SEO Site | Will Google Caffeine Affect You Making an Income Online?

Google announced this week that it was seeking testing on its new search engine architecture code named Caffeine.  I tested it and some of my sites rose in rankings and some lost rankings.  It was a bit of give and take.  With this new architecture and Google gradually phasing it in, it just reminds me what a joke the term passive online income is.  The term passive denotes something that you just throw up and money just comes rolling in with very little work.  If you are trying to make an income online, then you know how much work you have to put into it and it is anything but passive.  To me, it is like a cat and mouse game between publisher, advertiser, search engine, and the affiliate program.

As the publisher, you have to write the content that matches the needs of the advertiser and beat other publishers to the top of the search engine rankings.  As the advertiser, you have to get the most bang for the buck for your advertising campaign by buying the right keywords.  As the search engine, you need to match the intentions of the searcher to the right web pages.  As the affiliate program, you need to provide enough incentives to the consumer, advertiser and publisher so it is worthwhile for all parties involved including the company’s bottom line.  It is an always changing dynamic as each aspect of the internet marketing business is tweaked.   You always need to stay on top of things since if even one party changes their rules, this can dramatically affect your network portfolio.  And people want to call making income online passive?

Google is constantly tweaking their algorithm and due to my job, I was at a Google demonstration of their new Google Search Appliance 6.0 for enterprises not too long ago.  The speaker from Google said they have thousands of PhDs in natural language working for them and they are always pushing the envelope to make it index faster, get more accurate results and return results faster.  It’s like it is reaching into your brain trying to decipher what you really mean when you type in its single search box.

In theory, as Google gets better in latent semantic indexing, the search engine rankings should reflect web results that provide quality content.  And there lies the age old question from internet marketers: does quality content count?  Is on page SEO with quality content a bigger factor than off page SEO with lots of quality incoming links?  There will always be multiple factors to the Google search engine algorithm and no one will know for sure.  However, there will always be speed bumps to slow down the get rich quick schemes.  Personally, I’m not knocking these types of internet marketers at all.  There are many, many ways to making an online income and I also come from a finance background.  One such way is to get onto a trend quick and pull out when the market gets too hot creating a bubble.  Then comes the Google slap but you don’t care anymore because you’re onto the next online incoming generating scheme.  Those who piled into the bandwagon late will crash and burn.  It happened to me a few times as well.  It is the top internet marketing experts who can spot these trends in an instant but newbies are not so adept. It is best for young internet marketers to play it safe before they lose their shirts doing something they don’t understand.

I always recommend to friends trying to make an income online to go through the process of creating new sites and ranking them to number one without the help of any automation process or outsourcing.  Sounds harsh I know but this is for a couple of reasons.  First off, this separates those serious internet marketers from the pretenders.  This is what I meant when I said making online income is anything but passive income.  You work for it.  I also believe that it is important to understand the entire business model from start to finish before you outsource anything.  This includes keyword research, writing content, link building, affiliate search, lead generation, and store front building.  Call me paranoid, but I like to know how to do each aspect so I don’t get BSed by other people that I’m hiring.  I can call them out on anything because I have previous experience.

Here’s a little anecdote of when I was younger.  I used to work for a small start up company right out of university as a programmer and this was around when 9/11 hit.  It was also during the tech crash so I felt I was lucky to even get a job.  In any case, I was getting a lowball salary and I’m talking about dishwasher salary here but it was good experience to get my feet wet.  And I did everything for that company, from design, coding, writing tech manuals and even answering phone calls for tech support.  I knew every aspect of the program which funny enough was about language parsing and knowledge management.  It worked backwards from a search engine as that would infer that the user knows what he/she is looking for.  How many times have you sat in front of Google and wondered what you should type?  Instead, this program (or the engine we wrote) was to make sense of what knowledge you really had in your repositories and it spat out the themes of whatever type of data you had.  With that information, you can use that as the information architecture of your organization.  In any case, all that to say that with knowing every aspect of that software from the ground up, top down, sideways and in fourth dimension space, there’s very little bullshit I can’t spot.  If you’re in this business for yourself, you also need to take the responsibility to learn every aspect of the job as well.  It’s recommended to have some semblance of a clue as to what you are doing so you can convey what you want to outside help.  This will protect you from yourself.  That’s the price you pay for wanting to make an online income.  By the way, to conclude that story, I got a massive raise after my three month probation.

So speaking of money, another reason why you want to do everything for yourself when you first start out is to save money.  There are two types of people when they first try to make online income.  In one camp, you have the people who are very excited and willing to spend money on this new venture.  In the other camp, you have people who view internet marketing with scepticism.  They don’t believe it’s a real job with a real business model and they don’t want to put any money into it.  That’s fine as well.  For both camps, I think they should follow my advice and learn from the ground up.  There are many blogging platforms that will allow you to make online income for free.  They should cut their teeth on that and gain an understanding of the work load with their only commitment being time.  If they start making money, they can reinvest into the business.  If they don’t make any money then that means they still haven’t figured out how Google ranks for keywords and that’s the battle right there.  They should get out while they are still unscathed.

For those who take their apprenticeship on free blogging platforms, you will then have the foundation of your future network portfolio.  You can then use these assets to link build to future self hosted sites which can prove to be even more profitable.  So, take the time now to understand Google and the new Caffeine architecture.  Understanding Google Caffeine could affect your future online income.

Tags: free blogging platforms, google, google caffeine, learn seo, search rankings