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Archives for April 2007

Lo and Behold, Big G’s Page Rank Change Is Rolling Out

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Maybe I’m more obsessed with Google PR (PageRank) than most, due to being a math and stats (and computer) geek and needing to measure everything. Sure, PR is not an accurate measure of your site’s worth, but it is a measure nonetheless, which for some ad networks helps determine how much you’ll earn. And love it or hate, it just changed. Or is changing. Right now. If you haven’t seen the change, you probably should over the next few days.

Only moments ago, I checked one of my sites that’s too new to have made the last rollout in, what was it, late January or early Feburary? So lucky for me, it went from PR0 to PR4. Which really is meaningless because traffic is still transient. I haven’t posted even once per week regularly, despite my promise on the site. Anyway, until I do get consistent traffic, I have no plans on monetizing it. I’m taking a wholly different approach this time, unlike most of my other sites. [I’m talking about my personal site, which will never have contextual ads, but may have other types in the future, after it hits PR5.]

Still, my experience over the past two years is as follows. Take any keyword phrase and search for it. Usually, but not always, the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) listings will have higher PR pages at the top. That means, since most people are lazy and don’t check past the first page of SERPs, more traffic goes to the first ten pages listed.

The unfortunate thing about this new PR rollout, at least to myself and a friend, is that his PR5 tech site just dropped to PR4. (According to the two tools I’ve found to be most accurate. Other tools show a mix of 4 and 5, though they used to show all 5.) I had intended on buying it in a few days, but the change likely means both a strong drop in traffic and revenue. He let the site sit dormant for too many months after he left the United States.

Which means any zomblogs (zombie blogs) out there are probably losing rank if they are not at least gaining new backlinks. This may mean that Google has decided to implement some important algorithm changes – such as the momentum metric Ryan Caldwell suggested.

So, if you have a site and have let it slide, you may want to quickly find someone to write casually, before the next PR rollout. If you can’t pay, maybe guest-write on their side. Or you could sell your site at Performancing’s Blogs for Sale section. You should be seeing a few of mine for sale soon, as well as few job listings.

Note: If you want to check your PR, you could use Data Center Watch [via SmartWealthyRich], but i find it’s inaccurate. I prefer Aaron Wall’s SEO for Firefox plugin, which embeds results into Google and Yahoo’s SERPs, or Search Status for Firefox.

Review pMetrics on your blog and get 12 months free

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The first 100 bloggers to provide an honest review of pMetrics on their blogs will receive pMetrics premium free for 12 months.

Requirements:

  1. At least 250 words (if a video review, then this condition does not apply).
  2. At least one link (though we’d love more).

Conditions:

Post a comment on this thread with a link to your review of pMetrics (link must stay up for at least 12 months). We will then credit your Performancing username with 12 months of pMetrics premium for free. The first 100 members to post a review, as ordered by the comments in this thread, will receive the free offer. If your review is received within 6 hours of the 100th review, we will still honor the offer.

pMetrics Blog Analytics Now Available!

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Performancing is pleased to announce the re-release of pMetrics blog analytics. In its current state, pMetrics is a simple, clean, “chock-full-of-features” stats program, specifically targeted for blogs.

Plugins & Widgets

As more and more Performancing members adopt pMetrics we’ll be unveiling some uber-cool widgets and plugins to enhance your blogging experience. Plans currently include: 1) an AdSense tracking plugin and a 2) a Performancing “top blogs” widget that links back to the top 50 or so blogs using pMetrics. Discussion about pMetrics development and plugin/widget suggestions will be taking place in our pMetrics forum: http://performancing.com/forum/578

Simple Yet Feature-rich

If you’re a stats junkie like me, you’re constantly looking for useful information about site visitors. Site stats give us the tools to assess the success of our current actions and make strategies for improving the quality of content, navigation, headlines, etc. on a website.

Many of us need more in a site analytics program than daily log analysis. Sometimes we need a real-time look at traffic flow. Sometimes we need a quick and dirty, one page summary of recent search queries, pages visited, and referrals. Unfortunately, if you’re like me, you haven’t been very satisfied with the multitude of stats programs out there, especially for blogs.

That’s one reason why we’ve partnered with Clicky to bring you the new pMetrics. With pMetrics you get detailed information about each user without having to drill down 4-5 levels in the navigation. One of the things I personally can’t stand about Google Analytics is that although it is powerful, finding the information you want has never been intuitive or easy. pMetrics solves this issue.

Real-time “Spy” Analysis

But pMetrics offers you more. Have you ever wanted to get a good sense of real-time user behavior? pMetrics has a Spy function*; a real-time stats-ticker that shows each and every user behavior at your site, as it happens in real time. This information is priceless and can provide the details you need to increase site usability. You can also monitor, in real time, the results of any marketing and promotion that you are involved in.

Doing a Reddit and Digg campaign? Want an adrenaline rush? You can track the results in real-time, and let me tell you, it’s a massive thrill!

pMetrics also offers you a picture of visitor demographics and geography, breaking visitors down into countries and even cities, and then plotting this information on Google Maps.

RSS Feeds

pMetrics gives you the choice of making your stats public or private, and you can even publish a summary via RSS*. RSS gives savvy blog owners the chance to dispaly site stats in creative ways on their blogs and to view multiple stat summaries from a single RSS reader.

Referral Affiliate Program

Performancing members earn 20% of every payment made to us by any user who signs up through an affiliate link and eventually becomes a paying premium member. Additionally, there is a second tier commission of 5%, which means you will get 5% of any payment made to us by your referal’s referals. More information on the affiliate program is available here.

The basic version of pMetrics is available for free, but we highly recommend upgrading to the advanced version for a modest annual fee (just a little more than $1/month). The advanced version includes Spy (real time visitor stats) and RSS feeds so that you can syndicate your stats and view them in an RSS reader, saving you time and energy.

Get started with pMetrics right away!

*Premium version only

Blog Content from Article Directories: Evil?

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Not entirely.

In my previous posts, I’ve mentioned from time to time my disdain for blogs (and ‘probloggers’) relying almost exclusively on free content from article directories. (Disclosure: I own an article directory.) Two reasons why I think public domain articles do more harm than good for our blogs:

  • Free articles circulate widely on the Net, which means you’re not alone in using them. The duplicate content might merit you a penalty in the search engines, especially Google.
  • It speaks ill of the blog owner if he can’t produce original entries with his own tone/voice.

However, when used judiciously (and infrequently), free articles can get you out of a rut, provide you with keyword-rich content, and can be another way to showcase your expertise in your industry. Here’s what you can do with free articles on your blogs:

  • Combine the strongest/most interesting points from different related articles. You’ll be relying on quoted text here, injected with your own opinions.
  • React to the article. Found the author’s points misleading or downright erroneous? Correct him in your blog. Found the article to be the most info-packed content written in 400 words you’ve seen in a while? Praise and suggest it to your readers.
  • Discuss the article in the context of a previous blog post. This won’t be hard, especially if you’ve been writing tons of posts on your blog and your topic is a popular article category (e.g. internet marketing, pet care, travel destinations).
  • Compare and contrast the article’s points with those of a blog post from an established blogger in your industry. Not only will you attract the attention of your fellow (and quite famous) blogger, this type of blog post might turn out to be good linkbait.
  • Add images. What better way to visually spice up a blog post than by inserting an image? Since you’ll be using free articles, it won’t hurt to use free image resources, as well. (See my related Perf post, Images: Another Problogging Ace Up Your Sleeve)

Finally, if you don’t know your way yet around the article directory scene, let me point you to several great sites. EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com are good places to start, and I’ve been submitting articles to them for nearly a year already. You can also visit ArticleCrux.com, which I own and carefully maintain.

That said, the list above can’t build you a problogging career. You’ll still need to start where all good probloggers started – with highly original and helpful content.

Pre-Announcement: pMetrics Re-Launches

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This is the announcement before the announcement. The pMetrics site analytics package has relaunched. Get it now for your blog!

Working in coordination with Sean from Clicky, we have put a scalable server infrastructure in place to provide a stable pMetrics site analytics solution to the wider blogging community. Use and enjoy.

A more comprehensive announcement is forthcoming, along with suggestions of what you can expect to see in a pMetrics API for widget development, additional analytic plugin features (AdSense tracking anyone?), public exposure (read: linklove) for successful sites, and more.

Again, this is the announcement before the announcement, but for those of you who have been patient with us, we thought you deserved to know as soon as possible. So now’s the time to get back in the game.

For those of you looking for a sweet analytics program perfect for blogs, check out what pMetrics has to offer. You’ll like it:

http://pmetrics.performancing.com/

Problogger: Hate or Love the Title…

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It doesn’t matter.

Ia Lucero’s post on the Perils of Problogging is an interesting read for Performancing.com users, who more or less look to earn money from their blogs. The post has also been picked up by a couple of other blogs, most notably by The Blog Herald.

In the post, Ia raises a lot of points, ranging from bad site monetization choices to blogs being given a bad name by the numerous unoriginal “money mills” out there. My attention was piqued by one line she wrote (emphasis added):

With the abundance of article sites out there, amateur probloggers (what a paradoxical term!) think they can get away with posting unoriginal content, an especially attractive tactic since minimal effort is required.

Hmm, “amateur probloggers”? Does that pertain to Z-listers earning mere Adsense cents a week, or part-time probloggers? Heck, what makes a problogger in the first place?

Darren Rowse has a guest post by David Wilkinson about it, and so does Michael who talks about it in a country context. For me…

I don’t really care. If someone blogs and makes money from it, whatever the method or ethics, then he can trumpet to the world that he is a problogger. I’m hoping he doesn’t give the ‘job title’ a bad name by filling his site with content o’ junk and loads of poorly placed ads, but really, that’s out of our control. Why, how many people regard lawyers and salesmen with suspicion? (Not to offend our lawyer and salesmen friends out there.) For every profession, there’s somebody out there who thinks it’s make-believe or a joke. We’ve got to live with that.

I believe the best way to approach the word “problogger” is with guarded recognition, especially during the blogging industry’s formative years. It’s a title that is secondary. Because before you blog, you might be already a freelance writer, journalist, corporate executive, web designer, comic artist, and so on. I guess this is why many people – even those who already earn substantial amounts from their blogs – go “Huh?” when given the word “problogging”. They see blogging as just a supplement to their incomes and an extension of their main jobs. This POV in turn conflicts with full-time bloggers who eat, breathe, and live by their blog earnings.

Now, I’m really interested in hearing your feedback on this one: Do you call yourself a problogger? Do you get weird reactions from friends and relatives when you tell them you are one? And what alternative job titles do you use or suggest your problogging comrades use?

Me: I call myself a problogger; it’s proudly displayed on my tech blog’s sidebar. Yes, I’ve gotten dozens of “Whaa?” faces, especially from those who own only LiveJournals and other diary-type blogs. More recently, when somebody asks me what I do for a living, I simply say, “Writer”. (Many think it’s too generic, but I believe it’s just one of the most elegant titles in the world.) And if the person who asks me looks like a Net user, I chip in, “Website owner” or “Webmaster”.

How about you, guys?

Funding Good Writers With Text Link Ad Revenue

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Text Link Ads have been on my mind ever since The Link Nazi made it public that Google would be cracking down on sold links.

Many individual bloggers make the majority of their income from Text Link Ads. But I want to talk about another virtue of Text Link Ads: they can generate the revenue that publishers need to hire better writers.

If you’re like me and you own a large number of blogs and websites, then you also know all about the economy of content creation. For those of you who don’t know, let me educate you.

The fact of the matter is that search engines have yet to create the algorithm that can distinguish keyword rich crap from literary greatness. Since AdSense has been the main driver of content monetization, and since traffic is the key AdSense monetization, website owners have often resorted to buying lots of keyword loaded crap in preference to a few high-quality articles written by professional writers.

For $100 you can buy 1 or 2 excellent 500-1000 word articles or for $100 you can buy about 30 pieces of just legible English written by not quite fluent non-English speakers (not to offend any of our not quite fluent non-English readers). That’s just a fact and the explosion of crap content on the web is directly attributable to the economy that Google AdSense has created. It is Google’s monster. There’s no doubt about it.

Enter Text Link Ads. The TLA economy doesn’t directly depend on traffic, and so doesn’t depend on squeezing pennies out of the long tail. There is far more pressure from AdSense to create lots of crap content then from TLA. In fact, I’d argue that TLA creates an environment in which owners of blog networks, or multiple sites are freed up to migrate from content churning to actually being proud of the content they commission.

In my own case this is certainly true. TLA has finally gotten me to a place where I have the luxury of paying a premium for the content I commission. Rather than pursuing bulk content, I’m pursuing quality content. Worshiping the long-tail, in the name of almighty AdSense is no longer a priority. Creating good literary content is.

Because of TLA I now feel like a legitimate publisher, whereas before I had to wash my hands of AdSense blood each night before I went to sleep (well, not really, but you get the point).

If you were to measure a website’s momentum, how would you do it?

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In a post from last week, I made reference to the need for a momentum metric to buffer the standard strength metric that we get in PageRank. If a PR 8 site hasn’t been updated in 9 months, and is completely blank, that should be reflected in some publicly accessible data.

My question for this post is how would a momentum metric be best accomplished, taking into account the variety of sites that exist. In the comments section of that post, Phillip gave us a start:

Maybe it could be a rating that combines the separate metrics of today, i.e. this number of percentage points is given to Alexa traffic rank, this for PR, this for the number of Technorati mentions, and so on. The question of who gets the biggest weight in the rating would surely be cause of debate.

So why don’t we hack this out in the comment section of this post. Here are the questions to consider:

1. Momentum is a measurement of relative strength over time, and as such requires that we take “snapshots” – what is an ideal frequency of snapshots? One day? One week? One month?

2. To answer question 1, it would help to know the data that we’ll be considering in measuring a site’s momentum. Afterall, why take a daily snapshot if our data is only updated once a week or once every 3 months for that matter. So what data is relevant? Backlinks? Alexa? Technorati? PageRank?

3. How much weight should each of these data points be given?

If you have some ideas on how this topic, feel free to comment, but for answering these 3 specific questions, I propose the following format:

Once a week

Alexa – 25%
Technorati – 25%
PageRank – 15%
Backlinks – 30%
Delicious Votes – 5%