While having your own blog is very useful it doesn’t really help your site gain exposure. After all the only people viewing it are people who have found your site already! There are, however, many bloggers out there who are quite prepared to sell advertising to businesses and individuals, many of whom attract large audiences every day to their site.

Advertising on blogs comes in several forms. The first, and most simple, would be a banner advert. This would be designed by you, sent to the blogger, who would then put the banner on their site for all their visitors to see. Add a hyperlink (a link to your site) and the potential customers can click on the advert and visit you.

This is all well and good, but most bloggers will get no more than 100 visitors a day. Adverts on the net can be almost invisible to the regular surfer who is very used to being bombarded with advert after advert, so getting even a few dozen clicks requires great skill on the part of the advert designer.

It’s true that the link to your site can also assist with your sites rankings in Google providing the HTML is formatted to be SEO-friendly, but from a banner advert these benefits are very limited (and there is some dispute about just how effective image links are).

That brings us neatly on to the next form of advertising – text links. Text links are links on blogs that point to your site, except rather than simply having your site’s name in the text they contain a few carefully selected keywords. These adverts are very different from image adverts in that the primary target is not visitors to the blog they are hosted on; the target is search engines. Search engines see these links, and associate the text inside them with your site. Get enough of these links and you’ll quickly start ranking very nicely in Google for your selected keywords. How highly depends on how many links you buy, how competitive the keyword is and a number of other factors beyond the scope of this article.

Text links are generally placed in a section of the blog known as the “blogroll”. This is usually where a list of sites the blog author has decided to link to are found. Done correctly an advert will sit very subtly in among a list of genuine links. These links are found across the site, so a single blogroll link can mean hundreds of links to your site. Unfortunately search engines are acutely aware of the practice of these links being sold and they have safety features in place that will minimise the effects of site-wide blogroll links.

That takes us on to the final form of advertising common on blogs – blogposts. Unlike blogroll links, blogposts are actual posts by the author of the site about your site or a product your company offers on your site. These are also referred to as “reviews”, though in most cases they are simply forms of advertising. A keyword-rich link is craftily placed in the content and links back to your site. These are great for a short while, but as soon as the blogpost leaves the front page (when newer posts come along) the effects diminish. Their advantage is that they appear to be very natural to search engines, though dispute rage about their value for money.

So to summarize you have 3 forms of advertising you can explore with regard to blogging; banner adverts, blogroll advertising or blogpost reviews. Which works best? In truth it really depends a lot on what you are looking to achieve. If it is search engine positions then blogroll links or blogpost reviews are the way to go (effectiveness of one over the other changes all the time). If you are looking to target a particular audience, finding a blog which attracts your target audience and placing an advert on that blog is probably the way to go. A good example might be a supplier of spare parts for Lotus Elise’s targeting a blog about the Lotus Elise.

Blog advertising is a very effective form of marketing at the time of writing, but you should always be on the lookout for new opportunities. If you are about to embark on an SEO campaign being flexible and ready to adapt is the key to keeping one step ahead of the competition.

The way the press has stopped talking about blogging you’d think every blogger has packed up their laptops for good and gone away to country to spend the rest of their lives in total isolation. Although the blogging hype has died down over the past 2 years, the truth is more people than ever before are using blogs to give views and opinions, report the news and chat with others who have similar interests.

From sport to news and politics, blogging is a way to give yourself and what you have to say exposure.

So how are all these individuals with seemingly little in the way of IT know-how getting such professional looking, smartly laid out and snazzy blogs? The truth is most are using a package called “Wordpress”, which is available to download for free and so simple to get up and running that almost anyone can do it. Templates are freely available and can be installed by anyone with a basic knowledge of windows, custom templates are also offered on forums such as Digital Point by designers for a very small fee (many designers coming from India and charging as little as $20 for a fully customized template).

As a business having a blog on your site offers multiple benefits. Firstly it gives you a simple way to make announcements to the public, tell them more about your business and give help and advice with your products. Another benefit, often overlooked, is that it can present a human face to the end-user who may be unsure about doing business with you. Tell them about yourself and the people in your organisation; it can help make your customers feel a lot more welcome on your site.

Our own blog uses Wordpress, with our own template put together by one of our talented designers and programmers. A few small alterations have been made to the source code too (including the PHP code), but it is largely as it was out of the box and this is pretty common with most blogs.

There are a few other solutions out there, but it’s best to do your research before making your choice as migrating from one system to another is very troublesome.

Still few organisations have fully understood just what a useful tool a blog can be for any business. Whatever trade you are in I would suggest you seriously consider adding one to your site.

First of all we will create the attribute class. Create a class derived from System.Attribute and add a couple of fields. It is best practice to add the “Attribute” suffix to the end of the name. This does not need to be included when decorating a type or type member with the attribute as you’ll see.

public class DemoAttribute : System.Attribute
{
    public string Name = "";
    public string Country = "";
}

 
With the attribute class created, lets create another class to demonstrate how to use the attribute. Note I’ve excluded the “Attribute” suffix, this is accepted by .NET and makes code more easily readable.

[Demo(Name="Arthur" ,Country="UK")]
public class Consumer

 
Finally lets read the attribute through the constructor and dump the results to the console window. The following section shows the complete code for the class we’re consuming our DemoAttribute with.

[Demo(Name="Arthur", Country="UK")]
public class Consumer
{
    public Consumer()
    {
        Demo[] theseAtts = (Demo[])this.GetType()
            .GetCustomAttributes(typeof(Demo),
            true); //Inherit?

        Console.WriteLine(theseAtts[0].Name +
          theseAtts[0].Country);
    }
}

Run the following code to test:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    Consumer c = new Consumer();
}

Output should be:

Arthur UK

As I said, not a real-world example, but you should be able to get the jist of how attributes work.

The Telegraph ran an interesting story yesterday that would at one time seem unthinkable. Facebook and MySpace are in talks to share content across their sites.

The move would see MySpace music and video footage being shared on Facebook via the connect platform which allows users of Facebook to log on to third party sites using their Facebook ID.

“Facebook is focussing on building the best technology which helps people share content, while at MySpace they are focussing on more a content-led strategy. We would like to have their content, as we already do with many other sites, shared across our network because it is good for our users” said Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.

Sandberg’s predecessor, Owen Van Natta, is now CEO at MySpace and seems to be reading from the same hymn sheet; “We are in talks with Facebook, and other sites, about how we could partner with them.”

MySpace once dwarfed Facebook in size, but has taken a beating in recent years and has tried to differentiate itself from Facebook lately rather than try to take their rival on directly. This latest move may be seen as another admission of defeat in the social networking battle.

Here is the complete article from the Telegraph’s website.

Yahoo has announced that its paid inclusions program – where webmasters pay to get their sites quickly spidered in Yahoo – would cease after December 31st 2009.

The program has drawn a lot of criticism in the past as it was seen that there was some contradiction in having a supposedly unbiased search engine then allowing people to pay to get included faster and rank higher.

Microsoft will soon be taking over Yahoo search results, and it had been widely expected that Yahoo would have to drop the program in due course.

Yahoo has said it made the announcement 2 months in advance to allow its customers time to adapt to the transition, and has promised to work closely with its Search Submit advertisers to provide them with other search solutions to help their business.

The internet is on the verge of, what regulators ICANN have called “the biggest change since it was invented”. The body said it was in the final stages of introducing for the first time non-Latin characters to web addresses, such as Arabic and Cyrillic.

The new names, dubbed “International Domain Names” – or IDNs – could even be up and running within 12 months, with some estimates putting the release at summer 2010.

More than half of web users around the world use non-Latin scripts. Ron Beckstrom described the move as “necessary” as internet use continues to spread.

Plans for the changes were first approved in June 2008; however implementation has taken longer than expected.

“We are confident that it works because we have been testing it for a couple of years,” said Dengate Thrush. “We’re really ready to start rolling it out.”

If the plans are approved, as expected, at the end of the month the body will begin accepting applications on the 16th November.

There is a lot of discussion on the web about whether or not a Google suppression penalty exists and if so what is it applied for. Like the sandbox effect there are those that deny its existence. Ignore these people, some are deliberately misleading you, others are simply wrong. Google suppression penalties do exist.

Firstly what is a Google suppression penalty? Well you may have heard of people talking about a “30 place penalty” or a “900 place penalty”. This is a suppression penalty. Your site is unable to rise above a certain ranking. In the case of a site I was dealing with earlier in the year it wouldn’t rise above 40th place on any keyword having previously ranking top 5 on dozens. A suppression penalty is obvious to the SEO who has previously worked on the site or to an SEO coming in who takes a moment to study the site’s previous rankings. In the case of the site I mentioned it sat 40th or lower for 3 months then returned to the top 5 on the keywords it was previously ranking on – all of them. It was clear something had been put in place to lower its rankings.

So now we’ve established this penalty exists, what should we do to remove it? Sadly there is no simply, quick and easy solution. We are likely to face a few months in the Google dog-house before the site returns to its previous glory. What we must do however is use this time to clean up the site and get it ready to submit a reconsideration request.

The easiest thing is to go back to what you’ve done in the last few weeks and undo it. Any changes to the site, any links you’ve bought ask the webmaster you bought them from to remove them. With any luck this will be your solution. If not we’re going to have to look at a complete clean up of the site, with both internal and external factors being considered.

Firstly have a look at the site. Have you been a little over-eager with the keywords in the title and the meta description, or on the page? Clean them out. Anything that looks questionable on the page HAS to go. Forget SEO, your work now is about showing Google you’ve cleaned up your act and seen the error of your ways. If you’re losing thousands every day you are no doubt already feeling very repentant!

Now you need to go back over backlinks bought from webmasters. My theory is that site wide links trigger an alarm which is then investigated and the site punished if it’s believed it is artificially inflating rankings. So the next step is to go into webmaster tools, view all external links, and start contacting webmasters of all the sites you’ve bought site-wide links from and ask them to remove them. Contact all of them and give them 3-4 days to do this. To hurry them up mention your site has been punished – no webmaster wants to link to a penalised site, chances are they’ll be more than happy to remove your link for you!

Now wait a week. If the site has not come back by itself it may be necessary to submit a reconsideration request. There is some dispute about whether or not a reconsideration request is necessary. It may well be that the whole process of suppression penalties is fully automated. However it doesn’t hurt to send one, so that’s exactly what we will do. Be completely honest, admit everything (maybe blaming the “previous” webmaster if you you’re shy!) and throw any webmasters who have not removed your site-wide links into the fire. All that matters is showing Google you are truly sorry and have learned your lesson.

Once you’ve done this all you can do is sit back and hope for the best. If nothing changes after a couple of weeks it may be worth going over everything again and submitting another request. It can be soul destroying watching a site knocking around in the lower reaches of the SERPs, but don’t give up. Every change is getting you closer to recovery.

Finally once your site has recovered – which can be up to 6 months after the penalty was first applied – learn your lessons. Be conservative with your keywords, don’t buy thousands of links and always err on the side of caution. It’s better to rank #5 for the whole year, than #1 for 9 months and nowhere for 3.

Create Web Space have experience of rescuing blacklisted sites and can provide consultancy and assistance. If you’d like our help please get in touch to discuss.Create Web Space have experience of rescuing blacklisted sites and can provide consultancy and assistance. If you’d like our help please get in touch to discuss.

I browse webmaster forums almost every day and every single day there is a number of posts from webmasters claiming Google has penalised their site. But has it?

Sometimes a fall in rankings can be explained by a change to Google’s algorithm. Google does dozens of minor updates and changes to its algorithm every week and dips and peaks are very normal. In fact it’s quite unusual to hold the same position for many weeks in a row, with more backlinks tending to mean more stable rankings. Other times it’s simply a case of rivals building links and optimizing their sites and overtaking you.

It’s quite easy to tell if a dip is due to a change in algorithm or SEO from a rival. Normally in this instance a site will dip by a few places, occasionally a few pages if rankings are volatile, but not on all keywords.

When a site has been penalised it is very different. The site will bomb a number of pages on EVERY SINGLE KEYWORD except for the site name and domain name (and occasionally even for these). Anyone who has ever suffered a penalty or had to deal with a site that has received a penalty will know the difference. No amount of further SEO will bring the site back up; in fact it may harm it further.

So if your site has only dipped a few places and still holds good rankings elsewhere don’t panic, its just Google juggling its rankings about. If you suspect a Google penalty or need help removing one I’ll be posting some advice shortly.

There have been stories floating around forums like Digital Point for the last week that Google was planning to cease in displaying Page Rank to the general public and in fact had already stopped doing so. This story first broke when it emerged Page Rank had been removed from Google Webmaster tools.

On Wednesday last week it was quietly confirmed by Google employee Susan Moskwa on Google’s webmaster forums who made the following statement:

We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on Pagerank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.

Chances are therefore that the little green bar on the Google toolbar is already a good 4 or 5 months out of date.

SEOs that have been relying on Pagerank to determine where to place their links will now have to go away and have a long hard think about where they should be getting their links from in future and the factors that will determine which sites to place links on. It looks like the days of link brokers trading in Pagerank are now at an end.

For those who are not familiar with the concept, Pagerank is the importance Google attributes to every page in its index.

For achieving good rankings in Google your own Pagerank is not critical, but for people looking to purchase links (something which Google frown upon and routinely punishes sites for by the way) Pagerank is often THE critical factor in determining the value of a link on a particular site or page.

A link on a page with high Pagerank will have more of an impact than one on a lower ranking page, all things being equal (relevance and such also likely factor in, but that’s beyond the scope of this brief introduction).

It’s easy to see therefore how Pagerank is important to webmasters. Pagerank is generally updated quarterly, however the last update was some 4 months ago, meaning the current on is overdue.

The delay could be attributed to Google rolling out its new “Caffeine” search engine; however there has been some talk on the net that Pagerank updates simply aren’t being shown to the public any more.

Experienced SEOs will know that Pagerank is usually very out of date anyway and is not always a critical factor, but it does serve as a guide. If Google has indeed decided to no longer show this it is certainly a sign of them upping the ante on webmasters who artificially increase their rankings. Though its bad news for us web developers its also good news for internet users as a whole who will hopefully now see improvements in a Google that has become plagued with spam of late.

This issue is currently being discussed in depth over at Digital Point, those wanting to know more may want to check this link out.