If you want to rank for something worthwhile instead of just getting random drive-by traffic, what should you do? Keyword stuff the shit out of your page and alt-tag? Hmm.. nope, that’s not what you do. So let me break it down in two simple factors:

1. Domain authority / trust
2. Keyword rich inbound links to the image

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows a little about SEO. An image is a web document / URL like anything else, and you know how Google ranks such! Don’t get me wrong all the other factors like alt-tags and on-page optimization also seem to matter, but if you want to rank for something competitive, the above two factors are what it comes down to!

I don’t have any scientific tests to point at, but I can let you know that it worked good enough for me to rank in the top 5 for ’sex’ over a period of about 8 months last year (not ranking anymore due to other external factors).. I’d still focus on exactly those two factors when ranking images today!

Here’s the email we got (freely translated from German to English, original version further down):

At the moment millions of web servers are being attacked by viruses.

Please integrate the following addition in your root directory to protect your website.

www.XXXXXXXX.XXX/robots.txt

You create the Robots-file with your editor:
_____________________________________________

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
______________________________________________

Save it as robots.txt and put in it your root directory.

Only this way it will be sure that no harm will occur, since you forbid the virus to visit your website.
Hurry, since an heavy attack can be expected this week.

Any questions?

Internet-Security-Team
…

Original German version:

From: “Internet Security Moers” <internet-security-service@web.de>
To: <webmaster@XXXXXXXX.XXX>
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2008 11:30:16 +1000
Subject: Achtung, bitte Logindaten und Passwort bereithalten
Subject: ACHTUNG, gemeiner VIRUS. Dringend diese Datei auf Ihrem Webserver
einbinden
========================================

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

im Moment werden Millionen Webserver von Viren befallen.

Bitte binden Sie unbedingt den Anhang zum Schutz auf Ihrer Webseite
in folgendes Verzeichnis ein:

www.XXXXXXXX.XXX/robots.txt

Die Robots-Datei erstellen Sie mir Ihrem Editor:
_____________________________________________

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
______________________________________________

Diese speichern Sie als robots.txt und binden Sie in Ihrem Hauptverzeichnis
ein.

Nur so ist sicher, dass kein Schaden entsteht indem Sie dem Virus
verbieten, Ihre Webseite zu besuchen.
Bitte beeilen Sie sich, da an diesem Woche mit einem erheblichen Angriff zu
rechnen ist.

Noch Fragen?

Internet-Security-Team
…

Do you think some people fall for this hoax?

I’m sure many who have worked with websites and concepts based on UGC can agree that there’s more work to it, than it might seem at first. The reality is that it often takes a big effort to foster the creation of the content you desire, as well as to make sure it doesn’t get out of control.

If your platform for UGC gets some decent traction there will be tons of content submitted that is crap, misleading, profane, copyrighted, spam and so forth. Such content can easily destroy the platform/concept you created. Users might be turned off by it and you might get legal issues to waste your time and money on.

Many of these problems can presumably be solved through volunteering users who’re given the role as moderators. That is if you can find users who’re willing to take up the work. But then you get the work of maintaining good relationships with those key users. Do you have time for that?

It might take more work than you think, and it might get complicated. What are you going to do if your moderators, key contributors ét al are suddenly getting into strong disagreements/fights? Will you pick a side and possibly turn away some of the very people who made your concept a success.

So yeah, UGC might sound great as it is free content, but is it really “free” when you need to put in so much work to overlook, moderate and maintain what is being provided by users?

There are many websites that won’t work without UGC as it is the core concept. But I believe there’s even more cases where UGC is a really bad fit, and that people will see in retrospect that just hiring people to create and provide content would have given better results, and not to mention this being cheaper than the cost of handling UGC and a community.

I’m not opposed to UGC, not at all! I believe it’s really great - in some cases. But more than often I hear stuff like “hey, we’re gonna do this and that, and we’ll have users create the content, it’s a sure success!”, and sometimes it seems that most people think that for web startups, newspapers etc., UGC is the only way to go if you want to make tomorrows big hit on the web, as it costs nothing. That, I disagree with!

This also means that my work routines will be slightly different, so I finally have some time to write again. It was about time, indeed. The big question is whether or not I feel like I have something worth writing about…

For those of you going I hope you’ll enjoy it, and I suggest you check out the SEO poker tournament.

And just for the record, A4U expo was great and it was awesome with the people I met there.

If you are, and want me to buy you a beer there or something, just post it in the comments.

Ad blockers can’t be too aggressive

Ad blockers on the market can’t block all ads. If an ad blocker is aggressive and block “all ads” there would definitely be many false positives. Your browsing experience would probably drop to zero when you can’t see any images or links on pages you visit. So for an ad blocker to work well, it can’t be too aggressive which also means that some ads won’t be blocked and that there’s ways to work around ad blockers (maybe not for Google Adsense et al, but in regards to your bottom line).

AdBlock users might not notice less obvious ads

In my opinion there could be a good chance that ad block users are used to the “ad free experience” and are therefore less likely to notice the not so obvious ads that exist everywhere. It’s like, if something “bad” happens all the time, you stay alert (in this matter: banner blindness and the ability to notice affiliate links, paid reviews etc.). And if something hardly ever happens you’re too slow to notice it, when it does.

Diversify ads and revenue sources

If any website really suffers from ad blocking, it’s probably about time the webmaster begins diversifying the revenue sources. It’s a sure thing that contextual PPC ads and regular CPM banners aren’t the holy grail of great online profits. How about using alternatives and substitutes like mashing content like videos with ads into your website, use affiliate offers, sell your own “special” ads, sell paid reviews and paid links (shut up Google!) - and not to forget: sell your own products and services. There’s almost endless opportunities to monetize websites, but too many don’t go beyond Google Adsense…

Blocking users will only harm you

Lastly, it’s worth mentioning that users who uses ad blockers could be less likely to click your ads anyway. And more importantly, don’t ever block users unless they harm you - because users are the key to word of mouth marketing. What would you rather do, state your opinion and possibly lose a visitor, or have a user who doesn’t see ads but might link to your website and recommend it to others who do see ads…

Some might ask why I changed to full feeds, others might ask why I hadn’t done it already or from the start. Well, in when I started this blog I was unsure about what I wanted it to become, so I used partial feeds in lack of better knowledge. I then realized full feeds were better as I also prefer them myself, so I wanted to do switch, also because it’s the right thing to do. I just never got around it since I tend to “bundle” my tasks. And I wanted to change my feedburner url to a branded feed url, which means I’d also have to update my DNS records. But now it’s finally all done!

As I wrote back in June, I’ve been a bit ill. Then I got well, and went to a full 9 days of partying etc. at the Roskilde Festival, a great music festival we have here in Denmark each year. And just 5 days after the festival, I went on vacation and traveled around in Thailand for 3 weeks.

I’m now catching up on emails, work, reading etc. etc. And I hope that within few days I’ll begin getting back into posting here more often.

Oh yeah, my feed subscriber count hasn’t changed for the last month, so thank you for not having unsubscribed during my absence!

Many Google image search users are quickly clicking on to the direct image URL and thereby not seeing the page with the image. Also, it seems that many of the users don’t hesitate to click back to the image SERPs when they don’t see the image “above the fold” - probably because of Google image search framing the page with the picture and thus making it almost too easy to do so.

How to leverage Google image search rankings

This can easily be solved. It’s not something new nor is the “solution”, but still very few websites seem to do it. All you have to do is add a simple JavaScript - like the one below - to prevent framing of your pages (this is of course a bit more complicated if a website uses frames, but I hope yours doesn’t..).


<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
if (top.location != self.location) top.location = self.location;
</script>
 


After adding this to the one of my websites I saw a quite big increase in pageviews. It turned out that the visitors happily continued to browse around the website - which I find somewhat impressive since it’s not really an image focused website.

I can’t say for sure what Google’s standpoint is on breaking out of the image search frameset. But I don’t believe Google would punish webmasters who utilize such a script. Because such breaking-out-of-frames scripts are somewhat common and it’s really not a big deal. And I’m very sure that Google are aware of many websites doing this, that are still included in the image search index.

You should note that you might be getting image search traffic even though your stats/tracking system doesn’t report it. I won’t bother going into the details about this, but it happens with some tracking systems that are JavaScript based and try to get information that isn’t allowed to be retrieved from “external domains” - which a website will be since it’s framed by Google. This results in JavaScript execution being stopped by the browser, and thereby the traffic won’t get tracked.

Update:

LordThanatos suggested in the comments, that the following code can be used instead, and then avoid the back button problem that makes a user unable to go back to where they actually came from.


<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
if (top.location != self.location) top.location.replace(self.location);
</script>
 


Been busy

Except from all the usual stuff - which would take more than all my time if I let it - something new popped up. I discovered that one of my websites was receiving an amazing amount of traffic from Google’s image search. It’s more than 25.000 UV/day that wasn’t being monetized very well. So after discovering the traffic I didn’t hesitate to begin figuring out methods for monetization and I’m still working on it as I’m not yet satisfied with the results.

Illness

I’ve constantly felt very dizzy for quite some time now, and I’m still dizzy. Supposedly because of a virus on my balance nerve or something like that. Also because of this I can’t walk straight. I’m sure that whenever I go somewhere people around me think I’m really drunk since I obviously walk like if I was. Probably fun to look at, but not cool! The dizziness and inability to move smoothly really kills my ability to get much done.

That was it. A quick update on what’s going on with the non-blogging. Hopefully I’ll get better soon and then be able to catch up. I’m getting to the level of feeling comfortable reading, so it might not be long before I’m able to push myself to also writing something.

Here’s a funny video I came across - SEO is illegal.. Yes, that’s right. SEO tactics like keyword/link stuffing and publishing your content on multiple domains, is illegal according to the guy in the video to the right.

English isn’t my first language, so I thought maybe I don’t get the meaning of illegal and decided to check some definitions of illegal. The most common definition was this: prohibited by law or by official or accepted rules. Hmm…

• “prohibited by law”
  Is there laws that say I can’t utilize things like keyword stuffing or automatic generated content? I haven’t heard of them..
• “prohibited by accepted rules”
  I can’t remember having accepted any rules for how to make websites. Have you accepted any rules?
• “prohibited by official rules”
  Is there official rules that I don’t know about? Has Google or other search engines made official rules for inclusion and ranking?

Seriously, calling SEO illegal is one of the stupidest remarks I’ve ever heard… Dude, there’s the GUIDELINES - but there’s no frickin’ rules or laws that prohibit me from publishing crap content on my website!

Oh, did I mention that one of the products offered on his website is “SEO Pages* additions with Einstein provided content” and did you notice the star? The explanation of that goes like “*a maximum of 3 SEO keywords will be added per page addition” - so this guy, stating that keyword stuffing etc. is illegal, will maximum stuff 3 keywords into each of your pages.. WTF dude, what’s it gonna be? is it illegal or not?

Anyone in their right mind should have realized a long time ago, that Google et al aren’t doing much, if anything, to prevent PPC arbitrage. It’s been going on like forever and I don’t see any signs of it declining. But heck, I don’t care much about Google’s politics nor do I have anything against PPC arbitrage. I care about how it impacts me, and then I try to make the most of it.

Today it seems like everyone is doing PPC arbitrage. The big boys like: Kelkoo (owned by Yahoo!), Ask.com (serving Google Adwords), Shopping.com / Dealtime (also serving Adwords and others). Domainers are doing it too, on a scale I can’t even imagine. All the regular PPC arbitragers with the ugly Adsense and YPN filled websites are making money of it. And lastly all those sites that aren’t obvious arbitrage sites, yet has it as the primary revenue model, or are just using it to boost their traffic stats.

So YOU, get in on it! Join the game of PPC arbitrage and get your piece of the cake. Figure out the model that suits you best, make it work and then scale it in accordance with your abilities.

More than a year ago, I made a list of what I considered the 6 essential elements of a website widget in these web 2.0 days. It’s a simple list, but nonetheless I’ve used it multiple times when developing widgets, and it has in most cases helped to increase gains from pushing a widget. I then wanted to write about these 6 elements, but as with many of my other posts, I’m slow at finishing it.

But now came the perfect time to do it, as Lawrence of RateItAll invited me to test a new rating widget (as seen to the right). And why does that make it the perfect time? Well, I’d say that their rating widget includes each of the 6 elements in an almost state-of-the-art kind of way, so I see it as a great example.

A Widget’s 6 Essential Elements

1. Incentive
   It’s crucial that a widget offers an incentive to webmasters and bloggers otherwise you’ll have a hard time having them include your widget on websites and blogs.

   The RateItAll widget offers the benefit of promotion through a listing with the reviews on the RateItAll website.

2. Interactivity
   A static widget is boring and doesn’t provide much value. So make sure that your widget offers new stuff on a regular basis, and give users the ability to actually use it. Consider that webmasters won’t place widgets on their website just so you can get free advertising.

   In the RateItAll widget you’re able to post your own rating and review. And you’re also able to see who else reviewed it along with what they wrote and rated it. All without leaving the current web page.

3. Viral element
   You want a website widget to spread as far as possible, so offering users to get the widget on their own website or blog is a must.

   In the RateItAll widget there’s a clear “Get This Widget” text that leads to the sign-up page (currently closed beta).

4. Traffic element
   You still want people to visit your website where all your content and features are available (and it’s likely where you earn your revenue).

   The RateItAll widget drives traffic by making clicks on users and reviews lead to the corresponding pages on rateitall.com.

5. Linking
   Widgets are great for link building to increase search traffic as I’ve covered before in my post on link building with widgets. So including hard links to your website is a must.

   The code for the RateItAll widget includes both a link to the RateItAll website, and a keyword rich link to the category in which a blog is listed.

6. Branding
   Whenever you’re promoting a website you should also increase brand awareness. So including both logo and name in a widget is important, but for the most benefit, make the widget contain strong associations with your “service”.

   Brand awareness is increased by the RateItAll widget through the logo and mentioning of ‘RateItAll’. Furtermore, the widget has ‘rating’ and ‘review’ clearly mentioned which make users able to associate the brand with the service.

More Great Elements of Website Widgets

1. Sign up element
   Making users sign up, or just giving them the ability to do so, is a great way to increase your user base. So if possible, you should look for ways to do this with your widget.

   The RateItAll widget requires users to register to submit their rating and review. But the process is quick and simple, so many will likely do so.

2. UGC: User Generated Content
   Having users contribute with content is all the rage nowadays, and for many good reasons. If your widget provides opportunities to gather user generated content, it’ll add a whole lot of value to you.

   The ratings and reviews submitted through the RateItAll widget are a great example of useful UGC.

Can you mention further elements that one would benefit from including in a website widget?