Thrudigital

For many webmasters it’s impossible to imagine how they could get content for free. Of course, content is needed if you want to rank well and if you want your website to get some organic traffic. The idea is simple: Write articles and let people comment them. Of course, you may allow them leaving links within posts, within their profiles or whatever. In my experience the best comments are from those who aren’t interested in SEO, but from those who are seeking answers. People usually don’t surf the web because they want to buy something (although this type of internet users exist and they cannot be ignored), but they’re looking for information. If they cannot find the answer (even on your website), they start asking. Let them ask you as you’re probably expert (or they think so). Answering questions brings additional value to your website; Not only you describe something, you also answer real questions. The more questions and answers, the better.

You’ll get more content for free. This is the most important aspect of comments. Comments such as “Good article, thanks” should be ignored and even not published. Instead, comments of good quality with informative value can often bring new natural links from other websites. People will also bookmark your website and they will return too! What more could you want?

Since I let people ask questions on my primary website, some articles have experienced a boom in terms of traffic. Up to 100% increase. If I wanted to buy more content, I’d pay for it. Also it’s very important that by creating very informative pages you’re going to become an authority. Say that your 1000 words article can attract 100 visitors per day; Now imagine that it contains more phrases, more naturally written content… It will attract more visitors for sure!

Although, there are a few disadvantages too:

1) Sometimes you’ll be receiving spam,
2) Not everyone is using correct spelling (this could be overseen), and also 90% of people aren’t using dots, commas, and so on,
3) Sometimes people don’t read already existing comments, questions and answers, and they simply ask the same question again (ignore such comments).

Some time ago I visited a blog or article on some website where the author mentioned very easy way of gaining 10000 or 20000 or virtually unlimited number of links in a short time. The principle was this: Find as many blogs with the top commentators plugin installed as possible and comment. Keep commenting these blogs, but don’t spam. And you’ll get these links. So… I tried this method as it is really easy and simple. The only thing that may be frustrating is spending time. Because if you’re going to write 100 or 200 comments on blogs, not only you need experience in the topics which are blogs devoted to, but also you need plenty of time. The top commentators plugin makes it possible to get a free site-wide link if you make it to the topX (X is some number, I suppose bloggers can control this) commentators. So 10000 links can be achieved this way: Suppose that every blog with the top commentators plugin contains 200 pages in average. Then being one of the top commentators on 50 blogs will naturally bring you 10000 links. Easy… But there are, as usual, advantages and disadvantages too.

Advantages
1) It is easy to find such blogs. Just try this in Google : “top commentators” “powered by wordpress”.
2) Many bloggers also approve comments such as “Good article” or “Good information” (read below why this is also one of disadvantages).
3) These blogs (see point 1 above) are already indexed in Google, and the closer to the top10 they’re, the higher importance they carry. Practically speaking; Google likes them and so will your link.
4) Many bloggers talk about similar problems, so commenting one’s post can be useful when commenting second one’s post as one idea can be related/similar to the previous one.

Disadvantages
1) Blogs where the webmaster approves comments such as “Good article” or similar spammy comments are very easy targets for spammers. In the end, if you get into the topX of top commentators, any better spammer can kick you out of this list and replace you. Spam comments aren’t worth it.
2) Even 10000 links, but each 200 from one IP address, mean that their weight is lower than 10000 links where each come from different IP address.
3) It’s time consuming.
4) Many bloggers delete the top commentators list once per month, so a site-wide link today can be gone tomorrow.
5) Many (really many) bloggers use broken plugins or their WordPress installations are broken, and thus the comment form could work incorrectly (detecting you as spammer, or disallowing you to post any comment). In such a case you spend 5-10 minutes writing really good comment and after this you will get a blank screen after submitting the comment.

Now some real example… I tried this technique and spent about 2-3 days (each day maybe 5 hours of posting comments) on it. In the end, and after two updates of links in Google Webmaster Tools I noticed quite a good increase of external links that point to one of my sites; By about 2000 new links. Am not sure about how Google liked it, but definitely it seems to me that Yahoo likes these new links. Traffic from Yahoo has increased by 100%. From about 200 daily visits coming from Yahoo to about 400 daily visits.

Even though this is a completely legal SEO technique, still some bloggers will reject your comments and also bear in mind that not one, but hundreds or thousands of blogs may be dead.

In this article I’m going to explain the basic reasons for using unique title tags and unique meta description tags. As usual, I will use examples from some of my websites to demonstrate this.

In Google’s Webmaster Tools you can view various reports, including the Content Analysis report. This report provides data regarding duplicate titles, meta-descriptions and other potential problem areas. I generally ignored these reports because they never showed me too many errors, until I rented a dedicated server in the USA for my site www.aqua-fish.net. From that point on, my site was crawled much more often  (from about 40MB per day up to 550MB per day), and I suddenly began to spot a large number of errors related to duplicate title tags, meta descriptions, and short meta descriptions. Let’s quickly examine the effect this can have on your site, starting with the hardest-to-appreciate point:

1) Short meta descriptions
Short meta description tags mean that Google doesn’t consider the site’s description to be informative. This leads to the situation when this tag isn’t shown as a description within SERP. One can say that this doesn’t matter, but it can lower your page’s CTR if potential visitors aren’t clicking your link just because the description looks strange, even though it’s top-ranked. Some people have already reported that once their websites were shown with descriptions taken from DMOZ or Yahoo! Directory (this applies to Yahoo! search only, but DMOZ descriptions also apply to Google), they noticed an immediate drop in visits for certain search phrases. However, this isn’t the biggest problem:

2) Duplicate title tags
In fact this is the reason I wrote this article. I have spent hours coding and upgrading the core of aqua-fish.net while struggling with this problem. If you enter site:something.tld into Google’s search box, you should see the most important URLs from that something.tld domain in the top positions, while pages with the lowest importance should be seen last in the results. I was wondering why all top-thousand positions are pages served via show.php… I couldn’t see any pages served via index.php, with the exception of the homepage. It was clear that something was wrong, but I didn’t realise that it was directly caused by duplicate title tags and meta descriptions.

My second worry was the fact that PageRank changed for internal pages served via index.php all the time (again, except for the homepage). Some pages lost PageRank, some gained it, but then after the next PageRank update pages which were ranked in the last update lost position, and those which lost it previously, got it, in a never-ending loop… I couldn’t understand why this was happening.

After I moved the site and Google was crawling it much more often I spotted more than 2000 errors in Google Webmaster Tools. 2000+ errors is far from ideal, and certainly nothing to be proud of.

So I upgraded the core and fixed some of the problems, but I then noticed more duplicate title tags and duplicate meta tags in the reports. So, I upgraded the core once again. After a few weeks the number of duplicate title tags fell from 2000+ to only 134. This number will continue to fall as time goes by because some URLs haven’t yet been re-crawled. Eventually, of course, I hope to fix all the issues and see no errors in the reports.

So, what did this mean to my website? It’s still too early to look at the distribution of PageRank on index.php pages, or to examine changes in SERP for site:domain.tld. However, it seems that this upgrade was good in terms of telling Google which URLs do exist and which are no more. Traffic from googlebot fell from 0.5 requests per second to 0.2 requests per second, and organic traffic (from Google) increased by another 800-1000 visits per day.

If you’re experiencing problems with duplicate title tags and duplicate meta description tags, follow these steps:

1. Different URLs have the same titles or meta description tags, and each of these URLs does contain unique content:
Modify these tags manually. If your website is dynamic, you may have to create new functions. If it’s static, then you will have to manually edit each page’s HTML.

2. Same content is shown on more than one page (this usually applies to URLs with parameters):
This is what happened to me. For example, index.php?a=1&b=2 is the same like index.php?b=2&a=1, but for search engines these are two different documents, but with exactly the same content. I recommend you set-up a function that will handle all “invalid” URLs and will use a 301 redirect to direct them to “valid” URLs. Realistically, this is the only solution. You could make non-existing “invalid” pages, thus handling them as 404 pages, but you may also lose potential links, and wouldn’t actually solve the problem as a whole. If you’re not using parameters, but somehow more than one URL points to the same document, you should always choose between the “valid” and the “invalid” ones.

Sometimes spammers (or competitors) link to pages such as “…index.php?…” in order to confuse search engines and damage your website’s rankings! You know that out of two URLs (or more if parameters are proceeded to other URLs) containing the same content, one page must be considered primary. The second often looks like spam. The more spam-like pages, the worse the rankings of your website in Google will be! Fortunately, you can follow reports in Google Webmaster Tools, and it’s easy to redirect invalid URLs to their correct forms. This way, spammers or competitors don’t have the opportunity to damage your website’s rankings.

I now know that if I want more organic traffic from Google, I have to do my best not only in terms of link- and content-building, but also in terms of making both web pages and URLs unique.

(Just a note to readers: I decided to categorise this article as both “SEO” and “Programming”, as it’s related to programming if one wants to change the core.)

Sponsored links

In previous articles, I mentioned various ways to acquire links that carry more weight in Google. The important thing is that these links carry at least some weight, and thus you aren’t spending your valuable time on useless endeavours. In this article I’m going to explain a very simple technique for acquiring free links of good quality. Let’s start brainstorming:

1) Competitors A, B, C, …, X are ranked higher than the site of mine;
2) I know directories that accept free links;
3) I know tools that allow me to find links which point to various websites.

How can one combine these facts to achieve higher rankings? Ordinary people and “directory submitters” usually do this: they search phrases such as “directory of directories” or “directories list” in Google. Trust me, you will end up lost doing this. Firstly, “directories of directories” may well link to the same sources. You will need to track all websites that you visited for submitting purposes.

Second, many such directories just don’t work any more: some are still accepting paid submissions, and some are still are accepting regular submissions, but they are no longer being reviewed by administrators.

Third, some (not many, but some) of these directories simply don’t exist.

Fourth, how do we know that these directories are worth our time? Are they indexed in Google, or at least in Yahoo! or MSN? How often do search engines crawl such pages? Do such links carry weight, or are they useless? These questions lead to one conclusion: we need a different approach, that is both more effective and less time consuming.

Here’s what to do:

1) Create a list of your top competitors (search relevant phrases in Google),
2) Find a number of links (between 10-100) that point to these websites (using our link popularity tool, for example),
3) Visit these websites.

It is very likely that you’ll find directories which list your competitors. Thanks to human laziness, people often don’t change descriptions of websites that they submit into directories, allowing us to find all relevant websites, by copying-and-pasting these descriptions into Google. Those who read this blog regularly know that next is some examle.

Take the term cichlids. See google.com/search?hl=en&q=cichlids&btnG=Search and you should see cichlid.infocrux.com ranked in the top 10. It’s not a website of mine, just an example. So, now we just analyse links to this website. For example, using our link popularity tool, you can find linkdirectory.biz/Home_Family/ which links to that site. You just need to visit that page and copy the website’s description:

“Articles on different types of Cichlid fishes, their types, and care. Learn about buying, maintaining…” (This is an abbreviated description)

When done, we enter it into Google. You will then see which websites link to cichlid.infocrux.com.

Of course, there are a few rules which one should follow:

1) Always track already visited directories/websites: you can get lost very easily!
2) Always follow more links from directories. Descriptions may be different and you risk losing useful and valuable links.
3) Always search records. Go to the last page of search results and click on repeat the search with the omitted results included.

Advantages:

You’re about to visit websites that carry some weight in Google. They’re not penalised, and they do exist (or, at least, they did when Google last crawled them.)

Disadvantages:

No-one can guarantee that these directories allow free listings.

In fact, in terms of link-building, you can do more than just copying your competitors. Firstly, you’re analysing a number competitors, not just one. So, you should end up with more links than they have individually. You can also find pages other than directories which link to your competitors. In many cases you can find blog/website comments that link to resources. Why can’t you contact webmasters and ask for a link, or post comments on blogs?

Naturally, you’ll first need a website of good quality. This won’t work for parked domains or made-for-ads websites. More ideas coming later.

By the way, this technique could also work against you, if your competitors also use it. Start now and get ahead!

Yesterday, I was analysing differences between (European/US) Google.com and Google.co.uk (yes, search results are different for Google.com in the US and Google.com in Europe). While my website (www.aqua-fish.net) is ranked well in European Google.com, its positions are a little worse in the US (explained below), and its positions in Google.co.uk are very disappointing. So, why is it this way, and how can I improve my positions on Google.co.uk?

First, some facts:

1) My website was originally hosted in the USA, and was then was moved to Slovakia after some problems (for those who don’t know, this country is in Europe, and is distinct from Slovenia) and is now hosted in the USA again, on a dedicated server;

2) My website has plenty of links from free directories (this was my initial SEO);
3) In Google Sitemaps, I assigned the USA as my site’s geographical target.

Now, some knowledge gained from the facts above:

1) Being in the USA or Slovakia has no relation to the UK,
2) Free directories to which I submitted my website are usually hosted in the US or Pakistan.

So, without a co.uk domain or a UK-based IP address, what can I do in order to increase traffic from Google.co.uk? The answer is in links from .co.uk domains and links from UK-based websites. How do I know this? See these snapshots…

Phrase aquarium fish, Google.com, US

Phrase aquarium fish, Google.co.uk, UK

Phrase aquarium fish, Google.com.pk, Pakistan

As you can see, in Google.com.pk my website is ranked 4th, in Google.com it’s 7th and in Google.co.uk it’s 39th. This is largely because of links from directories in Pakistan. Now, we know that the way to increase traffic from Google.co.uk is getting links from co.uk websites. Unlike other websites, I’m also going to tell you how one can get such links in a relatively easy and fast way.

What do we know?

1) Directories often use the phpLD core,
2) Directories usually use terms such as “add url”, “submit url” in titles.

It’s easy to type these phrases into Google:

1) “powered by phpld” site:co.uk
2) “submit a site” site:co.uk
3) “submit a link” site:co.uk
4) “submit url” site:co.uk

There are many other possible queries; there is virtually no limit.

I tried this method yesterday and my site has already been approved in some directories. Some would view this as spamming. In fact, this cannot be called spamming as these directories exist, and we’re simply using existing technologies to make our work easier. Also, another objection may be related to the view that “directories are dead”. Actually, we are unlikely to find useless websites with this method (because the sites occupy top positions in Google, which indicates that these sites carry at least some weight.) However, there are a range of advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages:
1) One can find directories which couldn’t be found in other ways;
2) Such websites are known by Google. The better their positions in SERP, the higher the chance of getting a useful link;
3) It is fast;
4) You can find not only co.uk directories, but also any other relevant domains (for example, .us or .de).

Disadvantages:
1) Many directories are paid or require a reciprocal link,
2) it is difficult to tell if it’s still an active directory (though, aside from DMOZ, we can never really tell when submitting to directories).

Happy hunting!

Sponsored links

I have answered this question already on this blog several times, in a different way each time. However, I invariably come up with new ideas, and this time is no exception. Second, the fact is that this technique is already widely-used, though many webmasters don’t understand it. As usual, let’s analyse the background before we move on to the solution:

The background
As already explained here: Increase website traffic – My way, it is necessary to understand your visitors: why they visit your website, what they need (is it a store? an information site? a review site?), and to answer the question “Are visitors of my website satisfied?”. If people aren’t happy with what they found, it is unlikely you will see growth in your website rankings. Thus, it will be very hard to attract new visitors to the site. Conversely, happy visitors are likely to return to your website, and they are also more likely to link to it. Links are what your site needs to achieve top 10 rankings in any search engine. We’re talking about serious SEO and really competitive phrases (I won’t try to persuade you that you should focus on phrases that consist of 4-5 words, although I know that success comes from bottom to top: pages do rank for long phrases and only get better positions if they – the pages – have some inbound links.)

The conclusion is this: successful websites need “natural content”. Natural content isn’t an article that contains useless ideas, but instead content that people like. As you may have already read on this blog, visitors determine what is useful and what is not. To create pages that are full of useful content one needs to analyse traffic. This is all covered in previous articles.

Here’s another approach: if you let visitors create content, they will probably create enough to let you sit back for a while. See the three images below:

In these images I tried to show how important it is for a website to generate natural traffic (not bought from questionable sources or coming from rotating “traffic exchange” sites and so on) because only natural traffic results in questions and content contributions.

The difference between content that you write and user-generated content is that you don’t know if original content answers visitors’ questions. Usually, you will realise that people need answers to their questions (search engines send such traffic) on your website. Here is what to do:

1) Let people ask questions on each page (though don’t turn your website into a blog);
2) Tell people that you want to hear from them and that you will answer their questions;
3) Let people modify your content (explained below);
4) Identify contributors and allow visitors to rate contributions.

The difference between spamming and contributing
If one allowed anyone to modify anything on a website, the site would become crap. Because of this, it is important to implement strict rules for modifying and adding content. Not just using CAPTCHA protection, but also something like this: the content area is strictly for content, and prevents links from being added there. Links can be added to the resources box only. Every modification is held for approval by the webmaster or moderators.

All in all, people can create content for free, you just have to allow them to do so.

Sponsored links

I created this simple script to compare my own statistics to those provided by Google Analytics. I am not saying that Google Analytics sucks because it doesn’t. However, sometimes data generation is delayed, so it’s good to have something to compare with. I’ll probably expand the script shown below and add further features. These could include: unique visits, time spent on-site, impressions per visit, and so on. At the moment one can only check statistics via phpMyAdmin. However, if you’re even a little skilled at PHP, you can create functions that allow you to see statistics via your own scripts. Bear in mind that this code is an example of how to create a script that counts all impressions done by humans. Since robots don’t execute JavaScript code, only human impressions count.

Firstly create the table in your MySQL database by executing this query:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `days_impressions` (
`day` date NOT NULL,
`impressions` int(11) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`day`),
KEY `impressions` (`impressions`)
)

Then open your text editor and place this code:


<?php
$server = "localhost";
$user = "user";
$dbase = "database";
$passwd = "password";

$days_impr = "days_impressions";

//function that reports fatal errors in MySQL instead of showing them as output
if (!function_exists('fatal_error_report'))
{
function fatal_error_report($line,$file)
{
//fatal_error_report(__line__,__FILE__);
$to = "bugs@yourserver.com";
$subject = "Fatal error";
$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$messaget= '<html><body><h1>Fatal error has occured</h1><br />Details:<br />'.$file." on line ".$line." with this error ".mysql_error().'<br />Page accessed: <b>'.$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'].'</b>. IP: <b>'.$ip.'</b></body></html>';
$postmast= "postmaster@yourserver.com";
$headers = "From: ".$postmast. "\n" .
"X-Mailer: PHP/" . phpversion() . "\n" .
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n" .
"Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8\n" .
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n";
mail($to, $subject, $messaget, $headers);
die ();
}
//end of error reporting function
}

$link = mysql_connect($server, $user, $passwd)
or fatal_error_report(__line__,__FILE__);

mysql_select_db($dbase)
or fatal_error_report(__line__,__FILE__);

$date = date("Y-m-d");

$found = 0;
$result = mysql_query("select * from $days_impr where day = '$date' limit 1;", $link)
or fatal_error_report(__line__,__FILE__);
if (mysql_num_rows($result))
while ($qry = mysql_fetch_array($result))
$found = 1;

if($found==1)
{
$result = mysql_query("update $days_impr set impressions = impressions + 1 where day = '$date' limit 1;", $link)
or fatal_error_report(__line__,__FILE__);
}
else
{
$result = mysql_query("insert into $days_impr values ( '$date' , '1')", $link)
or fatal_error_report(__line__,__FILE__);
}

mysql_close();
?>


Don’t forget to modify these variables’ values:

$server, $user, $dbase, $passwd, $postmast, $to

Once you have done this, save the file as, for example, “stats.php”. Then place this code in all pages that are available to visitors:

<script src="http://www.yourserver.com/statistics/stats.php" type="text/javascript">
</script>


I will likely upgrade the script and add more features as time goes by, so check back here from time to time.

Sponsored links

In a previous article, I wrote about buying and selling websites, and the advantages and disadvantages of such investments/sales. There is another point of view related to investing in existing websites, so let’s explain how to continuously increase profit by investing. In fact, it doesn’t matter if you’re selling something, or if you’re trying to sell advertising space on your websites. In both cases one needs visitors. Moreover, these visitors should be new every day (because unless you ask money for membership or similar things, you cannot make money from returning visitors). Instead of analysing methods of generating traffic, let’s focus on content. Unique content can (and it is for sure) be the most important way how one receives visitors who buy, or whom ads are shown to. Despite the fact that there are already free articles, unique content comes with more advantages than disadvantages. Let’s name advantages…

1) Unique content of high quality tells the audience that your website is maintained by professionals;
2) Unique content cannot be marked as duplicate, thus your pages will not be ignored by search engines.

There are some disadvantages:

1) Some dishonest webmasters will copy your content (meaning that you’ll have to file the copyright infringement report with Google. You can also sue all who copy your articles);
2) Others may rewrite your articles (from what I understand, one cannot do anything against this unless these documents are protected by law, and lawsuits generally don’t last 1-2 days and are expensive).

However, the advantages do outweigh the disadvantages. Before I explain how and why I invest in content, please understand that writing content is just one of many methods of search engine optimisation. For others, read articles under the SEO category on this blog too.

A long time ago, I realised that I cannot write 1-2 articles per day because it is simply too time- and energy-intensive. Moreover, I am not an expert in every field, and having to study problems before I can write articles would waste further time and energy. All in all, I’d have to study for 12-14 hours a day before I can spend 2-4 hours writing an article. Rather than doing this, it’s easier to pay people to share their experiences (though the people must be skilled enough). Look how investments and earnings performed after hiring some guys:

The numbers on the horizontal axis are months, and as you can see, the 10th month earnings exceeded investments of the 3rd month. If I stopped investing after the 11th month, then ROI would be 24 months and 7 days (if any further earnings were the same as those of the 10th month).

The basic principle is putting enough money into the investment process, especially in the beginning when it’s naturally very risky. If I spent only £30 each month, then earnings couldn’t rise in that relatively short time period. However, pushing hard in the beginning and then ignoring further investments won’t do any good either. From the above chart, it is clear that more investments result in more revenue.

Here are the rules that I follow (followed, follow and will follow):

1) If you’re going to invest in articles, make sure that it’ll be a long-lasting investment;
2) Start with small budget, and if revenue increases during the first 2/3 months, try to invest more;
3) Invest in the things that you know! I didn’t invest in the stock market as I don’t know anything about it. Instead, I invested in content;
4) Divide investments into two types: money and traffic. Some high-earning pages don’t necessarily have high traffic and vice-versa, but high-quality pages along with high traffic bring more links, which is naturally the best SEO;
5) Tell people that you like their work and increase their hourly rate from time to time.

That’s all, folks!

Sponsored links

(Any figures – such as CPC, eCPM, EPC, CTR, monthly earnings – are imaginary in this article! They have been proportionally calculated to reflect my own situation, but one should not consider them real!) – Google AdSense doesn’t allow publishers to share details about their revenue

I have decided to share the latest things I learned quite by accident about Google AdSense. A few weeks ago my AdSense revenue fell for some unknown reason. The decrease was a massive 10.83%, which means if you earn (on average) £3,300 per month, you suddenly earn only £2,950 after such a negative shift. In fact, £350 here or there doesn’t hurt, but any loss should be considered as a deficit. No matter if you’re doing nothing but enjoying the life, or if you’re hardly investing money into new features or content, a 10% decrease in revenue is disappointing. Moreover, my problem wasn’t caused by negative trends in traffic.

So, I had to end all investments and say “stop” to people who worked for me. After days of analysing the problem I decided to make the following changes:

1) All CSS links became blue and underlined,
2) I stopped using 3 AdSense ads, and instead I started using only 2 ads per page,
3) Colours of AdSense links and URLs became blue too.

After these modifications, the trend of falling revenue ended. Everything became normal again, but why?

Firstly, using the same colours and underlining for ordinary links and Google AdSense ads (as far as I know AdSense links come underlined automatically) tells a visitor that both links are links. Imagine an extreme case, if you use black underlined text on your website: ordinary text is underlined, as are links. People struggle to distinguish what is a link and what is not. So, the best thing is to use the same colours for every link. Links must be uniform, and must look clickable. This didn’t cause any serious CTR increase (because before, links still looked like links; I simply made them consistent).

The biggest change came with removing a single ad unit. Basically, I removed the best earning ad unit. This doesn’t seem to make sense, but I had to do this, since that ad unit wasn’t a part of the content. I should tell you that average per-click earning was less than 6p before that change. After the change, the average increased to about 9p. I was surprised to find that removing the best-earning ad not only increased the average EPC (earning per click), but also didn’t negatively affect CTR! The second best-earning ad became the best-earning one, and the average CTR value fell by just 1-1.5%.

Why did the removal of the ad lead to higher revenue?
Advertisers in Google AdWords bid on each keyword/phrase and Google determines how much a click is worth. Of course, if advertisers specified a maximum CPC in their campaigns, then clicks cannot cost more than this value. On the other hand, since it’s a bidding system, the usual CPC is lower than the maximum offered amount. Imagine this situation: on your web pages you show one ad unit, say 160×600. Also say that there are four links in that ad. Thanks to the fact that only 4 links can be shown per page, only the highest bids are shown. I’m not an AdWords engineer, but the final value of click can be calculated this way: if the lowest bid out of these 4 links is £1.30, then the third link will be worth £1.30 + something(1). And the second link will be worth £1.30 + something(1) + something(2). And logically, the first link will be worth £1.30 + something(1) + something(2) + something(3). It’s just a simple example. All something(x) values are in dollars and are under the control of Google AdWords’ algorithms.

So, the publisher will likely earn more, and advertisers will pay more. Now imagine a different situation: you show 3 ads per page (for simplicity’s sake say that each is a 160×600 ad, and that each ad contains 4 links). So, it’s 12 links in total. Now, that £1.30 value is automatically lower due to the higher number of links shown. This is why showing 1 or 2 ad units generates more money than placing 3 ad units per page. On pages with small content I recommend you use only 1 ad unit.

Always remember that the best way to increase your AdSense revenue is, was, and always will be by increasing organic traffic!

Sponsored links

In this article I am going to hit back against those who offer website appraisals, and I’ll also explain how to appraise a website yourself. Why? Because nowadays website appraisals are more a business than a service. Consider this: how often is a website sold, and how many companies offer you an appraisal? There is a visible inbalance between supply and demand! For instance, I could appraise your website without using the well-known formula that a website’s worth is approximately twenty times its net monthly income.

What is wrong with companies that offer appraisal services?
First, in many cases they’re not even companies! I’ll bet that 95% of websites claiming to be companies are just individuals living in their parents’ house and masquerading as successful businessmen. Secondly, it is a big misunderstanding that someone can appraise a website without having spent at least 3-4 years in the business. When you consider someone, make sure you check the whois data. Also, it is prudent to check the testimonials. Often, they’ll either be missing or fake. A trustworthy testimonial is a testimonial which contains the names of both buyer and seller, contains dates and a mention on some third party’s website. Evidence of a successful sale is also required. Third, how can anyone appraise a site without being an expert in the field? For example, there are thousands of websites devoted to this and that. Say, for example, that you’re an expert bodybuilder, that you spent 10 years studying, training, testing. Then you put the weight of that experience into the website and it earns (in this example, the method of monetisation is irrelevant). All the information is based on your life and your skills, thus the value is considerably higher than 20x net monthly income, isn’t it? In addition, if you were to add more content and features to the website, how can it be worth only 20x of net monthly income?

Okay, now assume the opposite: your website has no useful content, no extra features, and pathetic traffic. It earns perhaps £50-100 per month. Now, why should someone pay twenty times net monthly income if the website needs serious improvement and investment? I’d rather build a website from scratch than pay someone for crap.

So, the concept of paying 20x net monthly income is completely incorrect. If you need an example, let’s imagine this: one of my websites does earn £1000 per month (this is the average based on the last 12 months’ data). If I sell it to you for £20,000, then I’d be earning 20 months’ income at once. And then nothing. In total: one year, eight months, or less than 2 years! All websites require at least minimal maintenance, so spending perhaps an hour a day is worth £1000 per month, isn’t it? But, it isn’t worth losing such a lucrative source of income.

So how to appraise a website properly?
One must pay attention to the potential, previous growth, trends, popularity, usefulness, and current status. So, if a website is 36 months old, and in the past 12 months has earned £1000/month, and if traffic trends look promising, then the website is worth at least £60,000, perhaps £70,000, or even more. How did I arrive at that value? It’s very simple: when you invest in content, ROI should be somewhere between 1 and 3 years. This means that sometime in the last three years, the seller put in enough effort to achieve £1000/month. This means high expenses (in comparison to what people expect from web; low investments and high income). All in all, the seller could have spent between £10,000 and £36,000 during these 36 months. But what if they didn’t spend a penny? Then it’s all about experience, and experience costs something too. If you want to learn something, then you need time, patience, and often money. Would you sell a website for £20,000 if you knew that it cost you between £10,000 and £36,000 to get it to its current state? So again, how £60,000? Add £20,000 (net earnings in 20 months) and add the value of your effort. If trends are promising (and they should be if they managed to earn £1000/month in the 24-36 months after startup), then add another £500/month net income for the next 20 months. That’s £12,000. In total, then, that’s £32000. Please understand that if any website earns £1000/month after 36 months, then there is a great deal of potential to earn much more as time goes by. This must be considered when appraising a website. Now simply calculate the work which has been done since beginning. If the seller spent only one hour a day working on the site during the last 36 months, then that comes to 1095 hours (calculated as 36 months = 3 years, each of 365 days). If he was paid £25/hour, it’d make £27,375 in total. Of course, if there was more work, then more money is needed to buy the site. All told, it’s £59,375. Since I like nice numbers, £60,000 looks better.

This sounds strange to those who buy websites, but to those who create content, write code, and do their own SEO, this is a basic and essential calculation.

I will never sell a website for too low a price. If you’re selling, don’t sell cheaply: it’s a costly mistake!

So, now you know how to accurately appraise a website. Calculate your work and the potential, and you get a result. Never use the stupid website’s value = 20x net monthly income formula!