My websites, my life.
Hitting all the Targets
When I founded CoinTalk.org in the fall of 2002, I simply wanted to provide an alternative to the USENET newsgroup that I had been participating in, as an escape to the burgeoning load of spam and trolling that are ubiquitous in an unmoderated newsgroup. I’m amazed at how far it has come. [Read more...]
About the Zealot.com Deal
This is one of my longest term projects. I’ve put a ton of heart and effort into building up this community to where it is today. As it stands, Zealot.com has over 30,000 members all of whom are very zealous about their hobby. [Read more...]
BloggerTalk Gets a Facelift
I put a bunch of work into BloggerTalk.com over the past few weeks. It had been a while since I took the time to do any work at all with BT, so it was well overdue. [Read more...]
I’ve always believed that the best way to make a successful website is to have solid unique content. First, we need to make some assumptions. Unique content can be useful, or useless. Duplicate content can be useful or useless. So, I could spend an hour writing up an article that would be of no use to anyone, while I could go to an article site and spend an hour hunting down useful articles. But, the big monkey wrench in this equation is that if you write uniqe content that is useful, people are going to steal it from you and publish it under their own name on their own websites. Google will reward them for doing it. So, what’s the better business plan then? Spending tons of your time to create great content, and having search engine spammers take it and publish it as their own? Or, be a search engine spammer and take whatever content you want? From what I’ve seen, Google gives bigger checks to search engine spammers than it does to people who create genuine unique content. Oh, I know, my perception of it is skewed, but really why is Matt Cutts so chummy with the search engine spammers?
Approximately two years ago, I was divesting myself of my hosting business, and in a separate transaction I sold off . I sold it for about what I paid for it. A few days ago, I bought it back from the person I had sold it to, back in 2003. I paid less than half of what it had originally sold. I’ve upgraded, and am refocusing the site. It was focused on being a technical support site, but since the osCommerce main site does that so well, there’s no need. There is a need, however, for a site focused on helping people who don’t need technical support, but would like to learn more about managing an ecommerce site. So, the focus will be on subjects like marketing, SEO, fullfillment, and other non-technical issues. The technical stuff is still there, just consolidated into a smaller area. Come over and say hi!
Well, I’ve finally gotten around to putting some more focus on my forums. Recently, I’ve started trying to further develop my Blog Forum. Started posting more, getting others to post, tinkering with the design a bit. I also reconfigured the sections to make more sense, consolidate a few areas that hadn’t seen a whole lot of action. I’d like feedback on it, and bloggers go and post!
I’ve noticed on a couple of my sites, Google Image Search taking up a lot of bandwidth. This helps explain it a bit. I’m not sure if it’s worth it at all. On one of my sites, they were pretty much just hotlinking my images, so I disabled hotlinking. The site wasn’t getting very good rankings in the search anyway, and still isn’t. If Google is going to take my bandwidth, I’d appreciate if they’d at least give me a good SERP in return. 
*disclaimer: if any Google employees ever read this, I’m being sarcastic with that final remark, please don’t ban me. 
One of the most commonly misunderstood subjects about Google is PageRank. It’s difficult to understand the whys of how Google approaches this, making some facts very secretive and some very public. But, there are some things that we can understand, such as the PageRank as shown in the toolbar.
Toolbar PageRank is a snapshot of real PageRank. The most recent toolbar PageRank update happened just a couple days ago. What the toolbar is now showing is how the PageRank appeard at some point in late December.
How do I know this? Well, because it included PageRank from some links that I added in mid-December, but not some that I added on December 30th and 31st. It’s possible that Google captured the PageRank on Christmas weekend itself, and updated the toolbar on New Year’s weekend.
Why is it important to understand that this is a snapshot? The PageRank you see in the toolbar is old news. The search engine itself updates PageRank on a daily basis, more or less. In fact, it depends on the importance of the site how often it’s updated. If you get a link from a very important site (high PR), you’ll get updated far more quickly than if you get a link from a low PR site. You can test this by adding new links and monitoring your positions before, during, and after.
I haven’t had much time to post to this blog in the past couple weeks, even less than usually, as I’m working day and night to meet my year end goal. The goal is 100 presentable websites. More precisely I will have ten forums, twenty-five content sites, and seventy-five micro-sites. Yea, more than a hundred, but it’s a nice round number. One of my latest is The Lemon Laws a content site about consumer protection and auto laws. Many more to come.
I’ve had this site around forever, and finally decided to clean it up, install my CMS, and relaunch it. I started this site, Online Auctions back when I was heavy into selling on Ebay, did little with it and it’s languished for the last couple years. Seems this week I’m on a roll of launching or relaunching a site per day. I need to work out the buttons on the site, but am beginning to like how the coder I hired did the templating system. Now, I need to get more content.
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