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The orkut community has seen a surge of Brazilian users registering and using the service. This is a well-known and curious fact. Brazilian users have reached 72.72% of the total users. This is followed by the United States, with about 10.92%.
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Because of the number of Brazilian users and communities using Portuguese, users from other parts of the world became upset with the service, when Portuguese became the first "alternate default language" with English as the primary default language. This prompted many community owners to create English-only posting policies. Some went so far as to start communities and discussion groups dedicated to complaining about this phenomenon. Hoaxes have spread, with the intent of tricking Brazilian users into changing their nationality on orkut.
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With the surge of Brazilian users, Orkut recently introduced Portuguese as the second language to its interface. This was in response to countless requests.
According to some, Orkut has become popular in Estonia where greater than 3% (June 2005) of the population are registered users of Orkut. This is the highest percentage for any single country. Brazil holds second place at about 2.5%. All other countries in the top 10 have users amounting to less than 0.5%.
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In a recent interview for a Brazilian news website, the creator of Orkut said he doesn't understand the phenomenon. He complains the North-American press and users are ignoring the service. Instead, they use similar services such as Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook. He noted Brazil is actually the main focus of orkut.
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What is the number one reason to choose pay -per-signup?
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1) IBILL - BUSTY AMATEURS - INSITE ADULT - DMR - ENRON!
The biggest companies in the world go in the toilet and they never say if they are about to die. Rules change, visa regulations change, 3rd-party processors go bust, paysite owners find religion, some owners have funds frozen by the FTC, merchant accounts are lost, etc.
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Every revshare program owner tries to give you 50 reasons why they are the special, chosen one. They explain why they are the only trustworthy program, they never fail, and their rebills are paid like clockwork.
However...
There are 99 ways you to lose EVERY DIME owed you, by a revshare program. There is only ONE way you get paid!
And that is why the smart money, the gambler who knows the odds, puts their hard-earned traffic into PPS.
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If Google is removing websites with duplicate content, they are providing a real service to surfers. Now, that has to be considered their primary job. For many subjects, if they really did a perfect job removing all the duplicate content, surfers wouldn't care a bit about ranking. Then, Google could show the remaining dozen websites in any order they pleased.
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And ... I;m sure Google knows this.
Some have the theory there are roomfulls of Googletechs manually whacking big-time scrapers. To me, this indicates more about those wearing tinfoil hats so tight, their hatstraps are cutting oxygen to their brain, than it does about Google. Nor, do I think Google's new process is targeting ODP clones. It seems, Google is just getting better at spotting "partial" duplicate content (e.g. serial plagiarism, if you will).
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Wearing MY tinfoil hat, I think Google could spot related websites who targeted collections of naturally, mutually-exclusive, but popular keywords. For example, how many websites possibly have natural content on both "Miami Hotels" and "Las Vegas Hotels"? A couple of dozen hotel chains, a few reservation systems, and ten million doorway spammers, that's who! Now, add in "Auto rentals", and SMACK ANY SITE WHICH TARGETS ALL THREE KEYWORD SETS. Next, sell ads to the reservation systems and the hotels AND NO ONE ELSE!
Presto, ten million spam doorways gone from the web.
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Wow, the air is cleaner already. Wanna think about "Oil Gaskets", "Toronto", and "San Francisco"? How about "mortgages", "Wyoming", and "Delaware"? "real estate", "Santa Fe", and "Boston"? Every website mentioning at least three trademarked fad diet plans AND includes links or form input?
That was fun. (now loosening the strap on my tinfoil hat....)
Earning more with affiliates than Adsense is much easier said than done! There are several major issues to confront.
1. Often, affiliate minimum payout levels are too high for most websites, except somewhat rare high-traffic websites. Often, it is $50, $100, or more before a check is issued. This likely takes many months, or years, to achieve.
Suppose you have 10 direct affiliate accounts at 10 places. That means you need $1000 in commisisons to get paid by all. However, with Adsense, you still do 10 different offers, but all in 1 account, with 1/10th the payout level.
2. Many times, affiliate banners stop working. This requires hard work to update the web pages. Worse, they are no longer offering the program at all, either directly or thru a place like Commission Junction (who often suddenly drops advertisors).
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3. Some affiliates do not give credit for all orders. A prime example are the 3 major Poster affiliates.
4. It is said a buyer visits 7 times, on average, before buying. After so many visits, they often go directly to the company and not use the affiliate banner and affiliate code. They may also order direct by email or phone. This effectively bypasses the affiliate source. (I have done that myself many times over the years).
Look at running a survey on your site to figure out how many of your visitors actually are able to buy something online (gender, age, and income are important).
Once you've isolated the source of your traffic, then figure out how to find good affiliate programs and sources of income within the major countries.
Fan items like posters, t-shirts, etc are useful only if the merchant ships to the countries your visitors come from.
Ebay might be a good program if with US visitors. Use their editor kit to target collectibles.
Blogs are good, but remember they are sometimes useless information. I've seen many blogs, where topics are unrelated and uninformative. Usually people make blogs, without real knowledge or ideas about anything, they just exagerate and lengthen a 1 sentence idea to 5 paragraphs for no reason. While posts are just there for ideas and information and not useless. (atleast not always).
However, getting started is hard part. Usually it should be started by a group of people who are friends and made the site together. Trying to start a forum on your own is hard, unless you get lots of traffic. Blogs are unprofessional, there is NO such thing as a professional blog, a professional blog is called an article.
I believe articles are 10x better. Blogs are usually for things people experience, or questions or problems they have. Almost like a really long forum post, while articles are for information, teaching, and educational, and are usually knowledgable authors.
We have here people stating flat out that one-way links are many times better than reciprocal links, discrediting them for being a scheme, for having some nebulous but inparticular association with bad neighborhoods, and whatever else gives reciprocal links their bad name, aside from their commonly poor implementation in practice, while ignoring the fact that one-way links can also be poorly implemented and when done so they can also be just as useless.
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Some examples of one-way links are from blog spamming, referral log spamming, guestbook spamming, and paid sitewides (ROS). Can we just ignore these atrocities of the one-way linkers while condemning recips for being spammy?
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Properly implemented, reciprocal links can take a site to the top of the SERPs. If you can't ride a horse and keep falling off does that mean the horse is bad? Shall we put it down for you? What about the next horse you ride and can't stay on? Shall we put it down also? If a person can't ride a horse they should probably refrain from making comments on the quality of the ride, or the usefullness of the horse.
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My point is that here in this thread and in others I've seen more and more lately one-way links are made out to be the holy grail, and they aren't. On-target (laser-targeted) content links is what works, and those can be had with recips just like they can be with one-way links. The implication is that all one-way links are good and all reciprocal links are bad and this is simply too far from the truth to even resemble it, yet here it is being spouted as god's own word.
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Quality links work. Quality links endure. Quality links help you rank. Quality links can be had either via one-way links or reciprocals.
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People like Einstein, people who do their own thing, aren't exactly the best candidates for links until they breakout. Einstein was no people-person, no football player, and he certainly was no politician.
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He's the sort of bloke who would've gotten good SERPs right away at Yahoo and at Google only AFTER he'd done something that not even the most critical person could deny was great ... which discounts much of his work.
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Kafka is another good example; he'd have gotten plenty of links, but only after he was dead, because that's when people recognized his talent. If the web had been around when these people were, would you find them?
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I guarantee that for a very sad period of time if you "Googled" their names you'd have gotten people talking about them in forums followed by countless keyword traps redirecting you to places to buy German beer mugs and maybe around #210 you'd find the sites the people in question actually created.
1. How much would you pay eg. a travel agent as a booking commission for a customer referred by the agent, who stays at your resort?
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2. How much would you pay for eg. a bus company that brings 40 people to your resort for lunch and a look around?
3. How much did you spend in off line marketing and promotion last year? What was that as a percentage of your turnover?
4. How much average profit do you make per customer transaction?
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5. Whats the annual or lifetime value of a new customer to your business?.
6. How many new customers have you budgeted to buy?
You don't have to post your answers here - but these are some of the questions I generally ask my prospective customers.
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I've found that if a prospective customer doen't know what his current customers are worth, or how much he is currently spending acquiring and managing new customers - then how will he have any idea of the value I'm adding to his business? Is 2 new clients/ week @$500 each a good result? Is 100 new clients/ week @$10 each good? The answer depends on whether you sell real estate or bunches of flowers.
SEO is new client acquisition. There are loads of ways to acquire new customers - some ways cost more than others - and different industries will have different cost structures.
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So if a prospective customer of mine can't get close to answers for these 6 questions, then how will either of us know if I'm adding value to your business? - and how will I know if this prospect is a good businessman - whose business I can make better? Are your goals realistic?
And how will we measure the success of the project?
If its not a win - win - then someone's gonna lose. If we are both professional, and know what we are trying to achieve - and have goals that are realistic & defined - then everyone will win.
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The 'mechanics' of SEO are important - but IMHO you look even harder at the business proposition.
It's true that the summer (northern hemisphere) is when traffic is lower and sometimes it's easier to roll new things into crawling/indexing/scoring. I wouldn't be at all surprised if we worked on revamping our webmaster pages, for example.
The SEO and quality guidelines pages have aged pretty well, but other parts of the webmaster section need to be reorganized; there's a few places where there's the same info (e.g. about robots.txt) repeated in several places or scattered over different pages. It's not trivial to reorganize that much info, esp. since it's translated into so many languages. But better to go ahead and start, and then if we want to tune those pages later, that's okay.
I've been aching for a long time to mention somewhere official that sites shouldn't use "&id=" as a parameter if they want maximal Googlebot crawlage, for example. So many sites use "&id=" with session IDs that Googlebot usually avoids urls with that parameter, but we've only mentioned that here and on a few other places. Getting started on things like that will be nice.
I appreciate the people who sat down and tried to tease out the info on our current webmaster pages and organize it more logically.
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