I’ve created a movie showing you that the “SEO guru’s” know nothing, and how my “thin affiliate site” avoided the Google Sandbox. Check it out here.
In fact, you’ll see the “sandbox” myth blown out of the water.
In the 9th minute of the movie imagine all the SEO guru’s scratching their heads! 
I always liked that little “number of pages indexed” at the bottom of the Google homepage… back in the days when they were competing with Inktomi (now Yahoo) and Altavista (now, err, part of Overture, which is part of Yahoo) to have the largest index. I guess now the competition includes Microsoft. Back then, it didn’t!
I was wondering how big Google’s index is now. I found a page saying that the specific search query, *-”a yielded 17,960,000,000. The page is dated December 2006.
So I tried the same search query today and got 11,900,000,000 results.
Does that mean Google has kicked out six billion pages from its index? That’s almost exactly a third!
(Using the *.* search used to return 25 billion documents, but that search no longer works, so it can’t be used in a comparison.)
A shrinking index would account for the recent decreases in PageRank that people have been seeing… if the index has shrunk by 1/3rd, then there’s less PageRank to go around.
Google still claim to have an index, “more than three times larger than that of any other search engine“. Can that still be true if their index is shrinking?
No, I haven’t gone mad.
If you want more traffic, increase your Trulevance.
I bet you want to know what Trulevance is now, right?
OK, I’ll spill the beans…
Trulevance is a contraction of Trust and Relevance.
Let’s break that down a bit…
Your pages need to be Trusted before they’ll get traffic. The best example of trust is Pagerank. But Pagerank can be manipulated. See the last blog post where Dr Andy agreed with me that links from article directories are now less valuable. Buying and selling PageRank is frowned upon by Google. So how can Google fight back and make sure that Pagerank maintains its integrity? Simple. It downgrades the value of links from low-PR pages, and boosts the value from high PR pages. If you’re outside the “highPR clique”, tough luck… your pages aren’t trusted. If you’re inside the “HighPR clique” congratulations… you can expect a ton of traffic. (ever typed anything into Google and NOT seen a Wikipedia.com page in the results? I thought not).
How else can Google determine trust? Well, what about the age of a domain name? If the site has been around for a decade and not changed ownership or overall content, you can imagine Google would trust it more than a fly-by-night site which pops up, gets a few links and disappears. A lot of people call this the Google Sandbox, where they don’t trust new sites that don’t have good backlinks but I expect it’s more like a fine wine getting better with age. First you have to escape the sandbox, but then your site may get awarded positive points for the length of time online with the same content and overall theme. The longer your site has been online, the better. I have sites from 1997, 1998 and 1999. I know a thing or two about old domains.
Have you noticed how difficult trust is to achieve? You can’t fake the age of your domain… and if you buy an old domain, Google will know about the change at the registrar (because Google IS a registrar)… and even if they don’t pay attention to that, they will notice if you upload your content and the site changes. You also can’t easily get very high PageRank links. This is exactly what Google wants.
The second part of “Trulevance” comes from Relevance. Put simply, this is a combined measure of your off-page reputation, your on-page content and how they match up. If sites around the Internet point to your page as a place for “cookies”, but your page doesn’t mention “cookies” anywhere, you’re going to find it harder to rank for the keywords your page is targetting. If your page is about the Ascari KZ1 supercar, but all the links to your page say “cookies”, Google will see the disconnect and write off your page as irrelevant. Incidentally, this is what happens when you buy an old domain hoping to put your content on it and get an instant ranking boost… there will be a disconnect between all the links pointing to your domain and what your content is about. Whoops. Bye-Bye Relevance.
Off-page reputation mainly refers to the anchor text within links pointing to your site, and the content of the Title tags of those pages. On-page content is what your page is seen to be about… its topic or subject… which is decided by the page title, bold words, headlines, the domain name and words in the URL as well as all the words on the page acting in concert to give your page a subject. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) helps decide what your on-page subject is by checking words on the page against other words it would expect to find from other indexed pages on the same subject… for example, is your page about Apple Computers or Apple Pie… finding the words crust, sugar and oven would indicate the latter.
When the off-page reputation agrees with the on-page content, you get “Relevance”. When you combine Trust with Relevance you get Trulevance… which means Google loves you and you’ll get tons of traffic!
What do you think… would you like to know the basics of SEO… I mean the TRUE basics and not the “guru fluff” that people with zero knowledge of SEO pass off as “the hidden truth”?
I’d like to get my hands on a short, to-the-point ebook which explained, clearly, the basics of SEO.
It seems to me that there are “fluff” ebooks and articles on the one hand, and real-experts on the other… but the real experts seems to go on and on and on with hour after hour of video or hundreds and hundreds of pages of waffle and arcane detail. OK, they’re the experts, but sheesh.. could ya consense it into less than 50 pages please bud?
Am I on the right track, here? Does anyone feel the same way?
Right then. I’m going to distill everything I’ve ever learned about SEO (real SEO, not the junk I’ve learned then discarded) into a short, sharp, punchy ebook… and I’ll get in ready in time for Christmas!
I was referred to a website selling “how to do SEO” information. They claim that they get great search engine rankings… OK, fine.
But on their sales letter they show a screen-capture from Google for the search construction auditing firm and say they’re first and second out of 2 million results… and they did it in less that six weeks!
Oh, C’mon.
Surely, by now, everyone knows that those results will include any webpages with the words, “construction”, “auditing” and “firm” on them. If you search for “construction auditing firm” using quotes, to determine who’s actually using or optimising for that phrase, you get EIGHT results… and two are from the seo company… so only six were competitors!
Why do I care? Because it’s fairly misleading… and in any case, I’ve done better myself. Years and years ago, you could search AltaVista for Business Opportunities and the ScamFreeZone homepage was the second organic result and also the third organic result for Home Business… phrases which were slightly more competitive, even back then, than “construction auditing firm” is nowadays.
When I got back from a family vacation in sunny Cornwall, I found an email in my inbox saying that the introductory discount for Andy William’s “Creating Fat Content” course has expired.
Dang!
I’d meant to mention that course, but while I was on vacation with my wife and kids, I promised myself I’d only read emergency emails.
So, when I got back I emailed Andy and said, “Andy, I know your course is amazing value at the current price, but it would really help me out if you could let my list have a chance to grab the product at the discounted price. After all, it’s not their fault I messed up!”
Andy was kind enough to agree and if you use the link below you can get the original “introductory discount” price… but he did put a time limit on this special offer… it only lasts until Friday, 9th November…
http://www.HowToProfitFrom.com/fatcontent/
So who is “Creating Fat Content” for? Well, in a nutshell, it’s for people who want to play by Google’s rules and get tons of free search engine traffic. Andy has seen what Google wants… high quality, themed articles… and he shows you exactly how to build websites full of what Google wants to see.
The benefit of creating “Fat” content are obvious… lots of free traffic for any niche you want to target. The drawback is that it takes a bit of time to research and write each article. Of course, if you take the long-term view, it’s probably better to create a site of 100 articles that gets traffic for the next 10 years than it is to create 1,000 websites that Google bans and you have to re-create every six months. 
So, my recommendation is to pick up a copy of Andy’s “Creating Fat Content” course and apply his techniques to the next few websites you create. You’ll probably be very happy with the results.
Don’t forget, this offer is a limited time exclusive for my contacts only. Please do not share this link with anyone.
http://www.HowToProfitFrom.com/fatcontent/
By the way, this is a very high quality course… including the main PDF ebook of 225 pages and four different pieces of software including “Content Publisher” which sells for $97, a special Internet Search Web Browser, a special version of Keyword Results Analyzer and a “Fat Content Article Editor”.
Don’t miss the limited-time special price… until Friday…
… and check out the “case studies” for some “eye opening” information…
http://www.HowToProfitFrom.com/fatcontent/
I think I’ll make a category for posts about Google’s “supplemental index” as I seem to be a bit fixated on it.
I was just meandering around the web and found this at Matt Cutts blog . It’s from Jan 2007, so it’s bang up to date, from the horse’s mouth info…
“As a reminder, supplemental results aren’t something to be afraid of; I’ve got pages from my site in the supplemental results, for example. A complete software rewrite of the infrastructure for supplemental results launched in Summer o’ 2005, and the supplemental results continue to get fresher. Having urls in the supplemental results doesn’t mean that you have some sort of penalty at all; the main determinant of whether a url is in our main web index or in the supplemental index is PageRank. If you used to have pages in our main web index and now they’re in the supplemental results, a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we have in the past. The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).”
I’m working on a new, top-secret project at the moment.
Don’t worry, it isn’t a “big box” I’m going to sell at $1997!
In fact, I don’t know if a product will come out of this project at all. I may very well keep the information to myself and dominate the Internet on my terms.
After all, I’m ploughing in my money and my time, as well as that of my developers… so it may be better to keep it all ”hidden” and locked in the same vault as the Coke(R) recipe.
What I can tell you is that my brain is melting from the information I’m trying to absorb such as… the latest, cutting-edge developments in organic SEO (white hat!), PHP scripts with artificial intelligence, the synthesis of end-user contributed content with core quality PLR content, the organization of multiple talented developers on the same project, plus my own crash-course in PHP site-building, xml sitemap generation and pagerank, page reputation, link reputation and so on.
I don’t know what other webmasters are doing, but in my opinion, this is cutting edge site generation on several different fronts and I’m really excited by it!
Can anyone guess what I’m doing?
When Michael gives advice, it’s wise to listen. For all those people who have bought templates, from any source, it’s an important message…
“Modify Your Templates or Suffer the Consequences”
It’s not exactly ambiguous, is it? The message is quite clear… you can’t use those templates “as they are” and hope to avoid any penalties from the search engines.
Personally, I’m not sure about this… if you look at most major sites, they’re built around templates. There’s usually a “masthead” graphic, a left-hand navigation menu, some “center of the page” content, and a footer with contact information. Usually only the content part of the page will change… so each page on the site has elements in common.
Perhaps the problem is when multiple sites online, that are otherwise unrelated, have the same site elements? But then, would every site built with XSitePro’s templates be hit with a “template” penalty?
I’ll have to ask Michael to clarify… but, until then, it’s definitely wise to heed his words of wisdom.
(having just done a bit more research, Michael seems to be specifically referring to using templated sites for Adsense revenue. He states that as soon as your publisher ID appears on a site, Google will check it against your other sites with Adsense ads on them, and if it sees a “template pattern” you may get hit with a penalty for having cookie-cutter sites)
One of the reason for starting this blog was to rank highly for my own name in the search engines, so people could find me easily. I accomplished that, and wrote a post about it.
One of the happy spin-offs is that I now get top rankings for other products, names and topics. For example, one of my blog posts ranks third for the phrase “Xybercode System” at Google.
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Now, you may think, well, “so what”?
But, it’s interesting to me because this is a hot new product… people are quite likely to type that phrase into the search engines at the moment and will be looking for the high-ticket product. The fact that my blog post is third, and only beaten by two of Jeff’s sites, indicates that I’m in a position to get some clicks and sales just from blogging about the product launch.
Did I get lucky for “xybercode system”? Was it coincidence that got me to third place?
I don’t think so…
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If you search for “Infoproduct Blueprint”, the other high ticket product launch from last week, my blog post ranks 4th… behind two results from Ken’s official site and a blog post by Joel Comm.
So, I stand to gain clicks and potential sales from organic search engine traffic just by doing a couple of blog posts about the launches. That’s the result of quick indexing of the blog posts by Google, and little initial competition for those product launch keywords.
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