The Life of a Webmaster: Advertising, Paid Software Download, Relevance in Search Engines
By Ion Saliu
Software Developer, Webmaster, Site Owner
• About this time last year (2007), I wrote in two articles:
It's been awhile! I was really busy upgrading my web site. Upgrade refers directly to the bottom line. I started to make money by allowing advertising on most pages at my site. The advertising is run through Google AdSense, as you certainly noticed. I get a small percentage, but it still is good money. It covers Internet-related expenses. Also, it rewards my efforts that I have put into developing and offering all the freebies you find here, especially lottery software and gambling systems. The work was hard and time consuming in 2007. Turned out, 2008 was even worse effort-wise. Among other things, I had to undo a lot of what I did in 2007! Plus, Google made some changes to their business, such as dropping one service (AdSense Referrals)!
I implemented Google advertising known as AdSense beginning of May 2007. It is not an easy feast, believe me. If you work with a handful of web pages — it is fun. But my website is huge. I did some pruning, but I still had to face 759 pages! Copy-and-paste scripts FIVE times on each of the 759 pages! It took me two months to accomplish the task! Well, I'll say it was worth the effort. The content of my site was already there — why not make some money for me? After all, I have expenses related to my Internet activity. Meanwhile, I offer lots of freebies, including software and systems. People pay with an arm and a leg, sometimes, to buy worthless systems and software packages from other developers! People can get unquestionably the best stuff here — and it is FREE!
Then I instituted a form of paid membership (a nominal yearly fee) if a visitor wanted to download my free-to-run software. That has been proven to be the more lucrative of the two financial activities I decided to implement. Bottom line is, the two businesses grossed over US $10,000 in less than half a year (in 2007). I thought I would take care full-time of my Internet business. Not so fast!
• • For some reason(s) my businesses started to decline the further I went into the year of grace 2008. I noticed also a severe drop in the number of visitors to my site. It wasn't easy to discover the wounds. Google sent me a hint on some HTML errors on some pages. Google informed me of several pages with duplicate title tags and/or duplicate description tags. I realized I had to look at a page-by-page basis! But I had to do it anyway, since every page had four referrals that had to be removed!
Having duplicate titles and duplicate descriptions implies duplicate content — the search engines do penalize such errors. The engines also penalize what they consider to be hidden text such as comments. I added comments to every ad on each of my web pages to help me know what a particular ad was referring to. It appeared that I was overusing the Google and advertising keywords!
In 2007, when I added the advertising scripts, I also created what I thought to be comprehensive footers. Every page at my site had the same 20+-link footer. I know it helped the visitors tremendously, by listing the most important pages of my site. The search engines, however, treated the footers as creating low relevance and duplicating a lot of content! The footers had also the unnecessary copyright notice that duplicated even more content!
I had no choice but correct all those so-called errors! In the process, I discovered that a number of pages, messages from the old forum, had no place being there. Some malicious visitors simply reposted an old message, without adding anything new. The guys knew that the search engines would hit me for duplicate content! The unnecessary messages were referred to from other pages, plus the search engines! I had to remove all references as well. You don't wanna know how badly I cursed all those idiots who littered my web site. That's the main reason I shut down the old message board. Many suckers cried badly when I made such a decision: One less means for them to cause me headaches! In the end, I removed more than 75 pages from my website.
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After reviewing my old pages, I don't think I was tough enough in my exposés! I even discovered a case of conspiracy against me that should have landed in a court of law. A casino chairman and a writer of gambling books and materials committed at least one form of conspiracy: To throw me in a potentially dangerous legal situation. In fact, I don't think that any of the cases of hostility against me was a case of solitary action. The planning was done by at least two individuals at a time!
Here is a short list of such cases. I laugh now in my BRRRRRRRRAHAHAHAHA manner. Truth is I got mad when the hostile acts against me took place. I even cursed them guys badly!
Slowly but surely I noticed improvements in traffic and also search results. But, then, I did something else. You might want to know that the www prefix is redundant. The search engines, however, are too idiotic to know the difference. So, there is further penalty for a Webmaster. More duplicate content! I was shocked to discover that Yahoo, for example, had over 2000 pages indexed from my site. How come? I never had more than 1000 pages! I realized that every page was counted twice but considered two different pages. For example www.saliu.com/index.htm and saliu.com/index.htm were considered two different pages, but with duplicate content!
The search engines knew that, but it was kept somehow like a secret. Try this: If you type google.com in the address bar, the browser changes automatically to www.google.com. I did the reverse: The browser deletes the www prefix and shows //saliu.com. The www should not be there; it is just a placeholder for the default subdomain of a domain. You create that by a redirect in the .htaccess file of your Web server.
Guess, what? More headaches for this webmaster! Some say it should be a temporary nuisance. Each and every page at my website has now a Google PR (page rank) of zero! It used to be 4 (sometimes 5) just before the redirect change. Isn't it crazy? Why is my site penalized by Google because I do the same thing they do: A change in the htaccess file?! The PR, I know, is meaningless garbage. Everything, absolutely everything at google.com has perfect 10 PR! No matter what! For example, I see reports at Google for my site only. All report pages are PR10! I am the only person who can read those pages… why are they perfect 10?!
Collateral benefit from reviewing my web pages: I saw a history of hostility from others. You might have read it several times. They say I am paranoid, because I talk quite a bit about attacks and hostility from others. But that weapon of my foes does not work anymore! It was their only justification. Their only defense was shifting the blame onto me. Like: Nobody has ever been hostile to me; it's only that I am paranoid!
