Banned By Google And Back Again.

The date: 29th July 2005. The time: early morning. I got out of bed and fired up my PC. Opened my browser to check my site. Had a look at the third-party Google toolbar plugin (http://toolbar.google.com/) on said browser (FireFox). It showed grey. Ice formed in my stomach. I opened my bugged version of Internet Explorer: my PageRank was 0. By now I was frantic. I went to http://www.google.com and typed in 'site:www.tigertom.com': no pages listed. I did this for two other satellite sites of mine: ditto. What had happened? TigerTom.Com (http://www.tigertom.com) had been banned by Google. I went to the WebmasterWorld forum (http://www.webmasterworld.com), and found out the awful truth. Google was doing one of its periodic updates of its algorithm, and had filtered out my sites completely. Further research there, and a bit of soul-searching, revealed why. I had too many pseudo-directory pages with auto-generated external links. Snippets from search engine results were used as descriptions of said links. Said links were run though a redirect script. These are hallmarks of pseudo-directories and 'AdSense scraper'* sites. Google is reportedly trying to filter these from its 'SERPs'**. I say reportedly, because Google doesn't announce these purges. They are inferred. To compound my sins, these pages were also effectively doorway pages†. The theory was that legitimate sites had been hit as 'collateral damage'. I say theory, in that Google rarely comments on individual cases. It won't tell you exactly why your site was banned. I guess this is for reasons of time, and to give no clues to spammers. In my case the ban was justified for my two satellite sites; while not looking like spam, they were effectively doorway sites. My main site was different. It had offending pages, but was mostly a diverse labour of seven years; a personal site on steroids. Google bans sites algorithmically: a site that fits their 'spammer' profile gets dropped via software from their index automatically. Real spammers shrug their shoulders and move on; honest webmasters write emails begging for mercy. Like me. I did some searching via Google, to find out how to do a re-inclusion request. Here's how: 1. First, you check your site is truly gone, by going to http://www.google.com, typing 'site:www.yourdomain.com' without the apostrophes. If it returns no pages at all ... 2. You check Google's webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. These are not really guidelines; you should treat them as iron-clad rules. 3. You stop the offending content from being web-accessible, permanently. If you're familiar with Apache web-server mod_rewrite you can: - Send a 410 'Gone' response to requests for the offending pages, or - CHMOD them to 600, which will return a 403 'Forbidden' response, or - Move them to a different directory if you need to keep them, or - Just delete them. Don't try to be clever. Just get rid of them. 4. You go to http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py, tick the relevant boxes, and type 'Re-inclusion request' in the subject box of the form. 4a. You add the complete URL of your site i.e. http://www.naughtydomain.com, 4b. You state that you have read the webmaster guidelines above, 4c. You admit what you did wrong; simply, succinctly, with no carping or special pleading. Don't try to be clever. Don't argue. Don't lie. Don't waffle. Google has cached copies of your site. When an engineer checks your site, he'll look for the offending content, and compare it against their cache. He'll spend about two minutes on it; don't give him a reason to continue to exclude you. 5. You ask for re-inclusion. 6. You wait. In my case, it took about a week; a long, unpleasant, fretful week. I sent follow up emails saying what I was doing, and a fax, and I was going to write letters if that didn't work. That was probably excessive. Once you have a ticket number, that's all that should be necessary. They emailed a standard reply saying "the problem had been passed to their engineers". That's good. I understand they send no reply to spammers. A week later my site was back in. Lesson learnt. To make sure I'm not so vulnerable again, I'm splitting my content to different sites, on the principle of 'best not to have all your eggs in one basket'. Have I learnt anything from this? Yes. Have more than one site as your 'money-maker'. Spend less time on search engine optimisation and more on traditional marketing. Come up with a unique selling proposition that compels people to link to your site. Easy(!)

Are Drop Ship Directories Really Worth The Money? Here Is A Guide...

By Brad Beiermann Ph.D., Hienote Inc. This question is often asked by many people hoping to start a new ecommerce site or simply adding to an existing one. The answer to the question can be simply answered with another question: How much is your time and online business worth to you? The more experienced ecommerce site owners will often ask the question a little differently: How do I find a useful, and legitimate, drop ship directory? The answer to this question is not immediately straight forward without doing a little homework. However, when you find a great directory, it can be worth the price of admission a thousand times over. So, in this article we are going to present a couple of important pieces of information that can help you answer some of these questions and guide you through the forest. First, let's get on the same page together and define what a drop ship directory is supposed to do (or contain). These directories are supposed to contain the names and contact information for companies that drop ship their products to your customers for you. They offer you the lowest wholesale pricing. They are able to ship single quantity items to your customers. They do not require minimum orders and the drop shipper will not ask you to pay any association fees. The drop shippers in the directory are usually one of two types: 1) They are the manufacturer, or 2) They are an import distributor with a warehouse. So, these folks are a key business ingredient when it comes to supplying and shipping product to your customers without you carrying the inventory. How hard can it be to actually find a drop shipper? The best way to answer this question is to try and find one yourself. If you have actually tried this in the past, then you know this can be a very time consuming task that requires some research. This is particularly true if you are trying to find a specific niche of products the general pub-2403258503801684lic has not seen often. These products typically do very well on the Web with a niche type of ecommerce business. So, finding the wholesale supplier to drop ship the items can be a very time consuming challenge, and sometimes you might not find anyone. One of the biggest values a drop ship directory brings is the ability to save you all the time searching for a drop shipper. The time saved can let you concentrate on other parts of your business. Another value a directory can bring is the possibility of finding new product ideas for your business. What should I be evaluating? Let's now turn our attention towards what you should be looking for in a drop ship directory. The drop ship directory business has been plagued in the past by many scam artists. Today, there are still some directory scams out there, which is to be expected. Virtually any line of business has, or has had, it's share of scams. A little bit of education is key in spotting the real directory companies from the not so real directory companies. With a little bit of knowledge and a trained eye, you can spot them fairly easily. For purposes of this article, we are going to focus on evaluating a directory and the company offering it. Again, this should help guide you through the forest. There are ten key parameters you should consider when considering a drop ship directory: 1. Balance - You want to find a directory rich in many different categories of products rather than the quantity of products available. Many of the directories try to advertise how many products are available in their directory (i.e. 500,000 products). Why is the number of categories important? A directory will not serve you well if it has hundreds of thousands of products, and none of them are in your product interest category. A directory with a good balance has focused on their categories of drop shipper products rather than the quantity. This gives you a better chance of finding something for your line of business. 2. Uniqueness - You will want a directory with uniqueness amongst its drop shippers. The drop shippers should offer a wide array of unique products that are not necessarily mass marketed. Why? Web sites offering unique and unusual products often do well on the Web versus sites trying to sell big brand name products that you can find with a mega retailer. A directory offering a bunch of big brand name product drop shippers could land you in the highly competitive commodity market against the mega retailers. 3. Selection - A directory with a good selection of drop ship categories is important. The number of drop shippers or the number of products a directory carries should not be the goal. The goal and question should be, "Do they have a drop shipper that would fit my line of business." A common mistake for many folks is getting fixated on the quantity of products a directory might offer with its drop shippers. The question they start to ask is, "A directory with over 700,000 products ought to have something for me to sell." Wrong! Be sure to remember the first parameter we mentioned. Balance. 4. Search Method - The directory must explain the methods they use to find drop shippers. Be careful of directories that do not pub-2403258503801684lish their search methods. If they do not explain their search methods, they may not have a solid search methodology. The directory could be full of a bunch of middlemen. At that point, the directory would be worthless to you. Directories using search methods such as trade show searches and foreign government agency searches are preferred over directories only focused on Internet searches. Why? Not all drop shippers and importers have a Web presence. A directory based on a bunch of Web searches could be missing some of the best hard-to-find drop shippers. 5. Sample - A sample of the directory should be made available to give an idea of format and information provided. The actual names of the drop shippers will not be given in a sample, but you will get an understanding of the type of information provided. 6. Price - This is a subjective parameter but there is something to consider. As an observation, most legitimate directories on the Web today are sold between the $60 and $80 price mark without any markdown. If you find one good drop shipper in a directory and you sell their products on your site, you could find your directory investment paid off quickly with just a sale or two. 7. Education - The Company selling the directory should have a website fairly resourceful with FAQ’s and articles written by its own research staff or owner. Topics should include drop shipping, ecommerce, importing and general FAQ’s about drop shipping. Watch out for directory sites only containing FAQ’s about their directory and not drop shipping. 8. Custom Search - Find out if the company offering the directory will do a custom search for a drop shipped product. A custom search can sometimes be done under certain conditions with the directory's parent company. As of this writing, Hienote is the only directory company advertising this type of service. 9. Toll Free Number - You should be able to talk to the folk's offering the directory without paying for the call. Contact by email only is not acceptable! Also, be leery of directory sites without toll free numbers or only a cell phone number given as this could be a suspicious con artist. 10. Customer Service - Any online business that cares about its customers should have a section dedicated to customer service. A company that offers a drop ship directory is no exception. It should have a section of its site dedicated to customer service. At a minimum it should have a toll free number, mailing address (not just a P.O. Box number!), email address, hours of operation, money back guarantee, and a phone number for calls outside of the country. With these ten parameters you should now have enough knowledge to get started in the right direction for evaluating a drop ship directory. In addition, hopefully this has given some food for thought in terms of considering a drop ship directory for your online business.

Anti Spam at the Enterprise Level

Copyright 2005 Richard Keir Every one of us knows how spam impacts us. Every day we either get a ton of spam - or if we're fairly well protected by spam filters - only a few pieces. Like a large number of people, I don't use any spam filters. Ah. You think I'm insane. But wait. My problem is that I get a lot of email from marketing types which I want to receive. And the spam filtering software is not very sensitive to my needs. Even white-listing doesn't always work. So, I prefer to get all that spam and just delete it. Now this solution can work for me despite the time it takes to delete my daily overdose of spam. However, at the enterprise level, it's a whole different story. If you have a relatively large internal network with even a modest number of email users, you're looking at a major problem. And the more users you have, the worse the problem is. Sure, you can put up software on the mail server. Works, kind of. But pretty soon you may find you need to upgrade the mail server. And that's after you already put it on a stand-alone machine. Rather than continuing to buy ever more expensive software to run on a machine that keeps needing to be upgraded, you might want to think about a dedicated anti spam appliance. To give you some idea of what's possible let's take a look at Barracuda Networks dedicated anti spam appliance. All you need to do is put this baby in front of your mail server. I say baby, advisedly because this one will learn by doing and by training provided by your users. Dean Drako, CEO of Barracuda Networks said, "Bayesian filtering is still one of the most accurate defenses against spam. The new plug-ins allow users to directly train the Bayesian filter, making the Barracuda Spam Firewall even more accurate based on the users individual email preferences. Viruses and other threats can infect the network quickly if they are not stopped at the network edge. With Intent Analysis our customers have an advantage over these threats because the Barracuda Spam Firewall is able to block them real time. Consequently we have consistently been a first responder when some of the most malicious virus attacks have hit, saving our customers from potentially devastating damage to their networks." This is one beautiful little machine. A Barracuda Spam Firewall can support from 1,000 to 30,000 active users. It can usually be installed in less than five minutes and receives automatic hourly updates for new forms of spam and viruses. It has a 10 layer defense system beyond the use of open source anti spam and anti virus solutions: denial of service and security protection, IP block list, rate control, virus check with archive decompression, proprietary virus check, user specified rules, spam fingerprint check, Intent Analysis, spam rule-based scoring, and Bayesian analysis. Plus it also does both inbound and outbound email filtering with the inclusion of sophisticated outbound email filtering techniques (just in case you've got a spam zombie on board or somebody's got an infected PC). However, it isn't exactly cheap. Still, when you consider the time, bandwidth, user frustration and potential hardware upgrade costs, the price may look a lot more reasonable. You can check it out at http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ If you are in the market for an anti-spam appliance, the Barracuda Spam Firewall isn't your only choice. The impact of spam on internet businesses - even those who primarily use it for just email - is so great that a simple search for "anti spam appliance" will find you a number of alternatives to examine. Even McAfee is getting into the anti spam hardware game. I'm hoping that it won't be too long before I can pick up a Bayesian multi-level anti spam, anti virus firewall appliance for my home PC that keeps me safe and cuts my need to delete without deep-sixing the email I want or costing me more than I can afford. I suspect it's on the way.

Affiliates need to read their Newspaper.

Millions of people check the news everyday-- in the morning paper, online, and on the nightly news. But far too often affiliates do not find out what has occurred in affiliate marketing that day; this is important because affiliate marketing changes daily. There are many resources for affiliate marketers to learn about the day’s happenings. The best way to learn about the changes in affiliate marketing is by visiting forums often. Forums provide a great resource by allowing new affiliates to learn from the experts. New affiliates hear and learn about the different opinions and techniques that are used in the industry. In turn, this information helps educate the affiliates and helps them decide whether they agree or disagree on the particular subject or technique. By visiting forums often you can learn timesaving tips as well as common mistakes that you can avoid. Here are some of the most popular forums that are most useful for affiliates: · AbestWeb: http://www.abestweb.com/ Who it’s for: affiliate program managers and affiliate marketers. With over 14,000 members this is a vast pool of knowledge that you can draw from. · WebmasterWorld.com: http://www.webmasterworld.com/ Who it’s for: webmasters and marketing managers. For all of your questions about anything having to do with Web design, this is the place to go. There are a lot of quality discussions that are segmented as well as moderated. · Search Engine Watch Forums. http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/forum/index.php Who it’s for: webmasters and affiliate marketers. Here you can find discussions and questions that deal with all aspects of search engines. Some of the topics include: Questions on specific search engines and directories, specific discussions on search engine optimization and web marketing, general search issues, and current issues. · ReveNews.com: http://www.revenews.com/ Who it’s for: webmasters, affiliate program managers, and affiliate marketers. This site is a great location to find articles on various topics and learn about what is news worthy in the industry. There are also forums strictly for affiliate managers. Here, managers can learn about those issues that are strictly pertinent for them, such as keeping an affiliate program in-house or outsourcing. You can visit http://www.10xmarketing.com/affiliate-program-management.asp to learn more about some of the options that are available to managers. These forums provide a great resource to learn about the technical details of running a program. Forums teach valuable information about affiliate marketing that will make help make affiliate sites more successful. By visiting and posting often in these forums many people become experts on certain topics. Networking opportunities will also arise. Many of these forums help industry leaders form business relationships. Forums are an amazing resource; do not overlook them because they are vital to ones success. Since affiliate marketing changes everyday, one should visit them as often as you watch or read the daily news.

A1 Technology Launches its independent SEO division A-1 Internetdesign

A-1 Technology Inc., a US based Offshore outsourcing firm launched its SEO division as a separate company, A-1 Internetdesign Inc. Having established itself in the field of software and website development, the company expanded to provide vertical services covering all domains of Online Marketing. Established in 1999, A-1 Technology has been providing web solutions to companies across industry sectors with special focus on Finance, Real estate and Health care Industries. The company has its headquarters in New York and other locations include New Jersey, Chicago, London(UK), Stuttgart(Germany), Singapore, Chandigarh and Delhi (India), thus ensuring a global presence. Two years ago, A-1 Internetdesign was started as a division in the company to provide search engine optimization as a complimentary service to its existing clients. As the importance of the search engines grew in doing business over the internet, the requirements of the clients also grew to include other marketing techniques to the portfolio. Ecommerce Maintenance projects were also being accepted that included SEO as a central task. In order to give greater independence, it was decided to turn the division into a separate entity. The new company under the name of A-1 Internetdesign Inc. would provide Ecommerce maintenance services including Search Engine Optimization, Blogging, Email marketing, ongoing development and design alterations. The offshoring advantage will ensure that the prices are competitive. All the services can be seen at the company’s corporate website www.a1internetdesign.com

7 Steps Of Mega Adsense Earners

The Google AdSense program is like finding money in the street. Kids in High School are making thousands of dollars a month with Adsense... Housewives, Retiree's, Mom and Pop's who've never made a dime on the Internet have created full time incomes by simply placing AdSense Ads on their web site or blog. Then you have the "Super AdSense" earners. We have all heard of them... the Elite few who are on track to make half a million dollars a year or more promoting AdSense sites. Do not be mistaken though... these people are not building like your Mom and Pop's do. They have systems in place that create sites for them... people who build sites for them... they have outsourced and automated many of the tedious tasks such as posting to blogs and searching for keywords. While most people cannot emulate everything these Super AdSense earners do... many of them you can. Here are 7 Required Steps you can implement today to copy their success. 1) Starting today... treat your AdSense business like it is a REAL business and track what you do. Begin tracking what you are doing that works... as well as what you are doing that does not work. This will keep you from making the same mistakes over and over, and you can repeat the steps that have worked in the past. As simple as this step seems... most people do not know the reason(s) to their success or failure. 2) Utilize the latest tools and software available. The Super AdSense earners are not any smarter than your average person. I know many people think they are... but for the most part, they are regular non techie people. They are smarter in one respect though... they use the latest tools available to them to automate most of the tasks involved with researching and creating sites. They use the latest keyword, site creation and search engine optimization tools available. The tools they use are their secret weapons. 3) Quit chasing the Mega Dollar keywords. You cannot compete with the search engine experts who create sites for the $80 payout keywords. You may get lucky every now and then... but in the long run, you are better off building sites for the low to mid range payout keywords. The competition is less, and your chance of success is much higher over the long term. 4) Choose broad niches and break it down. Choose a broad subject as your main theme (lets use computers for an example). From there... break it down into as many sub niches as possible. Using Computers as the example... you could build sub niches/sites like laptop computers, computer hard drives, computer keyboards, etc, etc. You could literally build hundreds of sites around one major theme and stay totally focused. Once you have exhausted every possible sub niche of that major theme... choose another main theme and repeat the process. 5) KISS Keep your sites easy to navigate and forget the fancy graphics that distract your visitors attention. Unless you are just building AdSense sites for the fun of it and to impress your friends... the purpose of having the site is to have people click on one of the ads, right? Then keep the site layout simple... dump the scrolling banners, dancing chickens and colored scroll bars... they are distractions. 6) What is the purpose of your web site? Your web site cannot be everything to everybody. If you have a full fledged ecommerce site, with products for sale... links to other products, it is not a good site for AdSense. If the primary focus of the site is to sell products... let it do that. Do not distract or confuse your visitor with to many options or choices. The best AdSense sites are AdSense only content sites that sell nothing. They are sites that "Tell"... not "Sell." 7) Be consistent. This is not one of those deals where you build one site and you are done. Refer back to Step #4. You must continuously build in order to be successful. Think of it as planting a crop that you will harvest in a month or two, and the sites you build are seeds. Once the seeds have grown and matured... you will reap the harvest. The more seeds you plant... the larger the harvest. To sum it up... utilize the tools available to automate as much of the process of building sites - doing research and building keyword lists as you can. This alone will help keep you organized and on track. Be consistent in building... treat it like the business it is and you will reap the rewards of your harvest.

5 Minute Guide to Video Editing for Beginners

Getting started with video editing is very simple you only need a few items and you can be producing quality movies at home that you will be able to enjoy for many years to come. Maybe even produce a hit Hollywood movie. The basic items you need are a video capture card, the software to edit, your computer, storage space on your computer and a camcorder, VCR, or you can display your movie on your computer screen. The process is effortless, all you do is capture the video to you computer using a capture card, then edit your video with video editing software and then download the video that you edited to either tape or burn it to a VCD, CD, or DVD. Let’s look at your computer first. You will need a minimum of a Pentium II 300 or faster, a minimum of 256 Megs of RAM, but you will get better performance with 512 Megs. You will also desire to have a 30GB drive that is split into 2 separate partitions. This means that you will have a C: and a D:. The C: should be given 10GB and will have all of your software stored there and the D: will be where your audio, video and editing projects are stored. Your graphics card should be a 32 Meg AGP. You can have an 8 or 16 Meg but the quality will not be as good. Storage is probably the most confusing thing about video editing. Video makers have many choices for storing their digital video files and this is why it can be so confusing. If you desire creating your own DVD’s then you are going to need lot of storage. The most you can get out of a single sided 4.7 GB DVD is around 2 hours of video. If you are using DV footage you are going to need 13GB per hour of video, this means you will need 26GB of storage and remember you always have extra footage that you need to factor that in as well so you are now up to 39GB of storage space needed. If you are adding other options such as graphics, MPEG2 footage for the DVD and the folder to hold it all then you are now up to 50GB. So, for your 2 hour movie you will need 50GB of space at least. So, when you begin be sure that you have enough storage on your computer for the type of video that you wish to store. On to the video capture card and the video editing software. When you first visit the electronics store you will find many manufacturers that create video capture cards. The most popular include Some of the reputable video capture card manufacturers are: Pinnacle, Matrox, Dazzle, ADS, Canopus, and Digital Origin. What video capture cards do to put it in simple terms is that these cards use hardware or software compression to digitize your video onto the hard drive on your computer. This way you can edit your video and play it back onto tape or display your movie on your computer screen. Some times, you can purchase the video capture cards along with the video editing software that you choose. Some of the most popular video capture cards that are packaged with video software include the Pinnacle Pro One which comes with the Adobe Premiere 6 full version, TitleDeko RT, DV Tools 2.0, Hollywood FX, and Impressions DVD. The Dazzle DV NOW AV can be purchased along with the Premiere 6 full version and the DVDit LE. Having music along with your video can also be accomplished with a MP3 Converter that will allow you to convert your MP3 music into a wav file or the format in which you need for your video. You may also wish to purchase a MP3 Encoder which will allow you to Wav or other formats into a MP3. A CD ripper is another item that you may wish to purchase that will help with converting your CD’s to MP3, WAV, WMA type files. One other software program that will make you life easier when you begin video editing is a MPEG Encoder which is a very easy to use program that will make converting several formats easy than you can imagine. Many of these MPEG converters will aid in converting DVD, VCD, AVI, MPEG, GIF, Flash, WMV, WMA, WAV, MP3, MP4, M4A, OGG, AAC, 3GP and even more/ So, now all you need to do is to find the best video editing software that you feel comfortable with and off you go. You can find several different video editing software companies that offer their software on a trial basis, this will let you try out the software so you can see if it is the perfect software for you. But, remember with the trial version you will be receiving the video capture card. You will have to purchase it separately.