Make Money Online

Google has announced the release of their new social media tool “Google Friend Connect“. This is going to be pretty cool from the limited features they have available for preview.

What Google Friend Connect is going to allow you to do is make any website you have “social” without coding knowledge. This opens the doors of opportunity for you to get your visitors active on your website.

Now your visitors can help create content for your website. Google Friend Connect gives your website visitors a reason to return to your website.

I am excited to see how this evolves because I have a ton of ideas for the th eGoogle Friend Connect social tool already. Check out the news announcement here and the Google Friend Connect page.

Google Friend Connect

( The typing/gun shot effect went a little crazy on this video )

Something really cool that Yahoo has just implemented into their search engine is a warning system.

If you search for a keyword phrase “make money online” for example you will this page. Notice the “1 potentially harmful website is marked on this page.” warning under the search bar?

Now if you scroll down the page you will find the actual website that Yahoo claims is potentially a harmful website.

I think this is an awesome addition to Yahoo’s algorithm but the only problem is what if Yahoo is wrong? How do you opt out of this or request to have your website and or page reviewed?

For instance one page on our website that offers free software for download was tagged. I know that this software is virus free because I run everything through Mcafee before I upload it. I don’t know exaclty what happened here, but this was back in 2008 and it still seems to be working fine with “NO” viruses of any nature.

There is probably some automatic trigger that causes this reaction and I’m sure it’s a small tweak that Yahoo will eventually fix. Overall I think this is a big step forward for search engines and something to make Yahoo stand apart from Google.

SEO Service

Big news today – Microsoft withdrew their bid for Yahoo and is no longer perusing a takeover. Is this really the end of the MicroHoo drama that remains to be seen.

To be honest this sucks because I really want to see these two merge forces to go up against Google. It would be a huge feat to conquer but you have to start somewhere.

You can check out the Press Release with all the details of Microsoft’s withdraw.

A recent conversation has lead me to make this post. A popular website that ranked for a highly competitive keyword recently kicked the bucket.

Banned from Google!

There are several very basic rules that every webmaster needs to follow to stay out of harms way. Keep in mind these are only a few of the things that could get your website banned but they are the “biggies”.

• Keyword stuffing: This is one of the most commonly used techniques and involves injecting a large number of the same keyword all over the page in the hopes that the web crawler will read this as relevant.

Keyword stuffing goes beyond the necessity of quality content and into the dark realm of throwing keywords in just to attract the search engines. You do not want to stoop this low.

• Hidden texts: This is basically the same as keyword stuffing, although these texts are often placed at the bottom of the page in smaller fonts, placed out the page, or done in the same color as the background to hide it.

Use of this tactic is one sure way to get your site banned so better not try it.

• Cloaking: Webmasters or SEO service providers who use this tactic are basically presenting different information to search engines and human searchers.

It is used to give a site a higher ranking and to lead searchers to websites based on search engine descriptions that turn out to be unrelated to the content of the site.

• Doorway pages: These are pages on a site whose main purpose is to target a specific keyword or phrase, and does not offer any useful content. Use of doorway pages can lead to the automatic removal of your site as soon as someone reports it.

• Redirecting: This is often used by webmasters or SEO services in tandem with doorway pages. Once a visitor lands on a doorway page he is immediately taken to a page that actually contains legitimate content. Again, one surefire way to get the boot from search engines.

If you are spending a lot of time building a website you don’t want to blow it out of Google by using some lame black hat method. Yeah you might make a few quick bucks but your goal should be to create a residual income.

It may take a while to get your feet wet and make money online but slow and steady wins the race – at least that’s how the saying goes

If you didn’t notice Google released new custom themes for your iGoogle home page.

Once you log into your iGoogle home page check out the right hand side of the page and you will see “Get Artist Themes”.

There are a lot of different themes to choose from and one I thought was interesting was from Marc Ecko.

If you don’t use a iGoogle home page I highly suggest you do. I have all my favorite RSS feeds displaying on the page which makes it easy to see which blog posts I am interested in.