Are You Letting People Pay To Take Your Position In Search?

@ Adrian,

Thanks for considering my point of view. I appreciate it.

@ Ritchie,

I agree with you about Google protecting their own business model; however, their system caters to a wide range of people including the “small” bloggers. Google helps people with all their needs. If you are an advertiser, they provide an awesome way to advertise, if you are a publisher, aka “small blogger”, they provide an awesome way to score traffic. Google does protect the small blogger by providing a controlled structure on how advertisers can advertise and how content can get indexed in their engine. It’s those that choose to “Game” their system that create a situation that can make Google a less relevant search engine.

Here is another thing to consider… “what search engine do you use to find things?” … if you use Google, there is a reason for it. And if Google said, “Ok… we give up, we’ll accept sites into the index that have paid their way to attempt to rank to the top, and we’ll also accept the sites that enabled this to happen” the result you will soon discover is a “Less Relevant” search engine… soon thereafter, you might make Yahoo your homepage.

Google is a business and its their job to protect their business model, their advertisers, as well as the content that is listed in their search engine. Without these systems in place, their index database would be nothing but a huge spam pool of trash.

@ David

Thank you so much for your comment and compliment. I am very glad that you are able to see my point of view. That’s way cool.

@ David C.

Well said man… I can’t help but consider how I would feel if someone just paid money to push my ranking down in the SERPS. I have worked hard to achieve my rankings in the search engine. I don’t have a lot of money, and because of the systems in place, my content is protected for others who try to buy the spots where I rank naturally.

@ Mark,

After reading your comment, I feel great about doing the post and video. Mark you are a very open minded person and I am sure we don’t see eye to eye on every single thing I write about… but I can count on you having an honest opinion about things. So, now knowing what you have shared with me in your comments secures the deal. If I can close out my day, knowing that I have helped just “one” person, then I have done my job. Granted, as the days, weeks, months go by it seems like I am helping more… which is awesome too!

@ Tish,

Thanks for the compliment!

@ Forest Parks,

I have got some good news and some GREAT!!! news for you. First off, I see you as a PR4 not a PR3. Secondly, Google loves you! I can tell that by how quickly your content is getting indexed in the SERPS. Lets look at a few things and see if we can’t get that search engine traffic to spike up a bit and the also lets see if we can’t squeeze a few more dollars per day out of your Adsense.

First off, it seems Google indexes your content fairly quickly… as seen here 22 hours. Not bad! Next thing… do a search on my blog for title and meta tags for blogger.com blogs. Search bar is at the top of my blog. You need to switch your title around to show the POST TITLE first and then the TITLE OF YOUR BLOG second. Currently its the other way around. I would even go so far as to even drop your BLOG TITLE off completely. Third thing is your BlogRush being on the top left corner is screwing up how DESCRIPTIONS in the SERPS. I would suggest removing BlogRush from your blog or relocating it (I’ll touch on that below again too!)

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Next, lets look at making some more money:

People read left to right… so your Google Adsense Leader Board is great! This looks nice. However, your BlogRush is also the second thing I see… and being a first time and unaware visitor… I would quickly leave your blog via BlogRush. You are basically sending too much traffic away from your blog via a system that doesn’t pay you money.

I would do one of two things. (A) Replace BlogRush with a Google Adsense 160×600 Text only, or (B) Replace BlogRush and widen out your sidebar to accommodate for a Google Adsense 200×200 Text Only.

If you choose option A, I would then add the 200×200 Text only into your post and make it so that your content wraps around your posst. *Go back to my home page and scroll down a few posts, I just wrote an article that teaches you how to wrap content around Adsense Ads.

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Overall, your blog’s health is doing great. Google loves your blog, you are a PR4, you have pages in the index. You just need to make your pages that are indexed look more appealing to people who see them in the SERPS and secondly, you need to execute better traffic control within your blog. If you want to make more money, pave the path to the things that make you money from your blog. Limit the options that people have while surfing the page and closely control your EXIT DOORS out of your blog.

I hope this helps… thanks for stopping by and thanks for dropping the comment.

opps… one last thing about the leader board… align that sucker to the left so that it is flush with the left side border of your template…

Zath,

With Wordpress by default, the rel=nofollow is applied to all the links in the comments including the link for your name. This was initially done to protect you back when it was hard to control spam. However, with all the spam protection programs available for WordPress I don’t believe rel=nofollow is needed for my blog. I closely control the content and links that get accepted into my posts via the comments.

The whole dofollow movement is ok, except for the rebellious attitude they give out against Google. Once again, rel=nofollow was put in place to protect the search engine as well as the individual web author… not the other way around.

I sport a UCOMMENT and IFOLLOW stating that links in my comments are machine readable as long as they are relevant and that I myself follow and visit your blog. If you look closely as my source code you will see that there are many sections in my blog that are NOFOLLOW. I pay close attention to my incoming as well as outgoing links.

Just make sure you go about it in a constructive way. A lot of the DOFOLLOW crowd are against Google and the REL=NOFOLLOW. I totally respect Google’s policies and have taken it upon myself to be the judge of which links on my blog are machine readable/crawlable and which ones are not. When the REL=NOFOLLOW tags are removed from a blog but placed in the control of good hands, it can really provide a very resourceful feed for search engine bots. Unfortunately, it is those that choose to “game” PageRank that cause this movement to get a bad name.

Also… PR3 is fine… and is really all that is needed for your posts to rank well in the SERPS. Take a look at the videos I have been doing and also I would love to have you watch David and I on RadioBlogTalk. We will have a new show (or attempt to… lol) every Monday morning. Visit, RadioBlogTalk.com and subscribe to our YouTube Channel!