So because this site is fairly new and all I’ve been playing around with the theme on Wordpress, and I just recently setup some Adsense Ads on the left sidebar. (Please pay attention to them I’d appreciate it =) Anyways, out of curiosity I went to a few of my posts to see what would be advertised alongside them. Most of them had fairly relevant offers posted there; however I was curious what they would put on my post about Google’s Anti-Competitive URL Policy and strangely enough they couldn’t think of anything to put there except for horoscope ads, and ways to tell the future! I’m sure there’s a joke there I just can’t think of it at the moment.

PS I’ve since hit refresh a few times and they appear to have picked up the relevancy a bit better… now they are for affiliate/PPC type offers.

In my newly found quest to promote this blog and generate traffic, I thought why not submit to a ton of site directories? I found a ridiculously long list of free web directories at lazyurl (they will know if I copy it!! and I submitted my site to a few. I’m curious - has anyone had any quantifiable success with free directory submissions? Anyways, the sheer monotony of doing that for about 20 seconds caused my attention to slip and I started surfing again.

I stumbled upon the following list of filters one can search Google with, and became immediately intrigued. These links search Google for blogs with a specific PageRank (PR), and apparently filter out all blogs that use nofollow links in their comments (better check them yourself though). That started me thinking. Chris Sandberg once told me that a great way to get traffic and rankings was to post on other people’s blogs; basically become involved in the community. In addition, links to your site from pages with a high PR count for more when Google is calculating your own PR.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no SEO Master; in fact I’m just starting out here. But I can put two and two together. So why not find a blog with a high PageRank, and post it to death? Just kidding, make sure your posts are meaningful.

So here’s that list of Google filters. Simply click on the PR you want, and search Google for a topic relevant to your blog, and voila, bang presto - you have a list of sites that have decent PR!

PR 6 - http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=01…66:2ziwmhsusja
PR5 - http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=01…66:gpfnyqgww54
PR4 - http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=01…66:fcvptc3lghk
PR3 - http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=01…166:ec1btv16hl
PR 0-2 - http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=01…ygwict5bzjo&hl

Now comes the next little problem: hardly any site out there is going to allow you to post a comment on their main page (most likely the highest PR page on the site). So if you posted on a sub page, you might not be getting any value at all, right?

Never fear, there’s a tool for that too!
I found this cool tool at SEOCompany.ca (which has many cool FREE tools) which will check internal site pages for PR. So if you combine the links above with this tool, you should be able to find high PR blog pages that you can post a comment on. Because most blogs use the title of the post in the URL, you can quickly look down the list and even pick a high PR page that is most relevant to your own blog.

Hope you find this useful.

The other day I logged into my Adwords account and I had one of those nifty alerts waiting for me:

Looking at my current campaigns, I don’t think this will affect me much; however I’m interested if others out there think this is a good or a bad thing. I frequently run afoul of Google’s URL policy with one of my ads - it is for an affiliate program where I link directly to the merchant’s site. Google won’t let more than one ad run with the same base URL. For example, 123.com and 123.ca can run side by side; however 123.com and canada.123.com are not okay.

The problem with this as an affiliate marketer is that if someone beats you to the punch by staking out an ad to the main domain, you’re basically out! At that point, because they’ve got a pre-existing spot in there, and are deemed “more relevant” than my hasn’t-run-yet ad, they get to keep their spot and I don’t get to run my ad unless I can find an alternate domain to send traffic to, and then convince them to carry on to my main offer. Where is the survival of the fittest in this scenario? It’s more of a survival of the first.

IMHO, Google should at least let my ad run for a few days, to see if it outperforms the incumbent ad. Some of the ads you see out there are so terrible you just know you could make a better ad that would be deemed more relevant, but we’re not even given that opportunity because of Google’s repressive regime.

In Vancouver BC where I live, there is this one intersection on Robson street (one of the busiest areas downtown) where there are no less than three Starbucks coffee shops! Out of four corners available - three are occupied by the same store! These three stores have been there for several years now, which tells me that each is profitable in its own right. If city council legislated that this wasn’t relevant enough for the average visitor to Robson street, then these stores would be denied a business license. How well do you think that would fly? Would Starbucks complain? Would the clientèle complain? Hmm.

I understand that Google doesn’t want an entire page of ads for 123.com, however if all those ads are outperforming ads for 456.com, why not? Markets will organize themselves; however Google likes to play divine architect and dictate what they should look like. Any Economics 101 professor will tell you this kind of intervention leads to inefficiencies in the marketplace and should be avoided.