The Sour Deal of Scour and Why I'm Moving On

Well, it's official. Scour has changed or rather dropped their rewards program and suckered quite a few people into working with them to improve their search engine (a job) without any pay or rewards. Well, sorry to say, but I'm no longer one of those suckers.

Here's what the search engine had to say:


Subject: Scour has changed its Reward Program
Dear theinsanewriter,

Over the past year, Scour has received a lot of feedback regarding the rewards program and the direction of Scour. Based on user suggestions, we have decided to discontinue the Scour Points Rewards program for the time being and instead focus on using our resources to improve the search experience on Scour. We are confident that you will be very happy with the changes and updates to come.

If you would like to read more about this change, please visit our Scour Blog: http://blog.scour.com/2009/09/01/scour-focuses-on-search-and-features/

Thank you,

Team Scour

Of course I understand that times are tough thanks to the economy, but giving users something to get excited over and then never paying up is not the way to do business -at least not honestly anyway. And I'm really not sure why users would be happy over those changes. Of course if you have accumulated points with the search engine, I wouldn't expect anything from them and it's just best to chock it up or blame me if you need to towards a waste of our time.

Really I could stay with Scour, but to be honest, I find Google (despite my ill tendencies towards their ad program) to be a much better search engine even without the enticing rewards. So it's time I said goodbye to the no-rewards program (ironically you have to have permission from them to delete your account.) and move on. Hey, we live and we learn about better ways to become successful online. It's like John Chow said, never put all your eggs in one basket. There are other and better fish in the sea or maybe it's the ocean. hmmm.

The Google Error That Nearly Cost Me

A few weeks ago I began noticing that my links began dropping through google. At first I didn't find it to be a big deal, but then after it continued to drop over the next several days, I began to worry.

The first thing I did was, I joined some new social networks and stopped by some new blogs. The networking has been great, but it didn't seem to stop my links from dropping. So, I decided to check out google's tools to see where exactly I was going wrong.

As it turns out, it wasn't a problem on my end. Apparently google had stopped crawling my pages, leaving only the most recent page in their search engine. When I wrote a new post, google would then take down the old post and put up the new one. While google's publicity for my latest post was great, it didn't help in promoting any of my other posts for very long.

After finding the problem and fixing the error, all seems to be working once again. As a matter of fact, I noticed last night that my google rank went from a 0 to a 2. How insane is that?

Google Adsense Update

Since traffic has been slow lately, I really didn't have a reason for checking my google adsense account. Out of boredom and a note from a visitor who'd clicked on some ads, I checked my account. Well, low and behold I've made a whopping .90 cents from them in the past few months. .85 for July and so far .5 for this month. Kinda cool I think. Google is finally paying off, even if it is in cents.

A Warning About Google Adsense,Payperpost and Freelance Writing

Today, I made my usual stop at John Chow's website and discovered an interesting, yet scary post about Rich Twin Poor Twin. Rich Twin Poor Twin is a website built by twins who were trying to make their millions using Google Adsene Only. Well, no more! After a pending loss of nearly $200,000 that was due to them from adsene last month, Google decided to ban the twins! Why they banned them was because google claimed they had invalid clicks coming from their ads. It's a story that sucks, but we learn from our mistakes. The worst part about it is, once google bans you, any money due to you will not be sent. So the twins are now out of nearly $200,000.

Never rely on google adsense as your only source of online income. If you do, you're asking for trouble like the twins did. Instead, look at other money making opportunities as well. As John Chow has mentioned in a prior Google Adsense post, putting all of your eggs in one basket is a big mistake! Don't do it!

On the other hand, if you're like me and have yet to receive any money from google adsense, you're probably not too worried, right? Well, you should be. You see, for a while my biggest mistake was relying on Payperpost and my freelancing job as my major source for income. To be exact, I was relying on my freelancing job as a writer, more than anything. Well two things have happened to me lately.

1. Payperpost hasn't qualified me for any opportunity posts lately. This is more than likely because I have a very low Google Rank that I can't seem to lift. Obviously as far as rank goes I am doing something wrong, but not sure what. So until I can raise my google rank, there will be very few payperpost offers I imagine.



2. My job as a freelance writer as I said, has been a major source for my income. While I love my job, lately my boss has had a really bad habit of going back on her word. Her first time was during a period when her payroll department didn't pay me the entire amount of money that was owed to me. The money I had expected was suppose to be used to help make a payment on this house. After letting my boss know about the shortened paycheck, she said it would be on it's way by that Thursday.
   
   Well, I never received it, so of course I emailed her. Her response was, it would be on it's way two weeks later like she had originally noted! So, as upset as I was, I sent her the original email she'd sent me about getting the money due to me by that Thursday (not two weeks later). Even though she did apologize, the damage was done and it was too late, so I ended up waiting the two weeks.

She did however, advance me money from last weeks paycheck, which was nice of her. But a few days ago I sent her a new list of articles and received a response saying that she had given all of the writers a month off. Something I never received notice about. She did however note that I could write 30 articles for her that month. While it shortens my income again, I figured it was at least some money.

So I queried her about the articles I had sent her for approval. Her reply to me was, she was unable to approve the articles until further notice, but I could write the 5 celebrity articles that were included in the list. So we went from 30 articles to 5 in just one day! And if we really want to go into details, I went from 60 to 30 to 5 in a matter of 4 days. And of course this is all during bad timing! Sigh, just my luck!!!

How Google Measures Link Popularity

If you're wondering like I did, how google ranks their links, you'll definitely enjoy the article below.

This came from Work At Home Mom. While this is not originally her post, I did want to provide her with a link since I found it on her page.

Link popularity is by far the most important factor for determining your search engine ranking. You need to know what link popularity is, why it is so important, and how Google measures your link popularity (over 50% of all search engine traffic comes from Google, and if you can rise to the top of Google, you will rise to the top of all the other search engines as well). But, before we talk about how Google measures linking, we need to cover some basics.

Link popularity is defined as the number of sites that are linking to your site. Some websites have thousands or even millions of sites linking to them, while others might have only a few. The search engines use the number of inbound links your site has as a measure of how important your site is, which translates into your search engine ranking.

The actual number of links to your site is not the only variable used to calculate your link popularity. The search engines also examine the relevance of the links to the subject matter of your site. For example, if a website that sells vitamins has 4,000 inbound links, but the source of most of the links are websites that have nothing to do with vitamins, then the algorithm that search engines use to determine link popularity will take that into account, and the link popularity score will not be very good.

It is possible for a website with a relatively small number of quality inbound links to be ranked higher than a site with a bunch of irrelevant or insignificant links. If I have a website that offers quotes for auto insurance, and I have 800 quality inbound links, then I might receive a much higher search engine ranking than another mortgage site that has 3,000 links that stem from link farms or Free For All (FFA) pages.

If you try to acquire inbound by using link farms or FFA pages, not only will it hurt your search engine ranking, but you might get permanently removed from the search engine listings. Links farms are sites where you can instantly exchange links with all the sites listed in that directory. FFA pages are pointless link directories. The search engines usually discount any links that come from either of these sources.

Now that we understand what link popularity is and how it works, we need to look specifically at how Google measures it. Google uses a number of variables in their algorithm to calculate your overall link score. The higher your score, the higher you will be ranked in the search listings.

One factor that Google uses in their algorithm, obviously, is the total number of sites linking to you. The more links you have, the higher your score will be. However, their algorithm is a little more complicated than that, and it is possible for a website with fewer links to be ranked higher than a website that has more links.

The reason for this is because Google also measures the quality of your links. If your website is about vitamins, and the site linking to you is a video game site, then that is not considered a quality link. The link still helps your score, but the link would help your score much more if it were from a website whose subject matter is the same as yours.

Also, Google gives a higher score to a link if it comes from a page that has actual content that relates to your keywords. For example, if your site is about jewelry, and another jewelry website has posted a link to your site on their links page, that link is not as valuable as a link to your site coming from a blog or a message board where a lot of information about jewelry is being written or discussed.

Also, Google gives an even higher score to a link if it contains anchor text that matches one of the keywords that describes your site. For example, if I have a site that sells lawnmowers, and a blog about lawnmowers has posted a link to my site, it helps my score even more if the link text (also known as anchor text) is LAWNMOWERS. To learn more about anchor text, go to a search engine and look up ANCHOR TEXT and you will be able to learn about it.

Another factor used by Google to score your link popularity is the diversity of keywords contained on sites linking to you. For example, if you have a site that sells handbags, and all the links to your site are from other sites that contain nothing but the keyword HANDBAGS, Google considers that to be abnormal. To get a higher score, you need to have links coming from sites that contain a variety of keywords related to handbags, such as BUY HANDBAGS, LEATHER HANDBAGS, etc.

It is difficult to increase your link popularity, but now that you understand how your score is calculated, you can devise a plan to improve your score. You might want to consider posting to forums and blogs that contain information that is related to your site, and when you post, include a link to your site. As long as you are persistent and tailor your strategy towards Google, you will do fine.

Note: I don't know who originally wrote this article, I happened to find it on a message board I visit frequently. I thought it was valuable information and wanted to pass it on. If you are the author, please let me know who I may credit for this great bit of information.

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