Blogging

Ideas for Blogging, including websites, information, and tips.

From BitchSlap to SmackDown – Why Google is just being DUMB!

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There is still a palpable sense amongst many bloggers that Google’s recent slapdown of blogs PR rankings has created a lot of mistrust, misinformation, and misperception about Google’s intentions. But a number of truths are indeed self-evident:

#1 Google is a search engine AND an advertising company.

Increasingly, it is collating a lot of the world’s information through its various programs in libraries, publishing, and so on; and it intends (with or without the owners’ direct permission) to sell advertising on such work. While the search engine benefits a lot of people, and so people tolerate the spidering of their websites (despite the fact that Google does NOT pay for this information) even though it costs them money to let this happen. Indeed, Google is increasingly playing up the advertising side of its business, by siding with newspapers, radio, mobile phones, and other advertising dependent media.

It’s Google’s success AS AN ADVERTISING company that has allowed it to grow beyond its humble beginnings. It’s its current position AS AN ADVERTISING COMPANY that allows it to generate its large profits.

#2 The GOOG Monopoly: Intentions vs. Reality

That Google is a large and increasingly powerful company that aims to control a sizeable share of Internet advertising, primarily through AdWords and AdSense. While it is not yet a monopoly, it’s fast behaving in monopolistic ways.

Whatever your stance is on paid blogging, buy and selling links or similar activities, the fact remains that this kind of information and linking is going to be influenced by money. It will spawn a whole new generation of companies that will trade this information, just as in the past. It someone wants to buy, someone WILL want to sell whatever Google does.

The REAL question is whether the governments in the US and Europe should be stepping in and asking REAL questions about Google’s intentions: Is Google merely managing ITS own search engines or is it trying to SNUFF out legitimate competition? As Google would have you believe through its own ‘shills’, they are trying to make the results ‘better’ for everyone in Google.com… Doesn’t anyone see parallels on how Microsoft tried to make Media Players ‘better’ for everyone by REQUIRING them to be installed on all systems, UNTIL the EU put a stop to that! Can’t anyone say “Goodbye competition!” / “Hello, Monopoly!”

And even if Google does NOT intend to behave in monopolistic ways, its sizable market share creates the environment in which it is monopolistic, and its decisions carry sway over all the people who rely on Google: audience, content producers, advertisers, etc.. Those three groups experience these monopolistic type consequences WHATEVER words Google uses to pacify the accusations.

#3 Web 2.0 is about RELATIONSHIPS

And that’s a fact. Everywhere you go, you see people building relationships (via email, chat, SMS, Twitters, Social Media, linking, postings, community)… The reality is that Google is very much a web 1.0 company that is arriving in the Web 2.0 arena late. It is still doing Web 1.0 things well, but its Web 2.0 ability is poor. It’s just done email, and chat. And while reinventing email has been good, it’s effort in chat can only be graded D- at the moment. They don’t have a social media website yet apart from Orkut, and it’s not open to anyone… Web 2.0 is going to be all about the relationships…

However, this betrayal of the very bloggers who create the content for Google strikes at the foundations of Google’s future. Undermining the work of bloggers who create posts, blogs and content for Google’s search engines isn’t smart. And the bloggers are starting to rebel: some are cutting their Google Services completely, others are dropping them slowly, others are simply looking for alternatives to Google in any area that is important to them.

So many bloggers are now completely disabused of Google’s impartiality now that they have begun to take their own actions against Google. While each action is no greater than a sand particle in a desert, it is not the individual action that causes problems for Google but the sum of those actions operating in unexpected ways that Google needs to be aware of.

Here is a partial list of actions I’ve read about: dropping Adsense, swapping RSS readers, installing Adsense Blockers, switching Search Engines, removing Google inspired conveniences from the blog (such as robot exclusions for WordPress duplicate postings – which aren’t duplicate, it’s just dumb GoogleBot thinking they are), blocking Google Spiders entirely from the Website, removing their Picasa Albums to FlickR… There are more than a dozen other ways that have already been discussed, too.

Worse, though, it has damaged Google’s reputation as an impartial and trustworthy search engine in bizarre ways that the engineers can’t have thought of. Imagine asking users to REPORT websites that ABUSE their guidelines (Wow! Now Google is trying to be an intermediary between the audience and the content creators) – imagine asking staff to manually alter a supposedly automatic ranking of the website – imagine asking bloggers not to violate their TOS (most bloggers NEVER saw the TOS of Google, NEVER signed up for it, were NEVER given any opinion about its creation, and were NEVER asked if it was OK for Google to spider their website). Google has simply acted like a bull(y) in a china shop in its attitude… “Hey, I’m taking my ball, and I’m going home… I’m not going to play with you.”

#4 PageRank could just disappear

But the dumbest consequences are already beginning to be felt of this decision to limit PageRank, knockdown rank, and install no_follow.

It’s just simple: take a look at Engadget (I’m not giving them a real link) to see what I mean. There are so few external pagelinks in Engadget that it is possible for visitors to become trapped inside and end up going around in circles. Naturally, this strong inlinking combined with no_follow on external links and limited external linking creates opportunities for acquiring pagerank in Google’s Search Engine. It really doesn’t help visitors find their way around. Many times I’ve given up in despair trying to find the link to products that they have featured only to end up on irrelevant related pages. More often than not, I’ve had to copy and paste the phrase in a search window just to find what I want. I usually end up closing the window itself (and no, I don’t exit by clicking on the ads!).

But what if everyone or at least large segments of the blogging population start using tools that automatically no_follow EVERY external link? Doesn’t that mean that PageRank will start to reduce on such sites? Doesn’t that imply that PageRank will become much scarcer…? Doesn’t that reduction in liquidity mean that index will start to fail further as PR for most sites just becomes impossible. If that is the case, PageRank will start to exclude popular websites and increasingly will have its reliability questioned, much as I’m raising the issue here. It’s at this point that we will see a revision to PR or even alternatives that measure different aspects come to the fore.

PageRank already has implications for websites like this one: in the official Google index, there are reportedly 168 links to this blog only! Hah! In Yahoo! there are an estimated 14,000 links to this blog. I’m no fool to believe either of these as being accurate. But I do know Google’s own statistics for the last three months, traffic came from over 250 ‘active’ referrers… Mmm. Something is wrong there.

#5 Other Dumb Mistakes

Removing the commenting boxes for URLs in Blogger, adding no_follow to comments (has it stopped spam?), … can you add to this list?

Unfortunately, one diatribe by itself won’t change Google’s heart and mind, but that’s how avalaunches start… when one or two snowflakes create or exacerbate an underlying structural problem in the snow. Perhaps my post will help to change one or two things… And so I’ll end with a quotation…

“In this simplified setting of the sandpile, the power law also points to something else: the surprising conclusion that even the greatest of events have no special or exceptional causes. After all, every avalanche large or small starts out the same way, when a single grain falls and makes the pile just slightly too steep at one point. What makes one avalanche much larger than another has nothing to do with its original cause, and nothing to do with some special situation in the pile just before it starts. Rather, it has to do with the perpetually unstable organization of the critical state, which makes it always possible for the next grain to trigger an avalanche of any size.” from Ubiquity, Why Catastrophes Happen quoted in John Mauldin’s Newsletter entitled “Black Swans and Endogenous Uncertainty” published on December 7, 2007.

Disclaimer: I would like to thank all the bloggers over the past few months who helped shape my thinking on this, from AndyBeard, JohnChow, the bloggers at Payperpost, and there are too many to thank! But I’m thinking of you as I write this.

Getting Traffic From Forums: all it needs is your signature!

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Many bloggers are members of forums, and tend to be quite active members at that…! But many forums prohibit or curtail promotion of your blog in posts. However, it is possible to promote your blog alongside any posts you make… how? In your signature!

Your Signature

No, it’s not your name. It’s text that appears at the bottom of posts that you want to tell the world about. It can be anything: from links to text to images… Whatever.

In PHP, SMF and VB forums, there is usually a space for your signature, and in that signature you are typically free to include text, links, html (on occasions), and graphics. The only restrictions tend to be: using the BB code formats, and the length. BB code is a simplified way to enter basic codes using square brackets and special tags:

[u]underlined text[/u] will produce underlined text and so on.

To create a link in BB Code, you simply type:

[url=http://yourdomain.com/article]Post Title[/url], so in BB Code I’d type the profile area in ‘edit signature’ (VBulletin)… (note that the tags have to be closed properly).

bbcode example

Which will produce this profile…

signature

And this looks like…

sample post

See how the code looks like a clickable link, and the title takes you to a post in my blog!

 

What do you link? Where?

Of course, this isn’t really anything special. But if you have been blogging for a while, and your membership of forums covers your blog focus for sure (at least in part), then you will likely have posts that would be of relevance to readers of your blog. In this blog, there are nearly 900 posts that I can draw on, though I’d prefer to choose something more recent and more relevant.

So for example, the Forum above is called Forumosa and covers a wide range of issues related to Taiwan. I noted that many readers are likely to follow Taiwanese blogs and blogs about Taiwan, so I added links to some of my posts in this blog about Taiwan. In another forum, on business, I’d choose some with a technology or business theme. In a third forum about education, I’d go with those posts.

So much in so little space?

The real challenge though is on some forums cramming enough links into the allotted space. Forumosa allows 1100 characters, but some forums only allow 500 or even 300 characters. Steve Pavlina’s forums really challenged me to create a meaningful array of posts in my signature in 300 characters, but it can be done. I had to cut the ‘www’ part of each address, shorten the titles to key words, and cut additional padding, but I managed to cram four links into my post… that was 295 characters, in all.

signature#2

The real challenge was to create appealing ‘titles’ in just four words or less! But it can be done…

A Useful Friend (updated)

Additionally, one tool I found quite useful was OpenOffice’s Word Count Tool which can also count characters. That saved a lot of unnecessary editing! It’s easy to find in the Tools >>> WordCount submenu. It is instant, and accurate. I am guessing that MSOffice also can do this, and it may be in the same place.

 

And the results.

While my traffic from my forums really depends on how much I post, even posting just a couple of times a week in prominent threads, and making relevant points in the discussion, can benefit. In fact, traffic from forums account for about 4.7% of my total visitors in the past 30 days. It’s not a great deal, but that was before I really optimized my signature. And I didn’t take much part in discussions. But with regular posting it should be possible to generate even more visitors. And compared to my Google Traffic (just over 10% in the last 30 days), it’s not to be sneezed at. Over the last eleven months, it has attracted just over 7% of my total traffic! That’s quite respectable.

(update: in the last 24 hours, since I updated my signature on Forumosa, and posted three times, I’ve attracted 14 click throughs. So it works quickly.)

Cashquests.com: A Blog with a future? Perhaps not

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(Or don’t let this happen to YOUR blog!)

Recently, many popular and less popular blogs were cashing on the craze for buying and selling blogs. BloggingFingers, CashQuests and a slew of others have been sold. It was John Cow who recently posted what happened,they were bought by IEntry.com for a largish sum (about $15,000).

So what was CashQuests.com? …

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CashQuests, aka Kumiko Suzuki’s blog (no link because it simply redirects), used to be one of my favorites. It was available online, and I came across it in the days after she lost her Adsense account (a post that I can’t find!). Since then, I enjoyed her making money blog and her posts on a number of topics including: getting traffic, making money, advertising and so on…

kumiko

This image was taken from Wayback Archives, and the quotation from her About page wrote:

My goal became to take the BS out of the blogosphere (creating the logophere?) and bring some originality and creativity into the world of ‘making money online’! I hope you like the result!

Kumiko really managed to create a strong identity with provocative posts, ideas and ways to make money. The transition from Kumiko’s CashQuest (as it was on Blogspot) to Cashquests.com was a slow and methodical one, but it wasn’t without its bumps. One Blogger even suggested that the blog had been sold then as well (but if it was, it must have been a private sale).

But during this time, there was a strong sense of continuity (whether posts were written or edited by her, we don’t know). In the archives you could still find some of her best posts, too.

After the BIG sale

Unfortunately, the new owners have not taken the blog seriously at all, except to milk as much money through ill-placed affiliate advertisements. The new blog has been left to its own devices without much obvious capable management or intervention.

RIP

You can see this neglect in a number of ways as the new owners have shown no real mastery of the WordPress application or its potential for creating a successful or vibrant blog:

  • 1. There are seven ugly big banners inconsistently (and untargeted) placed all over the blog;
  • 2. there is no more search box, making searching the archives for Kumiko’s classic posts difficult (though savvy WordPress visitors can still search the blog by adding the switch s?= and the keywords!);
  • 3. there are no pages, no links, no categories;
  • 4. there has been no posting on the blog regarding the change of ownership;
  • 5. there have been only two posts in a little over two weeks, neither of which demonstrate the quality and depth of Kumiko’s old offerings (the first was barely 102 words, and the second one was basically spamming forums with sales mails and reaping the benefits);
  • 6. the more traditional blog features that were used on CashQuests have all gone: no MyBlogLog, no real commenting any more (several of my comments have never been posted), no identity, no personality, and very little consistency; and
  • 7. the lack of any real formal announcement or introduction to the new owners really has to be the MOST thing to do to a blog and its readership.

It’s all in the numbers

In fact, these seven tactics really show new owners how not to run a blog. And, unfortunately for the new owners, the results are beginning to show: Traffic is down, Page Views are down, Comments are way down, and the absolute number of visitors is alsow down. While the original sitepoint sale claims that the traffic was about 500 Uniques per day, it’s hard to see with a ranking of only 55K on Alexa that the traffic could be that big still. There has been little in the way of new postings to attract readers. In fact, it seems that everyone is waiting for the new owners to make themselves clearly known, for a new and outspoken voice to emerge, and for the blog to recover.

However, I’m predicting this will NOT happen. Why?

Taking over someone’s blog is always going to be a difficult task, because of a number of obvious but overlooked reasons: but most of all, a BLOG is NOT a regular business. It is much different:

666cashquests

Look at the number of the Authority…!

It’s the Blogger, Stupid

The original (and often inspiring) driving factor is the original blogger, who is able to make their personality PART of the blog’s personality. Can you imagine John Chow’s blog without John Chow? In recent months, we’ve seen the Kumiko Identity become much vaguer and much less of a driving force. Fortunately, the articles were generally getting better in quality, but still there was something different as the blog evolved.

A blog is not a candy store!

Taking over a blog is not really like taking over a candy store. Because the candy store owner doesn’t really make the candy these days, he or she merely sells the candy to others. So a change of owner won’t really have an impact on the quality of the candy. However, in a blog the blogger is the salesperson and the manufacturer: when the blogger changes, it is likely that the quality of the bloggings will also change. It will be VERY difficult to maintain the quality of the writing (I don’t just mean whether it’s good or bad).

Bye-bye vs. Buy-Buy

Because the blogger changes, many of the original relationships that the original blogger sought and built up over the months and years will not necessarily be available to the new owners. It’s true that the new owners may bring their own relationships, and perhaps the readers will benefit. But perhaps they won’t. It was quite a while before the new owners of NetBusinessBlog really managed to hit their stride. And in that time, I pulled out of reading that blog on a regular basis.

 It’s All Downhill Now

And, there in lies the key: the readership may sense that the blog has lost its authority, its presence, perhaps even its leadership position. The readers will then check back occasionally to see what’s going on, but the loss of that stature in the eyes of the readers will erode the relationships with the readers that the original blogger managed to build up.

A quick look at the stats of CashQuests.com will highlight the current deterioration of the blog, its infrequent posts, its poor commenting record, and decreasing traffic.

alexa-cashquests

The blog was officially sold on 19 Nov 2007. So you can see where the traffic started falling fast!

Are you planning to sell? If so…

If you are planning to sell your blog, and you want your blog to survive longer than a few months, you may need to spend some time trying to deal with these problems by ensuring that there is a much stronger continuity between owners. Otherwise, while you may be happy with the money you made, your blog, your readers and your new owner may be wondering what is going on: as we are.

For more reading, check out this discussion on selling blogs and this one on buying blogs.

I’d like to know what you think of this phenomenon of buying and selling blogs… Have you ever thought of buying one or selling yours?