December 8th, 2007 § § permalink
Sometimes, when you have a website that is doing well in a small niche, is inevitable that an asshole will appear and will clone it. Depending on various factors, this could be a good thing or a disaster for you.
Today, I am gonna tell you why is a good thing.
I have a small site that’s one of the best in its niche. A few weeks ago, I received a link exchange email and I checked the website requesting it. To my surprise, it was a total clone of my own website, starting from the categories, content and monetization. Unfortunatelly for the sad bastard, here are my aces:
- My site is 2 years old
- Lots of natural links
- Lots of authority links
- 8000 RSS feed subscribers
- Excellent internal links on Google
Why the appearance of the clone is a good thing? Well, in order to take my position in the niche, he is forced to throw in the heavy artillery. He is forced to try a lot of optimization methods and he is forced to gain a LOT of incoming links. Due to the fact that he is a cheap competitor, he is not buying links but he is gaining them through request and submissions. Because my site was doing great through link baits and natural link growth, I’ve never payed attention (read this as: I was too lazy) to gain more external links. Now, the competitor is doing all the hard work (research) for me and all I have to do is to use Yahoo Site Explorer to track his actions and follow his steps 
To summarize: if a competitor appears don’t go nuts. If it is a spammer he’ll get kicked by search engines algorithmically. If it is a good competitor and you have some advantages on him, analyze his steps and stay one step ahead always.
December 1st, 2007 § § permalink
Two months ago, one of my content sites got completely flushed from the Live index. This was a clean content site, with enough content and incoming links. Due to the fact that even though I had a lot of #1 keywords on Live the traffic was insignificant I didn’t pay attention to this.
Once the Live webmaster tools were announced, I decided to give it a try. The tools that they are currently providing are not enough not raise my interest so I decided to test drive it with the banned (?) site.
Today, I saw that the site got back, more pages indexed and with more keywords in the SERPs (the traffic still sucks though).
Now I am going to submit a few more websites to see if the pattern repeats.
November 26th, 2007 § § permalink
We all have learned by now that having the ability to ping is doing miracles for our sites. So having a ping feature for a pligg based website is a must. Due to the fact that this is not a built in feature, we have the following options:
Buy a custom module. For this there is Plingger which is very cheap, only 10USD. This ping by default 13 engines and more can be added. If you are in a hurry this is for you.
If you are not willing to invest in such a module there is another option for you: Feedburner. Here are the steps that you need to make:
- Go to Feedburner and burn a feed for each of your sections.
- For each feed, go to the “Publicize” tab and activate the “Pingshot” service.
- Check the Google Blog Search Engine and Ping-O-Matic and than add 3 more search engines of your choice
If you want to deeply integrate your Pligg based website with feedburner, here is a tutorial on how to do it. This will allow you to get statistics for your RSS feeds.
Incoming search terms:
October 31st, 2007 § § permalink
I was writing last time about a new form of intelligent blog comment spam commenting. This new form implies that instead of mass, automated, crappy comments on low value blogs you get some medium quality comments made by humans, with links that are going to stay for a while.
Jon Waraas has just started a business out of this. The packages that he offers are:
- 100 comments: Get 100 targeted blog comments with BuyBlogComments.com for only $24.99.
- 500 comments: Get 500 targeted blog comments with BuyBlogComments.com for only $123.99.
- 1000 comments: Get 1000 targeted blog comments with BuyBlogComments.com for only $239.99
What those packages mean in fact? You get PERMANENT links at ~0.25$. Not for month, not for year. But as long as the target blog will last. That implies links that get old on pages that in time gain PR. And links not on non related pages but targeted to your niche. That’s quite a bargain.
Why is this better for blog owners and is different from common, crappy comment spamming? Well:
- The blog gets unique content
- Those comments are very likely to stimulate conversations. Remember those are human made and on subject
After all is a win/win situation, the only ones who’d might not like it being the Google engineers. But this form of comment spamming is pretty hard to catch, so they’ll have to deal with it 
June 23rd, 2007 § § permalink
Google got pretty fast lately. A few examples on 2 of my sites:
- A post was created indexed and ranked in 24h. Now is #2 for its target (low&local competition though). The result is still there after 1 week
- A post created 3h ago has been indexed and ranked (on the second page though and on a low competition phrase)