Pretty much everyone who has an internet connection has read by now that google is “cracking down” on webmasters that purchase links in order influence rankings. They have a new form you can fill out similar to their spam reports which triggers a manual review by a human. They say they will use this information to tweak their algorithm so purchased links can be devalued or possibly penalized. So lets take a different look at things from a logical perspective.

First of all there is no way the big G is going to be able to filter these purchased links from the serps without causing a lot of collateral damage to perfectly honest sites. I think they realize this and have decided to spread some misinformation in hopes of scaring webmasters away from those link sales.

Think about it from Google’s standpoint. Matt Cutts blog is read by tens of thousands of webmasters. His word is absorbed by people as if it has been handed down by god himself. What better way to start wide spread panic than to use him as the point of origin? Everywhere you look on Digitalpoint and other reputable webmaster forums you see countless posts with webmasters in a panic like the sky is falling. All of this and Google hasn’t even done anything yet. Even if you completely overlook the fact that Google is unlikely to be able to ever tell the difference between paid links and non paid links, you have to admire the snowball effect the announcement has already caused. Just the threat of penalizing these links will likely lead to the demise or at least decline of link buying across the net as a whole (even if it is an empty threat). Now THAT is some marketing power!

The search engines expect us to play by their rules, but in cases like this their rules are only to their benefit. It makes me wonder why people walk on egg shells in order to avoid making the search engines angry when in fact they know that we are in control. All they can do is hope that the hype and pr they spread takes hold of the masses and has the effect they desire as an outcome. Time for me to go build some more spam pages :)

My business partner and I have been taking a more active stance as far as protecting our civil liberties. Recently I have been reading more about the Federal Reserve system and the IRS. The first thing to note is that neither are actual government entities. The second thing to note is the fact that there is no actual law that requires us to pay federal taxes. Further, our federal taxes go 100 percent toward paying back the federal reserve that is owned by the largest banks in our country. Here is a 2 hour video that will give you some insight into the stripping of our civil liberties. I don’t buy into conspiracies, but there is some pretty strong evidence supported by quite a few high ranking people.

At any rate, here is the video in question.

I’ve read seemingly hundreds of forum posts discussing duplicate content, none of which gave the full picture, leaving me with more questions than answers. I decided to spend some time doing research to find out exactly what goes on behind the scenes. Here is what I found.

Most people are under the assumption that duplicate content is looked at on the page level when in fact it is far more complex than that. Simply saying that “by changing 25 percent of the text on a page it is no longer duplicate content” is not a true or accurate statement. Lets examine why that is.

To gain some understanding we need to take a look at the k-shingle algorithm that may or may not be in use by the major search engines (my money is that it is in use). I’ve seen the following used as an example so lets use it here as well.

Let’s suppose that you have a page that contains the following text:

The swift brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

Before we get to this point the search engine has already stripped all tags and html from the page leaving just this plain text behind for us to take a look at.

The shingling algorithm essentially finds word groups within a body of text in order to determine the uniqueness of the text. The first thing they do is strip out all stop words like and, the, of, to. They also strip out all fill words, leaving us only with action words which are considered the core of the content. Once this is done the following “shingles” are created from the above text. (i’m going to include the stop words for simplicity)

The swift brown fox
swift brown fox jumped
brown fox jumped over
fox jumped over the
jumped over the lazy
over the lazy dog

These are essentially like unique fingerprints that identify this block of text. The search engine can now compare this “fingerprint” to other pages in an attempt to find duplicate content. As duplicates are found a “duplicate content” score is assigned to the page. If too many “fingerprints” match other documents the score becomes high enough that the search engines flag the page as duplicate content thus sending it to supplemental hell or worse deleting it from their index completely.
My old lady swears that she saw the lazy dog jump over the swift brown fox.

The above gives us the following shingles.
my old lady swears
old lady swears that
lady swears that she
swears that she saw
that she saw the
she saw the lazy
saw the lazy dog
the lazy dog jump
lazy dog jump over
dog jump over the
jump over the swift
over the swift brown
the swift brown fox

Comparing these two sets of shingles we can see that only one matches (”the swift brown fox“). Thus it is unlikely that these two documents are duplicates of one another. No one but google knows what the percentage match must be for these two documents to be considered duplicates, but some thorough testing would sure narrow it down ;).

So what can we take away from the above examples? First and foremost we quickly begin to realize that duplicate content is far more difficult than saying “document A and document B are 50 percent similar”. Second we can see that people adding “stop words” and “filler words” to avoid duplicate content are largely wasting their time. It’s the “action” words that should be the focus. Changing action words without altering the meaning of a body of text may very well be enough to get past these algorithms. Then again there may be other mechanisms at work that we can’t yet see rendering that impossible as well. I suggest experimenting and finding what works for you in your situation.

I know I already made a blog post with today’s stats, but I had to post this one again. I just logged into cj only to find 4 new sales for the day. Here it is.

Sorry I haven’t updated in a few days. Everything has been going as planned. I haven’t had a chance to add more domains since we bought two new servers. If nothing else this data shows that a new user of our software can come in and EASILY make back their subscription fee plus some in just a week or two.

CJ Stats

SSEC Stats 

http://www.simplifiedsec.com/cj_scraper/cj_scraper.php

This steps you through setting up a domain and using our cj scraper to gather products and redirect url’s. Doesn’t get much easier than this.

I finally got things sorted with my computer so I can post this video demo of the software. It takes you through the basics of the software and gives you a good look at some test sites and such. View the video here

Follow along as my business partner and I attempt to make $60,000 dollars profit by the end of December with affiliate programs using our software. Simplified Search Engine Content

This blog post will be updated daily with statistics and information about the challenge.

FIRST 24 HOURS
As you can see we’ve had over 4,000 hits from google alone in the last 24 hours. This is across 18 domains. Here are the stats. I expect to see some initial regular user traffic in the next couple days.

Day 2 48 hours into the challenge

Here are the stats after 48 hours. As you can see we have had 6217 total hits. We are starting to see some traffic from google searches already. I didn’t have much time to put up more domains this weekend so this is still the numbers based on about 18 domains. I should have 50-100 more domains installed by the end of tomorrow. I’ll keep everyone updated.

Day 3 and our first SALE!
Today is day 3 of the 60K challenge. We’ve had a steady flow of search engine bots coming to the sites. We also started receiving traffic from google search results today (91 hits). Now the great news! We made our first commission off of the sites. We had a sale that produced 17.xx in commission. We’re on our way, but need to step things up if we plan to meet our 6 week goal. Not bad for day three though. View the graphs and shots below.

Day 4 Stats update

We had another good day as far as stats. It’s cut off on the screen shot but ask and msn have started hitting the pages. I’ll post cj statistics and sales this evening as they seem to update those near the close of the day.

We have updated our software once again with many additions and bug fixes. Customer feedback drives our software, and our list of updates reflects this.

• Added the ability to upload a bad word list
• upload unlimited number of main keywords
• upload keywords via csv file
• sitemaps added to all domains
• trackback spamming now optional
• new public affiliate program
• no longer need a cron job to create sub pages
• control number of links displayed in main menu
• domain token added to templates
• click-to-edit main keyword redirect url’s

I’m sure there are many others that I am forgetting or missing. Sign up today, download or upgrade!

We have opened our affiliate program up to the public, and intend to kick things off with some great prizes!

From October 25, 2006 to November 30, 2006 we will be offering the following tiered rewards payout
in addition to your one-time $15 per member payout:

* Rewards still subject to NET 45 payout

Tier One - 10 Referrals

When you’ve referred 15 members, you’ll receive this Apple® iPod™ nano 2GB* MP3 Player in Silver

• 2GB* internal flash memory stores up to 500 songs or up to 25,000 digital photos (iPod nano-viewable photos transferred from iTunes)
• Ultrathin design measures just under 0.3″ thin and weighs only 1.4 ounces
• Supports MP3 (up to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, AAC (up to 320 Kbps), Protected AAC (iTunes Music Store), Audible (formats 2, 3, 4), AIFF, Apple Lossless and WAV audio formats, plus BMP, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, PNG and PSD (Mac only) image formats; podcasting support

*Note: Actual formatted capacity less.