slamboard

I have ratcheted down my blogging frequency quite a bit as other aspects of my life and work demand more of my time and energy. I was surprised to see that my blog still ranks quite highly for the search term ‘Kimkins‘ after I have been mostly out of the loop for months.

I guess Google algorithms don’t discount you for being out of the loop.

I am considering outsourcing some of my blogs to my children for the summer, but I will probably hold on to this one because of its relative seriousness. Are there any other bloggers out there who are trying to get their kids into blogging? I have a vague memory of the Family Circus guy getting his kid to draw his daily comic. I don’t know if he really did that or if it was just a creative device design to conceal the fact that he had the shakes.

If you are like me, you don’t use the salad crisper in your refrigerator. The advanced operators on Google are kinda like that. I remember using similar commands when I was doing abstract searches on a cd-rom database at school back in the 80s. I am just mentioning them on here because I figure that there might be a few people like me who didn’t even realize that they were there. I think I might start using the allintitle: operator from time to time.

I am way late in making any kind of commentary about John Chow getting manually punished by Google for his not not evil ways, so I won’t bother. I will focus instead on page two of the Google search query for John Chow. It contains an entry for John Chow’s MyBlogLog page and the text blurb is written by John Chow. It is the highest ranking page over which he has any editorial control. His holiday wishes are expressed on this page at this time. I suspect that JohnCow.com is getting more Google traffic than MyBlogLog.com/buzz/community/JohnChow/, but every little bit helps.

The URL for my full name is taken, but I really need to make a point of getting domains for my kids. Having a your name as a URL is a tremendous asset if you don’t blow it by ticking Google off.

The Blogger’s Choice Awards was a success for its creator. It was a small ego boost for the winners. I nominated myself for a handful of categories hoping that it would attract a few readers. I didn’t get very many votes.

A big part of the success of the site is owed to the celebrity bloggers that took notice.

There was a fraught competition between supporters of Rosie O’Donnell and Will Wheaton. Will was initially flattered, but he became very critical of the site when he found out that it was affiliated with PayPurrPost. Rosie was more positive about the nomination and expressed the desire to win. Rosie has her detractors as well as her supporters and her page on the BCA site has over 8000 comments. Rosie won.

A very bad man initially had a huge lead in the Worst Blog of All Time category. When he tipped everyone off to the fact that he was happy about all the attention and traffic, things tailed off for him. Unfortunately for him all the attention was ultimately bad for business because his more questionable practices came under the scrutiny of people that were in a position to dam up some of his revenue streams. In the end Perez Hilton was proclaimed the worst. I think that is inaccurate, he is simply the most popular bad blogger.

The BCA’s were not a good traffic generation tool for the everyday blogger, in my opinion. If you were one of the few that got in before the unmoderated nominee lists became huge, you may have gotten a few clicks from people who were not already familiar with your blog. I did not see any sustained traffic benefit from participating in this silly exercise in self promotion and ego fluffing.

SEO tends to focus extensively on Google for the most part. MSN and Yahoo each have a piece of the search engine pie and everyone else gets crumbs. I was very surprised to see how many small players are on this decidedly unlevel playing field. One particular search engine appeared up on my radar today. It is called StrategicBoard and it is based in Israel. It is focused on blogs and has a human editorial element that is designed to exclude spam. If any of you readers are attempting to operate Google-free for ethical and/or spiteful reasons, you should check it out.

Everyone in Web Business and the Blogosphere have been sitting on pins and needles waiting for Google to run and update. Now that it has happened, there is a lot of emotional outpouring and ill-informed post game analysis going on. There is not really anything informative coming from the Google.

Truly important sites like Forbes.com and Washingtonpost.com suffered a drop in Page Rank.

Techcrunch.com is listed in an article on Forbes as one of the fallen. An early post on Techcrunch itself doesn’t seem to acknowledge any drop. The Techcrunch post used the word Jihad in its title and received many, many comments from people who were offended or pretended to be offended. I am offended by the Washington Redskins (or maybe I am just pretending).

If you are an outsider reading about all the Page Rank related anxiety and frustration, I will sum it up for you…It’s all about the money.

I have already published a short post about the increase in reblogging. I delete trackbacks everyday that come from ‘blogs’ that are nothing but a collection of excerpts from real bloggers who are creating real content. Given the automated nature of this method of creating a website that appears to have relevant content to the search engine spiders, I can assume that they occasionally feed off each other. I have noticed in the past few days that the reblogs that are set up to have a little attribution blurb are attributing it to the wrong author. A post that I wrote discussing LAP BAND surgery was incorrectly attributed to CarbWire. This attribution is in the form of unlinked text. The rebloggers get to exist in a gray area of ethics and legality because they link to the original source. They do not add to the discussion in the blogosphere, they simply feed of it to gain ranking for their URL so they can be monetized.

Even New York’s Largest Real Estate Company has to continually advertise and promote themselves in order to maintain their exposure and their standing. Prudential Douglas Elliman is the big one and they are putting in the effort to be at the top of the list which puts your property up there along with them should you choose to sell through their agency.

Say you have a valuable Park Slope real estate property…you want your Realtor to be on the first page for that search query. Prudential Douglas Elliman provides their service to a huge number of communities in the New York area ranging from Manhattan all the way out to Montauk. They have sixty offices.

The main page of PrudentialElliman.com features an excellent flash display of panoramic views of some really stunning properties. The prices are included in the display. The featured homes range from quaint to absolutely imposing. The site is certainly well designed to be enticing to potential buyers.

There is a weird feeling that I get whenever I get a glimpse of just how much I DON’T know about internet marketing and SEO. Reading a Technology Blog is generally stressful for me.

The blog over at DatabanqMedia.com has an interesting post about the pitfalls of orphaned pages. Until a few minutes ago, I had never heard of orphaned pages. Now I am worried that I probably have them. An orphan page is one that has no inbound links as a result of some restructuring of your site.

David Bayer is President of DataBanq Media and in this post he uses several diagrams and analogies to explain how orphaned pages can affect your Google rank.

I was sitting in a waiting room once many years ago and I ended up reading this fascinating magazine article chronicling one of Bill Gates’ regular retreats to his secluded cabin. I was a bit naive as I began reading. Once I got to the part about the dumb waiter that brings the cold soft drinks up from the ground floor, I realized that he and I didn’t have the same idea as to the meaning of rustic.

The founder of Thoof is on the same page as I am in this regard. He thought that Bill Gates’ thinking retreats were worth replicating, even if they had to be on a shoestring budget. He rented a one room cabin out in the forest and he was holed up there one snowy weekend trying to think of the perfect name for his new website. He was up all night tossing and turning. As the first rays of dawn creeped through the window, he suddenly was struck with an idea. He would let nature name his site for him. His plan was to go outside and listen for some sound in the forest that would be the name of a great new personalized news page.

He stood up, still wrapped in his sleeping bag and hopped over to the door. Opening was a bit awkward, but he managed it eventually. He then took the that one small hop for mankind….

THOOF!!!

All the hopping had loosened the snow on the roof and it all came sliding down on top of the founder of what is now known to one and all as thoof.com.

You may have noticed the Thoof badge on some posts around the blogosphere. The ranking lets you know how popular a particular article or post is on Thoof.