June 2009

If you have a mobile phone where you can download apps, then you may have noticed that some of the apps have ads on them. Mobile application developers use them to make money. Google had been testing AdSense on mobile apps for the iPhone and Android in a kind of private beta with roughly 10 partners, including Pandora, Shazam and Urbanspoon. Now the program is opening up to apps developers and publishers who meet some criteria (among them, a 3 month commitment, 100K+ page views).

On the advertising side, the process by which advertisers select their audiences and bid for placement is largely similar to the Web-based version of AdSense. “Placement targeting” (choosing which app to advertise on), keyword and broad geo targeting are carried over, although placement targeting is still in the experimental phase.
You can apply for Adsense for Mobile Applications by clicking here.

I’d summed up 6 unique tactics to fix online reputation in this post. You should have read about social media, reputation management profiles and other tactics to fix your reputation but these are actually more powerful and robust tactics to fix your reputation.
These tactics work for both individuals and corporations.

Review Sites
One of the fast and powerful ways to spread reviews is to get started with review sites like reviewstream.com
Example review here.
If someone can post negative comments/articles/reviews about your business online then why don’t you find sites where positive reviews can be posted!
These sites rank well with in SE and you can request your customers to post positive reviews about your business there.

Articles Sites
Informative articles with testimonials can be posted to sites like ezinearticles.com
Example article here.
Quality article sites rank very well in SE, articles are read by thousands of peoples, these articles are then picked by other sites and published on their blogs. You can get some good link backs to your sites and also your author profile at these sites rank at the top in search engines.

Guest Blogging
Many blogs have a section for guest bloggers, where a blogger can write and post a guest post. Post should be related to blogs niche. More about guest blogging.
Example here and here.
You can write guest posts, you can also link back to your sites from these guest posts, your name & business name also get published with these guest posts. Quality posts are always welcomed by bloggers.

Freebies
You can offer free books, CDs about your products, free tickets to events. These offers then can be promoted on freebie sites, can create lots of buzz and these items rank well in SE.
Example here,
Or, http://www.thatfreebiesite.com/

Event Listings
Event listings in your niche can be used to create buzz. Promote your business events through event sites and get lots of positive press.
Example here.

Paid Reviews
Paid reviews from established blogs can work magic but they cost good amount of $$.
More here, http://www.apennyearned.co.uk/reviews.html
An example by johnchow.com

http://www.johnchow.com/motive-interactive-shoemoney-contest/

He charge $500/review but you reach millions by buying a review from a site like JohnChow.com
For reputation management reviews can be purchased from Reviewme.com and paidreviews.com

Gifts to Bloggers
Gifts to famous bloggers can also work like.
Example here.

Creating Viral Contents
Viral content is the King! Requires lots of hard work and research for writing a post but it works magic. Read more about viral content.

Do you have a more creative idea? Share with us using comments.

1 year back Google changed how it handles no-follow tag but they have now made this change public. The change is to stop “PageRank Sculpting”. PageRank sculpting, is the process of using the nofollow attribute internally to change the PageRank flow among different pages. The objective is to give more PageRank value to some pages (the ones that sell something, for example) at the expense of less important pages (the Privacy Policy or Terms of Service, for example).

Earlier this month, Google’s Matt Cutts sent a shockwave through the advanced SEO community by saying that site owners could no longer perform “PageRank sculpting” using the nofollow tag in the way they’d previously thought. Now Matt’s posted more explanation about the change.

Here is a quote from that post that summarizes the change:

So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

Daniel Socco at DailyBlogTips has given an excellent explanation of this change and how it is going to effect us.

In other words, the usage of the nofollow attribute will still stop the page that is being linked to from receiving PageRank and anchor text value, but the PageRank that is being “saved” with the nofollow links won’t flow to the other links present in the linking page.

Google want to stop PageRank Sculpting, its fine but this change is negatively effecting bloggers. This change is going to encourage blog spam and also pages will have low PR. All the links on your comment section are reducing the PageRank that would otherwise flow to your internal pages. Google might do something to fix this problem, but we still got to hear about it.

Is there any solution to this problem? You might close your comments section that is not a reasonable thing to do. Or you can use an iframe or Javascript based solution to keep comments out of same page.

If you’re using WordPress you can edit your theme to remove commentators URL.

Do you have any solution? Share it with us in our comments section.

There is an excellent news for SEO’s. Google has started notifying webmasters after reconsideration requests. Google finally pushed through a change with the reconsideration request process that SEOs and webmasters have been asking for since the reconsideration request began.
Now, if you submit a reconsideration request, Google may email you a few days later with a notification that they have actually reviewed your site. The review email reads:

Subject: We’ve processed your reconsideration request for [mywebsite.com]
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: [mywebsite.com].
We’ve now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it’s in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don’t find any problems, we’ll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn’t appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take.

So now, if you submit a reconsideration request, you can know a bit later if your site is still in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines or not. This is a most welcomed addition.