Q: Should I Buy Links?

This is a question that gets a different answer every time it is asked.

To make a long story short, yes, but read on to see the ins and outs of this situation.

Yes, Google can penalize a site for selling links. This means that the selling site might lose PR and that the links may not pass PR to you. Obviously, if you are purchasing links for the purpose of acquiring PR, then this is something that will concern you.

However, don't forget, links were originally sold for traffic. Buying a link, a banner, a button or whatever is simply advertising. It is a great way to get targeted traffic to your site for whatever purpose you want them there.

Importantly, no, Google does not generally penalize a site for actions that somebody else could do to your site. If you think about it, if buying links caused a penalty to the buyer, then people would buy links for their competitors in order to have them be penalized.

The competitive nature of the net ads a lot of things to think about when determine how and why penalties might be applied.

Q: What Keywords Should I Use?

This is a question often posed by an Adsense beginner hoping to reap large profits from their online efforts.

This is not the right way to think about making money online.

If you want to make money online you have to provide value to somebody. Popular sites, those with traffic, are the ones that have something unique or interesting to offer to the public. It is a matter of putting together a compelling experience so that people will want to see it, talk about it, or share it with other people.

Waiting For The PR Update

Do you know what PR is? PR stands for page rank. It is a value calculated by Google as a measure of the importance of any particular web page. It has become important to many people to achieve and maintain a high PR value for their web sites. While I'm not quite in the same boat, I too am anxiously awaiting the latest PR update.

It has been a long time since the last one and Google appears to adjusting various algorithms. This has the potential, in the long term, to have a huge impact on the proliferation of spam blogs and spam web sites. I am hoping they get it right!

Niche Inspector Review

From time to time I like to splurge!

So, recently, I purchased Niche Inspector. I really like the tool, though I suspect I don't currently have the resources to justify the cost. However, that could potentially change if I find myself one or two juicy niches to conquer.

Before you go out and spend this type of money I would suggest you figure out how to do the same work manually:

• Use a keyword tool to get suggested keywords and the quantity of queries performed on those keywords.
• For each keyword returned, visit a search engine and see how many responses are returned for a user search.
• Also, for each keyword, use Google's keyword tools to determine a suggested price range for clicks using Adwords.

This can be quite a lot of work, and take a lot of time, but the results will be similar to that produced by Niche Inspector.

On a different note, I haven't found Niche Inspector a good way to discover new niches, but instead a way to see if my own niche ideas may be good. Quite simply, you can't just push the buttons and expect all kinds of valueable niches to be dropped in your lap!