Blogging has made the World a Village

Being from a small village in a remote part of the world (originally that is, before I moved to sunny Spain) taught me a few things in life.

It gave me the perspective that one only truly gets by being from a place where everyone leaves their doors unlocked when they go out, and everyone knows each others name. I have also now spent 25 years in a truly cosmopolitan society where one would never leave ones door unlocked, so I understand the flip side of the equation as well.

The recent world events including the tragic death of Benazir Bhutto, have brought to my attention the way that the whole world is to some extent developing a more “village” attitute, being brought together by online forums, social networking sites, and to a massive extent blogs!

My ramblings in the last post about the news brought in about 150 more readers than normal for one of my posts, all from google having searched relevant terms (a few even left comments) - and this does go to show that the whole interaction thing inside us really isnt dead, its just misplaced!

There was a time when everybody knew their neighbours, and now it seems more likely that you have friends online, by facebook or myspace, but haven’t a clue who your neighbours actually are. I suppose its just a sign of the times and a progression to the globalisation that runs our international economies today - its just extended now to also include our private lives as well!

Is this a good or bad thing? Well, thats totally down to personal perspective, however purely on a darwinistic viewpoint surely over development of online social groups at the detriment to developing “real” social skills is very dangerous - this is the first generation of humans in history that can realistically have a full social network and never really meet anybody.

I wonder what that will do for peoples social skills over the next 50 years?

Benazir Bhutto - how news affects SEO.

Its been an interesting day.

So far we have had two journalists on the phone this morning concerning photos that I have posted on a political forum that I designed.

To say I was surprised was an understatement, I mean, why were these journalists contacting us?

Well: about three months ago, Benazir Bhutto made her last public appearance in the UK, at a charity dinner in Rochester.  The political forum I own is Strood Conservatives which caters uniquely to politics in Rochester, Strood and Gillingham (our local area), was there that evening, and we have had the photos published for a few months…

It would appear that our forum has the last photos of Benazir taken in the UK before her tragic and cowardly assassination.  You can see the photos that are on our forum here: Strood Photos

What effect has this had on the forums traffic?

Well we typically get 25 to 40 u/v per day,  and we have had a decrease in traffic over the last 10 days as christmas has been upon us.  Traffic yesterday >1000 u/v with the same today so far. So thats 2000 extra visitors,  and all from google, or google image search!

It just goes to show the importance of staying in touch with developing world events for SEO!

MM

A Christmas present from Google

Following a few posts Ive made recently on a few forums asking this question (and my previous topic as well) there is now some rumour that we will see a TBPR update on Christmas day.

The source of this fresh rumour is none other than Matt Cutts, the unofficial Google spokesman for all things SEO related. Doing a TBPR update on Christmas day actually makes a lot of sense, I’m guessing that the 25th of December has the least traffic of any day of the year worldwide, closely in front of January first - now before anyone jumps down my throat on that I am of course aware that these dates are only really relevant to Christians in the west, but hey lets face it, its a heck of a big demographic of webusers inst it?

So - if we do have a major toolbar pagerank update on the 25th, who are likely to be the big winners and losers? Well, any sites recntly penalised in the mass delist will probably be the major losers, having lost all that accumulated linkjuice. Secondly will be those websites who have actively bought links from these sites, and particularly those that depend heavily on sitewide links from penalised sites. The winners will be the sites that have had the most organic growth since the last toolbar update, and have backlinks coming back in from hundreds and hundreds of domains.

Basically folks, the game has just got harder! Its no longer about buying 100,000 links on a major forum, its about “acquiring” 100,000 links on 100,000 different websites. Now thats going to be a whole lot harder than it used to be, hence everyone that is undeserving of their PR is likely to drop!

That will make an interesting addition to the Turkey and Cranberry sauce!

MM

The Google Mass Delist

Fellow compulsive SEO’s the world over have had one subject on the tips of their tongues this week,  and thats been the massive de-list of websites from googles indexes.

At the moment there is no definitive answer as to how many sites have been delisted from the index,  but a conservative estimate is that 10 to 12% of the entire index has been purged.  That would work out to be around 9 billion webpages from the index!!  As to why this has happened, well like everything relating to google there is no straight answer to that right now - but its safe to say that they have just been concentrating on sites that seem to be created primarily for SEO purposes, and cutting down on sites content with tens of thousands of pages indexed.  One personal example is my poker forum which had 3000+ pages indexed up until a week ago, now its total site: yield is 1200, so its lost 60% of its indexed pages.

Why is this important? Well, using my example of the poker forum, I derive on average for the last 3 months, 842 clicks from google’s non-paid searches.  That accounts for around 15% of my total traffic - and with 60% less pages it stands to reason that I will get 60% less clicks next month.  That calculation doesnt take into account the  fact that 80% of the clicks come from highly context sensitive searches, which will ofcourse decrease my overall loss in traffic, but all the same I would expect to lose maybe 100 u/v’s next month on the back of the “correction”.

My poker forum site though is of course just the tip of the iceberg - I am aware of sites with 75,000+ pages indexed in google that have disappeared entirely. These sites are primarily MFA sites (made for adsense) which is ofcourse against googles T.O.S.’s, hence giving need for the correction. I would imagine that these webmasters are a little upset as their sites will have almost overnight lost 100% of their adsense revenue’s, but as they say, live by the sword, die by the sword.

Many sites are ofcourse unaffected by this de-list - and those are the sites it would seem that have never employed active SEO practices. Another site of mine that has been unaffected is a political blog, which has both .gov and .edu backlinks to it, perhaps these have given it some credence with the big “G” and therefore it has been left untouched following the adjustment.

It remains to be seen of course if there will be a major pagerank update on the back of this re-index - in my guess there will be an adjustment, in the same way as there was last month during the directories “black wednesday” update - as ofcourse all that linkjuice from listed pages has now gone. This could be worrying if your webpages off site SEO revolved around backlinks from the sites most affected, such as directories, forums and other database driven SEO based sites.

I guess to sum up, its a lesson for the grey hat SEO specialists that just concentrate on total link yield, to look at their practices and build more context sensitive links rather than just buying mass links from services link TNX and so on.

Anyway, my calimocho has run out so Im off for some egg-nog!

Buenas Tardes Muchachos!

MM

WSOP 2008 Schedule Published

I’ve not blogged about my second passion (behind webmastery ofcourse!) which is poker.

I, like everyone else that plays, consider myself to be the best player on the planet.

In reality Im sure I fall way, way behind that level - but hey its nice to dream once in a while! Anyway, the reason for this post is that Harrah’s yesterday published the 2008 WSOP Schedule which you can check out by following the link.

I havent decided which events to play in this year, and the fact that its on over 7 weeks this year causes a bit of an issue as I would like to go for the whole lot, but there’s NO WAY I could swing that with the mrs….

So, I guess I will have to think carefully about it, and when I do decide I guess I will post it up here!

Anyway, Buenas tardes muchachos!

MM

$272,000 in one year. How I did it.

Hey folks,

I’m just finalizing a sale of one of my projects that has not only made the bulk of my revenues in 2007, but has also just netted me a decent amount of coin in selling it. Hopefully it will earn me even more in the next 12 months.

While I’m not going to go into great detail here (legal reasons) I can tell you that the site is a gaming related site, and provides gambling services (outside the USA of course).

Anybody can make this kind of money, but guess what people, you HAVE TO WORK FOR IT!  My success never came overnight. It came after 6 months of research in the market, 6 months of cold calling affiliates, 6 months of creating ideas - realising they were rubbish and creating more ideas, and that was just THIS PROJECT - never mind the years of prior experience!!

Finally it all comes into place. If it doesn’t come into place then just move on, go back to your day job (or don’t leave it), internet marketing isnt for everyone.

If I could be as bold as to instill a few messages in my post, the values that I feel benefit an internet marketer MOST are:

1) be persistent. If something doesn’t work for you first time, refine your idea and try again.
2) be original. How many ebook sites are there out their? Millions, thats how many. What makes yours special? if you cant answer that then your not doing it right!
3) invest in your ideas. This can be done in a few ways, if you have the money to outsource dont be afraid to use it, if you don’t, invest in LEARNING the skills you need. When I started out ifI needed something done in photoshop, I learnt photoshop. If I needed some PHP coding, I learnt PHP. Just deal with it!
4) NEVER, EVER GIVE UP - unless you ignored points 1,2 & 3 above. If you did ignore them, well, feel free to ignore point 4 as well. You would be best off just going back to whatever it was you did before.

One other tip that I have is to invest in the future. The last 3 major projects I built, I have sold on, but kept a fraction of the company. At first this seemed insane as I literally took $30,000 less than I needed to on the first one, but that $30k has been paid back to me in the last 3 years, and guess what, I will still earn out of it in 2008. This new project that Im just selling up now, well - I’m keeping 20% of it and the new buyers have the ability to market it way beyond my budget, so hopefully that 20% will be worth another $50k next Christmas.

Anyway, the moral of the story I guess is to never give in. If I have managed it I’m sure you can too!

Onwards and upwards with the NEXT project!

Why would Anyone Pay for Hosting Again?

Ive spent the week so far configuring my new hosting provider, and its finally ready!

I would like to announce here on my personal blog that as of the 5th of December 2007, my new hosting provider http://HostedWith.Us is open and ready for business!

Basically, you get up to 100GB of Storage Space and up to 100GB of monthly transfer allowance absolutely FREE!

All that we ask is that you have two small (tiny infact) links back to our homepage on your site,  and we add them automatically anyway so you dont need to worry about it!

What if you want the links removed?  Well you can do,  for less than 2$!!  Our aim is to really shake up the hosting market,  so go ahead, try us out today!

Buenas Tardes Muchachos,

MM.

SEO - Reactive or Proactive?

A part of Search Engine Optimisation that is rarely discussed is the need for proactive optimisation of sites and content rather than reactive optimisation.  You may have never though of SEO in these terms but let me break it down a bit for you so that you get the picture of what I am talking about:

Reactionary Search Engine Optimisation:
Building Links
Creating a sound html site
submitting sitemaps
ensuring link structure is sound
regsitration with directories

Proactive SEO:
Concentrating on what will be important tomorrow, next week or next year.

But I haven’t got a crystal ball, so how do I do it?  You might be asking yourself - well, its not impossible to predict whats happening tomorrow for a wide host of things.  For example, if tomorrow’s Sunday you could predict that you might have a lie in,  if tomorrow were Tuesday you might have a meeting.  This is proactive predictions of what will take place tomorrow.

Now, there are some problems, particularly to Search Engine Optimisation that will arise here.  Firstly,  who cares what your doing tomorrow (to be blunt!) and secondly how can you predict things that other people would be interested in, in advance?

Well its not as impossible as may seem.  To give an example: I have the site wsop2008satellites.com now, I registered this site several years ago (along with 2009,2010 and so on) as I knew then that this would be an important search term in the future.  At the moment I get about 300 uv per day from google organic traffic,  so it has been a success.  Now this strategy can be ported to all sorts of ideas,  for instance the 2012 olympics,  you can bet your ar*e that this will be a busy search term in about 4 years, so why not start on the site now?

There is also another way to predict trends, or atleast to react to them much much quicker,  and that would be by taking a look at Google Trends. This covers the highest ranked searches in the last 24hours, updated every 20 minutes,  but also has historical data as to the average amount of searches going back about five years.  An experiment would be to play about with various keyword combinations to see what traffic you get off google for having them in your website or blog, that are currently experiencing high search volume.  A good pointer here is to ignore common searches like “restaurant reviews” as its fair to say that there are about a hundred million other webpages that are far more established than your page that cover this subject already.  A better idea is to concentrate on “unusual” keyword combinations.  For example, right now (15.12BST) these are popular terms: “Seth Tobias”, ” missing canoeist”, “eric the midget webcam”, “I am legend ending”. It will be interesting to see how many hits I get off these in such an underdeveloped (from an SEO p.o.v.) blog.

Anyway, Im off for my calimocho again,

Buenas Tardes Muchachos!

MM

Building Communities on the Internet

The internet is a valuable tool - and if you filter out all the porn and spam that are at every corner, the new fad for social networking is in my opinion perhaps the most important social development since, well, the internet itself.

In days gone by (alright, 95-96 so not that long ago) the internet was seen as a great tool for social interaction. I remember 12 years ago selling an old lady a laptop and internet connection to keep in touch with her granddaughters in the USA, who had the old compuserve numbered email addresses. That was my first real introduction into the power of “connecting people” as nokia like to put it. The internet was set to join people together, to create huge online communities of like minded thinkers, to connect you more and more to the people you love, and even meet new ones. It just didnt really work out though.

I mean sure, there are lots of forums and there always have been. Forums are indispensable sites to discuss mutually interesting topics, but they were never intended to be peculiar to a group of friends. This is where Facebook, Bebo and others have really come into their own over the last year or two. I know your thinking that Ive forgotten to mention MySpace, but in all honesty I dont rate (and never have done) their community. Its merely an extension on what geocities were doing 10 years ago, while encouraging you to stick to a certain format. What MySpace never did was connect you in an online environement to the people around you - which is what the success of Facebook is down to. Its not random people on another continent, its your very own friends and family, albeit quite possibly on another continent!

Whats the future going to hold? Well, this new craze I am glad to say is surely here to stay. A great indicator to this is the fact that Ning has over 150,000 social networks on it, and Facebook is the 8th most popular website in the world at the time of writing. This is what the internet was always meant for, but along the way we got sidetracked with all the porn!

Long live Social Networking, Long live The ‘Net - Vive La Revolucion!

anyways, my calimocho is getting warm. Off to enjoy a tipple and my favourite TV show,

Buenas Tardes Muchachos,

MM