During the last weeks, people in many SEO forums noticed some strange Google result changes. Rumor has it that there is a new -60 penalty that Google applies to websites in which it has lost trust.

What has happened?

Some webmasters found websites that were listed on position 61 in Google’s search results that had Google Sitelinks below their listing.

Normally, Google only displays Google Sitelinks for the first search result.

Many webmasters believe that the website that was listed on position 61 with the Sitelinks was the number 1 result for that keyword but had been penalized by Google.

What does Google say about the -60 penalty?

In a Google Groups discussion about showing Sitelinks for #61 results Google employee John Mu referred to a -60 penalty discussion.

Google hasn’t officially confirmed that a -60 penalty exists. However, Google employee John Mu indicated in a discussion about the -60 penalty in the official Google groups that Google penalizes websites if they contain certain spam elements.

Which spam elements trigger the -60 penalty?

It looks that Google applies this penalty to websites that buy links.

Many of the websites that seem to have been penalized had many inbound links from websites that linked to them from every single page of their website (so-called site-wide links). Sitewide links are an indicator of paid links, which Google sees as an unwanted way to artificially inflate search engine rankings.

The head of Google’s anti-spam team Matt Cutts has often said that websites that buy paid links will be penalized and it looks as if Google tries to do the job properly.

If this penalty for paid links really exists then even websites that follow Google’s rules can get in trouble. Your competitors could harm your website simply by buying links or by creating mini-net websites with sitewide links to your website!

Last year, Search Engine Journal made quite a stir in the blogosphere when they condemned the nofollow link attribute. What a difference a year makes. Google made it abundantly clear that they’re not going to stand for paid links, and they’ve taken a tough stance on the issue. Unfortunately, the algorithm’s logic is flawed, and many sites have been unfairly penalized.

One of my own blog networks was affected by this mess, even though none of the sites had ANY paid links on them. Months pass, and Google still isn’t sharing any PR love with these sites. What’s a webmaster to do, when clueless advertisers put more value in the almighty PR instead of looking at cold-hard traffic statistics? Give in..

The first step? The blogroll. Unfortunately, Wordpress doesn’t make it easy to “fix” this issue, but thankfully I came across Justin Cook’s instructions on how to tackle this issue. Hopefully Wordpress makes this a standard feature in a future version, but for now this is a fantastic work-around that takes only a minute to implement.

In addition, I decided to tag all of the affiliate links in my sidebar with rel=”nofollow”. While it’s hard to say if this is necessary or not, I’ve decided to err on the side of caution. After all, how can Gooogle tell the difference between an affiliate link and a paid link?

Lastly, don’t forget about counters, chicklets, and other tracking icons on your site! Most of those link back to their own site.. Why give them any link love? Stick a nofollow on them, and you should be all set. All of your PR juice will be kept within your site, which will hopefully help give you a higher PR when the big G rolls out their next update.

Google is prohibiting newly registered domain names from participating in the Google for Domain Names program, severely hampering the practice of domain tasting. They would block all domains if they are less then five days old. This new policy change by Google could stop all Domain Tasting in its tracks! The new policy will go into effect before the end of February.

What is Domain Tasting?

Domain tasting is the practice of registrants using the five-day grace period (AGP) at the beginning of a domain registration to test the marketability of a domain name. What the domain taster does is register millions of domains and place Google Adsense for Domains on them, then drop the domains after the AGP expires and start all over again.

According to Jay Westerdal at Domain Tools, one Google domain taster was generating as much as $3 million dollars a month from the practice (and that was after Google’s cut)..

Oversee.net and other companies have been using this practice for years and it will have a direct impact on them. The gravy train of free money might be coming to a halt very fast. This policy change at Google should be announced to the channel partners soon and it will have a huge echoing impact on the Industry.

Good riddance! I’m sure I’m not the only one who has tried to register a domain name for legitimate purposes, only to find out that it’s already taken by a parking company. Google has been making some policy changes recently that’s upset webmasters all over the world (drastically reducing the referral bonuses, changing the Adsense clickable area, etc), but I think this is a change for the positive. What do you think?

If you’ve been a regular reader of this blog, you’ve probably noticed that my posting frequency has slowed down considerably. My primary source of income is from my e-commerce site, and December has been a record month for us! Over the years, more people have started doing their Christmas shopping online. And I can’t say I really blame them, it’s absolute chaos on the roads right now..

We noticed that we were getting WAY more traffic than in years past, and certain product pages were getting thousands of hits each day. (And these were pages that didn’t have any sort of SEO done to them!) Google Analytics showed us that all of the traffic was coming from Google. Next, a trip to Google Webmaster Tools showed us that we were ranking #1 for the pages that were getting all of the traffic!!

So how did a bunch of pages without ANY search engine optimization end up in the #1 spots on Google? It’s called Google Universal Search. Universal Search is a new system that Google rolled out back in May 2007. It blends listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages. You’ve probably seen it over the past few months, as YouTube videos and Google News articles started showing up among your regular search results. What worked for us was that we were submitting XML feeds to Google Base (formerly Froogle), and they decided to include Base products in the search results. Since virtually no one uses Google Base, we completely dominated our niche!

[Edited January 5th: Apparently Google has decided to remove Base products from Universal Search, and traffic has dropped drastically..]

Google states that they pay out over $500 million each quarter to AdSense advertisers. Are they using old statistics, or is that still the case? Most webmasters I’ve talked with stated that they used to make a LOT of money with AdSense since it’s inception, but that things have changed. Maybe AdWords users have finally learned that they can specify different bid prices for Google vs. content network ads? Maybe it has to do with Google’s Quality Score addition?

It’s hard to say, but a quick scan of the top blogger sites show that most of them have phased out Google Adsense almost entirely, and are now monetizing their site through other means (affiliate market, other ad networks, paid reviews, paid text links, etc). I came across an interview with Markus Frind (of PlentyOfFish.com fame) from 2006, where he talks about a $900K check he received from Google for 2-months of Adsense. Yet if you look at POF today, you’ll notice that there are no longer any Adsense ads. They’ve now been replaced with something else entirely. Why the switch?

We run Adsense on a niche site that gets around 4000 hits a day, and the results have been downright dismal. Hopefully in the next week, we’ll break the $100 barrier, so that we can stop running the campaign, get paid by Google, and move on to something else that monetizes better.

How have your experiences with Adsense been?

It’s a simple concept - Don’t rely on a single source of income, because if that revenue stream dries up, you’ll be screwed. And that’s exactly what happened with Henry and Wilson, twin brothers from Baltimore who got banned from Google AdSense earlier this year and lost roughly $200K as a result! AdSense was the only way they were monetizig their websites, so this was a devastating blow.

If Google suspects that you’re involved in click-fraud, they’ll ban you first, and ask questions later (if ever). It’s happened before, and it’ll happen again. It’s great that they’re so proactive when it comes to click-fraud, but many innocent bystanders have unjustly fallen victim to Google’s ban-stick.

Never let yourself rely on a single source of income or traffic. Making money online is all about maximizing income and traffic from multiple sources. Yahoo banned one of my sites about 6 months ago for no apparent reason, and my pleas to them fell on deaf ears. Has it affected my traffic? Sure, but I’ve worked around it, bringing in other streams of traffic to compensate for it.

Below are some AdSense alternatives that you should consider implementing on your site:

Some Good Affiliate Programs:

You’ve got nothing to lose, so try them out - The results might just surprise you!