My Newbie Blog is coming up on it’s first anniversary.  We have been writing articles on how to create a blog since January 26 of 2008.  The site was set up to help people walk through creating a blog step by step.  Along the way we discuss some basic SEO strategies and some of the different ways to try and make money on the Internet.  We have specifically targeted the keywords “how to create a blog” to drive traffic to this site.  Currently, we show up in position 10 or 11 on Yahoo and in position 45 on Google.  The Yahoo return generates some traffic to the site, and we also generate a fairly steady stream of traffic by encouraging people on some of our other sites to take advantage of the information provided on this site.

When this blog was started we were using version 2.2 of WordPress.  Now we are up to 2.7.  This means that some of the screen shots will be different, but the basic information is still primarily the same.  The site will still be able to asnwer your how to create a blog questions.

The site has never down well with Adsense.  I have put ads on the site at different times, but the click percentage is always bad and I have to take the ads back down.  That happens on certain sites, usually because the type of people who are visiting the site aren’t interested in the ads.

We are still hoping to get the site to become a page 1 Google return for the how to create a blog keywords.  We are page 1 for Newbie Blog on Google, but that doesn’t generate much traffic.  Most sites do better after they have been around for about a year.  We are looking forward to seeing what happens to the site in 2009.  We lalso ook forward to what the year holds and if we can help you with your blog please let us know!

What is Google bombing? Here is the definition from WikiPedia:

A Google bomb (also referred to as a ‘link bomb’) is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions. Because of the way that Google’s algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created if many sites link to the page in this manner. Google bomb is used both as a verb and a noun. The phrase “Google bombing” was introduced to the New Oxford American Dictionary in May 2005. Google bombing is closely related to spamdexing, the practice of deliberately modifying HTML pages to increase the chance of their being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned…

Whenever we use SEO to improve the rankings for our site we are trying to figure out the Google algorithms that are controlling the results. Anchor text figures in to the algorithm in a significant way. But the algorithm is touchy and if you overdo one keyword you can get penalized for Google bombing. One of the results is that your keyword quits being returned in the results. The best answer is to balance between 3 or 4 keywords so that you don’t push one to hard.

If you read the article on Google Bombing in WikiPedia you will see how the process is sometimes used for humor. (I apologize to anyone from France who reads this and is offended but it is an interesting example of Google bombing) One example is a keyword search for French Military Victories. The result looks like this:

If you open the first result on page 1 this is what you get:

The result is part of the SEO process. Using keywords and links in a such way that the site that you want to have returned is what is returned. The idea is that if it can be done with a joke it can also be done for your site.

As we talk about how to create a blog understanding SEO or search engine results is very important. To help illustrate some of the concepts I thought we would do a case study using one of the blogs we help called Evangelism Software. The Evangelism Software | Ministry Software blog has been on page 1 in position 1 or 2 for the last month as a Google return for the keywords “Evangelism Software”. That changed 2 days ago as a couple of new sites jumped ahead in the search results. Here are the search results as of today.

You can see that the site we are working with, Evangelism Software | Ministry Software has dropped down to position 5. Let’s look at the sites that jumped ahead on the results. The first site is shown below.

This site is set up with a couple of free program offers and Google Adsense in the heart of the page. This return is a page from a much larger site. The main site has a page rank of 6 and over 29000 links. That is a lot of links. There really isn’t much useful information on the site. It exists to display Google Adsense. Don’t get me wrong, the Adsesne program is a good thing, but it shouldn’t be the only reason a site exists.

The second site is another page from that same big site.

Again this page exists to get people to click on the Adsense ads. The third result is an actual site talking about evangelism.

Until a couple of days ago this site used to trade 1st and 2nd position with the site we work with. Showing up in position 4 we have

This return is kind of off topic but comes from a site with a lot of authority. The site we work with is now at position 5

This site provides some useful information about using free software to set up blogs for evangelism. You will notice that there is also Adsense on the site but it is not the sole purpose for the site. Evangelism Software has a lot of good things going for it to return a good result from Google. Working against it is that it hasn’t been around very long. This is all part of the deal with setting up blogs. It is possible that the sites that have just jumped into the top spots will move back down the page because they don’t offer much. In the meantime, Evangelism Software will have to make sure it keeps posting fresh content if it wants to move back up. The reality is, though, that even at the number one spot there is not much traffic for this keyword. For the month or so the site was ranked # 1 it only got 1 visit from the keyword search. I think that the sites that are just set up for Adsense clicks are going to be disappointed. My visit might be all they get.