Today is April Fools’ Day.
Although I would like to come up with some very clever April Fool post I will save that for another year and treat you to a quotation instead. The quotation that I have chosen is attributed to Leonardo da Vinci (April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519).
“I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.”
Clearly some things never change.
Ezine Articles has introduced a new ‘Diamond’ Account level.
The reason given for this new account level is that the article directory has outgrown its current membership level structure and that this causes Platinum-level members to be grouped together unfairly. This is undoubedly true: nearly all regular authors are Platinum-level members, but the quality of their work varies vastly.
The ‘Diamond’ Account Level aims to recognize the “Best of the Best” expert authors.
To atain Diamond level you must be someone who only writes original works, presents them in an easy-to-read format (bullets, numbered lists and only a hint of bold or italics styling), doesn’t generate user complaints, submits regularly and is a genuine expert in the topics he or she writes about (as evidenced by your website URLs and bio).
Specifically, you must:
Diamond Authors will:
Diamond authors will need to maintain the quality of their work or they will risk losing Diamond status.
Hopefuly, this new membership category will improve, in time, the overall quality of the Ezine Articles directory.
One of Google’s own official blog posts stated recently “As ‘pure webspam’ has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to ‘content farms’”.
Google defines “content farms” as “sites with shallow or low-quality content”.
In 2010, Google launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. These affected some internet marketers significantly – future changes may well affect them even more as it is clear that Google intends to continue the fight against content farms.
However, the higher quality internet marketers should see this as an advantage rather than as a problem. All you need to do to keep ahead of the competition is to produce better websites with better content. If you’re lucky Google may actually ‘de-index’ some of your competitors.
I have just come across this and thought that I would share it. It probably reminds most of you of someone in particular.
“You only need two tools in life – WD-40 and duct tape. If it doesn’t move and should, use the WD-40. If it shouldn’t move and does, use the duct tape.”
Ezine Articles, probably the most effective article directory, has recently announced five “Quality Improvement Changes”.
The aim of these changes, which are effective immediately, is to improve the quality of the articles accepted into the Ezine Articles directory – and about time too some would say.
The changes are:
It looks as if there may be further changes to come too.
Overall, I believe that the changes announced to date are an improvement, but many article marketers will not agree. Those who submit dozens of poorly written and “spun” articles will lose out, but then they should not have abused the system in the first place. In the longer term, readers and quality internet marketers will benefit.
Last week, I mentioned that Google does not like webspam and takes action to remove it from its index.
Google believes that the actions it has taken over the last few years have resulted in search quality that is “better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness”. Of course, these factors are measured using Google’s own evaluation metrics that they have refined over more than a decade.
Google also believes that English-language spam in Google search results is less than half what it was five years ago – and spam in other languages is lower than in English. However, Google has noticed that webspam has increased slightly in recent months, and they have, therefore, introduced new efforts to continue to improve search quality.
These efforts include the use of a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, for example, repeated spammy words – the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments.
Google also claims to have improved radically their ability to detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam during 2010.
Clearly, Google will continue to fight what it perceives as webspam. Make sure you do not fall foul of the Google “rules”.
Did you know that Google has its own ‘Official Google Blog’? Well it does and it’s well worth a read from time to time.
Last month, the blog dealt with webspam, which it defined as “junk you see in search results when websites try to cheat their way into higher positions in search results or otherwise violate search engine quality guidelines”. I will deal with this in more detail next week.
Google’s blog post also made clear that they do take strong action on spammy content in their index. Interestingly, they also stated that:
Finally, the blog post asked for feedback on how they can do a better job and work towards a better Google – is this just going through the “big company” motions that we have all heard before or are they really interested in our views – you decide.
The rather long-awaited WordPress 3.1 was released yesterday. WordPress 3.1 is named “Reinhardt” in honour of the jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt.
There are a great many improvements claimed for this version. In particular, the release seems to be a big step further towards being a real Content Management System (CMS). The WordPress team claim that “The only limit to what you can build is your imagination”.
See the WordPress team announcement for more information.
I have just received the following email which I would like to share with you.
Hi, folks…
I sent a note out to some of my customers yesterday about
my latest product, looking for feedback. Not much so far,
but most of it’s been pretty awesome.
Stuff like “HOLY CR*P!” and “it’s like you created it just
for me” and “I have a feeling this will be the purchase I
look back on as the best one of the year – if not my IM
career.”
Trick is, I’m not really even sure what to call it. It
has me baffled… And I’m the one who created the silly
thing.
Check it out: [ Link to product removed ]
It’s very cool, but it’s… different.
Interesting technique that you may like to make use of. Don’t copy it exactly though!
Sam Walton (1918–1992), who at the time of his death was thought to be the richest man in America, once said “Most everything I’ve done, I’ve copied from someone else.”
Once you have been in internet marketing for a reasonable period of time, you will realize that truly original ideas are hard to come by. Even the world’s greatest innovators rarely stumble upon a concept that has never been tried before. Most of the internet “mega-companies” are based on something much older, but with a new twist.
Don’t, therefore, spend all your time trying to come up with something really great that has not been done before – spending some of your time on this is fine because if you find it you could make a large fortune. Rather copy Sam Walton and copy the success of others.
This does not mean ripping off someone else’s work or breaching copyrights, etc. It means taking good ideas that work and make money and adapting them to your individual circumstances.
Ironically, if you do dream up the next great thing make sure you exploit it quickly because it will be a very short time before others imitate you – perhaps the sincerest form of flattery.
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