Of course I have no evidence, just like any other person who doesn’t work for Google, that Google is manually manipulating its SERPs to favor these sites, but from experience it definitely looks like this is what is occuring.  On the other hand, you can also argue that the type of sites listed above should be listed at the top because by nature they attract natural links all on their own, therefore ranking highest in the SERPs.  I’ll leave it up to you to decide which argument you believe while I make an argument for the former statement in this post.

If you look at the type of sites I listed above you’ll see all these sites have one thing in common - there is no interest for these sites to ever purchase Google AdWords advertising.  When have you ever seen a government or state site do AdWords advertising, or a free site like Wikipedia, or Myspace, or a newspaper?  Maybe in rare cases it does happen, but the majority of the time these sites never advertise through AdWords.  Well, these are the type of sites that are populating Google’s first and now second page SERPs more and more, while also knocking down regular webmaster sites in the SERPs.

Again the next statement is all speculation and I have no solid proof, but the reason I think Google is doing this is the search engine is trying to make it harder for regular webmasters to get traffic organically through the SERPs.  Advanced SEOs and webmasters already know a large percentage of search engine traffic goes to listings in the first page of the SERPs, and for high traffic terms possibly even the second page of the SERPs.  If Google populates these pages with the sites listed above then the only way “Joe Schmoe” webmaster can get some of that valuable search engine traffic is to bid for keywords through Google AdWords.  The result of this, of course, is inflated CPC keywords since there are more advertisers competing for keywords, and more profit for Google.

In addition, a secondary effect this causes is the stifling of the buying and selling of text links, which Google has been diligently trying and unable to stop to this day.  Buying and selling of text links has grown into a huge business that cuts into Google AdWords profits because instead of funneling their money into AdWords, many webmasters choose to buy text links to rank in organic SERPs.  Google knows this and sees the text link market as a competitor and enemy to its business model; which is why for the last few years, and more aggressively within the last year, Google has been going after sites that either buy or sell text links.  Populating the first and second page SERPs with the sites mentioned in the first paragraph, and making it nearly impossible for regular webmasters to outrank them for organic search engine traffic will stifle the text link market because if webmasters can’t turn a profit through organic SE traffic by ranking in the top spots they won’t buy text links anymore.  Any smart webmaster wouldn’t pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for text links to get mediocre rankings which receive barely any traffic through the search engines.  All that money which was going into text links for SEO will certainly be used for AdWords advertising after all things are said and done, and Google will be smiling its way to bigger profits.

So you can see that Google benefits in every single way by favoring the aforementioned sites in its SERPs;  benefiting specifically by forcing regular webmasters to use Google AdWords if they want any type of traffic from Google’s search engine. It’s Google’s monopolistic way of forcing webmasters to use AdWords, and increase its profit if you ask me.

1) Give a brief overview of the SEO Lab concept
2) How all future labs will be structured
3) How readers can make the most out of these labs

1) Brief Overview of the SEO Lab Concept
I came up with the idea of setting up an SEO Lab section on the blog to provide our readers with valuable, concrete evidence about how the search engines and their algorithms work through actual real world tests. There is so much misinformation on the web it becomes extremely difficult to separate false SEO information from SEO fact. Like I mentioned in my first SEO Lab post, I have been doing small tests in the past to learn how the search engines work, so I decided why not just take it to a much larger scale by documenting my research and sharing the results with other people. So this is the beginning of the idea you see here.

The SEO Labs are meant to be in chronological order so the most simplistic algorithm tests are completed first. The higher the SEO Lab numbers go the more difficult/advanced the algorithm tests become, therefore it is suggested that all visitors interested in the SEO Labs read the labs from the very beginning first, and then follow through to the present. This will provide a more complete, understandable picture of the whole process.

2) Structure of SEO Labs
All future SEO Labs will have the following structure:
-Opening Remarks
-Testing Information
-Questions
-Closing Remarks
-Results

3) How Readers Can Make the Most Out Of The SEO Labs
An open dialogue is probably the most important factor I want to accomplish through these SEO Labs. I do not claim to be the all-knowing, end all and be all source for SEO. I am only human and know I too can make mistakes (even though it’s hard to believe), so if readers notice any inconsistencies or errors in the SEO Lab posts by all means bring them to my attention and the readers attention by posting a comment.

In addition, if you have a question which is similar or relates too an SEO Lab which you would like answered I more than welcome you to post a comment with your question, and if your question is relevant I will add it to the SEO Lab.

Finally, again I suggest that new readers to the SEO Lab read all posts chronologically from beginning to present as each lab builds upon all previous labs.

Once I have completed installing all the plugins and optimizing the blog, I will make a detailed post on what plugins I installed, as well as how I optimized the blog.  I hope our readers enjoy the new layout and design!

Money niches are affiliate marketing niches, which if promoted successfully, can bring in a tremendous amount of income for the affiliate marketer. These affiliate niches are usually extremely easy to convert traffic into sales, or provide high payouts for each lead or qualified sale. Money niches do have a drawback - they are usually highly competitive making it very difficult to become successful for someone just getting into the affiliate marketing industry. Examples of money niches include travel, ringtones, pharmaceuticals, and insurance leads. All these niches have at least one of the two characteristics of money niches that I just mentioned.  Many affiliate marketers chase after these niches because there is a lot of money at the end of the rainbow, so to speak, if they are successful in their efforts.

It took me about a year before I really felt comfortable with affiliate marketing and decided to take a dive into money niches, but because I was already generating a fairly steady income online I wasn’t too worried if it took awhile to generate any income through these niches or even if my efforts failed completely. Once your a seasoned affiliate marketer and have a good steady income being generated from your affiliate sites, by all means go ahead and take a dive into the money niches to get your piece of the pie!

So you have your list of interests sitting in front of you; now what? Your going to analyze your list using certain factors I’ll be discussing in this post; narrowing it down to the top 3 niches will give you the highest probability of becoming successful as an affiliate marketer!

After analyzing your list against each factor make sure to eliminate niches that go against each factor. In the end, you should try to end up with about three different niches that you will be promoting.

Factor 1: Competitiveness of the niche
Competitiveness of the affiliate niche isn’t really as important if you’re already an experienced affiliate marketer because you probably already have the foresight of knowing what roadblocks are heading your way as you progress in becoming successful in the niche, but for a new affiliate I advise you try to weed out the extremely competitive and even semi-competitive niches from your list. Steering clear of competitive niches in the beginning will help shield you from huge disappointments when you aren’t able to become even moderately successful in these niches.
So how do you figure out which niches are competitive? There are actually a few ways to do this - one way it to perform a search about your particular niche on the search engines and analyzing the total number of search results returned. The higher the total search results the more competitive the niche. In addition, you could also check the number of backlinks for the top 10 or 20 search results, and again, the higher number of backlinks these sites have can help gauge the competitiveness of a niche.

Factor 2: Variety and amount of products/services and affiliate programs in the niche
The best way to get a feel for the amount of affiliate programs in a particular niche is to join several of the more popular affiliate networks like Commission Junction or ShareASale. Once you signup as a publisher browse through the affiliate network categories to see which niches left on your list have a large number of products/services to promote. Selecting niches that have the most products/services to promote will make building your website and affiliate marketing promotions that much easier.

Factor 3: Ease of converting traffic/leads into qualified sales in the particular niche
By now your list is probably narrowed down to just a few niches and you could probably select which ones to promote on your own, but one other important factor to consider is the payouts for each niche. You’ll probably want to select niches that are easy to convert with payouts that aren’t too low. To put this into example, it would probably be easier to start generating income selling hotel bookings, car rentals, or airline tickets in the travel niche; rather than trying to generate leads for luxury home purchases. There is no real way, except through some common sense and critical thinking, to get a solid answer for this factor. As you become experienced in affiliate marketing you’ll begin to get a better feel of which affiliate niches can generate qualified leads/sales easily, but for now just think to yourself “what are people more likely to make a purchase for online - A or B”?

There are many other factors you can use when deciding which affiliate market to promote, but the above mentioned is a great start to help you out when making your decision on which affiliate niches you’ll be promoting. The main objective is to make sure you start out with niches your interested in so affiliate marketing will be something you enjoy doing!