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Don’t Lose Yourself in a Startup

Friday, August 20, 2010

hacker news keyboard

Play Doh Ritalin

My girlfriend had a training session the other day.  She was thrilled that the instructor brought in play doh to keep her occupied while she listened to the session.  Without the play doh, she would have been texting or day dreaming.  She mentioned that her old trainers used to bring in pipe cleaners for people to toy with.  My desk is now covered in play doh creations made by the most delicate of finger presses in an array of neon colors.

Keyboard Scrabble

My desk is also covered in papers, markers, books and various electronics.  There was a paper on HN about keeping your area as empty as possible, but I only lasted for a month.  I noticed my productivity has been dropping lately.  17 hours in front of the monitor daily with around 2-3 hours worth of work to show for the effort.  I thought my failure might be due to the fact that I gave up on a spotless area.

I tested her instructor’s theory by playing YouTube videos at 2x speed while rearranging my keyboard keys into random words.  Usually, I would be browsing while the lectures played in the background.  I listened to the lectures for around four hours.  The result was a glorious keyboard reconfiguration that spelled “hacker, news, .com, hi, gulf, turbo vd (what).  Wait, the result was I couldn’t manage to type my password without a glance at the keyboard because I’m too used to flashing back and forth after 13 years, or that my three key doesn’t play well with the period key.

Actually, I soaked in quite a bit of information while puzzling with my keyboard.  I also took three full pages of notes… I’ve never taken a note while listening to YouTube lectures.  I continued on for a bit recalling some of the information, and then, out of nowhere, I started writing like a maniac for 6 hours about my main project.  Four hours of YouTube + keyboard scrabble + brainstorming was greater than the past 5 days of 17 hour work days.

Conclusion

Work; work hard.  Chug the red bulls and starve to death.  Just don’t forget to take a step away from the scene, and get a grasp on the bigger picture of what you’re trying to achieve.  I probably didn’t need to destroy my keyboard, but maybe a walk in the sun or something of that nature.  I get so absorbed in new projects that sometimes I lose myself in the smaller details.  What results is a product that never comes to life!  What good is a product which only has a starting point?  Should I be worrying that my regex for the email submit’s filter component doesn’t accept some random tld or that my product is still missing core features?

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HobbyTron — What’s going on there?

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Three days with no sleep.  While working on a SEO tutorial 10 people might see, I ran across an anomaly called HobbyTron in Google Keyword Tool.  I thought I was just dozing off again.  How does it make sense that an electronics store can afford $50 per click?  This hobbytron site must be daily steak&lobster-profitable to be able to dump a $60k budget into Adwords per month, right?

This keyword is showing high CPC

Overview of Hobbytron

HobbyTron.com is a website that sells toys and electronics.  Consisting of an inventory that would keep a 10 year old interested for a few days and  items that might grab the attention of adults.  The prices in the online store are about matched up with the prices on Amazon (~10% overhead).  Overall, the quality of the site is somewhat like the e-commerce stores of 2002.

But MS shows HobbyTron at only $1 per click!

This is the first thing I checked.  Maybe its just someone toying in Adwords and bugging out the results with frozen campaigns or zeroed accounts!  That must be it.  MS show me the money.

You can now leave the blog now, oh wait

Oh yeah, I can finally goto sleep!  Obviously it was just a keyword tool bug.  Yeah, a bug!  No one in their right mind would pay $50/click for an ad when their own site is already #1 in the SERPS for the keyword.  Oh well, time for WHAT THE HELL why did I open AdWords?

Just to get some closure on the subject,  I created a new campaign and toss in hobbytron into the query with a $10,000 budget.  Yeah, its not over, check it out:

The adword results are in, $60k a month keyword

$2126.35 is spent daily on the #1 position for hobbytron or $63,790.35 over 30 days.  Most advertisers do buy the top ad for their domain’s title.  If you search for “nerdkits”, you will notice that nerdkits has a competitor buying the main ad spot.  If you search for “hobbytron”, you will notice that just their advertisement and site idle at the top. No competitors or anything of that nature occupying the adspace.

Why I’m Annoyed

Other than stumbling upon this and wasting a portion of my morning writing this post and researching this keyword?  I searched the keyword right away.  The site was full of holes, half the links were blank.  I kept looking at those items on Amazon and realized the correlation between the customer reviews on HobbyTron’s Facebook/Twitter link ring and disgruntled users in Amazon with those same products.  They have exact same complaints on both sites: Item A arrived broken/shattered into pieces, Item B doesn’t work at all, Item C lasted 3 days, Item D was never shipped and I’ve called over 200 times this week without an answer.  They’ve felt the burn of Consumer reports and various other sites.  Most of the results in Google’s index for hobbytron in the top10 consist of complaints and negative consumer reports.

This site is obviously a scam.  They’re selling shoddy products or not shipping them at all.  They’re also starting fake companies on Amazon, and avoiding negative feedback from what I can piece together.  Instead of sinking money into SEO consultants and Adwords campaigns, maybe they should try putting some cash into customer service?

Please, correct me if I am wrong.  Am I staring at this picture for too long?  There’s a paper trail in Google tools and footprints that seems obvious to me.  Is hobbytron just a company that started a decade ago, got overwhelmed/greedy, invested money into all the wrong parts?

Perhaps I’m misinformed about services Google offers!  It was my understanding that #1 payer for an Adword gets the top position over a certain threshold of money/relevance to the search.  If relevance is 100% and money is >5 cents, that should be plenty for this company to maintain their #1 in serps with a glorious ad right above them for less than $15/mo with 60k impressions/mo at 5c/cpm-cpc.

One final thought, you can place your business on Google Maps for $25 a month.  Perhaps, if your business is on maps and you run an Adwords campaign, Google makes the competitive Adwords price much higher?  I still don’t like the shady business they run…

Filed in Adsense, Adwords, SEO, Search Engine Optimization | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Almost Lost my Niche Site in Google’s Index

Thursday, August 19, 2010

As I (have/will have) discussed in articles on this site, keyword research is a pain.  So when Google drops the ban hammer on a niche site, there is a flood of guilt, remorse and denial when it comes to seeing your site vanish from the search engine.  Countless hours of finding a good keyword, researching domains, possibly investing in a premium domain, setting up your hosting and securing it, creating your website, and all of the content you published on it; all for nothing.  Why?  You failed to read the Adsense Policy and Webmaster Guidelines.  Google Webmaster Toolkit has a HTML suggestions tool to show you information regarding your site that might get it removed from the index.  Sometimes, a WordPress plugin just goes hostile…

It happened to me today. I logged into Webmaster tools and noticed my sitemap was uploaded, but my index count had dropped by 50%. I checked an hour later and I only had 10 pages indexed. I panicked and searched for reasons why this might be happening to my niche that still hadn’t reached cache status in Google. I found the issue in Diagnostics > HTML Suggestions. Duplicate title tags galore, and duplicate this and that! What had happened to my WordPress niche site? Well a certain add-on with images got a little mis-configured and literally changed the image name, alt text, and link of every image to a group of keywords. I literally had 200 images all saying a few words. Duplicate content is not acceptable in the eyes of Google.

I went through the rest of the menus and found Labs > Fetch as Googlebot. It was worse than I thought! Google has completely ignored my sites IP from being fetched. I was never to be in the index again. Refreshed the page one more time, 5 links remained indexed. I fixed the plugin’s configuration and removed all the duplicate content, but I was still banned from Google’s indexing. Luckily, after trying a few techniques, I resubmitted my new sitemap. Five minutes later I could access my site with Fetch as Googlebot. Woof, its slowly being reindexed and will probably take an extra 2-3 weeks to be cached.

This story describes a technique known as keyword stuffing. That’s having more keyword on the page than content. The old keyword density ratio =( Keywords in content / Amount of words in content )*100. Its been advised to keep this number anywhere from 5% to 8%. I doubt a few injustices here and there would do much harm to the art of keyword density ratio. Yet, if you have multiple image galleries all with the same picture name, alt text, and anchor link; you might be keyword stuffing.  In this 445 word count article, I could have mentioned a keyword 35 times in it.

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Common Adsense – Google will ban your account

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

(I’m going ahead and posting segments of my composition of SEO articles)

Making Money from Google formula – Adsense Success = (Google drives traffic to you + Google pays you to display ads – Your greed) / Your common sense

If you want to make money from Google Adsense, then you need to follow their policy!  Never bite the hand that feeds.  Google is the main provider of traffic.  Google is one of your monetization techniques.  The reciprocal bite from Google can result in your Adsense account being banned and site being removed from the index.  If you want the paycheck, then you follow their policy.

If all else fails, remember: “Google has an algorithm for that; I should avoid it.”  Google will catch you!

Why you shouldn’t mess with Google — Google is optimized to find people betraying their policies.

  • They have JavaScript on your page that calls back to Google servers and cookies that monitor your users and habits based specifically on your site.
  • But if you’re using Analytics… Google is seeing who views your site, who referred them, how long they are on it, etc.
  • If you have web master tools running, you’re leaving an even longer paper trail.

10 Commandments of modified Google policy — Search for Google Adsense Policy to read the real thing.

  1. No Invalid Clicks or Invalid Impressions
    • Don’t click your own ads.
    • Don’t pay people to click your ads.
    • Don’t let your relatives click your ads.
    • Don’t buy traffic or exchange traffic.
  2. No Encouraging Clicks
    • Do not deceive users into clicking your ads (putting an image over ads).
    • Do not ask users to click your ads.
    • Don’t make any mention of your ads supporting you or your site.
  3. Follow Content Guidelines
    • No >=18+/illegal/vulgar/obscene/shady content. (Girlfriend notes: “No things that are fun”)
  4. No Copyrighted Material
    • Follow DMCA, don’t put Adsense on sites with illegal software downloads or videos.
  5. Follow Design and Content Guidelines and Site Behavior
    • Don’t create spam pages.
    • Don’t scrape content from other sites and put it in yours.
    • Make sure your page is working properly and not something from Geocities in 1999.
    • You should review all of these at the Adsense Policies site. Some of the information regarding crawling your site is useful in Site Behavior.
  6. Legitimate Traffic Sources
    • No spamming emails.
    • No paid traffic.
    • No malware.
    • No popups.
  7. Default Ad Behavior
    • Do not mess with the JavaScript Google gives you.
  8. Proper Ad Placement
    • No ads in email, software or popups
    • Ads must be in pages with content.
    • Cannot be placed on a specific page, such as: a href=www.site.com/ads title=Ads, and linked to.
  9. *Adsense for content
    • *Maximum of 3 ads and 3 link units on a single page.
  10. ***Adsense for search
    • *Maximum of two search boxes on a single page.
    • *Maximum of one search box and one link unit.
    • *You cannot mix ad units and search boxes.

Enough with the modified commandments of Google!  I hope I have made it clear that if you mess with Google there are no second chances.  They will not reinstate your adsense account, your site will not get reindexed, and you will have lost your sugar momma.  Bookmark this page and the Adsense Policy page, learn them and then profit.  Don’t let your greed get in the way of your e-morals.

How to get banned from Google - Things to avoid at all costs.  I tried to rank these, but gave up.  Some are black hat SEO, and some are just plain dumb.

  1. Clicking your own ads.
  2. Altering Adsense Javascript.
  3. Buying traffic or clicks.
  4. Hiding ads from viewers. (Siphoning impressions)
  5. Asking for clicks.
  6. Malware, viruses, bad software; illegal content, etc.
  7. Hiding keywords in your site, but not providing content for them.  Some forms of cloaking utilize this method.
  8. Using more than one title tag per page.
  9. Using multiple micro niche keywords to link to a mass market/niche keyword page.  IE: light keyboard, wired keyboard, keyboard with mouse, all link to the page with only the keyword “computers.”
  10. Stay away from automation.  Your IP is linked to your Google and Keyword Research searches, and is linked to your Adsense/Analytics/Gmail etc.  Using bots to write articles or using scripts that traffic bomb Google(certain keyword tools), etc.  Automation is bad.
  11. NEVER, EVER, mention how much you earn on Adsense!
  12. Do not generate filler pages (pages with a title and no content) and place ads on them.
  13. Do not place the same content on multiple pages.

I hope we have covered the topic of following the policies of Adsense.  There is a ton of cash to make with Adsense.  Being lazy, finding shortcuts and breaking policy will result in a ban.  Don’t make your money, EARN IT.

But, But, But I Can Deceive Google’s Algorithms - Yes. You can, but you will get caught right around the time your paycheck is being prepared and they run that audit on your site and their logs.

Adsense isn’t GLaDOS from Portal.  Adsense isn’t going to forgive you after the walls come crumbling down in Portal 2.  There is no cake for loopholes and breaking policy.

  • Proxies  -  Yeah, right.  You would be shocked at how easy it is to detect abnormal activity on a site with tens of thousands of viewers.
  • Traffic Exchange  -  Remember that paper trail?  Google has all the traffic exchange sites indexed, and they all leave a referral URL trail when they visit your site.
  • Friends/Relatives in Other States  -  Abnormal activity is abnormal and has been seen a million times over.  Do you talk to Lisa in Gmail while logged into Adsense on the same account?  Adsense has your IP and Lisa’s IP now.  Go ahead, encourage Lisa and see what results.

I’m not trying to scare you.  Google Adsense is an amazing opportunity for anyone trying to make some spare cash with their spare time.  Just follow their policies.  Now that you know the policy, let us get into keyword research and domains!

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Making money on the internet

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Edit: fixed the image to soothe certain TOS injustices; it seems, even when making a small joke, some people like to hit the abuse button!
Every money making scheme I’ve dreamed up and then tried to apply in the real e-world. The e-world is a cruel place that crushes dreams and men’s souls.
Money making schemes online chart

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