A weekend shout out to the little guys

Posted by stuart as blogging, blog

When I started blogging, there were a couple of people who were kind enough to leave the odd comment on my blog, and link me up. (I remember running whooping with delight to tell Mrs. PMPR when this blog got its first actual backlink).

One of the hardest things when starting out with blogging is “getting seen”. It’s a real struggle to break through, and I remember being so incredibly frustrated reading blogs which purported to help other bloggers, telling noobs like me to not put monetisation techniques into place until you were getting 500 unique visitors a day. 500 a day?? Five a day is cause for celebration for a new blogger. (Including your dad and your best friend!)

Now I get frustrated when bloggers like Shoemoney and Darren at Problogger tell me that doing keynote speeches at conferences and having your articles republished in metropolitan newspapers is a good way to increase your readership.

If you are a noob blogger, just starting out, this post is for you. Your chance to sell your blog to others.

I’m opening the comments in this post to those just starting out in their blogging adventure. If you’re just starting out, leave a comment on this post, telling us a little about you and your blog. Don’t forget to provide a link using your choice of keywords as the anchor text (like this: a blog about blogging and making money online).

Be as expansive or brief as you like. Tell the readers of PimpMyPageRank why they should be visiting your blog, and don’t be shy! They don’t bite! (well, not many of them, anyway)

I’d like to keep this to blogs with a pagerank of 2 or lower, it really is for new bloggers looking for another avenue to promote themselves.

As an added bonus, I’ll randomly choose two commenters to have their blogs listed under the blogwhore badge in the left sidebar of this blog. The listing will comprise of a short paragraph about the blog and a link to it.

Cheers, and get writing!

Google search supplemental results seem to make no difference to ranking

Posted by stuart as seo, search engine optimization, search engine, search, google

I’ve noticed something interesting today.

Once again, trawling through the logs of an experimental site I have which contains far from original content (no surprise most of the pages are in the supplemental results), I noticed something which surprised me in relation to search engine rankings.

Some of those “supplemental” pages are still out ranking “non-supplemental” pages for the exact same keywords.

Now my understanding of the supplemental index is that it’s a “secondary index” where google goes fossicking around looking for results if it can’t find any good ones in its main index for a certain keyword/phrase.

This has been an interesting experiment, since google started dumping pages into the supplemental index, traffic (from google) has dropped by about 80%, but I’m still getting a tricke, and still out-ranking other non supplemental pages for the exact same keywords.

Any SEO experts out there who can tell me why this might be happening, and what it means?
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Two new text tools at textreplace.com

Posted by stuart as adsense

I’ve just updated textreplace.com with two new tools:

1. The Random Text Generator - with this tool you can choose between a variety of subjects, and get auto-generated text based (loosely!) on that subject
2. The Text Scrambler - paste some text into the box, and get back a scrambled version of that text.

Not sure of the actual usefulness of these tools, but they’re stretching my php learning, and I guess someone might find them useful for something!

How the hell is google finding orphan pages and crawling them?

Posted by stuart as adsense

I’ve been working on a few new tools for the venerable textreplace.com (where you go to hack up your text! ), and put up a new tool about eight hours ago.

Now this tool has not been linked from the home page yet (it’s still in testing), but I noticed something interesting the “latest visitors” section in my AWStats tonight.

Google has crawled every freaking page in the directory that the new tool resides in!

How is this possible? This is an orphan directory, linked from absolutely nowhere!!

WTF?!?!?

Edit - I think I’ve worked it out, and if I’m right, this confirms something that’s been debated a fair bit.

I’ve got AdSense on the pages. If this is the reason that my pages were crawled so quickly, that’s interesting. Moves beyond any doubt the fact that the AdSense bots are telling the Search bots about new content.

Maybe we need to start adding AdSense to pages to get them crawled almost instantly, even if we don’t intend to use AdSense on the site long term.

Thoughts?

First auctionads money

Posted by stuart as advertising

It’s only taken about a bazillion ad impressions, but I made my first money with auctionads today

Interesting thing is that I’ve had about 1,000 ad impressions, 33 clicks (3.3% CTR), and made $0.13.

That’s an eCPM of $0.13

If those clicks had been on $0.05 AdSense ads, I would have made  $1.65.

Small beans I know, but as an experiment, auctionads has been a dismal failure.

(Interesting to note as well, that a small slip of the finger on the keyboard turns auctionads to suctionads - coincidence? )