There has been a lot of talk recently about some changes that Google seems to be forcing on those people who have been producing blogger blogs and putting adsense on those blogs.
It may seem odd since blogger and adsense are both owned by the big G but there have been a lot of user producing hundreds of blogger blogs with adsense ads on them but little in the way of original content and it seems the powers that be have decided to clean up their system and get rid of these lightweight websites.
Some very well regarded, established blogs have been caught up in this change and while some have simply found their sites de-indexed by G others have had their sites taken down, never to be seen again. If you have put a lot of work into a website over many months that can be very upsetting but ultimately Blogger can do whatever they want. It is after all their main site and they decide on the rules.
This event emphasizes the importance of developing sites you can control by using your own domain name and renting server space to host the sites on. Use a good website backup system to keep copies of your sites and if anything goes wrong, whether it is a hacker taking down your site, your hosting company losing your files or any unforeseen disaster, you will be able to have your site up and running again in a short time.
If you want to develop a long term business with your websites the old ways are the best ways. Your own domain hosted on server space you control, publishing unique content that is of value to your visitors. It may take longer to build sites that make you money but over the long term you should have a business model that continues to work and keeps you on good terms with the search engine gods.
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If you were a mountaineer climbing a vertical cliff what would you be thinking about? I would guess you would be 100% focused on the cliff face and where your next hand or foothold was. It would be the same if you were walking the high wire. You would not be spending your time on a forum about how to walk the high wire you would be focusing on your next step and your balance.
So it should be the same with your online business. Concentrate on what you are doing. Don't get distracted by an email offering the latest internet marketing product. If you must, you can set aside some time of day to do that later but right now, you should be working.
Is reading this blog working? It may be if it helps you progress your online business and helps you to focus after reading this article but how many blogs will you read? How many forums will you spend time on? We all know how doing anything on a computer can seem like a time sink. You sit down full of good intentions but get distracted from what you were intending to do and before you know it two hours have gone by and you still haven't got started on what you meant to be doing.
We all need a break every now and again. It can help you concentrate if you allow a few minutes relaxing every hour or so but don't let that few minutes of browsing the web turn into a whole afternoon or evening if you seriously want to develop your online business.
There are a few downloadable tools that will set timers for you so you can allocate a certain period of time to a task and these time management tools help some people stay focused on the task in hand but they are just support and the real challenge is to train yourself to be focused and self disciplined about your work.
Do you know any lazy successful people? There may be a lucky few but most, even those that like to appear otherwise, are serious hard workers when they are working but thanks to their singlemindedness they get on with the task in hand, get it done and then relax and chill out. That is a good model to follow so buckle down and do what you have planned and then relax and read the blogs and forums if that is what you want to do to relax.
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Just about everyone online tells us that we should all be using wordpress because it is quick and easy to use and also because Google loves it. I am a big fan of WordPress myself and I use it for many different blogs. This site is a wordpress blog and I have no plans to change that anytime soon. But... my experience recently makes me wonder if wordpress is always the right choice.
I have a website in a pretty competitive market. I purchased the site a couple of years ago and it has been sitting around the number 5 position for searches for it's main keyword pretty much ever since. I never did anything to promote or develop that website. Maybe I added a couple of backlinks but literally just a dozen or two. It was a plain and fairly ugly html website and all I ever did was to change a couple of the affiliate links. I am not even sure if I changed all of them, that's how little work I did to the site.
Earlier this year I decided I should spend some time and completely revamp the site and I decided to put it on a wordpress blog. I spent several days setting up the blog and transferring all the articles over to the new blog. This was a month or so ago and I recently checked my Google results. What did I find? The website that has been consistently in the top ten search results for the last two years has all but disappeared from the first page. Before the change there were a few dozen keywords showing up on the first page for searches there now appears to be only one and that is at position number ten!
So what are we to make of this? I am disappointed. As far as I am concerned I have improved the site. The articles are almost identical to the original html versions but the site looks better and I have added more pages, information and offers. WordPress blogs have more code to make up the page than a simple html website with various links and menus and I wonder if this has reduced the value G sees in the site which, if true, would suggest that a simple site with less code is more effective in the eyes of the big G searchbot.
This is something I need to investigate further but right now I am regretting transferring the site over to WordPress. I had planned to work through many of my sites and change them over to WP but now I think that might be unwise. Maybe I should have tried it out first with a less successful site as this is obviously costing me money in lost revenues now but I do like WordPress with it's ease of use and appearance so I will persevere for now and hope that this is a temporary setback but the lesson must surely be this. Just because lots of people tell you WP is the best thing since sliced bread don't assume that is always the case. As always, test and test again to establish what works best for you and your websites.
I have this theory, as yet unproven. The easier it is to do something the less it is rated by Google. So, easy to get backlinks would be of less value than hard to get backlinks. Easy to build website, i.e. wordpress blog, less value than html sites. You would think that what is basically the same site would be rated basically the same by the search engines but apparently not so something has been downgraded and it would appear to be the platform used to produce the site.
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