There wasn’t much I could do as this work was completed some time ago so instead of crying about it I thought I would at least try to save some of this missed SEO link juice.

Here is the line I added to my htaccess to avoid at least some of this catastrophe:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
Redirect 301 “/ ” http://www.mysite.com/

This rule simply says that if my website is accessed with a space after the root slash then it will permanently redirect to my homepage.
If you needed a redirect for a page on your site that actually has a space in it you can use this technique as well, for example:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on

Redirect 301 “/contact us.html” http://www.mysite.com/contact.php

I hope this helps some people!

So…here is a solution!

Here is a list of 656 Auto approve article directory sites perfect for article submission software!

Here is a list of the top 50 article directories based on PR and Alexa rank. Some of this list give no follow links back and some also cost money to submit (denoted by a $), but all of these are guaranteed to help your website soar up the search engine results pages if you submit quality content and strategically place your link.

This list should really help kick start you on your path to article submission greatness!

Well Structured Page

By this I mean the entire page structure where your ads are showing. Good CTR and good earnings all start with excellent, captivating, interesting website copy focusing on good keywords. Pair with this a good page title, good use of H tags,  and include an image or 2 with nice alt tags. Lay a good foundation so google knows what your content is about and can serve you the highest paying ads.

Captivating keyword focused content will also ensure that you will mainly attract quality website traffic. This is also very important because if the traffic you are receiving isn’t actually interested in your content there is a good chance they won’t be interested in your advertising either and will just hit the back button or close the window.

Ad positioning

Seasoned adsense users already know what image I am going to show next…but here it is anyway:

This is adsense’s official advertising “heat map” which shows us the positions that google considers to give the best CTR for your ads. Google’s page here goes more into this! Generally I have found that Ad position really requires a bit of experimentation as each page tends to perform differently. Within the content and just after the content seems to work well in general cases but there are sites where anything below the fold just won’t perform. A simple change of placing an ad inside an article sent my CTR from 1% up to 3.5% over night. No change in the content, just a 5 minute change to my website yielded a fantastic result.

Ad Colors

This one surprised me most. I once had a site that was barely scraping 1% ctr but I had what I considered great advertising positions for the content. The ad’s matched the website perfectly, down to the font type but it just simply didn’t perform in the way I had hoped. So I tried something crazy (generally advised against anyway) and changed my ad colors to vibrant green which contrasted quite strongly against the regular grey background. My CTR jumped 1% right away.

The point I’m trying to make here is that sometimes if you make your ads stand out more you will actually improve the chances of getting clicks. Having said this in general cases  you will want your advertising to blend in with your content. Match the background colors, font sizes, types and colors and whack your ads in locations of your website that emulate the linking structures of your site if possible.

Bad sites mean more clicks?

Some people also believe that a bad site leads to more clicks. The idea behind this? If a website is ugly and hard to use the user will naturally want to get out of there as soon as possible. Pair this with some well positioned relevant advertising and users will most likely click on the ads to get away from the monstrosity. A classic example of this is the adsense giant plentyoffish.com which claims to have once made $10,000 in adsense in just 1 day.

I wouldn’t really condone going down this road but it is something to consider for those internet marketing philosophers!

Benefits

Ad optimization really is an important part of running an adsense website. When I started in the game I didn’t spend the time on this step until a year into developing sites. When I finally took 10 minutes to reevaluate my ad positions I actually kicked myself because I increased my revenue by around $5 per day just by making a few simple changes.

Spend some time experimenting with your ads and you will unleash the full potential of your sites!

This script is particularly useful if you have included pages across your entire website (such as a navigation) and wish to include something in this section for the homepage only (such as a special advertisement or link).

Here is a simple php script to detect if you are currently on the homepage:

In this post I’m talking about the Joomla component extPlorer - http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/core-enhancements/file-management/2630

Simply put this component is pretty awesome and I would highly recommend it for someone that doesn’t have server access but still wants the ability to see the file structure and change folder permissions, files and all kinds of other cool stuff on the fly.

This component by default is Super Administrator access only, which is great in most cases! However I came across a situation where I needed to allow an Administrator access.

Open up administrator/components/com_extplorer/admin.extplorer.php
Around line 60 you will see this:

The change is dead easy really, simply replace this block of code with this one:

And that’s it! Re-upload the files and now administrators will also have access to this cool component!

Firstly, ensure that whenever your 404 page shows it has a custom title, something along the lines of “Websitename.com – 404 not found” so that you can easily spot this title. You must also ensure that the URL showing in the url bar when a user hits a 404 shows the URL they are trying to access rather than websitename.com/404.html.

Once you have this set up and google analytics installed you are actually all good to go!

Simply log into google analytics simply navigate to the “content” reports and then select “Content By Title”

You should see “Websitename.com – 404 not found” in this list. From there you can simply click on this title and you will see a list of 404 pages that were requested.

http://www.timbystechtalk.com/seoarticlewritingpros

I have been around the block a little when it comes to purchasing content online, with wildly varying results. From cheap article packages with poorly spun content and no real quality to overly expensive, but excellent quality niche articles. The best advice I can give you is that 9 out of 10 times a $2 article is going to be worth $2 (and not worth your time). An excellent middle ground between poor quality outsourced articles and expert niche writers is  Seo article writing pros! I have used these guys multiple times and they offer excellent rates for the level of quality in their writing. If you are looking for native English speakers writing your content you should  check them out.

My Experiment

When my friend first introduced me to the SEO article writing pros he told me he had fantastic success with them previously. Not doubting his word on July 5th 2010 I decided to jump in and start an experiment. I chose a small pet niche and had 10 articles written for me focusing on the higher traffic keywords of the niche. Within a week I was handed back 10 excellent quality articles that needed no revisions. It was pretty obvious whomever wrote the article was a native English speaker and they also took some time to educate themselves on the niche they were writing on.

I paired this with some basic off site SEO, I would have spent nothing for the first 4 months of the experiment. I simply let the content sit there. I gave the site some back links from my own related websites to set a foundation. Around November 2010 I started with some link building, just simple directory submissions and nothing more. By the end of January 2011 the site was starting to gain some traffic naturally so I pushed on with some higher quality link building such as article submissions and even used a service once offered by Seo Article Writing Pros that they called a “sniper submission service”. It is now May 2011 and this site is now bringing in around 90 unique visitors a day all from search engines.

This may not sound that impressive but in less than a year with the help of quality content I have been able to create a website that generates around $1usd per day via adsense with the following investments:

• 10 articles – $100
• Directory submissions – $50
• Article submissions – $150

I spent around 10 hours total over the course of the last few months out sourcing the work and building the website and I have already paid off about half of the costs. By the time a full year has gone by I will be already making solid profit and hopefully have my traffic at least doubled!

The backbone of a good website is good content. I recommend that you take the time to write your own articles about areas of the world that interest you! Realistically however we are not all article writers or we may just find it easier to outsource. I hope my experiment has inspired you to try building a small niche website with quality content and if you are stuck for finding quality workers then give the Seo Article Writing Pros a chance, you won’t be disappointed.

I did the usual things to try and find the hack on the server such as grepping for the URL that was being redirected too but it came up clean (it was a bit of a clever hack).

I had a search around and found a bunch of files used by the hacker including their little shell script that allowed them to upload files and send out mail etc. After removing this and a number of associated files the site no longer redirected however the URL of the site was always appended with “?rf=1″ which let me know there was still something fishy going on.

I’m not a unix expert so it took a bit of googling before I found out how to grep properly to escape certain characters. The grep I ran from the root directory was this:

grep -R “\$_GET['rf']” *

Note the use of the back slash to escape the dollar sign. This finally showed me some good results! I’m not sure exactly how the hacker got in but I can tell you that the issue was with poor folder permissions.

This directory had the folder permissions 777 – /public_html/includes/languages/english

This allowed the hacker to edit every single English language file and insert this piece of code:

It took a bit of cleaning up but I ended up running the same grep and editing files until there were no more occurrences across the server. I then went in and tightened up the folder permissions to 755. A few days later now and there are no more issues with redirections and it looks like the site hasn’t been re-hacked! Time to apply some tighter folder permissions on your CRE installs.

So what is considered black hat seo exactly? It generally consists of cloaking, link farming, hidden text, spamming meta tags, gateway pages, and other “illegal” methods of hiding content and keyword stuffing.

1. Invisible text – This technique is simply hiding text on your page. For example putting black text on a black background so it isn’t visible.
2. Keyword stuffing – Google is pretty good at picking this up now so you are better off not stuffing your page with the same keyword over and over. Natural content is the way to go.
3. Spam – Just creating worthless pages of scrapped or poorly written worthless (keyword stuffed) articles for the purpose of just having content. Stay away from this sort of stuff, there is no long term win here.
4. Gateway/Doorway Page – These are spammy pages that are solely created to rank for a keyword and then redirect the user to another page. If these pages redirect a user without their knowledge (eg an auto redirect) it is considered a form of  “cloaking”.
5. Cloaking – This phrase refers to showing one page to the google bot and another to the user. This method is used a lot by pharmaceutical spammers where they will insert code into a webpage that will detect the user IP and if it matches a list of google IPs they will show the regular page content but if a normal website use comes onto the site they will be redirected to a pharmaceutical affiliate page.

Keep your link building and content creation ethical and you will have no problems with your rankings (in most cases) and it is always the best way to fly when you have a long term goal in mind. Black hat SEO will also lead to banning from a lot of affiliate programs, including adsense, so ask yourself if the short term benefits outweigh the long term ones before you start messing with dodgy strategies.