Although not many blogs entered this year’s Blogger NCAA Tournament Pick’em Contest, we do have a winner after last night’s championship game.

I want to congratulate Cage Today for winning the contest. He beat me by 24 points!

Also because you won the contest, you are eligible for free advertising on my blog for a month. So please contact me and I’ll get your banner up ASAP.

I’m sure you’ve heard a hundred times that content is King or that you must have unique content if you want to rank high in Google. I’ve probably even said it before on this blog. But today I’m telling you that it’s all a lie. Sites with zero unique content can still rank high in Google.

Take a look at this Brady Quinn fan site (not one of my sites). The entire front page of information is composed of reworded content from Quinn’s wiki page. The owner of this site just changed a few words here or there. But read through it… it’s the exact same content and nothing unique at all.

Then 90% of the rest of the content on this site is syndicated news from sites like Yahoo Sports or Cleveland.com. None of those syndicated articles are unique either.

This site ranks #2 in Google for “Brady Quinn”. He probably gets 500-700 uniques/day during the offseason and 1,500 or more uniques/day during football season. So how does he rank so high for a competitive keyword with zero unique content? LINKS! The site has a lot of links pointing back to it.. and these are links from unique IPs (I checked).

So there you have it. It’s not ground-breaking news. Links are more important then content. Next time you’re stuck and your site won’t rank any higher… stop adding content to it and start adding links.

For the first time in the three years I’ve been making websites, I’ve finally had one enter the Google Sandbox. College Fight Song Ringtones was completely removed from all Google rankings. The site is still indexed in Google (seen here), but it just lost all the rankings.

This website was bringing in about 60 uniques a day and making ringtone leads every now and then. It wasn’t a big earner, but I expected it to be one come football season. I was getting uniques and ranked on page 1 for all types of keywords like “tar heel ringtones, hokie ringtones, wisconsin ringtones, memphis tigers ringtones” and so many more. Now they are all gone.

Do I not have to worst luck or what? I’m starting to think my server is cursed. It’s been 6 months since my two biggest sites got penalized by Google and I lost thousands of rankings and unique visitors. And now I have one of my up and coming sites get Sandboxed! Nobody I’ve talked to has had this type of luck.

I built Fight Music Ringtones from the ground up using Wordpress. It has only a handful of links back to it, like from this blog or some other sports sites I own. I didn’t do anything spammy with it. It’s not a dropped domain that I picked up. I followed all the rules, and yet it ended up in the sandbox. The site got 1 unique yesterday … and that was me. It has completely disappeared and there is no telling when it will come back. Could be a week… or I’ve read some people say a year.

I’ve never used my blog as a means to preach about political issues, and I don’t intend to turn this into a political blog. But the United States is facing one of the most important Presidental Elections this year it has ever seen. We are at War and we are in an economic and housing crisis. A lot of young people are preaching Barrack Obama on Youtube and in their blogs. They think it’s cool to vote for a man who’s campaign is about “Change”. They seem to ignore the fact that Obama attended the Church of Reverend Wright who preached a damn America and that we are to blame for 9/11. Obama may be a good speaker and promise all these things like National Health Care … but when it comes down to it, he is not the person I want as my President. He’s not Patriotic enough and I don’t trust him. I am not a right wing conservative Republican, I am more of a moderate Republican, and that’s why I’ll be voting for John McCain.

Democrats are all about abandoning the war in Iraq, raising my taxes, and doing nothing about our national security. They don’t believe in being on the offensive when at war. Instead they’d rather put their heads in the sand and wait for some terrorist to attack us again. And it’s not even the war that gets me going… it’s the damn taxes. Americans pay way too much tax as it is, the last thing I want is Obama in the White House trying to pass all these new government programs that will cost an arm and a leg. You want National Health Care? Be prepared to pay taxes out your ass for it.

What pisses me off is so many Americans expect the Government to do everything for them. They just want hand outs. What ever happened to America being the land of opportunity and the land of the brave. We’re supposed to have fears. The Government can’t take your fears away from you no matter what they say.

Anyways, back to the title of this post. “Make money online? Vote for John McCain” Why you ask? There are several reason, and I’m taking the issues straight off JohnMcCain.com. If you are a business owner or make any kind of money online, there’s no reason to ignore these issues.

Keep Tax Rates Low: Entrepreneurs are at the heart of American innovation, growth and prosperity. Entrepreneurs create the ultimate job security — a new, better opportunity if your current job goes away. Entrepreneurs should not be taxed into submission. John McCain will fight the Democrats’ crippling plans for a tax increase in 2011. Left to their devices, Democrats will impose a massive $100 billion tax hike, almost $700 per taxpayer every year.

Ban Internet Taxes: John McCain believes we must make a farsighted, robust, and fervent commitment to innovation and new technologies to sustain our global competitiveness, meet our national security challenges, achieve less costly and more effective health care, reduce dangerous dependence on foreign sources of oil, and raise the quality of education in the United States. John McCain has been a leader in keeping the Internet free of taxes. As President, he will seek a permanent ban on taxes that threaten this engine of economic growth and prosperity.

Allow First-Year Deduction, Or “Expensing”, Of Equipment And Technology Investments. Expensing of equipment and technology will provide an immediate boost to capital expenditures and reward investments in cutting-edge technologies.

Cut The Corporate Tax Rate From 35 To 25 Percent. A lower corporate tax rate is essential to U.S. competitiveness. America was once a low-tax business environment, but as our trade partners lowered their rates, America failed to keep pace, leaving us with the second-highest rate among the world’s advanced economies.

If you want to read more about McCain’s stance on all the important issues, please visit www.JohnMcCain.com.

Starting a website from scratch sucks. The more I get involved in making money online the more I’m beginning to realize it’s all about acquiring websites in a marketplace rather than starting one from scratch. Unless you have other websites that can fuel a brand new one, then there is no advantage to starting from the beginning other than cost.

Almost every website I have owned that is worth a damn has been one that I’ve purchased. And I’m not just talking about buying a website for keeps, I’m also talking about flipping. Buying a website that needs a little work for a cheap price, and then flipping it a few months later for big time profits after you fixed it up.

Starting a site from scratch is so much harder then just buying one that already has traffic coming to it. Let someone else do the dirty work for you. Keep your eye out for good deals in the marketplace and don’t be afraid to just email website owners and offer them something for the site even if it’s not listed for sale.