This is one of the many reasons the seo and internet marketing industry gets a bad rap. There is another seller on eBay selling PR 6 and PR 5 sites that are all fake PR. Go to this eBay link and see for yourself. He definately knows what he is doing as he lists different pr datacenter checks, and other tools yet none of them are the fake detection tools that check for old 301’s. If you use this tool provided by Seo Logs and type in one of the domains, www.abengoabioenergycorp.com you will see it is stealing the Page Rank from www.abengoa.com. What the person did was take the first domain and did a permanant 301 redirect in the .htaccess file to the legit domain and then after a Page Rank Update he took the 301 off and it gives the new domain a PR 6 until the next PR update when am excited buyer will find out that they now one a pr 0 site.

This is very important to understand and look for when buying links or sites, you always want to check the validity of the Page Rank they are boasting since most of the time that is what you are paying for. You don’t want to pay a pr 7 price tag whent he site is a 0 and has no back links.

Checking the back links of the domain can help as PR is only passed through links, if a site has no back links just as all of the sites in the eBay listing have no backlinks you are not getting legit PR.

Also unrelated to PR but very important to buying links is check the page you are getting the link from and make sure it isn’t supplemental, getting on a supplemental page isn’t going to help you out either. There is a lot of money wasted on fake pr and supp links.

It sucks there are still people falling for this. I emailed the seller we will see what happens.

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Another lame ass policy by the Google Adsense team on placing images near Google Ads. When I read this I was pretty much blown away and wonder how many stupid people are really out there because the way I see it Google Adsense team thinks alot.

Who is not smart enough to figure out the difference between a Google Ad and an image? Who does not already just look past the ads on most every website we look at?

The new policy Google has set forth is preventing webmasters from placing images near the ads that would try to increase click through ratio. I can’t even begin to explain my lack of words for DUH! Google is making to much money because they have teams that actually research this crap out and come up with these policies. Here is what I don’t get - why the hell would they not want to increase the CTR (Google and the webmaster)? I really do not believe an image near an ad is going to make the click less valuable.

I think the ads are good to have on pages and serve their purpose (monetary purposes) but from my experience most people that click on the ads know what they are and want to learn more, just like when doing a search on Google when the sponsored ads come up on the right, or up top!

I will just keep using YPN and loving waking up in the morning!

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With the launch of the new website yesterday Yahoo Publisher Ads looks to now be out of the beta version/testing and are live! I am hoping the new version will allow ads to show up internationally. I have not dug deep enough to figure that out yet, but I am very happy that Yahoo Publisher Ads is live and everyone can get a taste of freedom away from the “other” major ad program. I love Yahoo! Publisher Ads because of how nice the customer service is, and how they actually get back to you … unlike the “other” major players who just seem to not give a crap.

I would just plead to Yahoo to keep up the good work and keep the customer service at the same level now that they will most certainly be getting bigger and more popular!

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Just an update for everyone, it looks like the Trump website has been fixed and re-cached properly. Oh well … it was fun while it lasted. And thanks to “print screen” functions we can all enjoy it agian and again. Feel free to check out the post and screenshot of what Trumps website results on Google looked liked when it was hacked….

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Just came across something I thought was so freaking funny! My best guess is that the Donald does not want to his site to say Trump Small Penis and other related terms…

BUT thats what you see in the results for Google when you type in “trump” and the Trump website is the #1 result but take a look at the information that Google is pulling? (more…)

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I am not telling you to stop using the search engine Google anymore, but I am trying to help you understand what Google wants to happen with the use of thier name.

They want media companies/orginizations to stop referring to searching the web as “googling” or “go google it”. (They have legal documents to back it up as well) I have just one thing to say about this; WHY?

I have been on about 10 forums today talking about this, and read a number of comments (pro and con) about Google doing this. I am still trying to figure out how this could ever be bad PR? I have seen the examples of Xerox and people “making a Xerox on thier HP Printer” but even so … has that ever hurt Xerox?

The real problem is Google is starting to become as big as Microsoft and turning into them when they say they live by the “do no evil” motto.

What I think should happen is this; Google should spend more time and PR energy fixing Pay Per Click Fraud with thier Adsense/Adwords programs. I said this before but I don’t think Yahoo would ever mind someone “Yahooing” Do you? I would love to hear your comments!

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Just a quick note about something Utah SEO Chris Bennett (owner of 97thfloor.com) came across the other day and it got me thinking about all the things (scams) we got to be careful about in the world of SEO. If I can bring this up here and maybe save one person from not making a mistake then it will be worth it!

He had come across a page that was selling a Page Rank 10 text-link for 200 a month. Anyone involved in the world of SEO knows that is just to good to be true. Besides what it could do for rankings (for whatever word you anchor up) just imagine the actual traffic you could get from a link on a PR 10. It could be insaine.

So, just for kicks we investigated a little bit and found out the site only had a couple back links to it and virtualy NO Offsite Optimization. MSN, Yahoo and Google all showed no signs of the site even on radar. There are tools to find out if sites are cloaked and we ran some tools on this site and found out it was jacking the Page Rank from another source (which actually was the PR 10) The site in question (which I will not give any exposure here), had no page rank and like I said … virtually no back links. Crazy huh?

So the point here is to be careful when purchasing links. I would always make sure anyone is very careful about any links they mighy buy on Ebay, forums or other various search engine blogs, or domain names promising a PR 9 or 10 - yet only selling for a 100 bucks??? Ask yourself this: “Why would anyone be selling a PR 10 site for 100 bucks”? The answer is they would never. Never in a million years.

To me its amazing the forms that fraud takes on. Who would have ever thought you would have to worry about purchasing links on supposed high PR sites, only find out the site is probably banned on most search engines. Be careful and stick to the basics with link building. A link from a banned site on Google could be bad news for the future of your site, and you never want to have to deal with that!

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Many may or may not have known but now that MSN does not use Yahoo! (formerly Overture) for its PPC results there is probably a good chance of getting some decent keywords for a pretty good price with the new MSN AdCenter.

Heres the question though: Will it do anything for me? In the search engine world MSN is #3 in terms of traffic served up. Google who owns 62% of search traffic is #1, and Yahoo! comes in at #2 just infront of MSN.

When you are talking of “billions” of searches on a daily basis though that is still alot of traffic. I think its a good opportunity for the marketing budget challenged! You will find that some big keywords that were normally un-affordable are now in reach. Will it last long? (cheap PPC costs) Probably Not, but it could give your business the push it needs to take your marketing to the next level.

Don’t expect the kind of traffic you would normally get from Google AdWords for a keyword or phrase, but try to find more keywords to go after since they are affordable. You can make up the traffic in volume. Find good targeted keywords that are “converting words” and I think the MSN AdCenter will be beneficial for you in all of your search engine marketing efforts. That is the key, understanding that just doing one thing is not an end all solution. You have to have a SEM plan that includes many strategies, and the MSN AdCenter is just one!

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There was a pretty good article in the New York Times yesterday about the battle between Microsoft and Google. It talks a lot about how aware both comapnies are of each other and all the increased spending that they both plan for the rest of this year and throughout 07. The most interesting thing to me was most of the spending Google plans on making is for new machines and computers to be able to store more information. Below is an exerpt from the article.

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Yahoo Publisher Ads (Google Adsense type program) today annouced to its publishers a new blog with useful information regarding the Publisher Ad network! I feel this is going to be a huge resource for anyone interested in making money with these kind of programs. If you are curious as to what these ads are, look on the right hand sidebar of this blog, and you will see “Ads by Yahoo” This is what the Yahoo Publisher Ads are. If you are interested in signing up with this program you can do so by clicking on this link: Yahoo Publisher Ads

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