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The last few days have seen a lot of activity by Joel Comm, author of the highly acclaimed ‘Adsense Secrets’ eBook. This valuable guide shows you step-by-step how to make the maximum legitimate earnings from your website or blogs. The Fourth Edition of Adsense Secrets has just been published and I recommend it highly. I have been reviewing Joel’s products for more than two years and generally they are written to an extremely high standard. Today, however, I followed another link to the latest eBook which offered a free guide entitled ‘How to set up a profitable website fast’. Ever-curious, I signed up for a download in the hope that there might be a technique that was new to me.

What I read was a really disappointing, out-of-date book that included many ‘recommended products’ that would get your new website banned faster than you can say ‘profitable website’. The first link I noticed was to sofware called ‘BlogBurner’ that promised to create and post customised keyword-rich content to your blog dozens of times a day. When I followed the link all I found was one of those free blogging sites that hosts a blog for you on their domain and promises to pay you 1c for a page view.

On page 67 Joel points to a resource for web content free of copyright (because it was published before 1921) called ‘the Lost Files’. Follow the link and you will see this message:

The Lost Files Has Closed Its Doors!
All Billing Has Been Discontinued.

Never mind, let’s try something else: nest, a content aggregator site called completrss.com. Call that up and you will find a parked page because someone forgot to renew the domain registration. I know this, because one of my domains lasped last year and the same page appeared.

There is a very long section on RSS feeds that I found quite confusing, and I use RSS myself. But here again I noticed a resource that wa snew to me - feedster. Search for Feedster and you will find the service has been moribund for well over one year.

Another software recommendation that is mentioned twice in the book is called Traffic Equalizer. This is one of teh most dangerous ideas in this ebook: Traffic Equalizer takes or `scrapes` content from an outside source such for publication on your site as so-called fresh web content. There are numerous stories of sites being banned after employing this software and rightly so. I have been the victim of content scraping and I condemn this misuse of other people’s intellectual property.

Chapter 25 concentrates on cloaking techniques and redirects: if you wnat your site to remain indexed in Google, do not use either of these techniques - and do not use doorway pages, which are also mentioned earlier in the book. I could go on, but I have to go and do something productive.

Anyway, my conclusion - buy Adsense Secrets 4 and you will do very well. Ignore ‘Build a Proditable Website Fast’ if you wnat to stay in business.

The number of links to your site will affect your page rank and search engine rankings. But, in the words of Google, “avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links”. How can you be certain that you have not allowed any bad links from your site? It is now much easier to find out with an excellent free link checking tool called the Bad Neighborhood checker.

Thousands of links from overcrowded directory pages in niches unrelated to your site will not benefit your page rank - of course I was aware of that and I am quite careful about the places where I seek backlinks now. The Bad Neighborhood tool will quickly scan the outbound links on your website, and on the pages that your website is linking to, and alert you to possible problem areas.

I used this on my own site and there were a few questionable links lurking in my outbound links, which I would not have discovered without using the tool.

You get a lot of useful information from the link checker: link density is highlighted using the red, green amber traffic light system. Green means the site meets Google’s Webmaster guidelines of 100 links or less. Then there is a tick to indicate that the page checks ‘clean’ - i.e. there are no links to adult or other questionable sites. If a link is not ticked then it can show as a ‘redirect’ - not always suspicious as the tinyurls will flag in this way. But you might want to check other redirect links that show up. If the link page no loner exists the ‘404 not found’ cross will show, and finally if the link includes links where the anchor text contains bad language you will see the ‘Bad Neighborhood’ alert.

My suspicious links had arrived on my site because I hosted a few ‘Blog Carnival’ editions. The blog owners who submitted stories to me had some very questionable outbound links from their own sites, to adult and gambling sites. These were ‘nofollow’ links but they would still penalise me so I have now removed the links and I am not hosting any more blogging carnivals.

Another site that had sent me some bad outbound links was wholinkstome.com. Because any website owner can enter their URL on the site and the latest additions are listed together, my URL was next to all sorts of gambling and adult pages.

All this showed me that care is needed when choosing where to exchange links for your website or blog, and the online link exchange sites are out as most member sites are simply spam sites that could get your own site banned if you link to them.