This morning brings an email from them:
I remind you, that your RSS feed has been registered in -scraper site- database. -scraper site- is based on website RSS feeds.
Hourly our RSS parser reading new link from each registered RSS feed and publish it on our website. New links ranking system and search ranking system based on rank of the website in top referrers.
In total -scraper site- database contains 127 your links.
From the moment of your RSS feed registration, -scraper site- has sent to you 1206 hits.
If you want to take part in traffic trade, you should publish reciprocal link to -scraper site-.com and start to send visitors to us.
More you’ll send visitors to us, higher getting up your links in the list and you’ll get more traffic.
If you will not publish link to -scraper site-.com in 3 days, we’ll consider that you refusing from traffic trade with us and we’ll delete all your links from our database.
My logs don’t show so much as a single referral from them.
That registered bit reminds me of those envelopes that hope to fool you into thinking they are from the government.
Pretty ballsy.
]]>Though one character promising the usual phallic magic has come up with yet another new twist: homilies.
Three or four sentences of generic pieties that might apply to just about any damn thing. They might appear on a Hallmark card from a grandmother with poor taste.
Might actually get approved by a naïve Blogger who doesn’t bother to look at the URL accompanying the comment.
]]>It seems almost forever since I had luck with AdSense. Admittedly that is partly because I don’t have enough pages running AdSense anymore. I’m not clever enough to auto-generate pages. And only have so much time for creating pages.
I do have one site that does fine with AdBrite. But only one. Until Google slapped one of my sites down I had decent luck with SearchFeed but they don’t really have enough inventory, nor did Kanoodle for the sites that I tried it on.
As Google has wised up my luck with datafeed sites has declined considerably. I guess what I need to get a handle on may be to mix datafeeds with “content.” Generally one affiliate click beats an AdSense click by far.
I need better time management, better focus and to somehow gain a clearer insight into how things work.
Don’t far too many of us.
]]>“Greetings http://www. … .com/. You have a very interesting blog, as I can see you have been really working on it. Regarding your work I can make you an offer. Our writers agree to write some UNIQUE posts for your site every week, in your turn you will place the link of my site on your home page. If you are interested, and you have some questions, look please at my new blog http://www. … .com/, posts on your site will be like this. Reply me please with your answer regarding my offer. Best regards.”
I went to the solicitor’s site.
The unique “content” was mostly two paragraphs posts that almost anybody could write in their sleep. The example posts were along the lines of :
It is nice to know that people are saying nice things about you. If you feel it would be nice to read more nice things about yourself why don’t you try writing nice things about others. They’ll think it nice to read your nice words.
Not sure how to say nice things? Just think of what nice things have happened to you, nice things people have said to you and done for you. Then you’ll be in a nice mood and feel like saying nice things about the nice people.
Well, I guess it would be nice for you to build up some backlinks. But it would be even nicer if your unique “content” were nicer than what I can download off the myriad of free articles sites.
I do wonder how many people will go for this.
]]>]]>AdSense has launched a new beta test called Vertical Images, where an image would take the place of an ad within an AdSense ad unit. These images - which are generic, and not company-specific - act similar to an ad link unit, linking to a page related to the ads and image that appeared in the ad unit.
New age web design:
]]>Believers in vaastu shastra say the Indian science, which seeks to create harmony between nature’s five elements – earth, fire, water, air and space – man and objects, can be directly applied to the web, just as it is to home design.
“Just as the world comprises of the five basic elements, each website has five elements and these need to be in balance with one another,” says Dr Smita Narang, author of Web Vaastu, a new book that marries vaastu laws with the Internet.
The book has proved popular with businesses.
I just bet it has.
Websites look to ‘vaastu shastra’ for more hits
Vaastu Shastra for dummies:
Enumerating the principles Narang advices that the that the ratio of the page width to height should never be more than 1:2, ideally 1:1. She suggests that the distribution of the layout be such that the North and East bear 25 per cent of the weight while the North East remains empty and the North West bear half the weight and South and South West carry about 75 per cent of the load.
Importantly, the website should be bottom-heavy and any type of projection or retraction should be avoided, Narang explains.
The address of the website should be placed in the South, West or South West. This is also the portion of the website that should be the heaviest. According to Narang the center, ‘brahmastaan’, should not be occupied with heavy graphics. The same applies for the North, East and North East. Kapoor says that according to Feng Shui the logo should be in the top-middle or the right-hand top corner.
As per Feng Shui the pyramid is a symbol that one should be careful about. It signifies that the energy is being pulled up . So while it may be great for the construction business, using it on a website for furniture would mean its end,” Kapoor says.
She advices the use of the metal element in the form of coin shaped cursor for all websites. There is also paraphernalia like the unicorn, fruit and dragons that can be placed on the owner’s desk to usher in luck for the website.
As far as fonts are concerned, vaastu suggests that you use ones that are either straight or tilted to the right to “conserve energy.”
Auspicious ratios are 1:1, 1:2, 1: 2.5 and 1:1.5. Solid fonts should be placed in the South and West corner, never in the East or North. Also, graphics in stable shapes like rectangle, square and circle are advisable while irregular ones like triangle, trapezium and pentagons will spell doom.
Now vaastu ‘n Feng Shui for your website
I bet you’ve already started redesigning your site to make sure those fonts don’t waste any energy and eliminate harmful triangles.
]]>Recently I decided to add a few sites to some almost randomly selected directories.
My only criteria were quick and easy entry and relevant categories (with the latter proving the tougher of the two).
I couldn’t help but smile at the serious policies statements of these sometimes threadbare directories. Particularly: no MFA sites.
Clearly many of these general web directories were made for AdSense. Sure they are hoping some webmasters will pay for featured listings. But some are only charging a dollar. And they have AdSense code plastered all over their pages.
In this case the submitter is their content writer. By supplying site descriptions they are giving MediaBot words to read so that Google will display more than the PSAs that many of them were showing.
Excepting the directory creators who know what they are doing - e.g., pursuing tight niches - I wonder two years from now how many of these sites will have become parked domains.
]]>My most recent one (admittedly that I’m aware of) was a beaut.
Now I wondered why traffic to a site suddenly spiked. Seemed to be lots of traffic from Google all of a sudden. I didn’t wonder deeply: Google is as capricious a mistress as Wanda in Venus in Furs.
Nor did I notice that my 404s had similarly spiked.
Looking at the .htaccess on another site I saw that I’d really screwed up a redirect last week when I moved an old section of one site on to a domain of its own.
I’d pointed to the wrong domain. While they are similar in theme they don’t have the same pages, hence the 404s.
All I did was lose useful traffic and annoy a number of web surfers (who should be spared that at least until they get to the page they wanted to see).
This is among the more boneheaded mistakes I’ve made as a webmaster.
]]>A couple of years ago I - who am nobody - made a mention in an old weblog that I was buying a new computer and after thinking about it decided to stick with Windows though I’d toyed with the thought of a Mac.
There was a deluge of hateful responses. One guy literally told me that I’d been offered the keys to paradise but had refused them.
So it was amusing to read Dvorak write about baiting Mac users as a publicity stunt. Linkbaiting.
]]>I’ve come to the conclusion that after my last publicity stunt, I must be a sadist—and I probably, at this point, need counseling. I do have seriously mixed feelings about tormenting people, especially masochistic Mac nuts, who I seem to target every so often, much like dropping a cherry bomb down an ant hole and running for cover.
So you go to your Google Sitemaps page and it says your site hasn’t been crawled in a week.
You look at your site’s log and see Googlebot has been there gobbling away.
Five days later your Sitemaps page says Google had been indexing your pages even as the sitemap stats were saying it hadn’t been there in days.
Seems that the Sitemaps data is actually updated well after some crawls. So if it looks as if Google is ignoring you: just be patient.
]]>But it has brought to mind my chief complaint with many forum posts:
Nope, it isn’t the stale questions from newbies. We’ve all be new once. And in far too many areas my own understanding is shallow.
]]>But I weary of unqualified, unexplained opinions.
Let us say you are looking for the “best content management system.” You will probably get
No one bothers to explain what makes his or her recommendation superior. It is rather like being back in that horrible social space called high school where too much of life is seen as a popularity contest and is established by assertion.
To be fair when people ask this sort of question they rarely explain their needs. Probably they haven’t evaluated those with any clarity: bestness is enough.
And - in this particular - example reading that the CMS has modules isn’t very helpful. What CMS doest have plugins or some similar means for expanding or beautifying the system?
Really, folks, explaining your opinion would be helpful. Don’t just assert.
]]>Danny Sullivan writes of Google’s refusal to allow questions about Google itself on Google Answers.
In a fit of high-mindedness I wrote a response to his question on Yahoo! Answers.
]]>As Google’s various projects make it ever more pervasive in our online lives they need to become more sensitive to their trustworthiness is perceived. If they seem deceptive or deceitful the eventual backlash could be overwhelming.
The company’s catchphrase should be amended to “Don’t be evil or stupid.”
Equivocating and evading like a politician isn’t going to dim the incipient paranoia with which some people regard Google.
Sure, they should answer questions and with transparency.
Didn’t you?
Nothing special resulted. Admittedly I did discover a tiny number of pages out of many the almighty search engine said it was having problems with. A quick regeneration of the pages put those aright.
But I never saw a benefit: the pages were crawled regularly without sitemaps. No more so with them.
I said to heck with sitemaps.
But I had a sitemap reconversion experience recently. I added four more sitemaps.
Near as I can tell those sites haven’t benefited a particle. Each has fresh words added daily (content to you illiterates).
Maybe Google is occupied with bad data pushes, seventeen new varieties of beta gimmicks, sorry, projects. But those sites were doing no less well without the sitemaps.
For now I’m not persuaded that Google sitemaps are benefiting me.
Yet.
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