Nick from Threadwatch and Patrick Gavin just started up Performancing.com - it is a group blog by professional bloggers and is made for professional bloggers to help them succeed! Other team members are Chris Garrett, Andy Hagans and Peter Brady.

They already have some good posts there about building and retaining credibility in a blog, how to get links to a new blog and the different blog software available - and much more!

I don’t have plans to monetize this blog - but I am getting ready to start up a blog on another site and I’m sure that Performancing.com will be a great resource! Thanks for creating it guys!

I guess Jagger 3 doesn’t like my site. Everything was going fine until yesterday, when my traffic went way down. I have no idea why Google doesn’t like my sites. I have no idea what to do now.

This site, for example - please if anyone knows, what is wrong with it? Why doesn’t Google like it? : Butterfly Gardening and Conservation - the only thing I ever did that might be considered bad is have a datafeed on in - but it has been gone for months now. Everything else is original that I did a lot of work for - all the photography I did myself and it took a lot of time and money.

And this one: Ideas for Women - it may not be as pretty - but there is nothing wrong with it, nothing that breaks any of Google’s guidelines as far as I can tell. And I spent a lot of time working on it. Every article on it that I wrote I put a lot of time into.

I give up!

Any one out there need some work outsourced?

Matt posted in his blog and at webmaster world that yesterday Jagger3 started showing at data center 66.102.9.104.

I don’t really follow any keywords too closely, so I don’t really know how Jagger 3 will turn out for me. However, I am a bit disappointed to see that one of my sites that has been penalized/filtered for quite a while now - and I have no idea why - is still not showing up for its name at that datacenter. A site: command does show the right number of pages now though. ["www.mydomain.com"] doesn’t show my site either.

My cafepress store for that site shows up in the top ten though - I wonder if using my regular site navigation on the cafepress pages is what is hurting the site? It seems it is good for users though - makes going back and forth from the site to the store seamless for them - but maybe Google doesn’t like it, or gets confused by it?

The studio of WebmasterRadio.FM was hit bad by Wilma and they have not been airing live shows since then. But starting tonight, live shows will resume with Domain Masters (with host Monte Cahn from Moniker) tonight at 7:00 EST!

The past few days they have been remotely streaming music and recorded shows only.

If you have not yet been listening to WebmasterRadio.FM and you own a web site - you really should! They have some great shows with informative hosts and guests! These include ‘Thats A Wrap’ with Greg Boser & Daron Babin, ‘Strike Point’ with Mikkel deMib Svendsen & Dave Naylor and ‘SEO Rockstars with Todd “Oilman” Friesen.

Google addressed the recent concerns about smart pricing in their Adsense Blog. They didn’t, however, even address the big issue about whether or not smart pricing is calculated based on accounts, sites, or something else. Which would seem to indicate that it is calculated on an account level.

They do say that the clickthrough rate isn’t involved. They also say that more than the conversion rate is involved in determining ad prices.

In the Threadwatch discussion about smart pricing graywolf brought up the point that
“One poorly converting site can result in smart pricing impacting an entire account, even sites completely unrelated to the poorly converting one”. Google didn’t address this issue either.

Update Jagger is still not over. This update even has official parts to it - Matt Cutts, at least, has been referring to three different parts of Jagger. Jagger1 should be completed by now and Jagger 2 may be over or may be still spreading to additional data centers, as Matt indicated that this would take several days. Jagger 3 is expected to start tomorrow - Wed., Nov. 2nd. according to Matt, both in his blog and a recent post at Webmaster World. This third part is expected to address some canonical issues. It will be interesting to see how that turns out. Jagger 3 is also ‘the base that I expect us to build on going forward’ - I don’t know what Matt meant by that either - but eventually time will tell.

Other observations about Jagger? Some people have reported that reciprocal links seem to be counting for even less now - and some people believe their sites have had SERP drops due to too much reciprocal linking. Other people report that they have done many link exchanges and their sites are doing fine. Must be some combination of at least some type of reciprocal links (off topic?, too many?, too large a %?) and something else that is making their sites go down.

WebmasterWorld is back online and functioning at its usual domain: http://www.webmasterworld.com ! Its been down for something like 6 days now, but sort of running at http://www.searchengineworld.com. Didn’t realize just how addicted I was to it until it was gone.

It was kind of nice over at searchengineworld.com for the past few days though. A smaller group of people and I found myself posting more than I usually do.

I feel bad for Brett having this happen to his site, but I’m sure it won’t cause any long term harm - with the site being as popular as it is.

I usually have a tough time writing. I just can’t get the words out sometimes. Consequently, it often takes me a really long time to write even a small amount of content for a web site. I found these tips for writing, that seem to make sense - maybe they can help someone else too.

Big discussion at WMW about how a scraper site is defined. Ogletree (and a few others) are of the opinion that Google and other SE’s are just bigger scrapers:

Google is a scraper site. A scraper site is any site that does not make their own content and uses a bot to crawl the web and publish snippits of other sites. Now when it is refered to here they mean some guy bought some scraper software and puts up several thousand pages with adsense on it.

I have to agree with this opinion. Not that I have any scraper sites myself (don’t know how, or I’d give it a try). Google is just bigger and gets more visitors. And just because you can opt out doesn’t change anything.

Not that I hate Google, but I don’t see how anyone can argue that it is not a scraper.

I also don’t think my sites are being hurt by scrapers. But - still I would like to see Google get them out of the serps. But can they? And without some innocent sites getting banned along with them? I came across a couple yesterday that were kind of hard to tell they were scrapers. Should be interesting to see what happens with them over the next few months.

Bourbon, the most recent - (and longest I believe) - update of Google started on Fri., May 20, and still isn’t quite done yet! Yesterday GoogleGuy posted the following at WebmasterWorld:

Here’s the advice that I’d give now: take a break from checking ranks for several more days. Bourbon includes something like 3.5 improvements in search quality, and I believe that only a couple are out so far. The 0.5 will go out in a day or so, and the last major change should roll out over the next week or so. Then there will still be some minor changes after that as well.

Since then he has been answering questions in another thread: Questions for GoogleGuy.

GoogleGuy’s patience at answering so many questions, especially from many who are new to SEO, is extremely impressive. Don’t think I would be able to do it.

So what has happened with this update? I don’t know, but some of the theories going around in the Bourbon update threads are nothing less than ridiculous! I don’t know how they come up with some of them. And unfortunately not many senior members have chimed in with a voice of reason yet.

Many people are speculating that all the Adsense scraper (and of course most of them spell it wrong!) sites that are linking to their sites is what is causing them to lose their rankings. That’s silly as hell. If anything, loss of those scraper site links - as they got thrown out of the index - is what is causing their problems.

But, I guess it is too early to draw any conclusions yet, according to GoogleGuy. So we will wait, and hopefully some more experienced SEO’s will share their thoughts about this update with the rest of the community.