This is a question that has been a subject of much speculation recently, especially with Yahoo performing poorly in recent times.

In my opinion, I have to say in no uncertain terms: NO, NO and THRICE NO!

Once upon a time, Yahoo could be said to have the best search engine there was – until along came Google and not only created a better one, it did everything so well that people now “Google for things” – the word “Google” is most definitely in the modern dictionary.

Now if it was just about search engines, absorbing Yahoo into Google might not be a bad thing at all, but there is a lot more to Yahoo than just the search engine, and here is where a lot of the problems lie.

As far as search engine popularity, Google has dropped from 85% in 2009, to 83% in 2010 and 79% in 2011.  Yahoo has gone from 7% in 2009, to 6% in 2010 and risen slightly to 9% in 2011.  The main rival to both of these, Microsoft’s Bing has gone from just 3% in 2009, to 7% in 2010 and currently stands at 9% in 2011.

While this looks as if Google is losing market share and Yahoo is gaining, there are some factors behind this that ought to be considered.  Firstly, Bing is a relatively new search engine, and it’s rise in popularity has almost certainly had an effect on Google.  Secondly, the algorithm change that Google underwent early in 2011 (known as “Panda”) hit many sites hard, especially Yahoo, and some users of Yahoo in particular have moved away from using Google more as a boycott than because they prefer the functionality in Yahoo.  The extent to which this move remains firm will probably be seen by 2012, and I personally expect to see a slow move back to Google.

But aside from the search engines, Google is well known and respected for Google Maps, Google Earth, Blogger, YouTube, Google Mail and the latest offering Google Plus.

None of these products are known to have major problems across the whole Internet community.  Practically anything that Google releases works, and works all the time as well, without crashes or errors.  The name Google is synonymous with quality products.

This is sadly far from the truth when it comes to Yahoo, and it’s publishing arm, the Yahoo Contributor Network seems to exhibit more errors than most systems do during a Beta testing phase.

Since purchasing the Internet publishing company Associated Content in May 2010, the problems that writers who contribute to Yahoo publishing sites have just gone from bad to worse.

While Associated Content had it’s share of programming bugs, they were usually dealt with fairly quickly and the system was fairly reliable. 

Within months of Yahoo taking over, they replaced certain parts of the system with code that was so broken, junior programmers would be red-faced by it.

The fact that Yahoo articles do not rank well in Google since the algorithm change is just another slap in the face for Yahoo, but truth be known the slip in traffic began months before that and soon after yahoo took over the company.

Recent problems that most people in IT would consider extremely embarrassing in a live environment include (a) the wrong day of the week being displayed for statistics, and (b) links in RSS Feeds being incorrectly formatted.

The wrong day of the week only took weeks for Yahoo to fix, whereas the RSS Feed issue has been ongoing for a good 10 months and currently has no due date for it to be fixed.

With RSS Feeds being a major way in which articles are propagated across the Internet, and a source of backlinks and traffic for articles, the fact that Yahoo seems incapable to fix something which ought to help boost it’s traffic, rankings and earnings, is a little worrying.

In summary therefore, should Google, a company that is known to create software that is reliable, buy Yahoo, a company that is becoming increasingly known for it’s incapacity to achieve this?  My answer – most definitely NO!

Google would be far better creating it’s own systems that would compete with Yahoo, than to take over those which are so full of bugs as to be a corporate embarrassment.

In case you were wondering, YES I am a big fan of Google.  I have used many of their products and found few problems.  In many ways (such as built in conversions and translations in their browser) Google are one step ahead of the user, adding features that are really useful and easy to use.

I have been writing for Yahoo Contributor Network and previously for Associated Content since January 2010, and seen traffic to my articles rise dramatically until Yahoo implemented it’s first major changes, and then the slide began.

You can find my articles HERE – I doubt you will find many of them easily in Google.  You are more likely to find where I have added them to Digg or blogged about them than to find the original articles.  And as for the RSS feeds – some readers do correctly fix the links, but others don’t.

Google’s claim is that it is trying to lower the relevance of “Content Farms” in it’s search engine, but if like me you are a writer on the Yahoo Contributor Network (or YCN for short), you will have seen traffic to your articles drop as much as 70% in the last few months.

It’s easy to see that Yahoo articles are either not listed, or listed low in the list of pages, if you search on Google for the exact phrase “News From A Weird World”.  This is a series that I have published on YCN every Wednesday for the last 15 months.  If you look at the domains that are showing up in Google, it’s places where links to my articles have either been added manually by myself, or have been added through RSS Feeds.

The first site that I see is Redgage, where I manually added a link to the article.

Then there are 2 links to Delovesto.com, my main blog, where I also add links to these manually.

Thirdly, we have my blog on Blogspot, where I sometimes add links manually.

Next, She Told Me, which is an Adsense Revenue Sharing site where I share many of my articles.

Then we come to The Laughline, my humor site, where you guessed it, I manually added a link to my articles.

Are we seeing a picture here?

Next comes Zimbio, where links to all my articles are submitted via RSS Feed.

After this is a Squidcast (news item) that I sent out about my Squidoo lens that is an index page for News From A Weird World.  Google does by the way love Squidoo.

Finally, a single entry for YCN at the end of the first page of Google, and it’s for an older article published in February.

The second page on Google lists 2 entries from Digg,  2 more from Zimbio, one from Stumpedia (manual submission), and then one from Qondio, another writing site where I had written an article about Offbeat News items and linked to my News From A Weird World lens on Squidoo.

Another entry for Delovesto.com and one for Redgage.com completes the second page on Google.

But where are the remaining 60+ News From A Weird World articles that I published on YCN?

The third page on Google begins with my Squidoo lens Offbeat News, the predecessor of News From A Weird World, then Zimbio, Redgage, and several sites that copy the introduction to articles but do at least link to the main article instead of plagiarizing them.

Finally on this page, a ca.news.yahoo.com search page that no longer exists.  Bizarre!  All of these come before all but one of my original articles on YCN.

The good news is that there are 2 more listings for News From A Weird World from YCN on the fourth page of Google, but who is going to look that far down?  Also on that page are what looks like more plagiarized versions.

In total, only 3 or 4 out of 60 of the original articles seem to be included on Google, which is really poor.

Many other writers are experiencing the same thing, so maybe it’s time to look at writing elsewhere, somewhere that my articles do get well listed on Google, and I think that this list shows very well which some of these sites might be.

There are more ways than one to earn money from writing.   You can get an up front payment (nice to have), payment based on traffic (which is what I have mostly been getting from YCN), and you can earn from Affiliate links and advertising like Google Adsense (which I do on my blogs, as well as on other sites where my articles are to be found.

At the end of the day the key is TRAFFIC!  Without traffic you aren’t going to see earnings, and traffic is very much dependent on search engine placement.

If the site that you are writing on is getting penalized by Google, then no matter how good the SEO is on your articles, traffic will suffer.

I would definitely be interested to hear feedback from anyone else who is a writer and who is experiencing similar problems.  It’s always good to know places to write where search engine listing is good, and where earnings are generally better.

If you would like to become a friend of our blog, please Join using the Google Friend Connect option at the bottom of the rightmost sidebar.

Looking forward to seeing you there.
Tony

I have been using Adsense for over a year now, and the month by month experience does teach you a lot, however my current earnings are at best $100 a month, and that frankly isn’t good enough, it won’t support me, however $100 a day would at least help to cover much of my expenses.

I am sorry if you thought that this article was going to be the Golden Egg, the secret to wealth and fortune, BUT don’t leave yet, since my aim here is to share my knowledge with you as I learn more and try different techniques to increase my earnings.

So what is the secret to earning a lot of money with Google Adsense?

Well, ultimately it’s getting enough people to click on links on your web site / blog, but it’s a lot more complicated than that.

To get clicks you need traffic.   Yes T-R-A-F-F-I-C.    The clicks won’t come unless you have visitors.    Now these visitors must also be interested in what you have to offer, and it has to look interesting from the start and load fast, otherwise they will leave a page even quicker than they arrived,  and that does you absolutely no good at all.

“Oh great” you might say, all I need is to just get enough decent traffic, enough clicks from my visitors, and I am all set.

WRONG!

It’s still not that easy…

Clicks are not all worth the same, and I wish I knew the secret as to which ones are worth more than others.  The truth is, that while you might get a click that is worth $2, you might also get 20 clicks that are only worth $0.01 each.    I have had quite a few days where I only had a handful of clicks, and I made more than those days where I had 40 or 50 clicks which totalled less than $1.

So the question is, “How do I try to get better value clicks?”

It’s all based on keywords.

Different topics are worth different amounts, and advertisers pay a higher price to get their adverts in front of you for certain topics.

Take Credit Cards for example, or Mortgages.   These are two examples of higher paying keywords.

Well, now we know the theory of what you need to do, (a) get the right traffic to your site, (b) make the page design and advert look/placement attractive to maximise clicks, and (c) gear the page to higher paying keywords.

If you can get 100 clicks a day that is a good start, but at 1cent each, that’s only $1 total!  If they pay an average of $1 each, there is your $100.

That’s the lesson for today.  I am working on taking this to the next stage by focusing on traffic.   You can have a brilliant design that is perfectly optimised, but without traffic it’s worth nothing.   Equally traffic without clicks doesn’t pay, but traffic does get you noticed and affects your search engine rankings.

Please bookmark this page, or better, subscribe to our blog Off The Record and get notified when new blog posts are created.

From a description alone you might think that Tagfoot is just another site like Digg or Stumbleupon, but aside from being able to bookmark pages, there the similarity ends.  The whole interface and experience is something else.

With Tagfoot you can bookmark different types of items, including  news, photographs and videos.  There is even a facility to build your own wishlist (more about this later).  Maybe you would like to let the world know about your blog or website, your photographs, the latest funny video you found on You Tube, or a news headline .   This is the place to do it.

You can share anything with other members.

Over time you can build up a list of friends on Tagfoot who have similar interests.  Members tag themselves to identify things that they are interested in, and when you bookmark an item you have the ability to share it with friends, either by name, or by specifying various tags.

Tagfoot is a wonderful online community made up of diverse, vibrant, fun and interesting people of all ages from all around the world. There’s quite a following from Squidoo and Hubpages on there, plus from other social networking sites as well.

This is the fun part…

Once items have been shared with other members, you can comment on them and rate them. We have some fantastic, side splitting conversations as well as more serious ones too. The more you interact with others on Tagfoot, the more you will gain from it. It’s not just about promoting your own stuff. It’s also about helping out others.

If you like an item that someone has shared, you can opt to give it a Foot-Up, which tells the person who bookmarked it that you like this type of item.  You can also foot comments on items up or down.   The more you bookmark, share, comment on or foot up, the higher your footing.  The Tagfoot home page shows you your rank or footing and it’s fun to rise up the charts as you find more things of interest to comment on.

Now, here’s the clever part…

If you have a Google Adsense account or an Amazon affiliate account, you can earn money on Tagfoot.

Add at least ten items each to your bookmarks, news, videos and wishlist, and you can then apply to ‘Support’ to have your Google Adsense account linked into your Tagfoot account. Adsense adverts are displayed on every page, and a percentage of these will be for your account.  So the more interesting and diverse your bookmarks, the higher the chance of you earning something from the clickouts.

And there is more to come…

If you have an Amazon account, you can add items from Amazon to your Wishlist and tag them.  There is a Widget that you can configure to select Wishlist items that match given tags, and you can display these items on your web page or blog using the Widget.  This will drive people to Tagfoot and if they buy – well I think you get the picture.  You can see an example of the Tagfoot Widget at the top right of this page.

Do you Twitter?

Twitter is rapidly becoming the site to be on, with millions of tweets being sent out daily.  There is an interface from Tagfoot to Twitter so that having bookmarked a page, shared a page or footed an item, you can opt to have a notification sent to your Twitter account.  Cool eh…  Add Twitter to your Tagfoot account and you get a shiny Twitfoot badge.

Tagfoot is spam free

There’s no spam on Tagfoot, or at least if someone attempts to spam it’s soon discovered and reported. You decide who to accept on your friends list and if they get too heavy with the shares they send you, you have a variety of options to control what you receive.   Tagfoot has it’s own police force, a select group of elite members called Bigfeet, who constantly monitor postings to ensure that everything is running smoothly and that nobody abuses the system, either by posting spam or illegal material, or by oversharing their posts.  Guess what?  If you achieve the elite status of Bigfoot, you get another shiny badge on your profile.

So what do you think?

Hopefully this description of Tagfoot has got you curious.  Even better by now if your curiosity has got so aroused you already clicked on a link and checked it out.  If by this time you are still not sure about Tagfoot, all I can say is that both of us have been members for a few months and we wholeheartedly endorse it.  We have learned a lot, laughed a lot, and met a lot of great new people.  So what are you waiting for?

I hope that you will take a look at Tagfoot, sign up and become a participating member.  Certainly if you have your own websites or blogs, this is a great place to give them more exposure to the world.  We would love to hear from you to know what you think, so please leave us a comment if you have anything to say, or indeed if you have any questions we can answer for you.

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