How many of you know that building a website or webpage, then publishing it means nothing at the time you publish. Well I didn’t and I felt like Rodney Dangerfield (no respect) when I realized this. I had signed up for numerous online marketing affiliate programs and I expected to have made at least one sell of an affiliate product.
I checked my visitors log within the cpanel of my hosting account and noticed that there was no traffic to my site other than the GoogleBot and me. So I decided to do a Google search for my website. Well it turned up nothing but information pertaining to the previous owner of the domain name. Then I searched in "Online Marketing", which I knew was a long shot.
Well during this time I had signed up for Google Adsense, a program where Google pays you on a per click basis in most cases for advertisements they place on your website or blog. I figured this would be a way to make a little extra income on top of affiliate products. Google has to approve your website before they will allow you to place ads.
Well as I stated before, I felt like Rodney Dangerfield again when I received an email from Google stating that my application for Adsense was disapproved. I thought, not only is my website not visible to sell affiliate products, but I’m not even going to make any money from Google Adsense either. The email went on to say click on this link for the reasons for this disapproval.
The reasons were that I violated Google's webmasters guidelines and that my site offered no original content. Now lets look at each in the order given. I read Google's guidelines and the only thing I could see was their dislike for Cloaking. Now my understanding of cloaking is disguising the destination URL that displays on the bottom left portion of the webpage with an alternate URL. This is also known as a redirect.
I think I understand why Google takes this position and I can’t blame them. Say you visit a website or blog and decide to click on one of the links on the page you’re visiting. The link icon says, “Check out the large selection of books we have at low prices” and the display URL at the bottom on mouseover says, “http://Amazon.com”.
Now you click on the Amazon icon and behold you’re redirected to some pornographic website. Now for some that would be okay, but to others that would be offensive. It wasn’t where you intended to go and most important, think about our children who surf the web. Apparently this was such a problem that Google banned the practice or maybe never allowed it in the first place. Now again, this is my take on this issue.
The only problem I have is that we are not redirecting our visitors to another website, page or blog. They end up where the advertisement or link states. Here’s an example: Your visitor sees an icon that says, “Check out the large selection of books we have at low prices”. They mouseover and instead of seeing the affiliate link http://amazon.com/AffiliateID, (which we don’t want thieves to see), they see “http://www.mywebsite.com/AmazonBooks. As you can see ,there is no deception because Amazon Books is clearly apart of the URL and most importantly, your visitor lands at the Amazon Books page.
Well I’ll give an explanation for my actions in the next “A Journey” post, so until next time, have a Prosperous Day!
I checked my visitors log within the cpanel of my hosting account and noticed that there was no traffic to my site other than the GoogleBot and me. So I decided to do a Google search for my website. Well it turned up nothing but information pertaining to the previous owner of the domain name. Then I searched in "Online Marketing", which I knew was a long shot.
Well during this time I had signed up for Google Adsense, a program where Google pays you on a per click basis in most cases for advertisements they place on your website or blog. I figured this would be a way to make a little extra income on top of affiliate products. Google has to approve your website before they will allow you to place ads.
Well as I stated before, I felt like Rodney Dangerfield again when I received an email from Google stating that my application for Adsense was disapproved. I thought, not only is my website not visible to sell affiliate products, but I’m not even going to make any money from Google Adsense either. The email went on to say click on this link for the reasons for this disapproval.
The reasons were that I violated Google's webmasters guidelines and that my site offered no original content. Now lets look at each in the order given. I read Google's guidelines and the only thing I could see was their dislike for Cloaking. Now my understanding of cloaking is disguising the destination URL that displays on the bottom left portion of the webpage with an alternate URL. This is also known as a redirect.
I think I understand why Google takes this position and I can’t blame them. Say you visit a website or blog and decide to click on one of the links on the page you’re visiting. The link icon says, “Check out the large selection of books we have at low prices” and the display URL at the bottom on mouseover says, “http://Amazon.com”.
Now you click on the Amazon icon and behold you’re redirected to some pornographic website. Now for some that would be okay, but to others that would be offensive. It wasn’t where you intended to go and most important, think about our children who surf the web. Apparently this was such a problem that Google banned the practice or maybe never allowed it in the first place. Now again, this is my take on this issue.
The only problem I have is that we are not redirecting our visitors to another website, page or blog. They end up where the advertisement or link states. Here’s an example: Your visitor sees an icon that says, “Check out the large selection of books we have at low prices”. They mouseover and instead of seeing the affiliate link http://amazon.com/AffiliateID, (which we don’t want thieves to see), they see “http://www.mywebsite.com/AmazonBooks. As you can see ,there is no deception because Amazon Books is clearly apart of the URL and most importantly, your visitor lands at the Amazon Books page.
Well I’ll give an explanation for my actions in the next “A Journey” post, so until next time, have a Prosperous Day!
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