I noticed changes in my toolbar today while I was checking up on my sites, PR update has finally started, I see changes in 6 of Google’s DC’s so were still in the beginning, lets hope for the best, from the looks of it, my main sites got a PR increase however some of the old sites didn’t, which is expected!
I’ll post a full list of the changes once the PR update settles down.
A friend mentioned this video were Micheal Arrington interviews 12 web2.0 CEO startups, the main question in these interviews is whether web2.0 is a buble similar to the web1.0 buble. This post introduces the new Web2.0 category on my blog!
Google loves blogs, especially Wordpress, and while i love Wordpress, there are certain things that are needed to optimize your Wordpress blog (which i need to start applying as well) well I am really not looking to rank my website for any certain keyword as you can see from my title, thats probably why your probably going to see some of things that I advise you to do not being done here, but dont get confused, i still do them on my other blogs that I do want to rank well on!
The biggest issue with Wordpress blogs is the duplicate content that Wordpess’s structure has, duplicate content as you know might lead to a penalty from Google, so, here are some tips that you can apply to your Wordpress blog, or for any other blog for that matter than has the same issues.
1- Block out the archives from robots.txt, blogs as you know have archives, and while those archives are useful for your readers, they could be damaging to your rankings since each single post you make has an exact copy of it in those archives, doing this is very simple and can be achieved using 2 lines of code:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /archives/
This is of course, if your archives folder is one level deeper than your root directory.
2- Use a Wordpress theme that only displays the 1st paragraph (or couple of lines) on your blogs index, and followed by a more link to the full story, in the case of my blog, the whole post is available on the index page, and a complete copy of the post is included in its own url, which is exactly what duplicate content filters is made for!
3- Select the most appropriate category for your post, so you should always have each post in only one category, much like this post which is included in the SEO category only, having it in multiple categories creates different urls for the exact same post.
And since were in the topic of Wordpress blogs, my good friend Charl started a new blog featuring only the highest quality free Wordpress themes, I found some interesting themes over there, this theme being one of them.
If your interested in learning more tricks about robots.txt and how you can use it to block certain areas of your website that you know has duplicate content, or if your looking for more information about it in general, check out Webmasterworld’s robots.txt forum.
MyBlogLog
I added Mybloglog block a couple of days ago, what do you think? I think I am a bit late since most blogs I visit have added it a long time ago, my reader community is currently at 1! wohoo! get over there and add yourself!
Some of you have probably heard or read about the huge storm Matt’s recent posts specifically this one regarding paid links and the spam form he asked people to report websites selling links on.
This post has generated a huge controversy about whether will Google start looking at paid links as “spam”, the fact that Google’s engineers are thinking of penalizing sites selling links and the fact of asking webmasters to report paid links is a whole different story, and in my opinion, is a very bad idea for a number of reasons:
Below I highlight some of the replies from very well known individuals in the online marketing and SEO industries.
- Andy Beal from Marketing pilgrim wonders “What business does Google have in dictating the disclosure of any business relationships on others?”
- Raj Dash from Search Engine Journal questions whether Google is aiming towards being a monopoly, he says “Google seems to be going after a monopoly on advertising, telling webmasters what they can or cannot have on their sites. Does anyone else now think it’s a conflict of interest that search engine as powerful as Google is monopolizing advertising?”
- Over at threadwatch “I can’t believe it is anything more than a publicity stunt and mind control exercise.”
- SEOClass has the following title for the post discussing this topic “Google Wants to Tell You How to Run Your Website”
Other posts to check out:
- Webpronews, 7 Reasons Google’s Paid Link Snitch Plan Sucks.
- Searchengineland, Paid Links Under Scrutiny By Google Again
- SEOblackhat, A Hearty Welcome to All the New Search Engine Spammers!
This is a quick post to share with you guys a very cool audio file that was sent to me by a friend, I have uploaded the mp3 file here, you need good headsets to fully enjoy the effects. I am not sure how they created it, but its pretty awesome!
The last part is a bit freaky, so watch out!
This is sort of a quick update, don’t have much time for a fully fledged update, I am planning out 4 new projects, some are still in the research phase, others i started working on, phase 1 of project F is finally coming to an end, wh-d will also be launched soon, you can see it online right now but its still being tested and bugs ironed out, might be another week before I start marketing it.
I sold Post4hosting 2 days ago, yep, I finally did it, I had that site for over 2 years, one of the longest websites I’ve ever owned, its now in the hands of someone who hopefully will grow the community even more and harness the full potential of the website.
Thats about it I guess for this quick update, I’ll post another one when I have more news, I am also planning to post a PPC Arbi tutorial once I am done testing around some campaigns and have some solid results.
I’ve spent this whole weekend working on my sites and just wishing the day would extend for a few more hours, time tends to slip by when you mostly need it, so what have I been up to you ask?
Project F
Currently the main project I am working on and have been working on for the past 4 months, the project seems to stretch every time I think its going to end, I received the last html page for this phase of the project, I had a very hard time finding a coder to finish the last set of PSD’s, I hired around 3 coders and all fell through, the last coder I hired from rentacoder.com and he did an awesome job in a timely fashion, from now on, any html/css jobs that I need will go to my coder over there.
I think its time to give a little hint on what project F is, well a very little one, its a social networking project, a large one, I’ve got lots of unique ideas for the website and everything has to be well thought of for this website to grow to the size of what I am planning for, the website will hopefully be a big player in the social networking industry in a few moths of its launch, as I said, this is the biggest website that I’ve worked on, its taking lots of time and money, but it hopefully will be worth it.
Web Hosting Directory
Wh-d.com is going fine, I received an email from Jonathan (the coder I hired for the job) 2 days ago with some good news, apparently he ran into some programming problems that he was able to fix later on, so thats good, hopefully the website will be up by the end of this week. Hopefully I say!
Blog Network
I’ve spent most of the time this weekend building a new blog network which will be mainly used for link building purposes, I’ll be setting up each patch of blogs on a different c class ip, its not a good idea to have them all on the same c class ip for Google’s sake.
Network website
I’ve have a design laying around for a while now, I bought this design from talkfreelance, I don’t like having unused PSD’s, so I sent it to a regular coder that I usually use and I got the html/css for 3 days ago, I am still thinking of a name for the network, I’ve got a couple of names in mind but nothing set yet, any suggestions?
Post4hosting cleanup + possible sale
I spent around 3 hours yesterday going through all of the hosting accounts under post4hosting and suspended around 90 accounts! most were inactive and others had unlicensed scripts, I usually do this kind of clean up every 3 months or so, I guess 3 hours every 3 months isnt that bad, anyways, I’ve been thinking of selling post4hosting, I barely have the time for the website but the main reason is that I’ve had this website for a very long time and I am no longer attached to it, I would like to see it in other hands that will work and grow the community, the forum is really picking up now with nearly 55 new posts per day and 5 new forum members per day.
I’ve spent some good time optimizing the website and now it has excellent ranking on Google, Yahoo and MSN for very competitive keywords, if your interested in the website and would like more details, please do content me and leave a comment and ill get back to you with more details.
Matt Cutts Blog hacked!
Well this has nothing to do with me :p but I was surprised today when I opened up page flakes and read the title of this post on Search Engine Land, apparently, Darkseoteam hacked the website, there is a post about this on their blog as well.
