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Like a cowboy that never killed any indians, received no key’s to the city, or made it’s way into the hearts of profit searching webmasters, Google Referrals is finally riding off into the sunset.  Of course, since Google Referrals never worked for anything, their depart isn’t as dramatic as a cowboy riding off into the sunset.  In fact, I’ve used Google Referrals and despite getting quite a few clicks, that never turned into a cent of profit.  First they had a little red line of text at the top of the adsense control panel, and then they sent out an email to it’s users.

For those of you who don’t know what Google Referrals are, they’re somewhat similar to Clickbank, Click Junction, or Amazon.  You’re supposed to get paid whenever signs up for a product that you refer them to, through google.  Unfortunately for google, that wasn’t working out as they’d planned, and they decided to just shut it down.  Atleast they’re giving us notice, so we have plenty of time to remove the adsense referrals from our sites.

Note: Referrals will be retired during the last week of August 2008.

Luckily I only have 1 unsuccessful page that contains a referral button.  Battle of the Browsers never really saw the light of day anyways though.

You may have been under the impression that submitting your website to hundreds of search engines could boost your organic traffic, and improve your rankings in the long run. Then again, you know that it would take hours to submit your site to hundreds of search engines, and anything other than manual submission is out of the question. When search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN are dominating the search engine market because of their ability to automatically index new websites, you might wonder what the point of suggesting a url is anyways.

The biggest search engines of them all, Google, along with Yahoo and MSN are constantly searching the web for new websites and pages to index. LookLinkLove was actually indexed days after it’s creation because of links pointed towards it from popular websites. The common misconception of most people have is that suggesting a url will help get your site listed sooner. On the contrary though, suggesting a url just puts that website in a queue to be indexed behind thousands of other websites. That’s why sites like Google say that it make take up to 6 weeks for a site to be reviewed and indexed.

It’s easiest for you to just allow your site to be indexed naturally. If you were to link to a new site in your signature at a popular forum like Digitalpoint, then google’s spiders would follow the links back to your site and index it pronto. Basically, there is no need for you to suggest a url to your website, unless it was formerly blacklisted by google and the content has since changed.

Listed Downsides:

• Puts your site in the back of a six week queue
• Wastes your time
• A lot more complicated than just putting a link in your forum signatures
• Completely pointless?

Sorry for this short post, just consider it a quick tip sort of thing. Now you’re aware that submitting your site to search engines is probably one of the most pointless SEO tactics.

In a perfect world, only the websites people like would be at the top of the search engine results. In a perfect world, webmasters would focus only on building up their content so that people wanted to read it. In a perfect world, Search Engine Optimization Does. Not. Exist. Google is trying harder and harder to stop webmasters from gaming their websites to the top of the search engines. I’m assuming that they’ll never be able to completely end webmaster’s ability to purchase success.

A friend brought this to my attention when he told me that most webmaster’s were spammers. Buying, selling, and trading links are all against google’s wishes. Though Google is not the law of the internet, they’re plenty powerful to make it seem so. As far as I’m concerned, Google is right to deem the actions of certain webmasters’ wrong, or right.

Think about it, if the websites with the best content were at the top of all your search results, you and everyone else would get the information they really wanted. Unfortunately for your search for greater knowledge, depending on a webmaster’s ability to get people to link to him, he’s able to put any site he wants at the top of the search results. To me, it’s spam when you put a link on your site just because you were paid to.

Don’t get me wrong though, I have no problem profiting from people advertising on my website. Google does it with their contextual advertising company, Text-Link-Ads does it, Kontera does it, John Chow Does it, and so do many other websites. I feel so redundant right now I think I should end this post, but I’m ending it knowing you’ll see SEO in a new light. If you see the flaws of your old disgusting SEO habits, then repent, and try social networking. Since only the good stuff really gets popular, it’s not as spammy as Search Engine Optimization.