July 17th, 2006
The other day, two big events in the world of Internet happened practically simultaneously. Both Yahoo and Google conducted search engines and ranking updates. Yahoo published information about Yahoo search index update and Google is thought to update its PageRank.
Rajat Mukherjee, official Yahoo representative commented on the update:
“We rolled out an index update last night. As usual, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index.
Remember, we recently beefed up our online help and resources, and the best way to provide us with feedback is via the online form”.
As for Google, the only thing we can do is wonder and guess. The company didn’t publish any official info, but the changes are definitely taking place. All we can do is wait for explanations or specialists’ comments.
[tag]Google, Yahoo, PageRank, PR, Yahoo search index, Google toolbar, updates [/tag]
Posted in General Business | No Comments »
July 14th, 2006
A merchant account is not for every online seller to run his web store (it mostly depends on the scale of your business – most individual online entrepreneurs are more than happy with PayPal services).
I have been using PayPal for years and was happy with their service all this time. Yes, PayPal had some issues 5 or so years back, but they have resolved them.
I was always interested to get some extra features that were not available in their ‘Help’ section:
- give my customers discounts
- sell gift certificates
- provide shipping options
- paypal coupons
I know of O’Reilly’s ‘PayPal Hacks’ manual and this forum
One more way to find PayPal solutions is PayPal Help website – one page with a selection of tips and tricks that will help you to extend the limits of PayPal as a payment solution for your online business.
Summary: now everyone talks of GBuy and how it will take away PayPal customers. But PayPal was the first company who paved the way to this sort of services for small and middle online businesses. I am sure it will help them to stay in the game. Google is a great company, but it tries to be everything and everywhere online.
[tags]paypal, merchant account, gbuy, affiliate marketing, home based business, online business, work from home, google, links, seo, website promotion, e-commerce[/tags]
Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Home-based business | No Comments »
July 14th, 2006
I have recently posted about my experience of link building. In continuation of my article, ideas on the future of link building expressed by Abhilash just prove my own conclusions – link building is and will be just a waste of time, you will not achieve the desirable effect by adding your website to directories, submitting press releases, contacting webmasters for a link exchange and leaving your signature in forums and blog comments.
To summarize the observations in the article: websites will have no way to gain links, but buying them (and taking into the account many things to make that link work for you) and getting natural links. Yes, Google has progressed greatly and is very good at spotting and closing any flaws that webmasters are lucky to find when working at the link popularity.
SEO is not likely to last long since now. It simply does not work. Webmasters can work at their websites improving the quality of content, but I think ‘big companies’ will take niches one by one leaving individual webmasters no space for activity.
Summary: I have an impression it is time to change the industry. Or at least it is time to look around for other kinds of projects.
Those webmasters who started 5-7 years back have advantages over those who joined the game 1-2 years back. They have more online property and space for manoeuvre.
[tags]link popularity, links exchange, affiliate marketing, home based business, work from home, dmoz, google, links, seo, website promotion, e-commerce[/tags]
Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Freelance, Home-based business | No Comments »