Before I kick things off, I want to thank all of you who have been posting your comments. They are great and help me discover new things every day.

Anyway I build websites both for fun and as a way to experiment with SEO. Recently I have been working on monetizing these projects just to see what the “make money online” hoopla is all about. I don’t make enough to retire, but its fun non the less.

One website I threw up had to do with DRM Free Movies. It was one of my early projects and I have not had the time to really build a valuable website. It did receive about 20 to 30 unique visitors, so I decided to throw up some AdSense, Amazon, and AdBrite to the site to see if I can monetize the traffic. I made about 50 cents to a dollar a day which was nice.

A few days ago I checked my analytics, and lo and behold I was receiving 0 traffic. I investigated to see if the site was still ranking for the keywords, and of course it was not. What was interesting is that the “brand name” still ranked the website, but all of the keywords I was targeting do not.

I believe it was due to human review that my site was removed. Thanks to Rose who posted a comment on Google Human Review and sent a link to SPAM Guidelines.

Lets use this opportunity to learn what NOT to do and how to avoid a Google penalty.

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I love to check the postings on CraigsList since it is one of the best ways to keep a pulse on actual demand in certain industries. I typed in search to see what kind of things come up. Hell, if it wasn’t for CraigsList I probably would have never learned about SEO or found my current firm. Anyway I found this hilarious post from an anonymous source ( I suspect Google) in which you get paid to review search results.

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