Monetize Pro

Lately we have been looking to invest a percent of our earned money online. We all know the famous line: “Don’t work for your money, let the money work for you“, and we agree with that! Currently we are browsing popular marketplaces like the one at SitePoint on a daily basis. Unfortunately we can’t browse Digital Point’s marketplace any longer because of a temporary ban (oops).

There are also other investment options which we are checking out lately, such as stocks and mutual funds. We will keep you updated about our investments and if we are making profit from it or a loss.

Yesterday we discussed the first 2 points of why your website may look like spam to search engines! Today we are discussing the two other points.

3. Link factors that can indicate a spammy website:

Spammy websites often have many links to other spam and low quality websites. Low quality websites aren’t likely to have links from trusted sites.

4. Technical factors that can indicate a spammy website:

Spammy website often use redirects (JavaScript, MetaRefresh, etc.) from landing pages. Spammy websites also often use cloaking. Of course, other spam elements such as hidden text also cause problems with search engines.

If your website uses many of the elements mentioned above then it could be classified as spam. In that case, you should consider a redesign of your website.

Is your website nowhere to be seen in Google? It might be that Google doesn’t like your website because it looks like spam. Check the following points to find out whether your website might look like spam or not.

1. Domain name factors that can indicate a spammy website:

The domain names of spammy websites are often very long and contain many hyphens. Those domain names often contain commercial high value keywords (the keywords for which you receive lots of spam messages that we don’t want to mention here).

Spammy domains are often registered by people who own a very large number of domains. The more domains a person owns, the more likely it is that the quality of a single domain isn’t high. Spammy domains are often very young and have a short registration period. Low quality domains also often use .info, .cc, .us and other cheap top level domains. Spammy websites often have many keyword-stuffed sub domains.

2. Content factors that can indicate a spammy website:

Spammy websites often show very many ads. They also often contain high-commercial keywords. The keyword density and the keyword frequency on low quality websites is often very high. Spammy websites often have duplicate content and content scraped from other websites. Low quality websites usually don’t have unique content.

Low quality websites usually don’t contain a privacy policy, a copyright notice page and “Contact us” page with a full address.

Click here for part 2 to check out factor 3 and 4.

People are complaining all the time how hard it is to get their forums active. This is total crap if you ask us! If you want to succeed with your forum, you are going to succeed. People think they get new sign ups and posts while there is nothing posted yet, or something to discuss. Why would you think people will sign up and post in an empty forum? very odd thoughts if you ask us!

How should you start a forum? There are a few points that are extremely important to kick off a forum and getting new members! The first one is be dedicated as an admin. You should be the top poster in the beginning and create new topics to discuss. This should not be 10 new threads or something, but better make that a few hundred!

After you made a good amount of topics you can start promoting your forum! Get on relevant forums and get the word out about your forum. If people are browsing your forum and it has good and interesting topics on it (which you created before) people will join and even better, post!

If you succeeded to get around 100 members and they are posting on your topics, don’t stop! Reply again to them and create even more new topics. Create a community! A very good tactic is also to start contests! Some people will say: “people will only join because of the contest”. This is wrong, if you are running the contest for like 2 weeks, you have 2 weeks time to convince the people to stay at your forum! And they will stay if they feel accepted and there is a good community.

In the past we started a few forums as well and they succeeded, sold for good dollars! Recently we acquired a new technology forum and are trying to make this one an active place to be and make some good money from it!

The final words for getting a forum active: Don’t give up and be active!

After creating your final website layout and everything is ready, you need to promote your site to get traffic in! Promotion is a vital step in survival of your website. Without promotion no one will ever know about your site and your quality content or products will not be noticed.

Lot of webmasters gets too excited and are going to spam everywhere they can. This is not the right thing to do. It might get you a dozen of visitors in the first few days, but your reputation is screwed. For a good post on how to build your reputation as a blogger, check out this post from ViperChill.

Don’t promote your website when it is still under construction. No one wants to be on a website that is done for 50%. You should start promoting when your site is fully functional otherwise visitors might get bad impressions and will not return.

Wrong methods of website optimization. We still see websites that uses this method to hide text by changing its color with the background color, making it invisible to see for visitors (at first sight). Your site will get penalized for these actions, so better not try them. There are a lot of other black hat techniques that we are not goinig to discuss here, it might bring you at wrong ideas

We hope you got a idea now what not to do. Hope you learned something from it!

Recently some very important Google spam guidelines leaked out to the public. We got this info from Jon, who recently posted about it! If you are interested in this confidental report of 43 pages, you can read it here. This report will give you information about how Google is looking at your website and how the spiders are crawling it! We almost finished reading everything from this report and it has some useful information to use. It is not easy to read, but worth the time you put in!

It is important to know how Google is looking at your website and what aspects are very important to have. If you know this info you can achieve better rankings which will mean more traffic (and traffic is money). Thanks Jon for sharing.