Some thoughts on web 2.0 from someone closer to 50 than 20

Posted by stuart as fun, humor

When this little black duck first discovered the wonders of HTML sometime in the early nineties, and started cranking out frame-based delights resplendant with their tiled backgrounds and spinning animated gifs, never could he have foreseen the direction this wonder called the web would take.

Whilst he’s embraced some of the wonders of the new generation of web technologies such as RSS, blogging, and he’s even been known to stumble aimlessly when particularly bored, there’s still plenty about web 2.0 which leaves him wondering whether the world is passing him by.

So here are the thoughts on web 2.0 of a dinosaur who, although he loves all things tech, wonders whether it’s all really worth the effort.

Facebook - sounds like something we used to do with any girl who was willing in the church carpark whilst our parent blissfully sat through the sermon.

Myspace - What that guy with really bad breath at my first job always seemed to get into.

Social Media - When I and a bunch of mates got together to watch a porno movie

Stumbleupon - What I do when I’ve drunk too much, ie to stumbleupon the coffee table when I lose my balance.

Sphinn - What the room does when I lay down after drinking too much.

Reddit - What I did with a book I borrowed from the library - I reddit then I gave it back.

Digg - What people with afro’s and sideburns did when they liked something - Yes, I’m old enough to remember this.

Payperpost - The payment model my father’s grazing business used for their fence builders. You got paid for how many posts you put up in a day.

Slashdot - What I told my nana when I was going to take a leak - “I’m going to take a slash, Dot”

Squidoo - The black stuff a squid squirted all over you after you dragged it into the boat.

 Fark - What you said when your mate pointed out a particularly del.icio.us piece of tail.

Twitter - What my dad called me when I did something stupid - “You bloody twitter!”

What about you - Are you confused by web 2.0?

Pimp Your Favicon

Posted by stuart as fun

Got a favicon for your site or blog?

Hop on over to the Pimp My Favicon page and add it to the showcase!

We’re building what will soon become the world’s largest Favicon collection!

Don’t have a Favicon? Pop over and have a look anyway. You can add a Favicon from another site if you like.

So let’s build the world’s largest Favicon collection together!

Google doesn’t really care about spammy links

Posted by stuart as splogs, pagerank, google

First things first - if I read one more blog telling me that spammy links to my site can hurt my rankings, I’m going to knock on all my neighbours doors asking if they have a puppy. When eventually on of them responds in the affirmative, I’m going to storm their house and kill said canine.

If spammy links could hurt a site, we’d all be running around dropping links to our competitors on free-for-all links pages, and nuking them into oblivion.

Now, on to my point:

It’s no secret that the GoogleFairy has been quite busy of late wandering around the web sprinkling her green GoogleDust on sites here and there, taking GoogleDust from some sites, depositing it on others.

Whilst Google exporting PageRank to the toolbar engenders not nearly the hysteria that it once did, you just know that webmasters the world over are secretly checking all their sites, quietly patting themselves on the back for their gains, and bemoaning their losses, despite the disparaging posts they are making in their blogs about the irrelevance of PageRank.

Of course, I was one of those said webmasters. One of the things I do when there’s a toolbar pagerank update, is go through this blog, checking the posts that I know were popular at the time of their writing, and gained a few backlinks in the process.

One internal page I checked had actually gained a PR of 4, the same as the home page. The funny thing is that it was this post. In short, this post was just a list of 5,000 highly searched terms.

The post was an experiment to see how many trackback links I could get from sploggers (people searching through RSS Feeds for specific keywords, then publishing an excerpt of the post, with a link back to the originating site). Yahoo Site Explorer is showing 143 links to this post, each one spammier than the last.

If we’re to take pagerank as google’s measure of authority of a page, it would appear that Google thinks that this page is of a higher authority than some of the excellent blogs I read.

So here’s a tip - If you’re a pagerank whore, or if you’re into selling websites, don’t worry about building out a quality site with quality content and quality backlinks.

Just throw up a post with a shitload of high search volume terms on it, and watch the links roll in.

My lifelong dream has been realised

Posted by stuart as seo, search engine optimization

Well, the lifelong dream I’ve had since about Saturday afternoon when the thought occurred to me

I’ve been of the firm belief for some time now that the blog you are now reading, Pimp My PageRank, was probably the best SEO blog in the world.

Well now I have vindication, but don’t take my word for it, luminaries such as Yahoo and Google agree.

See for yourself:

• Ask Google which is the best SEO blog in the world
• Ask Yahoo which is the best SEO blog in the world

I’m just so proud!

Exhausted your link sources but still not ranked number one?

Posted by stuart as linking, link love, seo, search engine optimization

I’m doing some SEO work for a friend of mine at the moment. It’s been an ongoing thing, the site’s been optimised as best it can be for the keywords in question, I’ve exhausted my list of around 1,000 directories (yes this does work), written and submitted articles to all the worthwhile article directories (this works too), yet he’s still not ranked number one for his main keywords. First page, no doubt, but yet to grab the number one spot.

So what to do? Give up? Sit and wait?

I don’t think so.

We’re obviously on the right track, we wouldn’t be on the first page of results if we weren’t, we’d struggle to improve the on-page or on-site SEO, so it just comes down to links. There’s not a whole lot of other places for us to drop links. This is a particularly competitive industry, so none of his competitors are going to pony up a some linky goodness.

Do we just start buying links? I think not, this is no long term strategy, as we don’t want our ongoing rankings being held to ransom by some random webmaster.

There is one thing we can do though, which can help immeasurably. Whilst we may have used up pretty much all of the places we know of to drop links to this site, we can create another site and do it all over again.

“What, so you can have two sites in the top ten, but neither of them in the number one spot?” I hear you ask?

Well, you’re half right, and half wrong. I know we can move a second site into the top ten for his keywords, we’ve done it once, there’s no reason we can’t do it again. But doing it again gives us one distinct advantage.

We have an authority site to link from.

Whilst I’m a firm believer that a shitload of links is a good way to get a site ranked, there’s also a lot to be said for a single link from an authority site in the same niche. Google obviously thinks our existing site has some sort of authority, or it wouldn’t rank it in this quite competitive local niche.

So we’re off to create a second site. This is a particularly long term strategy, I wouldn’t recommend it for an affiliate or AIS site. The site we’re doing this for is a bricks and mortar business where long term rankings will be particularly beneficial.

This second site won’t simply be a second site for his business, I believe that search engines are smart enough to pick up on things like two websites in the first page of results having the same contact details, addresses etc. This site will simply consist of half a dozen well written and researched articles on the niche in question, with no outgoing links.

The important thing to keep in mind whilst building this second site is to keep it completely un-connectable to the first site. This means:

• Don’t use the same registrar to register the domain name
• Don’t use the same contact details to register the domain name (private registration with a different registrar is good)
• Don’t use the same Google Analytics account to track the site’s statistics.
• Whilst you could probably get away with hosting the site on the same IP as the original site (resellers host thousands of sites on the same IP, so the search engines can’t be sure that sites of a similar subject on the same IP are owned by the same person), it’s probably better to host this site on a different IP or hosting account from the original.
• Try to avoid using the exact same anchor text as you’ve used for the original site when gathering links.
• Don’t use the same web template as you used on the original site.
• Don’t place contact details on the second site.

Once we’ve written our articles and published the site, we start promoting the site in exactly the same way, in exactly the same places where we promoted the original sites:

• We write half a dozen more good quality articles and submit them to article directories
• We hit up our 1,000 or so link directories and drop our links on them (this is a good one to outsource - 1,000 submissions can be bought for around $70, but I find that they can be a bit hit and miss as far as accuracy goes)
• We hit up all the same blogs we did with the original site and start commenting on them using the new site as our URL

Over time, when our page reaches the first page in the search results (or even the second page), we drop a single, good anchor text sitewide link to our original site.

……and wait and see if this link is enough to tip us over into the top spot in the rankings.