I first got the phone call a month or so ago. I was knee deep in web site marketing projects and was actually jammed to capacity. I was looking to finish up all of my small jobs so I could move forward and do some more challenging assignments. Plus I was in the middle of releasing some top notch online hybrid techniques that I was about to figure out on my own. This has become somewhat of a hobby of mine if not an obsession. This phone call was different from the ones that usually come into my office. As I learned more about my prospect on the other end of the phone I became somewhat intrigued.
WORKING ABROAD IN MY LIVING ROOM
The project that fell on my desk was for an online campaign for the Philippines. I have no idea about anything that pertains to Philippine culture but this didn't stop me from getting involved. I was fascinated with the challenge of getting involved with this amazing project. You see, this customer was none other than the famous David Newby, Best Selling Author to, ?Why Didn't Anyone Teach Me This??. Newby is well known for his financial strategies that he teaches here in the states and abroad. I was eager to get started and got so wound up in the conversation that I didn't clarify the details. You see, I thought we had over a month to get this thing launched properly. Pleasantries were exchanged and money changed hands and my new customer was zooming off in his candy apple red Lamborghini
???..it turns out I was wrong. I had 4 days to pull off the impossible.
I had exactly under 4 working days to get my client, David Newby, listed and ranked highly on Google and Yahoo. That is not a whole lot of time. You see, we had decided not to bother putting up any pay per click campaigns up for our efforts. We didn't even want to put any sponsored links up. We were going to play a straight game of organic search engine rankings and do it very quickly. That meant that I had to get his pages at the top of Google without paying a dime.
Could it be done? Could we actually get our pages included into the Google directory index and have our pages rank at the very top? I knew that If I could actually get Newby in the top ten just once I had done my job. If I was able to get him listed just one time for every keyword set he had designed I would have been pleased. I had my work cut out for me. This meant that I had to get on the move. The more I sat around pondering the less time I had to make history happen.
BEYOND ORDINARY SEO, (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION)
The one thing we did that catapulted our results into another stratosphere was digital video. This wasn't just your ordinary web video. We shot the video using a HD camera with high resolution and a green screen effect. Basically we used a simple chroma key effect and completely took out the background and made it all white. The effect was flawless but that is not what got us high rankings. We took that simple video and translated it for the search engines. The video search engines that is.
Only 10% of all web traffic comes from the search engines. That is actually pretty shocking when you consider the significance of it all. So where does the other 90% come from? The traffic comes from a variety of sources and these are:
1. Video Search Engines
2. Podcast Search Engines
3. Blog Search Engines
4. Social Networks
5. Publicity Sites
These are all in addition to the regular search engines. The magic of using all of these incredible elements is that they literally propel your rankings to the top ? not once, not twice but multiple times. In fact, we were able to get to the top ten 8 out of 10 times in just about every category we picked. That is substantial. We did some incredible things with our rankings. We definitely got the word out about our seminar and info related products.
Now here is the one thing you may have never expected. We were able to get these top rankings in just four hours. That's right. Four hours.
It took a little pushing and prodding but we were able to get our message out there to the masses in just a few hours. Web video is definitely an attention getter. Not only were we able to get our messages into the niche categories but also into the top of Google. This was accomplished without so much as paying a dime to Google for pay-per-click or any sponsored listings. This is substantial.
Imagine being able to knock out the high cost of pay per click and still being able to dominate the top of the search engines. That is something that is worth celebrating about. I found myself looking for alternative ideas to PPC after my clients kept complaining about high rising costs to market online. This constant rise of client dissatisfaction pushed me into finding new ways to getting top rankings with moderate fees. In doing so I was able to get away from the expected ways of online popularity.
USING THE NEW TYPES OF SEARCH ENGINES
The best way to get good at this type of marketing is to try out new services and live by doing. It is one thing to think about it but taking action is the greatest short cut to great results. Not every industry responds the same way. When I created my first online radio show, (podcast) I noticed immediately that I was not a big hit in the Midwest. However my ratings picked up pretty heavy in California and New York City and ironically that is where all of my business is coming from.
When we were hitting 8 out of 10 of the top ten listings on Google we noticed these listings came from a variety of sources. Some of them were from video listings, some came from podcasting sites, some came from social networks and others came from blogs. But the kicker came in a few weeks. Since web 2.0 services like http://YouTube.com and Google Video automatically creates HTML code it makes life very convenient. This means that visitors can copy and paste into their own web pages or blogs. And that is exactly what happened. Our videos started to pop up on services that we didn't set up. Our clips started to pop up on video search engines that we never heard of. Someone had seen our clips and liked what they saw and posted them on other services. That means we got our material distributed for free.
This had a huge affect on our search engine rankings. This sent us to the very top on Google and Yahoo. I might also add that the other web site services jumped on board and put us up on high rank visibility as well. These other search engines often use the same technology. Ask Jeeves, Dogpile and many others borrow the same search engine technology to fuel their services.
The moral of the story? By using the new modern tools you can literally write your own ticket.
Web Search Engine Ranking
Plagiarism, which is nothing but copied content, produces duplicate content between two websites. It is well known that search engines are adverse to duplicate or identical content and that page rankings can suffer because of plagiarism. Google has guidelines against plagiarism and warns website owners against creating multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content, as stated in its Webmaster Guidelines. Having even a substantially duplicate content, much more a totally duplicate website, will penalize a websites' page rank.
In addition to having the page rank penalized, the website containing plagiarized work or duplicate content can even be affected so much so that it won't even make it to the search results listing. This happens because web crawlers, in an effort to be more efficient, do not crawl duplicate and near-duplicate sites that they have determined in their previous crawl. Because of this, duplicate sites do not even get indexed by the web crawlers, and so are not listed in the results page. In Google, mirrored sites are delegated to the link at the bottom of the results page which says “Similar Results have been omitted…”
Higher Ranking for Plagiarists' Websites
The problem, however, lies when search engines instead of penalizing plagiarists end up penalizing the website that actually wrote the original content. Website owners of original content oftentimes find that websites who have copied their content are given a better page rank by search engines.
Why Plagiarists Get a Higher Page Rank
This problem of being ranked lower than plagiarists' site happens mainly since Google and other search engines algorithms are unable to distinguish between the original and the duplicate or copied content in their index. Although it is true that search engines in general are adverse to identical content, since there is currently no way for the search engines to know which content is original, website owners of the original content oftentimes find that their site actually gets a lower ranking than a plagiarists' site. Hence website owners of original content are the one that sometimes get penalized for plagiarism.
Also, plagiarists, who are driven by profit use other SEO techniques that drive their page rank much higher. Hence, website owners with original content but without very good optimization techniques often find themselves ranked lower than content “borrowers”. This is of course a serious issue for website owners, especially business websites whose revenue gets affected by the lower page rank.
One way that search engines address the issue of duplicate content is by assigning priority for the content of the website that was indexed first. By rule of seniority, the first site that posts the content should be the site that contains the original content. This works most of the time but breaks down when plagiarists copy the content quite fast so that crawlers sometimes do index the copied site before the original one. When this happens the site with the copied content gets priority over that of the original content. To avoid this, some website owners use the Sitemaps system to submit their articles or other fresh content to Google. This ensures that the submitted content will be known to Google as the original and not the copy.
Fighting Plagiarism and its Effect on Your Page Rank
Plagiarism has been an issue long before the World Wide Web was created. The creation of the Internet has made it easier and more lucrative for plagiarists to copy content and pass it off as their own without any regard to copyright laws. As mentioned earlier it is a serious threat to business owners and at the very least is a source of irritation to bloggers whose posts or articles oftentimes get ripped off. Because of this, while most companies do their best to fight plagiarists many individuals find themselves losing heart. The fight against plagiarism seems to be a losing battle, especially to those who have no idea in countering plagiarism.
The first thing website owners can do is to find out in the first place if their site has been plagiarized. A good way to do this is by using Copyscape. Copyscape lets website owners enter their web pages' URL and then proceeds to scan other websites and notify the user for very close matches in content. Using the standard Google search also works. Simply copy a short paragraph from your webpage and paste it in Google's search box to come up with all the other websites that contain the same or similar information.
In case your content has been copied the next best step to take is to make a copy of the copied page(s) and then send an email to the website requesting them to remove the copied material or at least for a back link and proper crediting of the work, depending on your objective. In case the website owner or administrator doesn't reply at all or in a favorable manner, the next step to take is to contact the web hosting company they are using. Inform them that the site that they are currently hosting is infringing copyright and that they have a responsibility legally to regulate such sites. This could lead them to pressure the site to remove the copied content. However, this tack doesn't always work. When this happens it is time to take a more legal action and contact your lawyer. According to an advice given by Roy Sumatra, in case your web page rank is affected by the copied website do contact the search engines wherein your page rank is affected. Google is aggressive and serious in dealing with infringement issues and has guidelines for dealing with infringement of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
For those who want to prevent the hassle of being penalized as the copier of your own original content, as mentioned earlier, it is best to submit your content to through the Sitemaps system. By using the system, the content is submitted directly to Google and indexed by them automatically so that the content will be known as the original one and be given priority in case of plagiarism.
Both Ted Cantu & Danny Wirken are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Ted Cantu has sinced written about articles on various topics from Travel and Leisure, Computers and The Internet and Nutrition. Ted Cantu is an ex-Art Director and the owner of . He specializes in web site market. Ted Cantu's top article generates over 165000 views. to your Favourites.