Plus we’ve added some new sub-menus to the control panel to make it even easier to navigate your Master Site Manager SEO software account as well as save you even more time then ever! Check it out!

In fact, it’s even more appropriate because that’s what we ALL do when it comes to SEO.

Perhaps you’ve heard the term “Googlebate”? We’ve all done it… Come on you can admit it, we’re all friends here right? Wink, wink…

For those of you who don’t know, “Googlebating” is when we type our own name into Google to see how many pages Google returns that shows our name.

For example, look at the search term of SEO Google guy, Mr. Matt Cutts.

“Google-bating” for some people it’s become like a competitive sport! It’s even more so when it comes to SEO because when it comes to making money online via SEO, it comes down to traffic. And you get the most traffic by being #1.

The Urban Dictionary gives this definition of “Mental Masturbation” – “The act of engaging in useless yet intellectually stimulating conversation, usually as an excuse to avoid taking constructive action….”

And here’s where a lot of webmasters AND professional SEO’s get into trouble.  Because they waste time day after day checking their stats to see if their keywords have moved up or down.

Now on the surface I get that, but the reality is that you’re just stroking your ego. If you’re keywords are up, you’re happy for the day. If they’re down, you’re mood changes and it ruins your whole day.

But the fact is that NO lasting search engine result is going to happen on a day to day basis. Sure we’ve all seen cases where somebody (maybe even you) submitted a video to YouTube and your ranking (for the video…) went to # 1 for a day or two. But then after 3 or 4 days, the listing vanished only to resurface two weeks later at #15, or #30 or #163.

You see the point….

Sure you can concentrate on trying to make some “quick money” by being #1 for 24 hours, but is that a smart long term business strategy? If it is, let me know because I haven’t seen it work for any of the markets I’m in.

Guys don’t waste your time checking your search engine rankings daily (or even several times a day  – like I’ve seen some people do), you’re just wasting time on an activity that is not going to make you more money.

Yes, it’s true, Google is so screwed up right now that you could put up a page or video and using a combination of tricks, get that new link indexed and ranking with in as little as 20 minutes or less. But it’s a temporary ranking that in all likelihood will change within a day or so.

So instead of checking all the time to see how you’ve “done”, instead spend that time creating new content, getting new back-links, making your product better, or a hundred and one other things that will make you money.

Don’t be a slave to your rankings. They will change, so check them 3 times a week at most and you’ll find that you’re a lot more centered, have a much better over all perspective on what’s important and your over all SEO strategy.

Oh, and since we’re talking about Sammy Hagar…..  Here’s a shout out to my good friend and SEO master Jerry West!

Google also confirmed that this was a rankings change, not a crawling or indexing change, which seems to imply that sites getting less traffic still have their pages indexed, but some of those pages are no longer ranking as highly as before.

Based on Matt’s comment, this change impacts “long tail” traffic, which generally is from longer queries that few people search for individually, but in aggregate can provide a large percentage of traffic.

WebmasterWorld summarized what many webmasters are seeing particularly over the past few days with their Google search results. “Webmasters from very clean, very large websites report dramatic drops in long tail search traffic. MAYDAY seems to be the appropriate shout-out for those affected.”

Yes, most of these complaints come over webmasters seeing a huge drop in traffic from Google over “long tail keywords.”  Long tail keywords are  phrases that are 3 or more keywords long, sometimes also called “fat belly” keywords.

One person said he had a “traffic dropped 50% in a few days, 100,000′s of long tail k/w.” Another person “recovered until this Mid April, when it started seeing some recovery, then bang now 90% of its traffic, mostly long tail disappeared.”

This change seems to have effected only very large sites with “item” pages (ecommerce pages) that do not have a lot of incoming links to support them, are several clicks from the home page, and may not have substantial unique and value-added content on them.

For example, ecommerce type sites often have this type of structure. As a result,  these individual product pages are less likely to attract external links and the majority of the content may be imported from a manufacturer database.

Based on Matt’s comment at Google I/O, the pages that are now ranking well for these long tail queries are from “higher quality” sites (or perhaps are “higher quality” pages).

If you’re site’s been smacked with this new algorithm and your traffic is down to your internal pages, Matt Cuts suggests that site owners who are impacted re-evaluate the quality of their sites and if these sites truly are the most relevant match for the impacted queries,  determine if the the site is considered an “authority”, and ensure that the page does more than simply match the keywords in the query and is relevant and useful for that query.  (I.E. Beef up the content on those pages that are effected….)

Mat also notes that the change:

• has nothing to do with the “Caffeine” update (an infrastructure change that is not yet fully rolled out).
• is entirely algorithmic (and isn’t, for instance, a manual flag on individual sites).
• impacts long tail queries more than other types
• was fully tested and is not temporary

If you’ve been tracking your long tail keywords with Master Site Manager.com, look at the tracking chart for any of your keywords to see if there was a decline in your rankings from April 3rd to the 17th in particular.

Also check the charting trend for the last 3o days. Is it up or down? MasterSiteManager.com makes it easy to see if and or how badly this new May Day update is effecting your sites and your sales.

We’ll have another update in a few days with some ideas on what you can do to get your rankings and income back to their previous levels.

But for now, check your keyword trends and see where your keywords are headed. After all, you can’t make an informed decision about what to do next, if you don’t know where you are currently.

Till next time,

Don Schnure

One proven method of getting back links to your web site when doing SEO is blog commenting (not blog spam) by the way…

The trouble was that its always been a pain in the you know what to track down these sorts of related blogs.

Well now, Google makes it super easy to find blogs that are related to your niche.

Watch this video and see how easy it really is to find blogs in your niche that you can post comments too when trying to build your back link profile.

Ok, I admit this video isn’t my best effort. It’s what we call in the business “down and dirty” – which means nothing fancy but the information more then makes up for the production values

The fact that no body wants to admit is this:

You can not effectively do SEO on more then 3-10 keywords or phrases at once.

If you are trying to, then you are really hurting your bottom line because it will take you forever to achieve the rankings you are looking for.

Having said that, sure you could have an entire team in the Philippines doing blog spam for you in order to try to get back links for dozens of keywords at once, but that’s just sloppy.

Honestly, the formula for SEO success is to focus on 3-5 keywords CONVERTING keywords or phrases ONLY at a time.

Once you achieve your desired rank (that should be #1 of course) then and only then should you start to focus on other keywords.

I am continually amazed when I see people trying to do SEO on dozens of keywords/phrases at once. This sort of SEO strategy will cause you to lose in the market place – every single time.

Because your competitors who understand the value of focus and targeting will start to capture the top spots for each of your chosen keywords/phrases one by one.

At the end of six months, you’ll be sitting there scratching your head wondering what happened, and where all your traffic went!

And the worse part is that you’ll have a devil of a time at that point playing catch up, and most likely you won’t ever catch up and here’s why.

Let’s say you spent the next 90 days trying to rank for 100 keyword or keyword phrases and you managed during this time to get 1000 new back links.

Not bad right? That’s 1,000 new links to your site! Wow! That’s sure to pump up your back link profile and give you some ranking juice, right!?

Well, not so fast. Yes, you did get 1,000 new back links, and that will help your domain gain some new authority overall, but because your  efforts were divided between 100 different KWPs, you only managed to get 10 new anchor text back links per keyword phrase.

Think 10 back links per keyword phrase is enough to move your chosen page up in the serps for that keyword phrase?

Let’s be honest. If you are targeting a CONVERTING keyword phrase, then chances are that there is going to be a lot of competition, and 10 new links per keyword phrase isn’t really going to move you.

But what about your competitor who has the same list of 100 keywords that you do, but instead of trying to optimize for them all at once, they focus on just 3 of the keywords / phrases during the same 90 days.

Using the same effort, they also managed to get 1000 new back links – but since they focused on just 3 keyword phrases instead of all 100, they were able to add 333 links per keyword, where you were only able to add 10 links per keyword.

Do you think that 333 new links is going to move your ranking? You bet!

Search Engine Guru Dan Thies calls this “Having your lunch eaten” because, they moved up in rankings a lot, and you didn’t move at all. In fact, they stole your ranking out from under you and you didn’t even see it coming.

At the end of 90 days, you are still working on getting back links the same 100 keywords, while your competitor has moved on to the NEXT set of 3-5 keywords on the list.

Let’s look at what happens:

Now for the sake of argument lets assume that the rate of link acquisition remains constant.

Day 180:

• You now have 20 back links for each of the keyword phrases on your list of 100.
• Your competitor now has 333 back links for EACH 6 of the keyword phrases on the list of 100.

At the end of a year:

• You now have a whopping 40 back links for each of the keyword phrases on your list of 100.
• On the other hand, your competitor now has 333 back links EACH for 12 of the keyword phrases on the list of 100.

But let’s scale that out and you pump more of your profits into seo and hiring link-getters. And let’s say you went big and DOUBLED your work force and got double the results.

At the end of a year:

You now have a whopping 80 back links for each of the keyword phrases on your list of 100.

Don’t get me wrong, 80 back links per keyword is great!  But it took you a year to do it, and during that year you had new competition come into the market.

On the other hand, your competitor now has over 660 back links a piece, for 24 of the keyword phrases on the list of 100.

And I can guarantee that they are making more money then you – hand over fist because they are CRUSHING you in the search engine results.

Seriously, think of it this way. At the end of the year -

You have 80 back links per keyword phrase / url

They have 660+ per keyword phrase / url!

How will you ever catch up? You won’t.

Be smart, find which of your keywords converts the best and then FOCUS your SEO efforts on 3-5 keyword at a time.

Then and only then move to the next set of 3-5.

Doing your SEO this way ensures consistent results, dominance over your competitors and a sure and steady income.

You can read that post here: http://www.mastersitemanager.com/882/seo-monitor-outbound-link-tracking/

Now when we released this feature we strongly suggested how important this little number could be. Not know how many outbound links your site has is a disaster waiting to happen. And why paying attention to the Outbound Link Tracking feature of our SEO monitoring software is so important.

In a nutshell – If you see the number of outbound links on your site jump dramatically, (upwards of 200-300 over night) check the source code of your site ASAP!

It’s likely that a hacker has managed to get in and plant links to his porno / casino / sex drugs web sites.

What happens in cases like this is that at first Google will depress your rankings because your site is linking to “Bad Neighborhoods”.

Then after a period of time (Google won’t say how much – but we are thinking 60-90 days based on what we’ve seen) if you don’t correct the issue, Google will just de-index your site altogether. Ouch!

Here’s an example how bad the problem is with blogs like Word Press.

If this happens to you, it is correctable but it’s a huge pain in the you know what as you’ll have to go in an modify the WP database table. Restoring the blog/site from a backup won’t fix the problem in most cases.

But we found a very good explanation on how to clean your blog “IF” you’ve been hacked. Here’s another great WP hack prevention resource.

Now why would I say your account has been hacked?  Good question…. The answer will surprise you.

We recently did a maintenance  survey of the sites using MasterSiteManager.com for their SEO rank tracking and monitoring. And what we found was shocking even to us!

Almost 1 in 50 client sites that we monitor on MasterSiteManager shows that they have  over 200 outbound links on them (in other words – they got hacked).  1 in 50! Wow!

But that’s also a pretty good indication of how wide spread and prevalent the issue is on blogs all over.

So I urge you to login in to your MasterSiteManager account right now and check the outbound links for each of your sites.  After all, you can’t fix a problem you don’t know you have.

This was accomplished by splitting the database over multiple servers. Unfortunately, one of our programmers forgot to update the database look up table, and so a few users (less the then 4) were not getting their stats updated as quickly as normal.

The issue has been corrected and now all user accounts are operational, with the added advantage of even faster look-up speeds for both keywords and general statistics.

I personally apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you or your clients.

Thanks for your continued support!

Don Schnure
MasterSiteManager.com

Watch this video and you’ll see what I mean…

So what does this mean for professional SEO’s and web masters you, ridiculously inexpensive and VERY targeted traffic to Facebooks 200 million+ users.

Here are some facts that you may need to consider when talking to your clients about using Facebook ads:

1. Facebook has way more traffic. It get’s over 39 BILLION page views a month!

2. You can TARGET your ads so that only QUALIFIED people see your ads. Good luck doing that with Adwords – you can’t

3. Facebook is simple to use and fast, you’ll be getting killer traffic in just a few hours AND there’s no “Google slap” because Facebook actually respects it’s advertisers.

4. Facebook ads are 1/4 – HALF the cost of Google Adwords

5. Facebook ads convert considerably higher that Googles do AND at usually HALF the price or less!

Again I can’t stress this enough – if you’re doing PPC advertising for your own website or that of a client, you can now get highly converting, targeted traffic for pennies.

This video link below tells the full story and in just a few minutes you’ll see the ramifications of this fundamental shift in power in the advertising and PPC world.

FaceBook Adpower Video

Let me know what you think!

For example, what was your click through rate on various keyword phrases organic and PPC, how did you fare on click through in positions 6 – 10 versus 1 or 2, etc.

Or what percentage of people clicked on page 2, what page were they lead to, etc. How did organic compare to PPC?

Pretty cool stuff!

There is a lot of new stats to consider, but these new stats and details provide a ton of great information to confirm (or deny, as we found) your preconceived notions about what positions are performing.