Thank you so much for putting your confidence in us!

Niche Blueprint 2.0

With the help of our team and 3 great translators from our Forum, we got the job done in record time.

I’m thrilled with how they came out and thriled with the vote of confidence from Clickbank.

Here’s the press release

Thanks to Brett, Cindy, Paul, and Danny for all their hard work!

It’s a change to the algorithms that will have some sites see improvements in their search engine rankings…and others..well, not so much.

Wouldn’t it be great to see what’s going to happen?

Well..an enterprising individual has created a great tool that will allow you to type in a keyword phrase and compare where you are now…and where you’ll be once caffeine is rolled out.

Grab the tool here

QUICK UPDATE: This is not Google’s caffeine sandbox that was turned off, this uses the results from one data center where Google has confirmed that caffeine has been rolled out to.

How is the economic slow down hurting Internet marketing businesses ?

I’ve always answered that I’d rather be in an online business than a brick and mortar.  I can be so flexible with my business and advertising strategies…AND, it always seems like the one area of retail growth is online spending..even in an economic downturn.

Well…that’s happened again.  In a time where all spending is down.  Online retail spending for black Friday was up 11% year over year (Thanksgiving day spending was up 10%)

These are not trivial numbers for sure.

Online remains a great place to be during hard economic times AND good ones.

Source: ComScore

Let’s just think about it from a common sense perspective.  Although I’m totally oversimplifying, the whole idea of Google is that it shows the most “relevant” or “important” or “most popular” pages that it knows about for a given term. Oversimplifying again, the basic way it does this is to track the number (and quality/type) of inbound links to a page and what that link “calls” the page (anchor text).  So, in general, the more inbound links a page has for a given term, the higher it shows up in the SERPS.  Each inbound link is like a “vote” for the site it’s linking to.

When you comment on a blog (for SEO purposes), most of the time, the “name” field becomes the anchor text of the term you’re trying to rank for , and the link is the page you’re trying to rank for.  Does that really look natural?  Is that really a “vote” ?  Contrast that with a blog post or comment that has the link embedded in it.  THAT looks more like a “vote” … doesn’t it?  Compound that with the fact that Google KNOWS these blog comments are completely abused for SEO, and don’t you think they’re going to do something about that .. if they haven’t already?

We also know that Google already has processes to value the weight or importance of links.  For example, links from higher PR sites are more important; reciprocal links are less important (perhaps even valueless); no follow links are less important (perhaps even valueless); links from known paid link sites are less important etc. So, is it really a stretch to think, that Google is now (or already has) started to seriously devalue links from blog comments.  I certainly don’t think so, and it seems like Google is hinting at just that in the blog post I mentioned.

My personal opinion (and that’s all it is!!) is that links from blog comments that follow the typical pattern of name of commenter = anchor text and link is the page you’re trying to rank are going to or already have been VERY devalued.   I have come to the conclusion that it may very well be a waste of time.  Heck, Google themselves are saying just that!  This is a quote from their blog post about comment links:

At best, a link spammer might spend hours doing spammy linkdrops which would count for little or nothing because Google is pretty good at devaluing these types of links.

So what should you do?  I would (and I’m going to!) start to move away from using blog comments for link building (yikes…a gasp went up in the room).  I just think it’s common sense.  Blog posts with links and links within the body of comments (if you are able to do them!) would still be fair game I’d say, BUT…I think the writing is on the wall here.  I think the party’s over and it’s time to start focusing on other link building techniques.

Please note, I have no “insider” knowledge here and this is only my opinion.

This information is taken straight from the mouths of Google engineers.

There is no “duplicate content” penalty.  Full stop.

Here are the two times when it becomes a concern.

1.  If you have a duplicate piece of content that is in two places and you’re trying to rank both of them for the same keyword phrase…one will likely not show up in the SERPS.  No penalty…no sandbox for the “offending” site (whichever one that could be!).  They just don’t want to show the same thing multiple times in the SERPS.  Google recognizes there are good reasons for duplicate content on the web…so there’s no witch hunt here, just an effort to make the SERPS more useful.  The example that the Google engineers used was as follows:

If you do a search on “fuzzy bunnies” and there is a wikipedia entry, plus the print formatted version of a wikipedia entry…only the first one will be shown.  However, if you did a search on “fuzzy bunnies print version” or something like that…the print version would only be shown.  Common sense really, and how you and I would design a search engine.

2.  The other time that we need to be concerned about duplicate content is when Google “senses” an effort to “spam”.  That could be the exact same article posted on 1000’s of sites simply to get traffic or to get backlinks.  When they detect that, they will usually simply “de-value” the links from these sources.  That’s it…no death sentence for any site !

In my opinion and based on information straight from Google’s mouth…these two scenarios are the only ones we need to be worried about with re: to duplicate content.

For reference : Video of Google Engineer discussing this

From Twitter:   The winner is Mike Stronghill

From our Forums Eldon Beard

Please join me in congratulating them…I’ll be working with them just as soon as they want me to.  Thanks also to everyone who participated.  It’s much appreciated.

At the end of each year, we like to do some kind of contest for everyone.  This year, we’ve decided that the prize will be a 1 hour coaching session with me (Steve).

We’re going to give away 2 of these, and here’s how you can win!

Just make sure you’re a registered forum member and are following me on Twitter.  I’ll pick one random forum member and 1 random Twitter follower to be the 2 winners.

You can use this one hour for anything and at anytime you like.  So, if you’re not ready yet…no worries…hold onto it for when you are! Depending on the coaching/help that you need, I may also get others of our team involved to help.  You should know us well enough by now…that we’ll “over deliver” on this prize too!

So…you have NOTHING to lose…and 1 hour of coaching to gain…so sign up now!

Register at the forum here:

http://www.blueprintcentral.com/forum/

Follow us on twitter here:

http://twitter.com/steven_clayton

We’ll pick the winners on Monday 11/23, so make sure you sign up today!

Everyone has a theory, but not a lot of people have hard data…until right now that is.

We are quietly building a massive research tool that will allow us to do Internet marketing research like no one has ever done before.

It will literally be game changing..and you’ll hear about it sometime after the Holidays. You’ll also be able to get access to the data yourself…to do your own research…but…more about that later.

We have already been doing some initial analysis and we wanted to share some very interesting Web 2.0 stats with you.

We looked at approximately 60,000 “popular” internet marketing keywords (we’ll explain our population samples better in the future…when we’re ready to share more about our research tool, but suffice to say that these are random keywords that have at least some kind of marketing value…i.e. not “chair” or something like that!)…to see what the level of penetration was for web 2.0 platforms in the top 10 Google results.

Interesting fact #1 - 15% of all keywords had an Ezine article in the top 10 listings!

Interesting fact #2 - Excluding Ezine articles, roughly 7% of the keywords had at least 1 web 2.0 platform in the top 10 listings.

Interesting fact #3 - Squidoo, Hubpages, youtube, and facebook all had about the same penetration (roughly 2.5% of the keywords) … Wordpress.com, typepad, dig, and scribed were about 1/2 of those…coming in at about 1-1.25% of the keywords.

Interesting fact #4 - blogspot.com was the big winner. For a keyword that has a web 2.0 platform in the top 10 organic results, it’s almost 3x more likely to be blogspot.com than anything else!

Conclusions ?

Well…I’ve always had a lot of respect for the potential traffic from an Ezine article…but, perhaps not THAT much respect. It’s a pretty amazing statistic…and the first conclusion…is that Ezine should become an even more serious part of your marketing efforts.

In Addition, obviously…if you want to use a web 2.0 platform to enter the SERPS…seems like it’s a no brainer to use blogspot.com … owned by Google of course…but, I’m certain that has nothing to do with it.

Keep in mind, If you’re just looking for backlinks, any of these web 2.0 platforms remain sources…this analysis is only if you want to rank the page you’ve created.

Stay tuned for more fun…and an incredible wealth of research that will help you make money.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to look at even more keywords…and perhaps break down the penetration of Web 2.0 platforms by the number of competing pages…? (evil laugh) Oh..there will be so much more!

UPDATE

Someone asked for stats re: goarticles and articledashboard.

As I suspected…articledashboard was practically non existent , and goarticles was about 1/10 of Ezine