Sunday Around The Web June 7th

I thought today was Saturday, but instead it is Sunday. I lost a day somewhere. Anyways, here is what should of been in the Saturday post of around the web.

First up is a blind search engine taste taste of sorts. with the recent buzz about Bing, you can use this tool to vote which search engine gives the best results for a search query. you should use a search query unrelated to any of your niches as you likely have memorized what the results look like. Try it a couple of times on your next few random searches and see what your preferences are.

Came across Tiny Chat this week as well. It is a cool video cam chat room with a ton of free features. They do have a paid feature should you find it useful.

Danny Sullivan penned a great article on Twitters real time spam problem. It will likely get worse until it gets better. Word is that authorized accounts will be tested soon.

Matt Cutts released a few more videos this week. Coming soon pages and if they hurt you, Impact of server location on rankings and Getting Google to deeper pages of your website. All videos are short and get right to the point.

Website Magazine has a post about Targeting Social Networks for Sales with some demographics attached in it. well worth a read.

Well I Married My Dream Girl, I Married My Dream Girl

Admittedly I do not watch much television, but when I do, it is usually sports. I have watched almost every Penguins game during the NHL playoffs and that damn FreeCreditReport.com commercial always is shown. So much so, that I walk around the house singing it, to annoy my wife. God forbid I should every need their services, but if I did, I would likely at least look at their site. Their marketing is classic, ram the brand down your throat with a series of catchy jingles. You should always be working towards branding yourself whenever possible. with all of free social networking and video sites out there, a real creative mind could achieve a high quality branding through a real low budget ad campaign.

Linkshare Free SEO Web Seminar Next Thursday

On Thursday, June 11th, Linkshare will be offering a free seminar on SEO best practices. The seminar will be given by Victoria Edwards, SEO Internet Marketing Specialist at LinkShare. She will be sharing her SEO best practices, including ideas that may help you increase your search traffic. The seminar will start at 1:00 PM, EST and you will need to register beforehand. If you are newer to the business, I highly suggest you tune in to it.

Linkshare is a great affiliate company to market for and have been a very reliable earner for me over the years. You should sign up and look around at all of the products they offer to promote.

Click here to become a LinkShare Affiliate!

Why It Makes More Cents To List Fewer Product Listings

How many products should one show on a niche site page? This is always an ongoing question for niche site users. Lets look at it from a Page Rank distribution focus or as I like to call it: Link Juice. Now Page Rank is a highly debatable topic, but the greener the bar, the better a webmaster feels. The front page of your niche site USUALLY will have the most Page rank and that page rank is distributed through other links on the page. There could be links to other sites or internal pages of your site. At one time Page Rank was distributed evenly through all dofollow links on your site, but as Matt Cutts revealed at SMX, this is not the case anymore. Let's say you have 20 nofollow eBay listings on a page and 5 dofollow links to internal pages on your site on that same page. That is 25 links in total. The old page rank distribution method use to divide up the Page rank and pass it on equally to the 5 dofollow links, but that is not the case now according to Cutts. Now the links, dofollow or not get only an equal portion of the Page Rank distribution. So instead of 20% link juice like before, the dofollow links now get only 4% link juice passed on to each dofollow link.

Is this a big deal? In the grand scheme of things, I wouldn't rush out and change all of your sites structure and number products listed, but you should be aware going forward in the overall site structure. We want as much link juice and Page Rank passing down to internal pages as we can get. This also would mean you want to think long and hard about showing product listings on the front page of your site if indeed it is the page with the most Page Rank.

Let's look at it from a surfer standpoint as well. If they are looking for a particular product, they are PROBABLY on your page ready to buy. Listing 5 or 6 highly targeted items to match their needs is just as good in my opinion as listing 20. They want it, you have it. I hearken back to the example BANS golf store. it looks clean and shows the surfer exactly what they are looking for.

Let me close this post by saying once again that this is not a HUGE factor, but every little bit will help, especially when you are dealing with Google.

Matt Cutts On Google Deindexed Sites

Deindexed sites are common in the affiliate marketing world. This is not just for BANS sites as the common factors are usually site thinness or other major no nos that Google dislikes. While there is really no SURE FIRE way of getting it back in the index other than correcting the obvious mistakes and resubmitting to Google, it may be in your best interest to take your lumps and move on. You could 301 redirect the deindexed domain to a new one, but as Matt Cutts is quoted here:

Can you get hurt by 301′ing a penalized Web site to a new Web site?

Typically not because it could be a case where someone’s trying to Googlebowl you. However, if it’s a site that’s penalized and that Google doesn’t trust, then you may not be getting that much juice transferring over anyway. Sometimes its better to just start truly fresh.

Cutts is basically telling you to move on. Is this what everyone wants to hear? No! Are there situations where you can get a de-indexed site, re-indexed? Sure, I have done it myself, but it is hit and miss and no guarantees as far as a time factor.

So what do you do with all of that content you added after de-indexing? Personally, I would try and get all of the content to evaporate from the major search engines you are listed in for duplicate content sake. You can try to block all bots in the robots.txt and see how long it takes. Slowly add in your content to the new site and build backlinks slowly as well. Most importantly, learn from your past mistakes and do not let it happen again.

Do Link Shorteners Pass Page Rank And Link Juice?

Tiny urls and link shortners are here to stay. It makes posting urls easy via Twitter and several other platforms. While not all link shortener services are created equal, MOST will pass page rank or link juice if they are using a 301 redirect. Matt Cutts from Google, just did a video on this you can see below. He also references a post by Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land, who did expansive research on the link shortner services. The one he recommends as the best link shortner is http://bit.ly/

What If You Were Only Allowed One Web Site?

The title of this post should say it all. What if you were only allowed one web site? How would it affect the time and energy you put into it? Would you add content everyday? Would it be the authority site in it's niche? Would you make sure it succeeded and was promoted on every available turn? Would you write articles everyday to attract traffic from article directories? Would you social bookmark everything you could from your site? Would surfers think that your site was the go to place for information in that niche?

I think you see where I am going here. Tons of you are treating your best site like it was one of thousands that you own. One site can make a ton of money if you become the authority on whatever the niche is. You should treat your favorite site like it is the only one you are allowed to have. If you do this, I am sure you will see your income rise as the bi-product of your hard work.