I keep visiting a lot of websites that provide very good content, but fail badly on the usability side which can be improved with some work. And I felt that my websites can be seriously improved too, so I started learning about UX and then began some tests. Soon after I realized that Bounce Rate can be easily decreased and time on site consistently increased by just making some minor changes. So I started changing basically everything.

I will structure this post according to the steps I made in order to improve the UX ( user experience ) of my website and will also list most of the things I changed during the experiments. I will also state if the changes made affected my visitors actively or passively. I call passive changing the background colors, while active are the URL colors, font, size, or the clickable thumbnails.

What I changed

Passive:

• Site background
• Title size and font
• Font size and family ( tried Arial and Georgia )
• Font color ( from black to dark grey )
• Logo
• Location of images in the articles
• Website width ( Between 800px and 1020px )
• Loading speed
• Number of images
• Website clutter

Active:

1. Learning

2. Planning

3. Testing

4. Tracking

5. Understanding the analytics

Conclusion

Photo credit

So here’s how I see the whole situation. I don’t believe Google is not able to see who’s the original source and who just scrapes others’ content, because they were able to do it before Panda. Also it’s impossible to consider the scrapers and aggregators deserve to be placed ahead of the original sources. So maybe Google did this to make webmasters clean their websites, remove duplicate pages, quit spamming and improve content quality. They can keep this algorithm up for a few months until most of the websites are cleaned up and increase quality, so after that it will be much easier for Google to filter the results and become more relevant.

If this proves to be true, Google will lose all it’s credibility and it already started to, because legit businesses with quality content who relied on Google’s traffic can go bankrupt just because the search engine is playing with them. And from a company that everyone loved, Google becomes more hated than Microsoft, which surprisingly does a really good job lately. And we can see this in the search engine market share too, Microsoft and Yahoo are growing while Google is at best stalling.

Fortunately Bing is really relevant and at least in the last 3 months it has been much more relevant than Google, the latter being full of spam in the search results. And users don’t like crappy spam sites, which will make them switch sides. And I am pretty sure Google knows that, though they hope people will come back once it becomes more relevant, though some of them will be satisfied with Bing and will stay with them, because Microsoft doesn’t screw them how you do, Google.

If you still haven’t lost your trust in Google, let me give you one more reason to. Panda filters duplicate and low quality content, right ? Here’s an example of a scraper outranking Google’s own blog:

So Google considers that topsy.com is more relevant than their own blog for their own content. And I could continue with examples like this all day long. All of Google’s blogs are in the same situation, which is pretty shameful.

For the last 3 months, every webmaster started looking for solution to please the scary Panda, but there isn’t any good one, unfortunately, because it seems like if you have unique quality content you are not good enough for Google. Most scrapers copy the posts from websites’ RSS feeds, so a lot of webmasters shortened the feed to just 30-50 words with a backlink to the website and guess what. Scrapers who copy just that 30-50 words and also link to the original website still outrank it. It doesn’t matter the original website has a comprehensive 500 – 2000 words article, it’s still not as good as the short excerpt the scrapers copy. So no, there’s nothing you can do about it. The only one who can help you is Google and it will eventually restore the old algorithm, but nobody knows when or what they are going to do further.

If you still don’t believe Google does this on purpose, then please read their latest update on the Panda algorithm. There are some criteria websites must meet in order to please Google’s bot. And I wasn’t able to find a single one that scrapers or aggregators meet, though they still outrank the original sources.

Maybe you think I’m just another idiot that wants to begin a conspiratorial theory and if you do, please read the post again and try to find a better reason for what’s happening right now.

I find this frustrating and I believe Google really doesn’t care any more about its users and you can easily understand this if you spend a few minutes to look at the forum threads at the Google Support Forums ( I will provide you with some links later in this post ). I knew it takes too long to get an answer from Google, but I thought they answer fast at least when your company can be at risk because it’s main income can come from Google Adsense.

I have been an Adsense publisher for more than 5 years and had tens of millions of impressions along with a quite impressive revenue. During this time I haven’t broken the Adsense Terms once and I always contacted them when I wanted to do something that wasn’t specified very clearly in the agreement. Unfortunately they didn’t reply to me every time and I preferred to keep my account safe than risking getting my account disabled, which just happened without any reason.

The past 2 years I’ve contacted Google for about two dozen times for different inquiries, not necessarily related to Adsense, but also to other services including Google News, because I was a publisher. Like you expected, they only replied to a part of my emails and sometimes it took one or two months to get a reply from them. What frustrates me more is that Google is a huge company and definitely affords more employees that can take care of their users and clients needs.

Lately I became very interested about how Google Support works and how do they deal with emails from us, the users and, allow me to say, partners. Because that’s what we are, us, the Adsense publishers. We are Google’s partners and Google is treating us in an outrageous manner. Not only it takes too long until they reply to emails, but sometimes they do not reply at all and when they do, most of the time we receive automated and very vague emails that do not tell us anything. I know Google can’t tell us exactly how they deal with issues and they discover Agreement infringements, but we deserve some respect and a bit more transparency from them.

A very odd stuff that proves Google is really ignorant and doesn’t care about its users happened to me the past week, after my account has been disabled. Instead of receiving an email informing me about the issue and my disabled account, I received one newsletter from them and another reminder email. And please note that my account was disabled, so why would they send me Adsense newsletters ?

You can clearly view in the screenshot below that I received two emails from Adsense on March 23rd and March 25th, while my account was disabled.

On March 28th I found a form to re-send me a policy notification and I filled it in order to find out why I was banned. A day later I received a response from them and they again proved their lack of professionalism. You can see the content of the email below:

Instead of letting me know what happened and send me a clear email, they told me what I already knew, that my account is disabled. And these are the only emails I’ve received from Adsense since my account was disabled.

Now let me prove you that this is not an isolated situation and there are probably thousands or even tens of thousands of people like me who are ignored by Google and their support team. It only takes you a two minute visit on the “Disabled Accounts” section of Google’s Adsense Support Forums to see there are a lot of unsatisfied people who do not get any explanation or any kind of response from the Google team. And no, this isn’t the only section on Google’s Forums where you can see that. Other examples include the Google News Forum, Google Adsense Payments Forum, and more.

I could continue with examples about Google’s ignorance and lack of competence all day, but I will resume to a few more examples: This guy got banned though Adsense didn’t even check his website, this one has been waiting for a reply for more than a month.

Please spread the word and maybe Google will begin treating us in a fair way and stop ignoring us.

By Neil Patel.

2. 6 Things I Learned From Sifting Through 724 Blogger Emails

By Shoemoney.

3. 5 Beginner Blogging Mistakes

Must read if you’re a beginner. By Jonathan Volk.

4. 5 Ways To Network Your Way To Blogging Success

Some networking tips by Steve Roy

Changes aren’t big and it looks really good, in my opinion. Please let me know what do you think about it

P.S. For those who didn’t notice what’s changed, it’s the menu above. Now you can change your username directly from Google.com, log out or change your settings.

(Click for a bigger image)

An interesting post by Shoemoney.

2. Don’t Use Twitter Like a Wet Cracker

Joshu Thomas on some Twitter guidelines.

3. Essential SEO & SEM Tips for 2011 – A Comprehensive Collection

A must read post about SEO & SEM by Alek Jones.

4. The Way I Work: Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary Vaynerchuck tells us how he works.

5. Recommendations for Blog Commenting as a Marketing Strategy

Rand Fishkin writes about blog commenting and you should really read this.

You should first read my post 6 Sure-Fire Tricks That Will Make Your Posts Go Viral, where you can learn how to write the post. Afterwards read this post and learn how to promote it.

After you made sure to write a great post that people will love to share, you need to follow these rules:

1. Make sure it gets to at least 100 people

If your post will get to at least 100 people’s eyeballs, then chances are that at least a few of them will share it with their friends and it might get viral. Of course the chances of getting a lot of traffic increase with the amount of people who read it, so make sure to get it distributed to as many as you can.

2. The people it gets to need to be passionate about the niche

The above rule is valid only if your followers are passionate about the niche. Otherwise, they will just close the page and won’t share it with anyone. So that’s why is very important to get targeted traffic, followers and fans. Relevancy is more important than the quantity, always keep this in mind.

3. Share it on all your social profiles

Make sure to let all your friends, followers and fans know about your post. Also you can share the link a few times so you make sure everyone sees it. For better results, share it at different hours so you will cover all the time zones. Most links on Twitter are only seen in the first hour, so you need to make sure to share it at some hours most of your followers are online.

4. Email everyone

Like I told you already, you need to make profit of all the channels you have, so let anybody know about your killer post. Send an email to your mailing list, friends and other people you know who might be interested in your niche. Please note that I don’t advise you to make spam, just send the email to people who might be interested and you know are passionate about the niche. Also you shouldn’t send them emails very often, just do it when you have something really interesting.

5. Ask the people to vote it, share it or do anything you may need

When sending the emails and sharing it with your friends, you can ask them to share it further for you or vote it on the social media websites you’ve submitted it to, like Digg, Reddit, or StumbleUpon. Not everyone will do it, but there are some who like to help and will do it especially if they like it. Make sure not to disturb them very much about this. Only ask them once and understand if they don’t do it.

6. Ask people to comment on your social media submissions

Usually submissions with a few comments have more chances of getting voted that the others. This way people see that others are also interested about your post and might want to check it out. They might vote it and even comment too. Along with this, some social media websites count the comments too and it might influence the way your post reaches the front page. This is known especially on Digg and StumbleUpon, but it might work on others too. Also make sure the comments don’t look like they’ve been written just for this. The comments need to express something and be longer than just a few words. If you do have spammy comments, it might actually hurt your submission.

7. Always ask for your readers’ opinion

I’ve told you a few times before, you always have to make your readers and followers engage with you, so ask for their opinion about your post. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad feedback, it stirs even more engagement. Also social media is about engagement. On Twitter it’s great if people mention you, because you will be featured in their timeline, so all their followers will see a link to your username. On Facebook the post with the most engagement appear in the “Top News” section which is exactly on the frontpage, so here’s where it helps a lot.

Now please let me know what do you think about my post and if you have more ideas for getting a post viral.

1. 7 Reasons Why Your Blog Isn’t Getting Any Readers

Warner wrote a post that I really agree with.

2. Why Different Web Analytics Report Different Numbers?

I know many people ask this. I get this questions at least once a week, so here’s a great explanation.

3. Case studies: The psychology of penetrating their mind

I really don’t know what to say about this post. Ramit Sethi has some really mind-blowing posts. I recommend you to subscribe to his newsletter.

4. Quora’s Growth Explained By Malcolm Gladwell

I don’t know if you’ve heard about Quora. It’s a Q&A startup who got successful right from the launch in a very competitive niche. You should read this post because it teaches you some stuff about startups.

5. Ten Most STUPID Blogging Mistakes By Beginners

Even if I don’t agree with all of them, it’s a really useful post, especially for beginners.

6. It’s All About Exact Match People!

An excellent post on affiliate marketing by Ian.

7. My 5 Favorite, but Often Ignored, Marketing Tactics

Neil Patel writes about 5 marketing tactics everyone misses. I suggest you read and bookmark this post, because it’s really helpful.

Neil Patel has a very good point about running a business.

2. Duplicate Content: Block, Redirect or Canonical

Seomoz‘s take on duplicate content

3. How I Built a Successful Blog in 8 Months

Oni lets us know how he become a successful blogger in just 8 months.

4. Link Building Mastery: Master The Art of Link Building

Mark Collier wrote a great post on link building.

5. How to Turn $3,000 into $128,000 (Introducing M6 Method)

Corbett Barr wrote about how he turned a $3,000 investment in books into $128,000. This is a must read.

I have done this mistakes in the past too and they have affected me a lot, but now I triple check everything and test any assumption to make sure it’s true.

A few months ago a friend contacted me and said “Hey I bought an Adsense ebook that had to teach me how to earn about $200 daily and I only managed to earn $2 in 1 month.” Of course he didn’t learn anything from that ebook and only offered him a few free HTML templates, though him how to place his Adsense ads. I’m not saying there aren’t quality ebooks out there that are worth buying and reading, but you need to be careful what you pay for and of course you won’t get rich just by reading an ebook.

Also you can find a lot of people that offer surefire techniques of getting #1 on Google for any keyword and many other techniques like this. And of course they guarantee you it works, they say it has worked for them with hundreds of keywords and so on. And guess what ? A lot of naive people fall for this stuff and take it for granted.

I know it takes time to verify everything and even more time to test and research the advices you read, but at least you’ll know what you’re doing and not just rely on what others say.