These days it seems like everyone is an expert on Google AdSense. Unfortunately, that is not entirely true. Worse, much of the expert advice out there is based on old information or ideas that were never true in the first place. Either way, following bad AdSense advice can cost you a lot of money.

Here are the top AdSense myths mistakenly followed by publishers and writers.

The Highest Placed Ad Is The Highest Paying Ad

Not anymore. Once upon a time, this was true, but Google changed up the AdWords program a long time ago by adding an Ad Quality Score. Now, the amount of the advertiser bid multiplied by the ad’s quality score is used to determine where the ad is placed on websites and blogs. In other words, an advertiser with a “high quality” ad may get the top ad spot on your website even if their bid is significantly lower than the bid of another advertiser with a “low quality” ad.

The bad news is that you no longer no for sure which ad is the lowest paying on your webpage. The good news is that better ads convert more and with higher positioning are more likely to be clicked. That means that you won’t get smart-priced because a garbage ad keeps getting all the clicks on your website because they pay more.

Google Smart Prices AdSense If No One Clicks On Your Ads

This was never true. Someone misunderstood the concept and drew the wrong conclusions, and then everyone started repeating what they said until every assumed it must be true.

Smart pricing occurs when the clicks on ads from your webpages convert as a lower rate than clicks on those ads do from most other pages. In other words, if your website is sending garbage clicks to advertisers, your CPC will be lowered by smart pricing. However, if your website never sends any traffic because no one ever clicks on your ads, you will not be smart-priced.

All Image Ads Are CPM Ads That Pay Per Impression and Not Per Click Like Text Ads

I don’t know if this was ever true, but I know it is not true today. When an advertiser sets up their ad they choose whether they want it to be CPC or CPM. This choice comes after they choose whether or not to create a text ad or an image ad. In other words, an advertiser can create an image ad that pays per click just like they can create an image ad that pays per impression.

Unfortunately, there is no way to allow only image ads that pay per click. If you allow image ads, then some of those ads will be CPM ads and some of them will be CPC ads with no control from you over them.

Reliable AdSense Information Will Increase Your Earnings

Be sure that the information you are getting about AdSense is reliable. Attempt to verify any program information directly with Google before acting on it. Don’t forget to read through the AdWords information as well because not everything is in the AdSense section. (For example, there is no mention of Smart Pricing anywhere in the AdSense information on Google’s website. Smart Pricing is only mentioned in the AdWords sections.)

There is a lot of information out there about how to make money with Google AdSense. Most of it boils down to some version of:

1. Research Keywords
2. Write Keyword Optimized Posts or Pages
3. Build Backlinks to Optimized Articles
4. Move Up in Search Engine Rankings
5. Profit

If this sounds about right to you, I have some bad news for you. There is a very good chance that even if you fully succeed at the money making method listed above, you may never earn more money from AdSense than a few pennies.

If earning money from Google AdSense ads can’t be done by following the methodology above, then why do so many people repeat it?

First, off, congratulations on asking the right question. Secondly, the answer to that question is actually in the question itself. So many people repeat what they have “learned” about search engine optimization, or SEO, and making money with AdSense that it has become accepted conventional wisdom, even if it is not entirely true. If you are serious about making money writing online, it is imperative to be able to distinguish knowledge that has been used and verified first-hand, and the so-called knowledge that has been copied from sources second-hand.

The good news is that the formula for making money with Google AdSense above is not false, so much as it is incomplete. The most important step for earning money with AdSense has been left out of the formula, unintentionally, by hundreds of writers and webmasters trying to make a name for themselves as money making bloggers by reading information and then passing it on. There is nothing wrong with doing this. I do it everyday as a professional freelance writer by creating content and articles for publication based upon research that has been given to me, or data that I have researched myself. The catch is, that in order to be useful, the research that writing is based on must be both accurate, and complete. (You can read my freelance writing blog for more information and freelance writing tips.)

What Is Missing From Google AdSense Formula for Earning Money?

The key to making money with AdSense is getting clicks on the ads that are placed on the website or the advertisements displayed on the webpage that you have build with perfect keyword optimization. Most AdSense manuals of instruction provide the insider information for making money using Google AdSense by saying that you can expect a one percent (1%) click through rate on the Google ads displayed on your high-ranking webpage. However, while that number may be inline with most reported click-through-rates or CTR studies, that number is an average CTR rate, not a standard CTR rate.

The reality of Google AdSense is that some keywords get much higher click through rates. The bad news, is that many keywords get much lower click through rates.

If you spend a lot of time optimizing high-quality content and then linking it to the #1 position in Google search results (sometimes called Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPs), but nobody clicks on the ads that get displayed, you won’t make any money with AdSense no matter how good you are at high-ranking, keyword optimized, content for the web.

How do you find out what searches have keywords that get clicked a lot? Unfortunately, the only true answer is trial and error.

Some webpages can literally get a 25 percent CTR or even higher because the people searching for that information are so likely to be in need of services or products provided by Google’s advertisers. Other webpages can get less than 0.01% CTR because the people looking for that particular information have no need for the products or services provided.

The best way to find high-paying keywords for profitable AdSense targeting is to research high-volume, good-paying keywords and then publish well-written, high-quality web content around those keywords. Then, build some links to those articles and webpages in order to increase web traffic by having high-ranking search results linking to your content. By checking your AdSense Reports and your Google Analytics reports, you can determine which webpages are resulting in high click through rates and cross-reference those pages with what keywords are driving traffic to those webpages. Using those keywords to create high-ranking, top-quality, keyword optimized content to drive profitable traffic to your website that will actually click on your Google AdSense placements is the key to making money writing online by using AdSense.

Next Steps Making Money With AdSense

When you are ready to get serious about earning money with AdSense, important steps cannot be skipped.

First, you will need to start a writing business so that you don’t have to give your social security number out to everyone in order to get paid. Second, you will need to get approved for Google AdSense accounts. Third, it can help to be approved for Google AdWords as well. Finally, you will need to build a profitable website. One of the easiest ways to create a quality website is by using WordPress. Don’t get bogged down in WordPress themes that are search engine optimized and flashy. They are not any better for making money with AdSense and can cost you more dollars for webhosting if they use too many resources. Instead, look for great WordPress themes for writers that can feature your content without appearing boring or amateurish.

Then, grab the Make Money Writing Online Feed to stay up to date on all of the best money making writing techniques.

As most of you know, I have from time to time thrown a bit of effort into a writers profile of sorts at HubPages as Hub Llama. For the most part, this experiment has served just three purposes. The first, is to determine what if any leverage can be achieved by using HubPages to build backlinks to my other online projects. The second, is to have a sort of catch-all place where I can write quick, unpolished, articles that do not fit into one of my other websites or online businesses. The third, is to experiment with keywords, because HubPages pulls a bit of traffic and ranking on its own, so one can sometimes get a quicker feel for what variations of a key phrase or set of keywords might be the most profitable.

As nothing more than a potential side benefit, I have also followed the possibility that Hubs published on HubPages produce passive income online by themselves, though I have not made this any sort of focus in my endeavors over there.

In order to monitor profits from HubPages and determine whether there is any value in pursuing attempting to make money writing online at HubPages, I have, of course, installed my Google AdSense number on HubPages and linked the HubPages AdSense to Google Analytics. So far, the results haven’t been all that inspiring. It isn’t that Hubs don’t get traffic, they do. The problem is that the ads on HubPages don’t just draw from your Hub’s content, but also, seemingly, from Hubs around them, or from the overall HubPages domain itself.

What that means, when it comes right down to actual AdSense data for HubPages is that most clicks pay very low amounts, even for Hubs that are about topics and similar in content to webpages elsewhere that earn much higher CPC. For example, I often see something like $0.07 for a single click on a newer hub which make analyzing how much each click pays easier. A similar webpage on a related topic on a different site, or on one of my more carefully crafted sites, will pull down something like $0.35 to $1.00 for the same kind of clicks. Add in the fact that HubPages displays your ads 60% of the time, and you have a recipe for some low earnings.

However, today, I happened to notice a single click take down well over $2.00 on a topic where that would be considered a good amount anywhere. Now, that is just the one time, but it does raise the question. If the right topics were written about, and enough of the low-paying CPC advertisers could be filtered out in the AdSense competitive ad filter, could HubPages be a bigger source of monthly income?

We’ll find out soon enough. I’m going to launch my 100 Hubs in 10 Days Challenge soon, and I’m going to hit several “juicy” topics along the way. Between the extra linking, the HubRank pushed inevitably toward 95+, and my own backlinking and promo-ing, there just might be enough sizzle to see some real dollars earned on HubPages.

At the request of a friend I recently wrote up an article about the wedding DJ business. More specifically, I wrote a Hub about wedding DJ prices. The idea was that since so many people want to know what a wedding DJ costs, but so few DJ companies actually will say on their websites what they charge to DJ a wedding reception or other event, that he could refer them over to the webpage with the data.

The wedding reception DJ rate piece did pretty well while it sat on top of some of the topics pages on HubPages itself and generated a little bit of traffic organically. However, the article doesn’t really show up anywhere in main Google search results pages. The SERPs are, of course, loaded with long-established webpages that ironically, do not answer the question most people are asking when they search for wedding DJ prices or wedding DJ rates or something similar.

Instead these searches return webpages with information about wedding DJs who will do a wedding reception for you, but not pages that actually have any price or rates on them. In fact, most of the top search results flatly state something like, contact us for rates, or fill out this form for a rate quote.

This is one of the area where Google and all Internet search engines fail miserably. They are unable to detect the difference between a webpage that actually lists rates or prices and one that points you somewhere else for that same information. This is obviously a very tough programming challenge both from the perspective of being able to discern when someone wants actual pricing information, and from the perspective of knowing which content delivers an actual rate or price. Then, there is the even more difficult task of determining which pages best serve the searcher. For example, a highly regarded webpage about wedding reception DJs that does not list a solid dollar amount might still be a better resource than a thinly populated webpage with dollar signs all over it, but filled with less than useful information.

Out of curiosity, I have typed up this post which both exceeds the commonly excepted minimum word requirement to be taken seriously by Google (300 words) and that has two links with different anchor text to the webpage in question. The homepage of this site sits at around a 3 on the fabled PageRank scale based on various toolbars, so we aren’t talking about huge fire power, but it has been known to push up a page into the top 10 results for lesser used keyword searches. Thus, we’ll get to see two things. One, how far, if at all can these links push my Hub (which stands on the shoulders of HubPages and its "authority") and, two, what alternate searches might be less competitive, and potentially more profitable?

Stay tuned, or just grab the Make Money Writing Online RSS Feed.

Sometimes, finding profitable niches can be tougher than it seems. Just because a keyword has a lot of searches, like wedding DJs, or low competition, doesn’t mean it is going to be a money maker. High cost-per-click, or CPC, can be helpful, but there still have to be enough clicks to make it work out. Just remember the old joke about the kid selling his artwork on the sidewalk for $1 million each. A guy comes by and says, "You won’t sell very much that way." To which the kid replies, "Yeah, but I only have to sell ONE!"

It’s a funny joke, but it is also illuminating to the Internet marketer looking to make money by writing online. Too many writers see big dollar signs when they find a keyword paying $25 per click or more. That sounds great on paper, but if you only get one click per month, that’s a whopping $25 of monthly income. You won’t be quitting your job to live on passive income at that rate.

On the other hand, if you have decent traffic to a $1 CPC keyword and get 5 clicks every day, that works out to $150 of monthly revenue. That is a much better deal even though the CPC is lower for that particular keyword.

Of course, knowing which of the above scenarios will come true at any CPC or CPM is tricky. Sometimes everything looks perfect: high-paying CPC, high monthly searches, low competition, and still, it turns out to be a bust.

One of the easy ways to find out how a keyword will play out is to write a good quality page about the keyword. Use several variations throughout the post in order to "trap" as many keyword searches as possible. The goal is not to rank #1 for any particular keyword (not yet, anyway), but rather to see if there is any value in chasing the rankings for some or all of the well researched keywords you have discovered.

If the topic fits in with one of your established websites, put it on there and link it from as many places as possible. Then, sit back and watch your Google Analytics. See which keywords show up not just for visitors to the website, but from those who actually end up clicking on ads. Don’t forget, some ads pay high CPC because the get very low click volumes. That makes the high pay rates cheap overall for advertisers. You will earn higher AdSense income with ads that get 10 clicks per day and pay $0.50 than ones that pay $3.00 per click but are lucky to net even one click per day.

If the topic does not fit in with one of your existing websites, consider writing an article for another website like HubPages. A content article based website like this one gives you some built in traction for getting your page indexed quickly and seeing what the traffic looks like. If it looks like you have a winner, then you can put the time and effort into building a new site around the profitable keyword you found. If it looks like a dud you can move on to your next promising keyword.

Don’t forget to check back in with your published article every once and a while. Sometimes, pages build up momentum and become profitable after being published for a longer period of time.

Back when I first became a professional freelance writer, I spent a lot of time reading about how to make money online. I read pretty much every big make money online blogger out there and a lot of the smaller ones too. In fact, one of the reasons I started Make Money Writing Online was that almost all of those blogs, websites, and experts were focused on making money on the web with tricks, secrets, link building, SEO, article spinning, and so on. Very few, if any of them took the angle of how could a talented writer use their skills to earn money with writing online.

That does not mean that none of those sites about earning money online had nothing to offer. In fact, quite the opposite. Many of the search engine optimization tips, the keyword tricks, and the explanations about what makes money, what doesn’t make money, and how to get started earning money online, were very useful to helping me get my freelance writing business started. In addition, those same tips gave me some insight into how to build my own websites and online properties in a way that could generate passive income for me in order to compliment how much I earn as a freelance writer.

To Make Money With HubPages Do All The Steps

One of the more intriguing writers I used to read went relatively quiet not long after I found them and read through their massive archive of writing information and web income strategies. More accurately, they created a for-pay service called the Keyword Academy which based on what I have heard is relatively successful. And, while I certainly do not begrudge anyone who finds a way to earn money from their talents, I do miss having more frequent updates from them, primarily because I learned that what is said on that website tends to be true, whether it is popular or not.

Court (who I go back and forth about whether male or female, so forgive the pronouns if I get them wrong) turned me onto HubPages last year with the idea that writing a critical mass of good Hubs could:

• a) Provide useful backlinks to other webpages and properties in order to increase their value and visibility in search engine results pages, or SERPs;
• b) Actually provide their own revenue stream via the AdSense sharing program that HubPages uses to allow authors to monetize their earnings.

Apparently Court has gotten some criticism / complaints / whiners about whether or not HubPage is a good way to earn money online. In response, she posted an article titled How to Improve Your HubPages Earnings. Her primary contention in the article is that too many people do not do “all of the steps” required to generate profits from HubPages.

The best part is the analogy used of driving around the block. Basically, if you drive out of your driveway and turn right, you have drive to the next turn and then turn right again four more times before returning home. You cannot stop after fewer turns and expect to have accomplished your goal. If you stop too soon, your only real hope is to try and use hot girls to get more HubPages traffic.

Many writers trying to make money online by writing, whether on HubPages or elsewhere, Court says, stop before doing everything required in order to earn money with writing. It’s an interesting read, and if you are having trouble making money with HubPages, probably a good start.

However, like many make money online articles, it makes a lot of assumptions, and leaves out a lot of details. Not that is in any way insufficient. There is simply too much to cover in a single article of a reasonable length. Just covering the barest of basics about HubPages SEO Tips could take a handful of posts.

However, I thought I would help address one point and that is the issue of building links to promote your hubs. Don’t over think this. You aren’t trying to get your Hubs to rank #1 on Google for a hugely profitable keyword. (You should be doing that on your own websites instead of splitting the money with HubPages.) Remember that the whole point of using HubPages or eZine Articles or Squidoo or Associated Content and the like is to stand on the shoulders of their PageRank, so to speak. HubPages traffic volume gets hubs indexed fast without the writer having to do anything.

How To Link Promote Hubs on HubPages and Websites

In other words, you don’t need to build 900 backlinks to your Hubs in order to get anywhere. Frankly, if the topic isn’t too competitive, a dozen is enough to at least see what the Hub can do for you, or what it cannot do for you. Getting a dozen backlinks is not as hard as it sounds. You should already have a blog or website for your writing business. Throw a post up with some links there. Then add some bookmarks to Delicious or whatever you like, and then link some of your other Hubs to each new Hub and vice versa. Build a Squidoo Lens with links back to your Hubs and you should be well on your way.

At this point, watch your statistics and see which sites are attracting hits. Go out and give those sites another dozen links. Tweak the sites that are not getting any traffic and see if you can get them to build up some numbers. Once you have traffic, start watching your AdSense reports to see which hubs are generating revenue and then build secondary hubs that are related. Make sure to interlink them all.

Now, this won’t make you rich fast, or even earn $1,000 a month with HubPages, but it will give you a taste of what you can do, and that is what will push you to do the rest of those steps. A hub that I punched out with little research and just ten or so links about the best Chicago pizza now generates earnings despite having been all but abandoned months ago.

Once you see a hub generating $7.14 a day in AdSense earnings, it’s actually hard to NOT do more to make it perform better. Success is addictive. Don’t get caught up in an all or nothing mentality. Remember $10 a day in AdSense earnings is $300 a month in free money. Reinvest that money in your online writing business. Buy new domains, pay for better webhosting, get a notebook to write anyplace, anytime, whatever you need to keep going.

Before you know it, you’ll be making the decision about whether to quit your job and become a full-time Internet entrepreneur.

The HubPages experiment continues. Check out some of my best Hubpages Hubs here.

I hate to say it, but I’ve been sucked in by the whole HubPages concept. For those of you who are not familiar with HubPages, it is an article directory that allows anyone to author webpages using a web-based template. It’s closest competitor is Squidoo, although I find Squidoo a chore, and HubPages a little too much fun.

What makes HubPages so addicting for a professional writer is that the interface is remarkably simple to use and the output generated in the form of a published “Hub” or webpage is attractive and compelling. Additionally, I have yet to have the interface crash on me and cause me to lose any work, which means that I feel comfortable typing directly into the web forms instead of being compelled to type into a text editor like Notepad++ or Word and the copy and paste the results. This makes writing Hubs much faster than on less “trustworthy” platforms.

Still, to reach the full potential of HubPages, one needs to generate more traffic on their webpages or Hubs. There are two ways to go about this within the context of the HubPages system.

The first method to attract more Internet traffic to your website hubs is to get a higher HubRank or Author Score on hubpages. This provides two main benefits. One benefit is that once a writer has a HubRanking over 75, their backlinks have the HubPages nofollow tag removed which means that the links from HubPages actually pass their “link juice” on to the site they link to.

The other important benefit is that HubPages displays “other” articles or hubs to its visitors whether they are Hubbers (hub authors) or just regular internet users directed to HubPages via a search engine. Needless to say, appearing more often in these lists of articles increases the odds of people clicking on your links and visiting your own hubs. Ideally, that visit leads them to read more of your stuff, and eventually bookmark, share, or become a fan of your websites.

Today, when I logged on to HubPages I had an author score of 93. Since one component of any HubRank is “random,” according to HubPages documentation, there is no way of knowing how much of that score is “real” versus how much might be a pumped up random number. However, a 93 is pretty good either way.

Unfortunately, there are many Hubbers with scores of 98,99, and yes even the top score of 100.

How To Get HubRank 100

Getting all the way to a HubRank of 100 takes full participation in the HubPages community. Fortunately, that is pretty easy to achieve, even if you only want to “fake it.”

Commenting on other Hubs, making a few posts in the Forums, and publishing a new hub every now and then is sufficient to qualify as “full participation.” The only thing left to do is have enough traffic, fans, or commenters to get the rest of the algorithm up to the top.

Assuming one is writing quality content for publishing hubs, and that one is not interested in pandering to the lowest common denominator by writing dozens of hubs about hot actresses or pretending to be a hot housewife writing about her underwear, then the only two possibilities for driving increased traffic to the webpages for the sake of increasing the author score are a) building more links to hubs, or b) writing more hubs.

Since the point of my experiment with HubPages is to generate links OUT to my stuff, taking the effort to do anything more than the most basic backlinking to Hubs seems counter-intuitive. Therefore, the solution for most writers looking to earn money writing online is to produce more hubs.

Like I said, generating new hubs can be a quick process for an experienced writer. Assuming that a topic is in mind and the author is already a sufficient subject expert to write on the subject, it is entirely possible to write quality Hubs in 20 minutes or less.

In the past I have attempted to writer 30 Hubs in 30 Hours. However, this schedule leaves no room for error. Since I am unwilling to take any precious time off in order to ensure success, I looked for a new idea that would fulfil the objective of publishing a lot of hubs fast but have some more flexibility.

The result?

The Turbo Lightning HubChallenge!

Publishing 100 Hubs in 10 Days. The additional hubs will generate their own traffic and as a bonus compliment the traffic already being driven to my websites via HubPages.

To go all out, I have decided to sell-out this time, as well. I’ll be writing hubs on the most common “high traffic” or “high search volume” topics. After all, it isn’t like I’m building a whole website to compete for a single high CPC keyword with massive competition. If it turns out that the Hub works at drawing traffic, I’ll have an insiders look at what works for that search term.

If not, the hubs will still draw the eyeballs of visitors already floating around the HubPages community who happen to see a Hub about the best new free techniques for whitening teeth, looking younger, losing weight, and getting government grants for plastic surgery for hot housewives. (Oh, yeah. Now THAT is keyword stuffing!)

Will it work?

Find out. Grab the Make Money Writing Online Feed so you don’t miss a thing.

Not long ago, Google introduced the concept of certified third-party ad networks to the AdSense program. These advertisers are approved by Google and then permitted to display their ads on websites within the Google advertising network. AdSense publishers were understandably concerned that these certified networks might not generate as good of ads or as high of click through rate as the Google Ad Network.

On one forum, many webmasters were discussing blocking all Google Certified Ad Networks from running ads on their websites. Some publishers went so far as to say that they had seen their AdSense revenue drop after the third-party ads were first allowed. Some of these same website owners and blog publishers claimed that after blocking the certified ad networks that their AdSense revenue increased back to previous levels.

At this point, one of Google’s unofficial spokesman appeared on the forum and said that whatever they were seeing, it wasn’t likely related to the third-party ads because Google was rolling them out "very slowly" and that it was likely that no certified ad network advertisers were displaying any ad results on their websites yet.

Since Google AdSense is one of the easiest ways to earn money writing online, this is a very important issue for those of use who write our own websites to generate ongoing passive income for the long-term.

Is It Google or Is It Google Certified Ad Network Advertising?

Finding out who the owner of an AdSense ad is, is never easy. It takes a bunch of finesse and a little determination to figure it out. This is because clicking on your own ads to see where they go is a violation of Google AdSense Terms and Conditions, and it is one they take very seriously. Getting banned from AdSense for life is a common penalty for clicking your own ads.

However, there is a way to tell if some ads are third-party ads instead of official Google ads using Firefox and the NoScript Plug-in.

Set the No-Script Plug-in to allow all Google and Doubleclick domains to run Javascript on your website. If you use an ad blocking plug-in like AdBlock Plus you’ll have to allow them in its settings too. Do not allow any of the third-party domains.

Now, whenever you load your own site, whether to check on things or update content, if you see an ad, then it is a Google AdWords advertising network ad. If you see a blocked symbol instead, then you know it is a third party ad. It is a crude but effective way to determine whose AdSense ad it is.

Looks like I got an ad from 2mdn.net… 

Hover your mouse of the stylized-f with a circle and the tool tip that appears will say where that blocked Javascript or blocked ad is from. Then, you have concrete proof that Google Certified Ad Networks are displaying ads on your websites. If your AdSense earnings have fallen at that point, you can reasonably suspect that your website is not benefitting from the additional advertiser competition that Google has been touting as the primary benefit for allowing third-party ads on your website.

Get thee to your Google AdSense manager and block those ads. Whether you block all of the third-party ad networks or just the ones that seem to be appearing and lowering your AdSense earnings is a judgment call.

*****

*****

Am I just that jaded, or am I just that observant?

Recently, I have been experimenting with writing Hubs at HubPages. For those of you who are not familiar with HubPages, it is basically one of those sites where you can write whatever you want and publish it on their website for free. Of course, they don’t pay you either, but that is the price you pay for unmoderated access to their huge, and subsequently, semi-high ranking domain. (Technically, your Hub could be flagged and then taken down if it was truly terrible, but pretty much anything resembling a partial effort at writing something useful or entertaining passes muster.)

Anyway, one of the important things to know is that your links are nofollowed by HubPages unless your writer’s score, or HubRank is above 75. It is actually pretty easy, it seems, to get your score above 75 as long as you write six or seven half-way decent hubs and participate a little bit in the "HubPages community." That is a fancy way of saying you should leave a comment or two on some Hubs every now and then so that you are "active."

This also has the side effect of putting a link to your profile on someone else’s Hubs by way of your comment. Obviously, maximizing the value of this link requires commenting on popular Hubs early so that your comment is near the top where it has a chance of being read, and that the Hub itself is read by enough people so that if a small percentage of them click, that adds up to something worthwhile in the way of visitors to your HubPages profile page.

HubPages, perhaps unintentionally, helps you in this endeavor by showing you some of the top ranking people who publish Hubs, called Hubbers. These people are shown across the screen from time to time as featured authors. Some of them are very prolific and some of them write very good stuff, unfortunately, the two do not always coincide. Being a featured author is at least partially a function of your PageRank which is a function of how much you publish, how much traffic those Hubs get, as well as how many people comment on them, and how man "fans" you have.

I’ve noticed that a higher than expected proportion of highly ranked authors are very attractive women, or at least their profile pictures are sexy pictures of hot girls. I cannot say whether or not those pictures are accurate representations of those writers. However, I can say, that I know men, and in particular, the kind of men who would write for a free publication website are prone to clicking on those links and articles which appear to have something to do with attractive women.

To that end, I popped up on a free stock photography site and found an alluring picture of an attractive woman and change my characteristic blue llama graphic in the profile to the picture of the pretty girl. The stats at HubPages are not real-time and I’m not completely sure how much of delay there is in reporting the number of visitors to your Hubs. Regardless, I expect my traffic to increase in the next day or two. How much it increases will determine whether I’m just a jaded author wondering what makes some people get more hits, or whether only a fool uses something other than a pretty woman for their profile picture.

Any guesses?

There is a lot of misinformation out there about search engine rankings and how they are determined. Most SEO advice is based on a paper published by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were students at Stanford, and the subsequent patent application made regarding the same. The catch is that the algorithm contained in those documents is over a decade old. Google has updated their search ranking algorithm thousands of times since then.

While the methodology published in the original Google patent application and other documents no doubt remains the basis of Google’s search rankings, there can be no question that the simplified version often given as the basis for SEO activities is very out of date.

What Is PageRank?

Essentially, the basics of this original search ranking methodology involved a site passing "link juice" to each page it links to. The power of that link juice is determined by the original page’s authority, as measured by its PageRank, which is in turn derived based upon how many pages and of what authority link to original page. This outgoing link juice is then divided evenly over all outgoing links. All of this results in a numerical value, or other ranking, which then leads directly to the results listed for any given search, and the order of the search result rankings for that search.

At first, it sounds complicated, but just a moment or two of study brings into clarity the fact that this particular algorithm is pretty simple, especially for a computer.

In fact, the original Google algorithm displayed here would be both very easy to copy, and very easy to abuse. As Microsoft’s repeated efforts at crafting a search engine have shown, it is actually not easy to duplicate Google’s quality of search results. After failing with both MSN Search, and Live Search, Microsoft finally launched a new search engine called Bing. Microsoft’s Bing strategy has been not to duplicate Google’s level of quality in search results, but rather to shake up the user interface so as to increase the likelihood that a user will perform a search which is more easily interpreted.

When it comes to the various methods of abusing the Google search engine, as most often referenced as "black-hat SEO", Google has entire teams of people working to thwart their efforts. Matt Cutts is one of Google’s most public engineers thanks to his long running blog. He is also the head of the so-called Webspam Team, whose job it is to prevent junk webpages from clogging up the company’s search engines. As a full-time engineer who heads up a "team" of people, one can only assume that the efforts that take place in this arena are substantial. Each action they take has the potential to render numerous forms of "white-hat SEO" techniques worthless, or at least worth much less that they once were.

PageRank Reality Check and SEO Myths

One recent example was Matt’s blog post in which he made a few very important points.

First, that Google has drastically changed how it interpreted the only recently launched nofollow tag after another Google team, the Search Quality team, determined that webmasters were setting nofollow tags on links to valuable webpages in order to "channel" the link juice to certain, most likely more valuable, webpages. This practice, known as link sculpting, was actively recommended by virtually all SEO experts and Search Engine Optimization consultants right up the very minute the post debunking it as an effective technique was published.

Second, Matt commented that it was necessary for him to publicly and blatantly announce the change in treatment for the nofollow link tag because the people who research and test such things had NOT NOTICED. Not only that, but with a throw away statement a few sentences earlier, he noted that they had also not noticed other bigger changes made by Google to its search engine ranking system.

Third, before getting into the specifics of this particular announcement, Mr. Cutts re-iterated the basic version of the search algorithm used all over the Internet as outlined above. Then, he said that in 2000 when he joined the company that Google was doing "more sophisticated link computation" than was shown by the original PageRank papers that everyone quotes. In other words, this is NOT the way the Google search algorithm works anymore.

Modern Search Engine Optimization

The reason that SEOs and other Internet Gurus continue to espouse the old version of authority and PageRank is that it appears to still work. That is, if you look at a small enough subset of pages and you compare them to a similarly small subset of pages based upon another small set of factors, then yes, the old model explains things nicely.

However, like the Newtonian Model of physics, there are a great many things that cannot be explained by the long standing theory. I have personally seen webpages with a PageRank of 4 with no incoming links except for the Blogroll links of 3 or 4 websites that have nothing but a PageRank 2 landing page and the rest PageRank 0 pages.

It doesn’t take long messing around with any of the SEO toolbars out there to notice that a PageRank 3 site will outrank a PageRank 5 site even if both have all of the standard "onsite SEO" things setup right and the PageRank 5 webpage has more incoming links.

So, what does this all mean?

If you want to go out and build a bunch of quick throw together websites and then use SEO techniques to try and push them up high in the search results and watch the money start rolling in, your only hope is to go with the tried and true, Link Juice + PageRank + Backlinks model and hope for the best. Just don’t be surprised when it doesn’t seem to work for you as well as it does for "everyone else."

If, on the other hand, you want to earn money by writing online, then start building websites about topics you enjoy writing about. Write plenty of content and THEN see if there is any traction there to make money with ads or by selling things online. If so, then give yourself a high-five and keep writing, especially on those high paying topics and their keywords.

If it turns out that this particular passion does not have any future as a money making enterprise, then keep writing about it for fun. You never know if or when what you are writing becomes a hotter topic or just finds an audience.

But, and this is the important part that so many writers who fail to make money by writing websites forget, you also have to move on and create a new website. Fill that one up with quality content and see how that works out. Yes, things like keyword research can help give you an educated guess at what will and will not pay off, but in the end, there are just too many variables to know for sure. So, keep writing, and watch for your opportunities to arise. When they do, hit ‘em and hit ‘em hard.