the power of the button“, you can quickly place numerous bookmarks of your favorite (read “your own”) content across as many social media sites you choose.

They currently offer 2 service levels: one is free and requires that you add their bookmarking button all over your website, which may not be desirable by some, in particular if you prefer other bookmarking tools for your readers such as “share this”. The other option they offer is a paid version for $2.99 per month or $24.99 annually. This may not sound like much, but why should you pay for a service that borders on spamming and something does not bring back many valuable back links, as most social media sites use no follow on their outgoing links?

The “button” installs very easily as a plug-in for Firefox. They may come out with plugins for additional browsers.

The first question you’ll have to ask yourself, is how many social media accounts do you really need? Are the accounts at delicious, digg and Stumbleupon not enough?

Anyway, how does OnlyWire’s “easy” claim hold true?

It is indeed extremely easy to place your bookmarks across social media sites (once you have set up all you accounts with clever usernames and unique passwords). In fact, it is almost too easy to place your links and it almost feels like you’re spamming. Because of the no-follow policy of most social media sites, it almost becomes a trivial exercise of placing your links on any of those social sites: Do you really think you may get visitors from those links, even if those links are worthless from an SEO standpoint (no link juice)?

OnlyWire does do a good job at listing all the sites you submitted your “bookmark” to. However, it would be nice if the software would allow you to spin the descriptions and titles of your submissions. That way it would keep everything a bit more unique, will help with overall SEO and would not feel so much as spamming.

The nofollow Tag: To Follow or Not To Follow?

The no-follow tag (rel=”nofollow”) was introduced a while ago in order to stop comment spam on blogs and is now often used by webmasters to stop the leaking of “link juice” to external websites. In recent years, it has been proposed that webmasters can use the no-follow technique to move PageRank around their own sites and prevent the indexing of so-called unimportant pages on their websites. While this sounds straightforward, is this something that can be used safely?

It sounds fairly easy: use the no-follow tag on your own website to prevent the spreading of link juice to pages that are considered un-important or pages that are informational only and do not generate any money. Examples of such pages are the privacy policy and the contact us pages. However applying this no-follow technique has to be done and planned for carefully if you don’t want to run into any potential indexing problems.

The no-follow tags can be applied to internal links of a brand-new website and the chance for getting it wrong is fairly small. But if you apply the no-follow tags to pages of an established website in order to move PageRank around, you could run into some serious indexing problems: You could lose not only the PageRank of the pages you apply “no-follow” to, but your entire site could lose PageRank all together due to search engine spiders being caught in “loops” created by the incorrect application of the no-follow tags. Of course, you’ll find this out months later, when you have lost precious PageRank and visitors.

In my opinion, it’s better to use the no-follow tag on your blog if you have to use it at all. I don’t recommend using it on your regular (established) web pages that already have PageRank. Even your privacy policy and contact pages are important “contributors” to the overall PageRank of your entire website.

PageRank is a trademark of Google