Goodbye Google Supplemental Results – Increase Quality Rank Score or Trustrank

One very interesting tidbit I learned from attending the recent pubcon / webmaster world search conference was listening to matt cutts explain how to get a site out of the supplemental listings.

Supplemental search engine result positions ( SERPs ) are often seen with very large, new websites.  These sites often times have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of pages listed.

Generally, these sites are databases of content which have been published online.
Sometimes the content could be very valuable – for instance – if an academic journal decided to publish an archive of their article abstracts online.  This might add 30,000 new pages onto the web overnight – all of which would be very unique and valuable content.

Other times, these database websites are not very valuable.  The worst case might be an automated scraper site which mangles the content in a way that reads like jibberish.  In a situation like this, a blackhat webmaster might publish an almost unlimited number of pages (limited only by the size of database storage at his disposal).  This kind of content is basically garbage, and would surely frustrate anyone who clicked across this in a search engine listing.

At the conference, some webmaster asked ‘how can i get my very valuable website out of the supplemental listings?’.  I was a little bit surprised in how Matt Cutts replied to this.

Basically, he replied that when a site is showing up in the supplemental listings, it’s an indication that the site does not have enough backlinks coming to it.  If the site does not have enough backlinks coming to it – this would be an indication that the site was still lacking trust or reputation in it’s niche.

I consider this interesting because Cutts is basically advocating proactive link building in this case.  Building up links which would not develop naturally – rather links that would require the site webmaster to go out and solicit for others to link back to this site.

I suppose the rational behind his recommendation is that – if people really consider that your site is garbage – they would never bother to link back to your site anyway (who would want to link to such a scraper site described above?).  Thus – webmaster that links back to your large database website is a webmaster who is voting that your database is adding value to the internet.

At the Webmaster World conference there were also several references to a Google Quality Rank Score (which must be something like Trustrank).  There has already been a publically discussed Google Quality score which is used for Google Adwords – to determin how well an advertisement listing and landing page convert into leads for advertisers.  But in this case, I think the Google Quality Rank Score discussed at the conference was actually something different – maybe something that encompasses all of the different quality factors, as mentioned on Matt Cutts’ blog and in the Google Patent listing.  These quality factors include things like:

site age, document age, domain factors (how old the domain is, how long it is under the same ownership, domain name class – .edu, .org, .info, .com, .gov – hypens in the url?, etc), internal linking, external linking (how trustworthy are the sites your site links to?), link stability (are the links long lasting?),  frequency of updates, affiliate links, bad words, backlinks, site penalities (cloaking, hidden text, bad linking, etc).

Fast Ebook Creation with Webmaster Outsourcing

Ebooks can be worth their file size in gold in today’s knowledge based economy. The knowledge encoded into a high quality ebook could empower someone to build a successful business, have a high quality marriage, or even make a brilliant invention.

Author Sean Mize has put together a quick tutorial for how you can create an Ebook information product in less than a week. Combining the techniques that he mentions, along with webmaster outsourcing would create a successful force for anyone who wants to create high power ebooks quickly.

If you have never written an ebook, you probably think that is an incredibly impossible statement. And if you have, you know that it is possible.

My first ebook took me three months to write. My second, about three weeks. And my eighth, I actually wrote in about 1 ¼ days.

So when I say write an ebook in a week I mean it, and I have done better than that. In this article, I will simply give you the steps I used to do it and share with you a little of my mindset as I was working.

1) I sent out an email asking my subscribers what they wanted to learn more about. Once I had a feeling about what the next ebook should be about, I went into Word and wrote out an outline. The outline had the basic points of my topic, then under each basic point, I put several ‘subpoints’ that I could write about.

2) I began writing in sections – just one subtopic at a time. Do not look at the book as one huge project, look at it as many small projects, and just finish them one at a time.

3) I wrote about 5 pages one evening, then the next business day, I set a goal of writing the rest of it. I think that is the important part. In the middle of the afternoon, when my back started hurting, and I was tired, I only kept going because I had made the goal. One thing that is important here is that you have to learn to write even when you are tired. When I first started writing, I would write when I was fresh. Now I write when I tell myself I have to get the expected number of articles out, or the required number of pages out. And when I say expected or required, that is kind of how I think of them. I decide I am going to write 10 articles or 20 today, and that is usually what I do. And the same thing with the ebook. If I have decided that I want to release it on a certain day, then I have to do whatever it takes to get it ready to release that day.

4) Once it was finished, I put it down, and worked on the sales page for awhile.

5) Once I was rested from writing, I went back into it and worked on links that needed to be inserted, made headers and footers for it, ran spell check, and checked it for appearance.

6) Later that evening, I read it and corrected grammar and spelling errors not picked up by spell check (note: never trust spell check).

7) The following morning I had the sales page live and made sales by the evening.

Do I recommend you do this in one day? No, take a week or two to do what I did. But you can do it in a week or two; do not think you have to take a month or two or three. You don’t.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed a brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘

Download it free here: Secrets of Article Promotion

Do you want to learn how to build a massive list fast? Click here: Email List Building

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has created over 280 articles in print and 8 published ebooks online.

The Nebulous Relationship Between DomainPeople and Hostway

In the past one of the companies that I used for domain registrationwas Hostway. Overall they seemed to be a pretty reputable company, and also seemed to offer pretty competitive prices for their services.

A few of the domain names I’ve registered with them in the past have been coming up for renewal now. A strange thing is that the registration reminders that I’m getting for these domain names are all coming from a company called DomainPeople. Here’s an example of one of these letters:

support1@domainpeople.com
to danny
More options 6:11 pm (1½ hours ago)
Dear Domain Name Registrant,

Your domain name expires today — Sun, 05 Nov 2006!

Renew right now at http://www.domainpeople.com/renew

Please Note: Once the domain has expired, it will be placed on hold. While on hold, you will not be able to use your domain name in any way – including your web site, e-mail address or e-mail forwarding.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us anytime, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. E-mail us at support@domainpeople.com or call us toll-free in North America at 1-877-734-3667 or internationally at +1-604-639-1680.

Sincerely,
DomainPeople Customer Support
support@domainpeople.com
http://www.domainpeople.com

I heard something in the past about Hostway buying this company DomainPeople, to handle the some domain registration services, so in the back of my mind I wasn’t too alarmed about getting this email for domain name renewal from a different company than the one I used for registration.

This relationship is all explained in a bit more detail on a FAQ page on the Hostway site:

Who are AAAQ and DomainPeople?
AAAQ and DomainPeople are the domain name registrars Hostway has partnered with to process domain name registrations. On the Whois record for your domain name, AAAQ or DomainPeople will be listed as the domain name registrar. In particular, DomainPeople is the registrar for .info, .pro, and .us domain names.

Well, the tricky thing about this all is that – if you follow the link in the email reminder from DomainPeople – they end up wanting to charge you $35 dollars for your domain name renewal!

Hummmpf!  Well, luckily I was still able to find my old Hostway account information … logged into my control panel, and was able to manage my domains from there.  Renewal price?  $6.95!

This seems almost scandalous to me.   Is this some sort of scam that Hostway is using to increase their profit margins?  Has anyone else encountered this same inconsistancy in trying to renew a domain name registered by Hostway?

Strange enough, when I’ve googled for ‘Domainpeople Suck‘ or ‘Domainpeople Scam‘, I haven’t found too many negative comments… however one blogger – RFJason – describes the DomainPeople as being utterly clueless!

Junk Clicks from Adbrite Content Ad Network

I finally figured out where all of these Junk Clicks have been coming from! Gooogle Adwords, please accept my humble apology … you were innocent!

In fact, these garbage clicks were coming from the Adbrite ad network.

I initially signed up for Adbrite as an advertiser, because there are some good webmaster and SEO blogs which are Adbrite publishers. As you finish the signup process with Adbrite, they innocently pose the question ‘would you like your ads to run across our network of sites?’.

“Sure I would!”, I thought. Overall, the Google content adnetwork (via Adsense) has been a trusted source of leads in the past … and advertising across Adbrite’s wide network of sites could only expand the reach of our ads, right?

From my experience, I consider the Adbrite content network ads as ‘junk clicks’ for 3 reasons.

1. Adbrite syndicates ads via the Kontera ContentLink system. As I mentioned in a previous post – this leads to some very confused / low quality clicks.
2. The quality of sites allowed seems very low quality. These sites included 2kdown.com badongo.net btbbt.biz mimima.com websamba.com, at an average of $.13 per click! Other Adbrite content sites include megaupload.com rapidshare.de. These are mainly free hosting and free file upload sites.
3. There is no option to block ads on certain sites. Atleast with Google’s content network … when you see a click from a site you think is of low value, you can quickly block it. There’s no option like this for Adbrite.

Here’s another very informative blog posting, where the author describes a similar bad experience with adbrite PPC network ads.

Google Adwords – Target Audience – Languages and Locations (Geotargeting)

In theory, a webmaster outsourcing company could find customers from any place in the world. In practice, when you’re spending cash for online advertising, I think that it pays to be sensible about where your ads show up.

Webmaster outsourcing services are indeed very low cost – but generally speaking, a person from a high wealth country would be in a much better position to take advantage of services. … so wealth of a country becomes my first filter.

A rough list to use for this is the List of countries by GDP (PPP) per capita, available on wikipedia. GDP refers to the market value of all goods and services produced within a country. PPP, or purchasing power parity takes into account the relative cost of goods and services in any particular country. I prefer to use this list, as it feels slightly more accurate. Of course, I’m no economist