More Mailbag Saturday
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
Hope you’re enjoying your weekend as much as I am! Woke up this morning to a bright and sunny 22 degree day here in downtown Chicago. It’s so bright outside that it doesn’t seem possible it could be so cold! I’ll take sunny and cold over dreary and cold any day though…
Had another good earnings day yesterday, the holiday shopping boom seems to be moving along nicely. The numbers shaked out to $95 in Adsense income and $9 in Amazon commissions (off 7 items purchased at $126) for a daily grand total of $104.
Well I got an ton of questions this last week from readers and I wasn’t able to answer them all directly because I’ve been a little busy with some other projects, so I thought I would just extend Mailbag Friday one more day and answer a few more questions.
Question 1
This one comes from Cru, who asks: “Thx for the blog and a glimpse into life in the windy city. I understand how you spin the article to provide the content for the pages on a site. But how do you make it ‘easy’ for the visitor to navigate the site? (just in case a visitor happens to be one of the Adsense human checkers…) Do you have a menu structure for (say) the top 10 articles on the home page and then just list all the other articles at the bottom of each of these pages? (With a site map to help the spiders crawl them?)”
Great question! I do have a menu system. On the side bar for each page I have a very small menu that has links to my Privacy Policy page, an About Me page, a Contact Me page, and a link to the site’s home page using anchor text of whatever the main keyword for the site is.
It’s important to have links to those pages on every page, especially a link to your privacy policy page because you have to have that in order to meet the Adsense Terms of Service rules.
Then at the bottom of each page I have a randomly generated list of links to other pages of the site. I’ll put anywhere from 5 links to 50 links per page, and I change that number every couple of weeks automatically using a bit of php code that allows me to make one change to a master file on my servers root directory that every page of every site looks at.
The file essentially just lists a number, like 5.
When a person visits the page, the php code kicks in, checks that master file, see’s the number “5” and automatically adds 5 links. Or 20, or 50…whatever number I’ve got listed in the master file.
I change the number of links in order to keep Google jumping, so that every couple of weeks when the Googlebots return to the site, they see a different number of links and have to keep spidering. It makes Google think my sites are fresh.
I used to seed a sitemap page with a thousand links to pages within each site but I don’t really do that anymore because google does a pretty good job of just following the links on each page and spidering them all.
The links themselves and the pages themselves get autogenerated using a method I’ll talk about in the future involving Phpbay pro.
Question 2
Ralchev asks “Hey! I really like your website! How many backlinks do I need for each page/post of my blog for the specific long-tail keyword? and mainly – Is it great for the Google Panda update to build such a website with quality design, content and social activity?”
Hi Ralchev, thanks for the question. I don’t do any backlinks for any of the pages of my sites, ever.
To tell you the truth, I would not build high quality websites with quality designs, good content, and social activity these days unless it was just for fun, as a hobby, precisely because of the reason you mentioned – the Panda update.
To me, building one or even a few websites – even high quality ones – is dangerous because Google is in the habit of deciding arbitrarily that it doesn’t like those kinds of sites and simply deindexing them.
I know people who have literally spent years building quality sites with thousands of pages of really great content go from making $10-20k+ a month to zero overnight because of some Google algo change.
What do you do when that happens? Where do you go? You’re completely helpless and at the mercy of some behemoth corporation that has absolutely no interest in anything but their own profits. *shrugs*
On the other hand, I churn out crappy thin websites without thought or effort and make a ton of money. If some get deindexed, I just push a button and churn out more and the money keeps flowing in.
It’s very sad that the state of the Internet rewards my crappy sites and hurts your quality sites, and I wish it wasn’t the case because I really love building quality authority sites (which is one of the reasons I built this website – but I don’t make money off this website, I do it just because it’s fun for me to help people).
Question 3
Tim asks “Quick question regarding your page. I want to set up a link wheel kind of like you use, where there’s a link at the bottom of every post to the next post. Can you tell me how you set that up? I am using Word-Press. Any info would be appreciated!”
Do you mean the links at the bottom of this web site? I don’t do it like that for my adsense websites, but if you’re referring to this site – it’s just a feature of wordpress. Most themes do that automatically, I didn’t do anything special to make it happen. If your theme doesn’t do that by default, try poking around the wordpress settings, its probably just a button you need to click or something…
Thanks again everyone for the questions, keep them coming and…
Keep on building!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
