Monday, Frank Schilling coined the term Ballmerfreude -- taking pleasure from Steve Ballmer's misfortune. I shared that post from within Google Reader, so it shows up on my sidebar now. Well, an unintended side-effect of that is that I'm now the only site that ranks for that term right now in both Google and MSN, while Frank is the only one who ranks for it in Ask. (Strangely, Yahoo still doesn't have any ... Keep reading »
On some of my blogs, trackback spam has now become rampant. Not content to simply spam the comments, spammers are now scraping content from the RSS feed, posting it to spam blogs (splogs), and sending a trackback to the violated site in order to pick up a free link. The problem is that you wouldn't realize it was spam in most cases. On the surface, it looks pretty legit. Why is trackback spam a problem? Well, aside from the ... Keep reading »
Of course, that's not because I have budged from my PageRank of 4, but because ProBlogger.net, CopyBlogger, John Chow, and Blog Herald have all been chopped to a PR 4 -- apparently for selling links. Again, I'm not taking a stand on it one way or another, but if this doesn't convince you to stop selling text links, you must be earning a ton.
When trying to drive traffic to your site, bloggers are your best friends. Not only can they drive some great traffic with just a mention on their site, but when they link to you search engines take notice. Right now, nothing beats a good link from a blog. So how do you get them to mention your site? Get Their Attention If you've got a great site, this might be all you have to ... Keep reading »
If you care about traffic from Google, it's time to stop selling text links. They have confirmed that publicly now. I realize this may be pure FUD on their part, and I realize that I'm totally drinking their Kool-Aid, but if the largest source of my traffic says that they'll penalize me for selling text links, then hey, I'm not going to sell text links. I'm going to find another ... Keep reading »
Sounds like a scam, doesn't it? Well this time it's not. $9.99 is what GoDaddy charges for a year of domain name registration, and extending your registration by an extra year can have significant impact on your rankings. Back at the beginning of 2005, Google fulfilled the requirements to become a domain registrar. They had no plans to sell domain names, though. Instead, they were very up front about that ... Keep reading »
Many of you may hear a buzz this weekend about Google's "PageRank update," so I wanted to clear up some misconceptions so that you don't lose focus on what's important. PageRank (or PR) is a measure of the link weight pointing to a page. The more links you get from pages that have more links to them, the higher your PageRank. PageRank is just one of more than 100 variables that determine where Google ranks a page in the search results. ... Keep reading »
Time for another collection of links for those of you who have subscribed to the feed and don't get to the site often. Keep reading »
Several weeks ago, I read Matt's "How I Got 283k Feed Subscribers in 1 Day." The way he did it was to take TechCrunch's FeedBurner FeedCount chicklet and put it on his own site. By changing the link on the image to point to his own RSS feed, though, few would realize that he didn't actually have that many subscribers. I found it very interesting, but that was about it since I knew I'd never have any reason to fake my feed count. Over the next few weeks, though, I found myself repeatedly coming back to this statement: I can see the logic behind someone wanting to use a more popular feed image. Showing a larger subscriber count than what your blog has naturally makes your site seem more popular which unfortunately makes new visitors more likely to stick. Keep reading »
If you're serious about your blogging, you should consider attending the upcoming Elite Retreat in Orlando. I went to the first one back in December, and it led directly to me getting to the point just three months later where I was working 100% for myself. If that's at all on your radar, I would highly recommend this conference over any other. Here's why. Keep reading »
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