So you’re away on holiday! This happens! You get sick – it happens, too! How do you keep the blog posts up? How do you not let your readership down?

Well, guest blogging is one option that the itinerant or holiday making or sick blogger has. It brings new talent, new points of view, may attract new new readers from the guests’ own blog. For the guest blogger, it will provide extra exposure for themselves, drive more traffic to their own blogs, and challenge to reach new readerships.

However, for the blog’s readers you need to analyze if the situation will benefit your readers carefully. I was watching John Chow’s blog over the past few days while John was over here at Computex 2007. Now, naturally, he couldn’t blog as much as before: he was busy! So he invited Alex Shalman, Jane May and Michael Kwan to guest blog for him.

I think that it may have been a bit of a mistake, oddly enough not because of the quality of the blogs or the bloggers themselves. In fact, their posts were of a high standard, a very high standard. It’s just that page views and comments seem to have declined while John Chow was away from his website.

I can’t quite tell but it’s much easier to get in the comments top ten than previously. Also a quick look at Alexa’s page shows dropping page views. Comments per posting have decreased too. They used to be in the 60’s but now many are in the 40’s or so. And many of the guest blog comments are the ones50 and under.

I think the results may reflect something of a downdraft in John’s audience figures as he has drifted from posting his own thoughts to posting lots of posts about Computex, beer, babes and so on, that are less relevant to his readers’ interests! Perhaps his readers are tiring of his postings as much as they are not warming to the postings of the guest bloggers. Of course, this is John’s blog: he can do whatever he wants… but he may need to get back on topic. The good news is his RSS readership is still expanding. So perhaps the Alexa and comments don’t tell the whole story.

But what is a busy blogger to do to keep her or his readers happy? Suggestions.

For weird reasons, the following long comment wasn’t posted successfully. Hence I’m reposting this comment as a post. I think it’s really worth reading, I’m not sure if I agree with everything in it (I’m not exactly an expert!), but here it is anyway. It was written by Elizabeth Adams in response to a posting indicated below. I’d certainly welcome your thoughts! Do check out Elizabeth’s website, it’s worth reading!

Elizabeth Adams | eadams @ silverlink.net | elizabethadamsdirect.com

Re … Google’s Supplementals Hell, Part 2 … 06/03/07

Hello, Kenneth …

You wrote, “It’s not that the posts are published twice, it’s just that the cross-linking in blogs allows Google spiders to find the articles more than once in different places. It appears to Google that the article is published more than once, but in fact there is only one article, published once. There are multiple references to it at the same time, so Google’s ‘smart’ spiders think it is multiple posts!”

I don’t understand. How can a link be misinterpreted as content? Or two links as duplicated content? That doesn’t make sense.

Could there possibly be some other reason besides “multiple references” why articles are being swept into “Supplementals Hell”?

About a year ago, Google’s Matt Cutts said that “PageRank is the primary factor determining whether a url is in the main web index vs. the supplemental results” and that “typically the depth of the directory doesn’t make any difference for us; PageRank is a much larger factor. So without knowing your site, I’d look at trying to make sure that your site is using your PageRank well. A tree structure with a certain fanout at each level is usually a good way of doing it.”

So … well, is your site using your PageRank well? Is your tree structure fanning out a certain amount at each level?

(giggle!) I actually sound like I know what I’m talking about!

Marcia on WebMasterWorld said, “Not one single speck of duplication, what’s Supplemental and what isn’t on the test site(s) is 100% dependent on the amount of link love the pages are getting.

“People who are looking for dup issues where none exist are, unfortunately, chasing their tails.”

Halfdeck of Seo4Fun said, “Answer me this. How can a computer program read, understand, and judge the quality of an article in comparison to other articles written on the same topic? It can’t – until Google discovers Artificial Intelligence. Sure – there are ways to look for on-page spammy finger prints (e.g. illogial sentence structures, excessively high keyword density, overuse of bold and italics). But given two well-written articles, how does a machine decide – based solely on on-page text – which article is more valuable?

“It can’t.

“Relevance for a keyword can, of course, be guessed at by looking at things like the TITLE tag, keyword frequency, keyword location on the page, and keywords in H1. Relevancy, however, has nada to do with page value or page quality.

“How can a program judge the value of a page using on-page text alone when, from its POV, everything looks like a random string of symbols? To gauge a page’s value, there is simply no other option than to analyze off-page factors.”

Your PageRank is 3/10, which seems pretty good to me. How’s your “link love”?

Regards, Elizabeth …

P.S. When are you going to enable smilies?

There’s also more reading at What are Google Supplemental Results? : SEO Book.com

I’ve blogged about Adsense in the past, and in fact, this blog has had some problems with Adsense in the past, so I placed the Adsense ads with some trepidation. Anyway, I wanted to wait until I reach several thresholds before adding the adds:

1. my check came for previous revenue;
2. I passed the 100K for Alexa and Technorati;
3. I reached a 1000 visits in 30 days, not uniques.

All of these came to pass in the last few days, so I thought I would enable Adsense again. I’ve only put them on the main pages BETWEEN posts. I’ve placed 3 sets of large size blocks and they are blended, take a look at the image.

Unfortunately, my timing wasn’t good, as the traffic dropped significantly since last week! Summer is coming and people don’t want to be indoors, I guess!

I know this placement isn’t optimal for revenues, but I didn’t want to place them right at the top or in the sidebar (too crowded already). So, we’ll see what impact it has or if I need to move them.

I respect readers may not wish to see Adsense, so if you are using FF, you can download Adsense blocking software, like AdblockPlus.