Yes, that’s true. I got caught by Google for selling paid links.

You are probably already aware that Google is taking the obvious measures against paid links.

I have a couple of niche web sites; some of them hardly got any traffic, but they all had nice Google PageRanks. There was a time I was selling paid links with Backlinks.com which made me a small stream of income every month.

However, one day I woke up and saw a popular site of mine dropped from PR 3 to PR 0.

“It must be something wrong! I never used any blackhat SEO methods!” So I checked my other sites.

But to my surprise that all my sites listed in the Backlinks.com are down to PR0. Then I realized that I’ve got a PageRank penalty from Google. …Click to Continue →

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is maybe  by far the most confusing traffic-generation strategy when you’re just starting out.

Sometimes, you may have wondered that why your sites have so many backlinks, but still couldn’t get the high rankings as you expected.

To explain this, SEO guru Jonathan Leger introduced his “link pyramid” theory that you need to make your site’s link structure look nature in Google’s eyes.

We all know that all incoming links are not created equal. Links from authority sites are much more powerful than links from niche blogs, general directories or blog comments.

But does more authority links always mean better rankings? The answer might not be what you think.

To make it nature, you want to construct what he calls a “link pyramid” for your site.

This pyramid is a 3-level structure of links: 1) your base links, 2) your mid-range links and 3) your highest quality links.

…Click to Continue →

This is a guest post by Nick Bokhonok from www.FreeTrafficSystem.com. I’ve tested his free link building system and it works out very well for me.

Free Traffic System and Unique Article Wizard are much alike that you can build unlimited one way links with both by submitting unique articles.

I consider FTS the lite version of Unique Article Wizard since you can only republish your article on 30 relevant blogs, compare with up to 2,000 article directories in UAW. But if you budget is quite limited, this 100% free link building service is a good choice.

How Not to Waste Your Golden Keywords

You do not imagine how many people – while pursuing the best of the hopes – are naturally damaging their SEO success. Indeed the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

As a person who has been doing link building help to different businesses and as a person who has a daily growing community of link builders – I have seen too often how people are killing their chances to get more traffic.

That is why I decided to explain what is wrong and how to stop wasting your golden keywords in future.

What are these “Golden Keywords” About?

Let’s define the notion of “golden keywords” first, because this is a term from my personal use and you are not going to find it in the dictionary.

“Golden keywords” are the keywords with small link building competition and nice stable search demand. In other words, these are the keywords in your niche for which you can quite quickly get Google page 1 and milk this traffic, converting it into signups/sales/clicks on your site.

Finding these “golden keywords” is not easy, and usually people hire professional keyword researchers who are finding the keywords with small competition and nice traffic.

And this is where people get into the trap…

I Know My Golden Keywords I will Squeeze the Most from Them!

Nothing bad about taking the bull by the horns. You paid your money for the keyword research, and once you have the keywords – your hands are scratching to use them whenever it is possible. And this can cause you big SEO trouble.

The rule of a thumb is to make thorough use of these keywords ON YOUR SITE (where this is ok), but NEVER use them on the sites of other people.

Let me give you one example that will explain everything.

Let’s say your golden keyword is “bodybuilding for snoring relief” – obviously I have invented the keyword on the go, so don’t try to fight for this keyword

Of course, you used this keyword on your site: you put it into the meta title of the page, in the meta description, mentioned “bodybuilding for snoring relief” several times in the text and started to build backlinks with “bodybuilding for snoring relief” being inside the anchor text of your backlinks. Great, you’ve done your homework perfectly well!

But then you decide to get some extra publicity for this topic, and you submitted an article or press release and in the title you used “bodybuilding for snoring relief” – this is where the troubles come in…

You see, famous article and press release directories are very reputable in the eyes of search engines. That is why if you publish an article on a famous article directory with “bodybuilding for snoring relief” used in the title of the article, then very soon you can see that this article got a better position in Google for the search “bodybuilding for snoring relief.”

And this is just because you used “bodybuilding for snoring relief” in the title and it got published on a SEO trusted resource.

This is great for the article directory: you helped them to get top position for another great keyword. But is that great for you?

THEY Get Most of the Traffic You are Left with Breadcrumbs!

Even if the difference is small, and your article on another site has position 1 in Google, and your site has position 2 in Google – the difference in traffic will be serious. It is proven that position 1 can be getting up to 2 times more traffic compared to position 2.

Now just imagine how much traffic you can lose because someone reads your article on another site and will never click your link in the resource box at the bottom of the article.

Does It Mean I Should Stop Submitting Content to Other Sites?

Wrong! It is wise and important to build extra traffic via submitting your content to niche blogs, social news networks, article and press release directories.

But you should use general keywords in the title of your content publish on these other sites. If you use a golden keyword, then you are creating a serious competitor.

In my free link building network (www.FreeTrafficSystem.com) people submit content to niche blogs, and I noticed that a big portion of the people are trying to put their golden keywords into the title of the submitted articles, thus helping the niche blogs to get extra traffic and stealing this traffic from their own sites.

The only place where you SHOULD use the golden keyword on the pages of other sites is the anchor text of the backlink which links to YOUR site. Using golden keywords in anchor text of backlinks pushes your site higher in the Google search results, and this has been proven by thousands of link building experiences.

Summary

Be wise with your golden keywords – they are your online business asset. Do not help other sites to score for these keywords, by using golden keywords in the titles of any content, published outside your site.

Be smart – and SEO abundance will come to your business.

About author:

Nick Bokhonok – inventor of Internet marketing and SEO tools since 2000.

In his new community www.FreeTrafficSystem.com people build unlimited one way links for free and push their sites to Google page 1.

Yeah, you know how competitive the keyword“online marketing blog” in the search engines right?

No.8 in Google out of 43,100,000 results!

This is another screen shot I took when I just searched “online marketing newsletter” in Google:

My CBHelper newsletter ranked in the No.7 position, out of 29,600,000 results in Google!

You’ll see the results vary from time to time so we might slightly be in different positions when you check.

Updated: I got first page rankings on these keywords for sometime but not anymore.

This is because I realized that these high competitive keywords didn’t get me as much traffic as I expected, so I stopped aiming to rank on these keywords.

As one subscriber indicated in the comments, these keyphrases now don’t get many searches in Google.

But this post still shows the possibility of ranking on HIGHLY competitive keywords with my own SEO tactics.

You know, I credit the results to implementing a healthy mix of SEO techniques.

If you got all of your links from social bookmarking sites, if you got all of links from reciprocal links, if you got all of your links from directory submissions…

You are not going to rank as quickly or as highly as you expect, because Google knows that you are pushing hard to build links.

And one day Google may even slap you if they just devalue all the directory links, or all the social bookmark links or things like that.

My advice is, don’t ever put all your “link eggs” in one basket.

This is a good reminder to look at your own link building methods and see how you can diversify.

I will release an honest review on a secret link building tool in a few days that I use to get me tens of thousands of quality backlinks on diverse web sites.

Make sure you stay tuned so you won’t miss anything!

To your amazing success,

Henry

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1. How to get accepted by CPA affiliate networks
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Thanks for all your great feedback on the make money giving away freebies post I made.

However, some people have trouble when they try to join the CPA networks but without a high traffic website.

A blog reader told me that most of my listed CPA companies require the website should have at least 1000 visitors per month, in one of them they even need 10,000!

So how can you get your applications accepted?

Most CPA networks have comments section in the application. You just explain in the comments block that you are going to use Pay-per-click and purchase some banners or text links to send traffic with direct linking.

You can even try calling in them to get your application manually reviewed.

This should get you into the most CPA networks.

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2. The eBay affiliate program truth
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A subscriber asked for my opinion of the Build A Niche Store script(not an affiliate link), which create content sites through the eBay affiliate programs.

I haven’t personally tried BANS but I don’t suggest anybody to buy it, because the eBay affiliate program is not as profitable as some other ones like Clickbank, even Adsense. Since eBay is only sharing a small part of their bid revenue, about 4% of the closing value of a winning bid, which is not generous compare to 75% of Clickbank sale and 78% of Adsense revenue share.

In fact, personally I’ve never had a good experience with the eBay’s affiliate program. If you really want to use BANS, you need to get approved by eBay Partner Network firstly. But the weird thing is I never get approved!

When they was handling their affiliate program with CJ (which turned out to be a big fail) and my affiliate application got declined automatically.

And on April 2008 they finally dropped CJ and built their affiliate program in house. I tried to join their eBay Partner Network but no response from them since I submitted my application.

And even worse, they banned hundreds of affiliates this month for reason that the traffic they were sending to eBay was “significantly less engaged”.

And here’s even a Squidoo len by a sacked eBay affiliate:

http://www.squidoo.com/the-truth-about-epn

So for most for you, what you need is to follow a proven working system, not something that could make you money right now. (Remember the biggest money-making obstacle?)

Here are some proven working marketing systems by Marlon Sanders if you’re lack of one:

Promo Dashboard (Promo in 3 simple steps with list building)

Marketing Dashboard (Setting up your own online business like the experts)

Design Dashboard (Create amazing web pages that sell products like crazy)

Affiliate Dashboard (Launch your own affiliate program & getting streams of active affiliates)

Each of Marlon’s “Dashboard” products is a easy to follow system. I do love the 6 row of lovely icons, each icon is a single step for you to take. Easy and fun. I’m sure you’ll love them too.

Always remember you don’t need to chase the latest money-making opportunities all the time. What you need is just a system, a proven working system.

And always let me know what you think by leaving your comment below.

To your amazing success!

Henry