Somehow I found the time over the last few days to watch the three free traffic videos by John Reese. These videos were released to promote his Traffic Secrets 2.0 course, which is launching this week.

The videos are high-quality but very simple, mostly John talking to the camera… you can listen to them while doing something else. The first video discusses a traffic strategy called “results detection”, which is essentially figuring out what other people are doing to get traffic and then doing something similar using that research. He gives several examples of how to do this for search engine rankings, getting to the first page on Digg, etc.

The second video is all about “owning a larger piece of the Internet”, i.e. creating and distributing content. The “trick” here is to write lots of content in batches and let it trickle out slowly, using syndication to get it distributed far and wide. By doing it in batches you free up time to do other things, instead of being a slave to your daily blog posts…

The third video is about generating traffic by creating software: toolbars, WordPress plugins, online calculators, etc. Reese considers this to be an underused traffic generation method.

None of this is earth-shattering information, but it’s well presented and it might be a useful refresher. AdSense publishers will find the second video the most interesting, of course, since AdSense is all about content monetization.

Note that everything he talks about requires work. There are no magic bullets, which is a nice change from other books and courses I’ve seen. I can’t comment on how good the Traffic Secrets 2.0 course is, since I haven’t seen it, but if the videos reflect the quality of the information in the package then it’s probably decent value. The price tag’s high, but it’s delivered as a physical product (12 DVDs and various workbooks) and not just a series of downloads. (It’s much cheaper than the original course, BTW.)

Aside: Anyone know of any good WordPress plugins for easily editing old posts? I have to make some changes to this blog as part of my depenalization effort, but the thought of editing all those posts through the standard WordPress admin console is not a happy thought…

Yesterday I mentioned how I disabled text link ads on this site… a reader had a question that I thought deserved a proper answer in a separate post instead of as a comment. Here’s what was asked:

do you mean by that company text-link-ads [DOT… you know]?
Or do you mean something else? doesn’t google adsense itself provide text link ads? what about things like for CJ products/advertisers — is that also verboten now?

The text link ads I was referring to are essentially paid links that pass PageRank. Google doesn’t like paid links when those links are used to influence search engine results. Matt Cutts has discussed this for a long time:

What if a site wants to buy links purely for visitor click traffic, to build buzz, or to support another site? In that situation, I would use the rel=”nofollow” attribute. The nofollow tag allows a site to add a link that abstains from being an editorial vote. Using nofollow is a safe way to buy links, because it’s a machine-readable way to specify that a link doesn’t have to be counted as a vote by a search engine.

Essentially, Google wants you to either use “nofollow” on your paid links or use links that are generated dynamically when the page is loaded via JavaScript. (The latter kind of links don’t pass PageRank because the web crawlers don’t actually “see” them.) AdSense ads are done using the latter, for example.

The key is to avoid services that sell “dofollow” links. Google is penalizing sites that use such links.

I’ve taken the first steps to getting Google to depenalize this blog. They were:

1. Removed text link ads. I had some text link ads sprinked in a few places. It made me a bit of money, but not enough to offset the penalization IMHO. I’ve disabled the ads and removed this site from the ad marketplace entirely.
2. Turned off comments on older posts. I installed the Comment Timeout plugin to disable commenting on posts older than 15 days. The plugin is pretty flexible, it lets you keep active posts open for longer as long as commenting is occurring.
3. Went through and cleaned up ALL existing comments. This took a while, but I went through all the comments on this blog and removed the few spammy ones that had managed to squeak past both Akismet and me. BTW, I’ve concluded that Chuck Brown leaves the longest, densest, most insightful comments!

The next step is to run through the blog’s content and put “nofollow” on any disreputable and/or affiliate links. That will definitely take a while.

My goal with this is to not only restore the site’s natural search engine rankings but also to give contributors the proper PR boost they deserve, otherwise what’s the point of having a “dofollow” blog? Right now, though, I don’t think any PR is being passed to the other sites.