Google suggests that it might be worth your effort to request to have links removed that are pointing from low grade sites to yours. The easiest way this can be done is by searching the site for a “Contact Us” page, email address, or a phone number. If none can not be found then a Whois search can be performed. A Whois search will typically return the contact information of the site owner. Sometimes site owners block their contact information with a private registration. If that’s the case, then it may be possible to pass a message to the owner through the hosting company.
Of course if it’s not easy to contact the owners of the sites linking to yours, then it might not be worth the time invested. On the Google Webmaster Central blog, they suggests that efforts be made towards having links removed; however, if there are sites less than desirable linking to yours, Google does offer some reassurance by stating that they have 200 factors when it comes to determining relevancy in the search results. I don’t recommend investing time towards contacting site owners requesting the removal of links. Instead, I suggest investing time towards increasing the number of higher quality links pointing to your site.
Controllable things are another thing that should be taken into consideration. Once again, Google points focus on their design, content, technical, and quality guidelines. Google implies that they understand that certain things fall outside your control. With that, explain that emphasis is given things that webmasters can control such as having a well maintained site with high quality and original content with an excellent linking structure. And I agree. I can’t think of a single popular site that I would consider to be a terrible site. I am sure they exist, and I am sure you can leave a comment pointing me to a few; but all in all, in my opinion, all popular sites I have seen, fall within these guidelines.
My advice to site owners is to maintain a clean, high quality, and organized site that genuinely interests people. Don’t invest time into removing low quality backlinks and only invest some time into high quality backlink molding. I think it’s more important to spread awareness about your site, instead. If people like what they see, then they’ll come back many times over, and also they’ll link to it as well. Additionally, encouraging people to share information is very helpful too.
So what do you think? Do you think that it’s worth your time to remove low quality backlinks? What about spending time towards backlink molding? And what about time spent marketing and promoting your site? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
If you’re interested in learning how to increase your AdSense earnings, then on November 5th the Content Revenue Strategies team will be available to help you get the most from AdSense, and ultimately help you increase your earnings. The event will be held in New York at the Javits Convention Center during the ad:tech New York conference. The full ad:tech conference will be from the 4th thru the 6th; however, CRS will be held on the 5th.
It’s claimed that CRS is the first and only conference and expo dedicated strictly to AdSense and contextual advertising. It’s geared for small to mid-sized publishers who want insider tips on how to maximize AdSense earnings and increase revenue opportunities. Equally, CRS caters to advertisers who want to learn more about buying advertising across Google’s network and how to maximize targeting of advertisements to get the most of out campaigns.
Early registration price is $395 and includes a full day of education for bloggers, individual publishers, social media publishers, video publishers, advertising networks, search advertisers, search engine marketing agencies, search engine marketing service providers, and search technology vendors.
Of course, if you want to attend the full ad:tech conference, the price is $1195. You’ll be kept real busy with the full schedule of events and exhibiting companies. A few that may interest you include: FaceBook, Google, and Website Magazine. At a minimum, if you’re looking to really make the most of the AdSense program and increase your earnings, then I recommend attending the CRS. It’s affordable, far enough in advanced to make plans, and you’ll be aligned with some amazing and knowledgeable people.
Yesterday Google released a new version of AdSense geared for high end mobile phones. The news of this event was broadcast across four of their official blogs, two of which completely duplicated the content. (#1, #2, #3, #4) Ironically, Google also released a new parameter handling tool which helps publishers avoid duplicate content issues. More about that coming soon. At any rate, publishers and advertisers have a brand new, high end mobile phone optimized version of AdSense to work with. And I have to say it looks great.
Google created the new version of Adsense for high-end devices because of the rising number of people using them. High-end mobile phones such as the iPhone are equipped with full HTML browsers. The iPhone for instance has special mobile version of Safari installed. Sites that utilize AdSense for high-end devices will have more control over how the ads appear to high-end device users compared to the displaying ads for all phones.
Careful consideration may need to be taking towards choosing the right device to target. Google explains that if your site is written in xhtml or html and primarily targets high-end phones, such as iPhone, then choosing the High-end Devices Only Code is ideal. However, if your site supports a wide variety of handsets then server side scripting may be required, thus choosing the All Phones option will be best.
No code changes are required to be implemented. That means if you’re targeting all mobile devices, or if you’re not able to make mass changes to your website, then you’re not required to update your AdSense code. Instead, the standard mobile version AdSense ads will appear. However, and once again, if you’re wanting to take full advantage of this enhanced version of AdSense, then making efforts towards updating your code is recommended.
The last week in September, I wrote an article expressing some opinions about Google Sidewiki. One of the concerns I had with Google Sidewiki was the fact that users couldn’t claim “indexable ownership” of their content. Instead, content contributed in Google Sidewiki would be left for hackers, and other splog owners to tap into.
Being a blogger myself, at that time, I had no interest in using Google Sidewiki. The reason is simple. If I am going to invest time into contributing my thoughts into words, then I am only going to do that in a way that allows me to maintain control of my content and possibly even make money off it. In other words, instead of investing an hour of time into making a Google Sidewiki comment about another web page, I’d much rather publish the write-up on my blog, add a little SEO flavor to the content, slap some AdSense on the page, and make about $25 / year off my writing.
I am not sure what happened or why, but Google Sidewiki now offers the option to pipe your comments directly into your Blogger.com blog. In my opinion, this corrects everything, and instantly changes my mind about contributing and using Google Sidewiki. This new feature actually excites me simply because I am not able to spin off content on my blog easier than before. New article content can be published on my blog directly from Google Sidewiki. When the comment is published on the blog, a reference to the web page and the Sidewiki page are automatically included in the footnotes of the article.
Another feature I enjoy about Google Sidewiki is the fact that you can leave a welcome comment on pages that you own. The opening comment will remain on the top of the Sidewiki page, and the owner has the option of editing and or deleting the comment if desired. This feature gives site owners, such as bloggers, an excellent opportunity to welcome readers to their site.
The sharing features in Google Sidewiki are very helpful and useful. I’ll admit, when I wrote my first article about Google Sidewiki, I was so bothered by many things that I didn’t have a clear vision on a lot of the good things. The sharing capabilities are great. After publishing a comment, users can share what they wrote on FaceBook, Twitter, and by Email.
I hope to see additional sharing features in the near future; however, I am very pleased with the ones being offered. Frankly, FaceBook and Twitter are my two favorites, plus if I am batching my comments to my Blogger.com blog, I have additional sharing features available there.
That said, I’ll admit, I jumped the gun when I published my last article; however, I do feel my opinions regarding web spam and content theft are valid. Bloggers typically don’t like to contribute content in areas where they lose control of it or the ability to monetize it. With Google making the decision to allow people to pipe their comments directly into their blogs, this makes thing so much more appealing. At least it does for me. And don’t be surprised when you run across a few of my comments in Sidewiki. Also, and don’t be surprised if the post you’re reading on my blog was actually a post written within Sidewiki. And lastly, don’t be surprised if that post was written about you.
Even today with the Internet reaching balzing speeds, loading media rich web pages can still take a lot of time. Most modern news sites include high resolution videos, detailed screen shots, and streaming audio on their pages. This makes load time slow, even for users with the highest Internet speeds. Google claims that users need a way to flip web pages similiar to how people flip pages in a magazine or newspaper. Their goal is to completely eliminate load time all together with the addition of a new Google Labs experiment called Google Fast Flip.
On the Official Google blog, they explained that Fast Flip is an experiment where people can combine traditional print reading with online article reading to achieve a new and enhanced reading experience. Just like when people read printed magazines or newspapers, Fast Flip lets users browse through multiple pages quickly and instantly. Information is sorted and presented to users by their level of popularity, topic, and source. In other words, a user can use filters to display only news from one or multiple sources. Also, filters can be used to display information about certain topics.
Online Video Presentation of Google Fast Flip Created by Phillip J Rhoades.
In part of building Fast Flip, Google developed partnerships with three dozen top publishers including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, ProPublica and Newsweek. These companies will all share revenue earned from contextually relevent ads. Google aims to support the publishing industry with the many challenges they face. Google believes that Fast Flip can help encourage users to continue reading news.
Google recognizes that people are using mobile devices to get news and updates on current events. Because of that, they have developed a mobile version of Fast Flip. The mobile version is available for iPhone and Android devices and is accessible simply by navigating directly to the Google Fast Flip homepage. Viewing the mobile version gives access to popular articles, sources, and topics. Flipping through articles is done by swipping a finger over the page to the left or right. Users are able to tap to zoom an article to view a cleaner high resolution version.
I think Google Fast Flip is useful. Like many of the Google Labs experiments, I don’t think Google does a good job promoting it. At the time of writing this article, I wasn’t able to find an official Google video on Fast Flip, thus the reason why I included the video created by Phillip J Rhoades. That said, Google does an amazing job with creating things that makes lives easier for people. The problemi is that many people don’t know about it. I recommend that people read as many Google blogs as possible so that they can stay in the loop with what’s going on.
