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Some interesting figures popped up the week before last when the results of a consumer satisfaction survey run by the University of Michigan were released. It seems that more of the people who surveyed were happy with Yahoo than were happy with Google. To be fair the separation between the two was only one point but it seems that the trend that is developing when previous surveys are looked at is for Google to be going down while the trend for Yahoo is up.

And there's a dark horse in this race too. Ask.com showed a marked increase in customer satisfaction and now Ask is advertising in the United Kingdom too. So are you still concentrating only on Google like so many others are or are you working at building sites that Yahoo and Ask will find attractive too?

I've also heard that a new black hat technique of gaming Google went public last week. It's known as the Black Mask Project and it appeared in the form of an e-book. According to one of the participants in the project around 3,000 copies were sold in the first hour so you can expect to see a lot of spam around Google for some time to come.

Undoubtedly many people are going to be attracted by the suggestion that they'll make a lot of money if they use the project and they'll rush in to buy the e-book. But if you stop and think about it for a moment that could just be a waste of money.

If the project is genuine and does produce the results that the authors suggest then why aren't they already using the methods outlined in the e-book to increase their own bottom line? Actually I have little doubt that the project is genuine so the methods in the book did work for the authors ... but why spill the beans and let everyone in on the secret?

Well I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions but I'm wondering if we're looking at a situation where it worked for the authors and they've really gamed Google to the point where Google is now taking steps to prevent the methods working. I really don't know whether that's the case or not but I'm always a little suspicious of those who want to sell their secrets of making money.

Even if it does currently work most people would be far better off developing their own ways of achieving top rankings in Google. If you come up with the secret sauce for achieving good rankings - and don't share it with anyone - the chances are that you'll fly under the radar and your methods will work for a long time to come. As soon as you spill the beans and share your methods everyone will be using it and the search engines will quickly move to negate your exploits.

In some ways that concept is similar to the way many webmasters in this industry are always looking for advice on which programs are converting the best. If you've found a niche or a program that's working for you then you'll be making money but as soon as you share that information with others you're on the way to making less money because others will be making the sales that you might have made.

Think about it; if you're a sponsor then you want the most affiliates selling your program as you can find. But if you're an affiliate you want programs that aren't over-saturated. When you do promote over-saturated programs and paysites about all you're doing is providing your sponsor with more branding opportunities. That may work for them but it's not going to put a lot of money your pocket.

That's something you should also remember when a sponsor releases new sets of free hosted galleries. You either need to get them listed on your sites almost instantly or you may be better off to promote the sponsor in some other way.

Just this past weekend one major sponsor released over three thousand new galleries and they made sure their affiliates knew about it too. They emailed every affiliate with a full list of gallery URLs that also included the affiliate's code. Now that's really thoughtful and I'm sure a lot of affiliates are going to make a lot of money promoting the sponsor's sites that are being marketed in those galleries ... but a lot more affiliates are going to do little better than waste their time if they list those galleries.

Instead, if affiliates want to promote that sponsor perhaps they should be looking at the sites that weren't included in that gallery release. If you're going to show your surfers the same thing that they've already seen your chances of making a sale are definitely diminished. On the other hand if you show your surfers something that they haven't already seen 50 times before then your chances of making a sale are increased.

Well at least that's the way I look at it. Of course your mileage may vary so don't rely on what I tell you; instead go out and run some tests for yourself. This is a business and running around following the crowd or following some wannabe guru is not always the best way of doing business.