29. November 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Google

I’ve seen a lot of strange Google updates this year and this latest one is very weird. On Monday, a lot of new traffic came in, and now on a few select websites I see traffic way down. This is now completely typical to me. You can expect these violent swings in traffic, and it’s one way to keep you on your toes.

Updates like this are the reason I don’t make all my websites exactly the same. They’re also the reason I’m always trying to diversify my revenue from search engines as much as possible. If you don’t, you might end up holding the bag at the end of a nasty update gone bad.

I guess this is just all part of the game, so it’s nothing to get too excited about, but this time I’m immediatedly adding content to the affect website to see if I can hasten its’ return to the index. We’ll see how it goes.

20. November 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Web 2.0

I guess just about anyone could see this coming. Valleywag calls this post the Calacanis Effect and shows some leaked internal traffic numbers that show the re-designed Netscape has gone straight in the crapper. I guess there was no question that such a mediocre website, which pushed out its’ main constituency would end up in this boat.

Except Netscape visitors, most of whom only stuck with the neglected portal out of habit, were the worst subjects possible for Jason’s radical experiment. Traffic the week of June 18th, before the Netscape team remade the front page, was 137m pageviews. The following week, as Netscape decommissioned areas such as news and weather, it declined to 115m. The new front page, a clone of Digg.com, went live on June 29. The first full week after the change, traffic had plummeted further, to 72m pageviews. The Comscore numbers, which help advertisers allocated their budgets to different internet properties, mirror this decline.

At this point, you honestly have to wonder how long (or short) it will be before AOL pulls the plug on this experiment. The social news website at Netscape hasn’t seemingly evolved at all in its’ 4 or 5 month stint, and it’s obvious to anyone that it won’t grow at all. The Calacanis model just didn’t work out. Paying the so-called “top contributors” to turn in news stories is no guarantee of building a thriving site, and this case, it certainly hasn’t.

20. November 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Google

These Japanese researchers have come up with something interesting concerning how to determine proper names in Google SERPs.

The software tool, developed by researchers at the University of Tokyo in Japan, picks apart the results of a search engine query, identifying unique identities within these results. For example, it can tell the difference between Michael Jackson the pop singer and a travelling beer expert of the same name, who also appears on the first page of results produced by Google.

How does the software accomplish its’ task? Basically through a combination of Semantic analysis and on-page analysis that checks the first 100 results from Google. The software examines more relationships in the results to determine what is actually meant by the name.

Another example of how the use of LSI can affect indexing.

19. November 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Web's Best

Okay, I got this message when I upgraded PHP to version 5.2. The cause was a few includes that linked to remote files. I couldn’t easily find the answer, so I solved it after doing a bit of research.

The solution is quite simple. Find your php.ini file and add the following line:


allow_url_include = On

This did not exist in my PHP.ini file, but if it does exists in yours, just change it to “On”. If you have a similar message but it pertains to fopen, the solution is basically the same.

Add this line to the PHP.ini


allow_url_fopen = On

The same rules apply: add it if isn’t there or modify it if it isn’t.

Hopefully this post will save you some time. I personally love it when I can quickly find the answer using a search engine, so maybe this will help you out.

17. November 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Internet Marketing

One thing about comment spammers. They are a polite group, after all. Who else would take the time to compliment you before dumping 100 urls into a comment? Only a super-polite comment spammer. “Nice site.”

I know I love it. I figure, hell, at least he enjoyed the website! I don’t approve his spam, of course, but I think better of the link-bomber as a person. At least he thought enough to compliment me.

If only everyone in the world was so damn polite. We’d all be better off :)

15. November 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Blogging, Internet Marketing

You can get a decent amount of traffic from blog search, provided that you write about popular subjects. With more obscure keywords, there’s no reason to expect great success. But if your write about a subject that generates a lot of interest, you can expect pretty decent numbers from people looking just for blogs.

A lot of these people will be looking for information to link to, so this can be a huge advantage to your traffic-driving efforts. There’s no way you avoid this easy source of traffic. The main thing you need to do is update regularly and use keywords in your title.

It doesn’t take a ton of on-page optimization efforts to rank well in blog search. Just mention your desired keywords in the title and mention them once or twice in your message body. The thing is, blog search is based on freshness, so your post will rank for awhile, almost no matter what you do. The downside is that you will be replaced by the next post along.

All in all, it’s still well worth the efforts and one good way to jumpstart traffic building efforts to your blog.

08. November 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Google

If you haven’t heard the news yet, there’s some pretty big news you should read concerning changes made at Google.

Here’s where you can find the information:

I’ve also written an analysis about these radical changes, if you’re interested in reading.

Check it all out. These are major, watershed changes that will affect all Adsense Publishers.

01. November 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Google

I know it can change in minutes, but the results have been stable for a few days. I’m still noticing the strange blinking on and off Pagerank for my one site, but I’ve decided to ignore it. Odd occurences are nothing new in Google.

Lately my main concern has been spider frequency. The more the spiders come in, I figure, the better off we all really are. This is almost always the truth. I can’t help but noticing that pages don’t get spidered at all anymore if they’re in sections, and the sections don’t have many incoming links.

It’s a dog eat dog internet world these days, and it appears that you need deeplinks even more than you used to. I guess it comes as no surprise as it’s probably a good indicator that the content page is high-quality, if someone took the time to link to it.

It does appear that Google has restored some of their emphasis on relevance, which is always a good thing for me.

18. October 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Google

Another strange Google update/whatever. This time I see a perfectly great blog of mine get completely wiped out. All backlinks to Blog Republic have been wiped out in Google, despite the fact that Yahoo shows 66,000 of them. The site has also been reduced to a PR 0.

I’m sure there’s no good explanation for this retarted behavior. I can’t think of any logical reasons, and I’m sure I’m not alone. Just one more example of how bad Google sucks. They can’t get one routine thing done anymore as it relates to their functions as a search engine.

I guess this would even be demotivational, if I really cared what they “thought” of my website in the first place. As it stands, I seriously suggest they fix their broken search engine, before someone builds a better one and kicks them in the ass once and for all.

16. October 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Internet Marketing

Many people mention the idea of diversification online. Their idea is that you can spread the risk among a number of websites in a portfolio. This is true, but it offers a few disadvantages over building and concentrating on one website. I know I’ve tried both ways, and lately I’ve come up with some conclusions as to why concentrating one one website might be the better of the two methods.

With focus, you’re less likely to make mistakes. And mistakes on a website are almost as bad as mistakes made by football players during games. I say almost because at least you won’t end up “knocked out” by a webmaster mistake :) Or at least let’s hope your boss isn’t that mean. But the key to football and webmastering is keen attention to details. The less mistakes you make, the easier it is to get by.

With focus you are more likely to put a ton of creativity into your one main website.

If you work on one primary property, you will devote most of your time to the marketing, design, and business model of that one site. It’s almost bound to do better than 10 or 20 websites you might make. With focus, you can sharpen your one website to a finely honey tip.

Concentrating your marketing and link building efforts to one website will likely ensure success.

If you try to spread your marketing budget around, and attempt to link buiild for too many websites, you might find your efforts stalling out quick. Link building, in particular, can be fatiguing enough with one website, but to multipy the efforts across many has a tendency to leave you burned out and frustrated.

There are a lot of huge examples of companies who’ve done quite well with one domain.

It’s safe to say that Yahoo and Google have done very well marketing under one primary domain. They’ve all managed to brand themselves, and grow rich. If they had attempted to diversify, history might be very different indeed.

There are still tons of good reasons to attempt diversification, and we’ll look at them in a seperate, future post.