I had a dream last night where at first I was in grade school still. The dream was about and had the general feeling of technology that at the time was very new but would now be regarded as obsolete.
It ended with Daron holding up a little blue pill.
I woke up and thought - what is the new technology now? Or what works now for SEO and general web site success? What is thing that is the way to make money now, but will not work later? The thing that I will look back on and realize I should have taken advantage of at the time but didn’t? Is it Adsense? Blogging? Anything other than a large corporations site getting SE referrals?
Either way I woke up with a lot of energy and realized I really needed to get to work and make use of the opportunities that are available now.
(I swear the dream was real. And just for fun - go to Google and search for: [pill blue daron]
I haven’t been following very much of what’s been happening in the SEO world for a while - I haven’t even listened to WebmasterRadio or gone to their chat in a long time. I have been stopping by webmasterworld now and then though. I didn’t get to go to the latest pubcon either, but I heard that Malcolm Gladwell was going to be speaking. That and stuntdubl’srecent post made my think about his book The Tipping Point again.
I can’t seem get my sites to do very well - basically I don’t get enough visitors, and I don’t get enough visitors because google doesn’t seem to like my sites. I think it doesn’t like my sites because they don’t have enough links. But how do you get links naturally from good content if you don’t rank and no one sees your site? I’m trying blogging for that, but so far have not had much success with that either. Based on what the book says, I’m either a maven or an expert, but I’m certainly no connector or salesperson. I think I need to get the attention of a connector or salesperson, but I don’t know how. I’ll keep trying with blogs though and see if that works. Meanwhile I may post something about this at WMW too, if I have the time.
David Ogletree has a new tool to help people make more money - it creates affiliate links that look like Adsense ads. Pretty cool. And its free!
I may try it sometime, but first I need to figure out a good way to get Adsense on a blog without breaking any of the Adsense rules.
Stuntdubl has had a couple good posts on his blog lately, I’ve been meaning to write about them for a few days now, but just didn’t have the time.
One of them: Why I Try to Spend Less Time Analyzing Algorithm Updates - brings up some good points about how best to spend your time. As well as some great ideas about what Google may start doing soon or already be doing.
I try not to spend too much time on update threads. I try to just skim through them quickly, as most of what is posted is either off topic or just complaining (and yes I’ve been guilty of doing that too) - and not really information you can use to better understand what Google is trying to do. However, there are a few good points made in those threads, so I don’t think they are completely useless. You just have to remember to scan quickly through them, focus on the good stuff and ignore the rest. I’m not going to repeat the whole list that Stuntdubl gives in this post of things to look out for - but if you have a web site - you’d be foolish not to read it and take some notes!
His post Natural SEO Logic - Simple Standalone Variable Guidelines is also a good one to spend some time reading. He goes through several characteristic of sites and makes some estimates of what might look natural to search engines. These types of guidelines seem more important as time goes by, as doing something wrong might hurt you more than you can be helped by doing the right things. Or so it seems to me anyway.
Stuntdubl is a nice guy too, I met him last year at LV and he is good at what he does - so read what he has to say - or else! (Or else what? I don’t know, I felt like saying it!)
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.
