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Google's Disavow Tool: A Blessing for Webmasters?


The recent updates to Google's algorithm have affected many sites all over the world especially exact match domain sites like carinsurance.com. This has led to webmasters and SEO companies frantically relooking the link profiles of their sites and trying to delete what they think are spammy links. Well now Google has made that process much easier with the introduction of the link disavow tool. The much anticipated launch of this tool comes several months after Bing launched their own version of the tool. So what is this tool and why have webmasters been so anxious to use it?
Any webmaster will tell you how difficult it is to get rid of bad links as it involves contacting the corresponding webmaster with a link removal request. There are many obstacles in this process, for instance; a lack of contact details on the website, ignored requests and old sites that are not actively managed anymore. Some directory webmasters have resorted to charging a fee to remove a link to the site due to the volume of link removal requests.
What makes this process even more frustrating is that it is not easy to identify exactly which are the "bad links" and which links Google gives a site credit for. Rookie webmasters have sometimes caused more damage by removing good links which has left sites dropping in the rankings anyway. This is one of the downsides of the tool as good sites could end up being flagged as a source of bad links along with the "link farms" and paid directory sites.
In the last year companies in competitive industries have been using negative SEO tactics by linking competition, or "enemy", sites to spammy paid directories which causes the sites to get penalised by Google's algorithm. Google denied that negative SEO was occurring in the past, but by launching this tool it is clear that they knew that this was becoming a problem. Although it would be easier now to remove the bad links it opens up the possibility of sabotage from disgruntled employees, for e.g., who have access to the webmaster tools logins as they could remove the valuable links that a website has built over time.
If we disregard some of the dangers of the disavow tool for a second, it is clear to see that the majority of webmasters and SEO companies will find this tool indispensable. As the competition for rankings becomes more and more competitive we can expect to see many new tactics to try and thwart Google's algorithm. All I know is that it's good to know that Google is investing time and money in tools that will help webmasters clean up their sites.
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2 New Ways to Advertise Using Google Maps


Google Maps is the most popular online mapping destination. Seventy-one percent of the 91.7 million people in the US who visited maps online in February 2012 used Google Maps, according to comScore. This puts them far ahead of Bing's online map, or MapQuest. People use Google Maps to locate businesses and other landmarks, but there are two new ways that your business can use Google Maps to attract customers.
Blue Pin
If your business is a subscriber to Google's AdWords Express, which is primarily for small-to-medium sized, local businesses, then your business will have a "blue pin" on Google Maps. That way, when someone puts your keywords or business name into Google, you will have a blue pin that stands out from the rest of the pins on the map. When a user clicks on the pin, he or she will go to your business's location on Google Maps. The blue pin will also appear next to your listing in the Google search, making it easier for the user to connect to your location.
Google Offers
Managing a local business is enough work as is; not to mention finding time to advertise to potential customers. Online advertising is a great way to reach a plethora of potential leads. You might think you already have enough on your plate, or are already spending enough advertising dollars on your online marketing campaign.
Through your site analytics, you already know what your customers are searching for on Google to find the products and services you offer. Google Offers makes online marketing for local businesses easy by use of their current AdWords campaign. By jumping in the online coupon business as a competitor to Groupon and LivingSocial, Google is now a competitor with a new program called Google Offers. These offers can be directly linked with your listing on Google Maps and Google Places. This means that if a customer's Google search brings up your business' listing, the customer will see that you are offering an online deal. This is a great way to convert a web user doing a simple search, to a new customer for your business.
When using Google offers, there is certain guidelines that you must follow to be able to place an offer on Google. If these guidelines are not followed, Google will send you a notice advising you that your offer has been suspended due to requirement violations. Don't worry, this doesn't mean that you are unable to put your offer on Google. If you think that your offer is walking on that fine line, you can go to Google offer policies or the Google Business Help Center to better inform you on the requirements.
By Tom M Calvin
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Getting Started With Bing Webmaster Tools

When it comes to search engine optimization of a Website, we should make sure we optimize our site for all the search engines and not just one. Google is most popular search engine at the moment followed by Bing and others, and from last few months traffic coming from Bing search is increasing. Seems like Google algo changes which created lots of negative buzz, made Microsoft worked hard on their search engine and they have been integrating many things in their search engine like Social signals and deep Facebook integration.
Now, this post is not about bing search but it’s about Bing Webmaster tools which will help Websites owners and Bloggers to get their site on Bing search index and get more traffic from it.
I will keep this guide simple and up to the point to get your site indexed in Bing Search and in upcoming tutorials, I will explain other things that you can do with this free Webmaster tool.

How to Submit your site to Bing Webmaster tools:

If you are complete new to this, Bing webmaster tool is a free service by Microsoft for webmasters to submit their site and get a complete SEO report and information related to their site. In-fact, there are many features which are not even available on Google Webmaster tools and there is no reasons you should not submit your Website to Bing Webmaster tool.
Like any other Webmaster tools, you need to create a Free account or you can use your existing Windows live ID to login to your Webmaster account. Here is the link to get started. Once you are signed up and created your account, first step is to add your Website and verify.
Submit site to Bing
Once you have submitted your Website, you need to add details related to site and ownership like sitemap link, Website owner details and so on. If you have not created your blog sitemap yet, you can easily create using Google XML sitemap plugin and add your sitemap link in the Site info page. Providing your sitemap link will help Bing bots to deep crawl and index more pages on your site.
site details
Another interesting thing is, you can set Email communication preference and how often you would like to receive email for your site health issues. Since my Website is my full-time business too, I set it as daily alert so that I get notified regarding any site issues.
Email notification for site issues
Once you have filled out all the details, click on Save and you will be redirected to Bing Webmaster tool dashboard, where you will see a message next to your site saying  ” Site ownership has not been verified, Verify now“. Click on Verify now and use any of the method to verify your site. I find the adding meta tag to be easiest one, but you can pick any of the three verification process:
  • File upload
  • Adding Meta tag in Header
  • CNAME record to DNS
If you are using Thesis WordPress theme (Why use Thesis), simply go to Thesis site options and under Additional scripts copy paste the meta tag, clear your cache and click on Verify and within minutes your site will be verified. If you are using WordPress SEO by yoast, you can quickly add content part from meta tag verification and add it into WordPress SEO dashboard settings.
Bing site verification

Site Verified on Bing and What next?

So far, we have submitted our site to bing Webmaster tools and done with the verification. Next step is to configure few settings which will help up to get an extra edge.
Submit more sitemaps to Bing:
I have created separate sitemap for Images and videos and I must admit Bing bots are smart enough to pick all sitemaps from an existing site. You can generate your Image and video sitemap using Image sitemap and video sitemap plugins and under Dashboard > Configure my site> Sitemap you can add new sitemap to Bing.
submit sitemaps to Bing Tools

Submit individual URL:
If you have submitted a complete new site and it may take time for bing bots to crawl and index your site completely, you can manually add few links in here. Bing have put a limit of 50 URL’s submission per month and daily cap is 10. You should also check our earlier guide on how to make bots to crawl your site faster.
Ignore URL parameters:
If your site pages are indexed with URL parameters like replytocom in Bing search, you can simply add this Parameter here and ask bing to ignore all such links. I hope if Bing populates few URL parameter by default like Google Webmaster tools does. When I checked my indexed pages in Bing search, I realized I have few pages with attachment_id parameter indexed, now you all know what I did to get rid of such links from Bing.
Crawl Control:
This is another interesting feature by BWT, as they allow you to control when Bing bots should crawl your site more. So, you can set the most busy time of your blog and bing bots will select the time to crawl your site more when your site is less busy. This is useful for high traffic sites and sites with limited hosting bandwidth.
Block URL’s and directory in Bing search:
So somehow, bots started indexing your wp-content, tags or categories folder. Or you decided to remove all tags and categories or any other directory from Bing search, this section will help you to do the same. You can stop indexing of any page or directory on your site using Block URL section. This manual URL removal applies for 90 days and you will get an Email notification 8 days prior to completion of 90 days, and you can decide to keep the out of index or let it index in Bing.
Grant Access to your Webmaster tool to other users:
This is useful for many people like me who offers Free WordPress setup, as I can quickly add my client site using my Bing webmaster tools account and give him admin access later. Also, if you manage your blog with a team or with a partner, you can quickly give access to your site webmaster tool using users section. There are three roles which you can given:
  • Read only
  • Read and modification
  • Administrator access
There are many more things which we can do with Bing tool to improve our search engine visibility in Bing search, but to keep this tutorial short and informative, I will end it now and will cover next part in upcoming post. For now, if you have not yet explored bing webmaster tools or submitted site to Bing, it’s the right time to go ahead and do the submission. If you are stuck anywhere or have any questions, feel free to ask via comments.
Copyright of shoutmeloud.com
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How to Make Money with WidgetBucks


Recently, an advertising network known as WidgetBucks launched and began their quest to revolutionize the world of online marketing. In providing their pay-per-click shopping widget programs, WidgetBucks seeks to make advertising a much easier process for just about everyone involved. Traditional advertising is effective in some cases, but often times, it fails to meet the needs of companies. It just doesn’t reach customers in the right way. WidgetBucks is a different kind of online advertising, though.

Depending upon your role in the entire operation, WidgetBucks provides a different experience for various webmasters. The advertisements seem to reach customers in a different way. The latest marketing research has indicated that, on the whole, internet browsers are extremely fickle and they’re able to pick up on the tricks that marketing professionals bring. With WidgetBucks, the advertisements read more like content. Internet browsers see the WidgetBucks advertisements just like they do the articles on a webmaster’s site.

Webmasters have found that WidgetBucks can be very profitable when compared to other forms of affiliate marketing. Most website owners report a very high click through rate and from that, a solid CPM. What is the primary reason why this is happening? WidgetBucks serves the hot niches in the website industry. Among the popular niches are video games, sports, jewelry, health topics, and plenty of other things that are currently hot in the industry.

If you are a webmaster and you plan on making the big bucks using this advertising program, you better have a website in one of the popular niches. Otherwise, their advertising seems to fall short of the mark. Their advertisements are well written and are designed to make people really want to explore the product being advertised, but some webmasters find that their site is not one that benefits from such marketing.

The referral program is also very popular and is a good way to make some income using the program. At last check, WidgetBucks had an offer of $25 for any person who registers their high traffic site. From there, webmasters aren’t finished making money through WidgetBucks. You can earn 10% of the total lifetime earnings of all of the people you refer through your personal referral link. Depending upon who clicks on your site, this could end up being a very profitable aspect of the entire operation.

As far as payments go, there is a little bit of a waiting period. This can be frustrating at first, but after a while, the cycle begins to catch up to itself and you’ll be receiving regular payments. Just 45 days after the end of the month, WidgetBucks will send payment through either the Paypal system or through a personal check.

On the whole, WidgetBucks is a pretty good new system and they stand to revolutionize the market some. The advertisements are well written, which is the main difference between these ads and some of the other ones that you might see online.

Join WidgetBucks and earn more per click.
By Paul - moneymakerinfo
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How To Make Money Using a Blog

Many friends have asked me whether we can make money online from blogs or not. I told them you can make money even by selling lemonade at the corner of your school but the main problem is that you must have passion and time for what you will be blogging. Many people fail because they are starting blogs just to make money , they are writing 2 or 3 articles and they are using different affiliate links and other advertisement programs to catch any cents.
You must know that in order to make some money , at least you should know what you are talking about and not post just crap in order to increase number of posts in your blog.
Many newbies on the internet doesn't even know how to get a free blog online so in this article I will explain step by step what you have to do in order to make some cash from your blog
There are 2 big blog providers online which are
  • WordPress.com
  • Blogger.com
- WordPress has a lot of templates and widgets so you can use for your blog , you can create categories and you can even purchase more space and other cool features if you upgrade
- Blogger was purchased by Google so the best part is that you can get accepted to Adsense through Blogger. The bad part is that you cannot create categories but you can give Labels to your posts as they were categories (Im doing it)

You must know that creating a blog is really simple but updating it everyday with new and unique content is really a hard work (its not so hard if you speak about your favorite niche like I'm doing) So content will be the judger whether you will be a successful blogger or not, if you will update it once a week chances will be very low but if you will post good and unique content every day then you will be in the right road

So ok so far , you have created the blog , you chose your template and you are posting some articles. You will ask how will you get the traffic ?
There are tons of ways to drive traffic to a blog , I will explain some of the techniques I'm also using
  • Register at FeedBurner.com
  • Register at TechnoRati.com
  • If you are a member of DigitalPoint Forum add your RSS Feed to your profile (it will be shown under your username everytime you post a new reply or thread)
  • Write some unique articles and upload them at Article Directories (See this post for more explanations)
  • Register at MyBlogLog.com
  • Add your blog url to your signatures in every forum you are (if possible add also an avatar with your blog's address)
  • Add your blog url to high pr directories
So with 7 easy and free ways you can start seeing some increases in your traffic (Note that if you dont post regularly your traffic may decrease again)
Now I know that all of you are thinking , how will we be making money from our blogs ? Its really simple but I would strongly recommend use just 2 or maximum 3 advertisments and do not put the advertisements from the beginning (wait until you have some traffic then you may add them) Make sure your advertisements and other widgets are like your template so you wont have a lot of contrast.
Here I'm listing the ways how you can make money from your blog once you have some decent traffic and some readers
  • Adsense (CPM & PPC which pays differently for each niche)
  • Text-Link-Ads (Get Money if someone buys a link to your site from TLA)
  • ReviewMe (Get paid for different reviews you make , more traffic you have more you will earn)
  • PayPerPost (same as ReviewMe but it has more advertisers in their network)
  • Money4Banners (Doesn't matter if you have a small or big blog , you get 10$ when you sign up and 5$ every month just to display their advertisment
  • WidgetBucks (this seems to be most promising program which pays very high rates but nobody has received any payment so far as its a new company)

So I'm listing just these 6 ways but if you would be interested on others feel free to contact me and I will share my experience with you.

Make sure you use proper keywords for each article and make sure your blog structure is like :

http://yourblog.com/this-is-how-you...rl-must-be.html
and not like :
http://yourblog.com/2007/2425.html (SEO Purposes)

Share your comments for this article if you found anything special !
This article was created for some friends who asked me how can we make money from blogs and I believe that an advanced webmaster knows almost everything explained here
By Paul - moneymakerinfo
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