May PageRank update

Posted by multippt

Looks like Google decided to update the visible PageRank on the Google toolbar between the 30th of April and the 1st of May. Well, at least it came after much speculation (on Digitalpoint anyway) of PageRank updates following a string of PageRank penalties across sites that were caught selling paid links.

Overall, most sites received an increase in PageRank, while others had the same PageRank, which is good news for most sites on the whole. Of course, it is bad news for guilty site owners who have sold paid links, since Google is being extremely vigilant (and smarter) on what links are considered paid. Penalties are also carried out during the update, but most of it a few days before the PageRank update. This is done so presumably so that you can address the issue, and request for reconsideration, and have the right PageRank in time for the incoming update.

Spam should be considered a statistic

Posted by multippt

You hate spam. Everyone hates spam. Spammers would hope that you mistakenly approve their spam, but that never really happens, if at all. As spam volumes continue to rise, people can easily brush it off as a regular thing. Nonetheless, let’s turn that nasty piece of garbage to a piece of “bragging right”. The idea is this: The more popular your site is, the more spam you’ll get.

Why this theory is true

Generally, comment spammers tend to target certain sites more than others. So, well-linked sites (and sites easily found by others through god-knows-what) tend to receive more attention by spammers. As far as anyone can tell, it does seem that spam bots are really efficient - being able to find well-concealed sites, and hitting them where you least expect them.

The good news - because spam is so common, you need not worry about getting rid of them, because that’s taken care of by Akismet. (So dear spammers, your advertisements will never see the light, ever.) What’s next? Show off your Akismet counter. Once thought of as a spam deterrent that has apparently failed, the Akismet counter can be now considered a bragging tool - despite the prominance of spam, it still takes real effort to rake up over 1000 spam comments detected and destroyed by Akismet. Want to make your friends go “wow” in an ackward manner? Show them you have gotten Akismet to trash over 10,000 spam comments.

The What IFs

People might say that others might attempt to inflate their spam count by simply… spamming their own blogs. That, I have to say, is utterly dumbfolding, because why on Earth would they want to do that? Secondly, if you were to spam on your own blog, you risk having your comments detected as spam on other blogs. The spam count will never be inflated, because people often look down on something as “trival” as the Akismet counter.

What if you do really want to use the spam counter as a statistic? The thing is, as with any website popularity measurement, there are its flaws. The spam counter is so looked down upon, that no one will ever use it, if ever. Do not hope in the near future that Akismet might do something like Alexa does with traffic - give a special website ranking called “spam rank”, which should ideally have popular sites at the top of that ladder (since they get spammed often).

*Akismet count on this blog: Over 1600.

Small Firefox update - 2.0.0.14

Posted by multippt

Mozilla recently released an update for Firefox to fix a potential security threat. This update is available through auto-update.

The update only fixes one flaw in Firefox related to the Javascript “garbage collector” which may cause crashes in Firefox. While this problem has not been exploited for any purposes, Firefox isn’t going to wait till it is. This is not a feature release, so no new features are added.

An interesting note is that this update fixes only one issue, unlike other updates that normally patches several issues at once. In addition, the security flaw was fixed as soon as it was announced (i.e. on the same day). A pretty impressing feat, considering most other browser makers (notably Microsoft) prefer the all-in-one approach, compared to the bit-by-bit approach used by Mozilla.

Update: John Cow sold

Posted by multippt

Update: According to the auction site, it looks like John Cow’s site is sold. 

John Cow, a parody of the famous John Chow blog, is selling his blog (via SitePoint) at an (large) price of $25000, with an immediate purchase price of $50000. John Cow, while a parody, is still pretty popular, so much so that it has become a rival to John Chow. Both are Search Engine Optimisation experts, but gives a different viewpoint on the subject.

What if… you had the money?

Great, if you have about $50000 to spare, you can pop it in and an extremely popular blog is your’s. Of course, that is IF you even had $50000 to spare in the first place. John Cow’s blog has an earning potential of thousands a month (roughly the same amount a normal job can give), which can easily make up your “investment” after a few years. With such a popular blog, you can easily promote other stuff as well with ease.

Sales of such popular sites are extremely rare, and the opportunity should be seized.

Consequences of takeover

Knowing that no one can actually replace John Cow’s writing methods, John Cow’s popularity is bound to fall. However, if the new owner is just as good (or better) than John Cow, the opposite may occur. John Cow, as a reputable source of SEO related material, would have to rebuild its reputation again from scratch after the deal.

In addition, what if the owner decides to develop something totally different from the original site? Remembering once-popular Leapfish, it’s a pity that it was wasted when it was sold, especially when the new owner redirects the online appraisal tool to a real estate site which has totally no relation at all. Traffic of Leapfish undoubtly plummeted to new lows.

Note: The auction ends in a month’s time. Already there are some bidders, so you may want to save up if you really want that blog.

Entrecard pricing changes?: Either a smart or dumb move

Posted by multippt

For long, Entrecard’s been plague by a whole lot of problems relating to over-inflated ad prices. It’s good to know they responded, but revising the ad system to go by the number of ads in the queue? That has to be one of the most absurd, or greatest moves made by Entrecard.

What’s good about the ad pricing changes

As the cost of an ad is now 2^(how many ads you have), ads on Entrecard can have the following ad prices: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024. The good news - you can buy an ad out of a popular spot, provided if you are quick enough.

In addition, this change now rightly tells whose ad is more valuable, since popular sites tend to have ads that are highly-priced.

What’s horridly wrong

Entrecard’s move is going to mess with the entire Entrecredits economy. First off, people don’t feel the need to keep dropping cards, since they could easily snag off hundreds of ads in a day’s work. So, lesser drops means less activity on Entrecard. Sure, there will be more people buying ads, but this action severely devalues the Entrecard currency. In addition, people are now going to wait for everyone’s ad prices to fall to extremely low levels before buying.

The ad prices are also subjected to constant fluctuations. Since the ad price is directly influenced by how many ad spots that were taken, your ad price will decrease by half its original value the next day. What this means: Your Entrecard rank will plummet to the ground. If you are lucky, you’ll have someone buying your ad, and your site should stay at the top. In the past, while the Entrecard credit system has its flaws, it is a pretty good indicator of how active the owner is, and how popular a site is. Take that out and you are left with a simple system that is prone to being gamed - all it takes is for you to get 1024 Entrecard credits and you’ll be able to promote your site to the top of the ladder. Why bother paying 1024 for an ad, when instead you push your site to the top on Entrecard (a more heavily trafficked site) with the help of a friend?

Due to the changes in the pricing structure, Entrecard had to remove several items from the campaign page, such as “new”. This means that new Entrecarders will have trouble getting afloat in Entrecard at all, since there will be no one who would be willing to buy more than 4 ads on the site.

The pricing change has greatly affected the ladder. Your ranking in the ladder is influenced by:
1) Your ad price (only 10 possible prices)
2) A random factor

Due to the price change, the Entrecard community can be said to be divided further into the following groups:
-The insanely priced ones (512-1024 EC)
-Moderate (64-256 EC)
-The extremely lowly priced (2-32 EC)

Earlier any Entrecard that was priced over 400 Entrecard credits is called insane. Now, thanks to the new system, a normal user can never have an ad queue that is full.

Google webmasters and analytics update

Posted by multippt

Google has recently updated the backlink count over the past week, so you may see new backlinks registered in the Webmasters Tools page. While a Google update usually comes weeks after this happens, don’t be too happy yet, since Google is growing more and more unpredictable.

Google has also updated Google Analytics. You can now view the traffic charts by week or month rather than by day. This is useful if you want to compare traffic over a long period of time (or calculate how much traffic you have received in a particular month).

Another feature of note is benchmarking. If you are tired of Alexa’s inaccuracies when you compare rival sites, you could give a shot at Google Analytics. Benchmarking pits you against sites that have similar “size” (determined by traffic, with 3 classifications: small, medium, large) to your site. Generally, this statistics help determine if your site’s traffic is above average, or below average. It can also serve as a… benchmark, when setting new goals. Nonetheless, there are some glitches associated with this feature (that’s why it’s in beta), such as some charts being unable to show some info if your site lies to far above or below the benchmark.

A nice feature of benchmark is that you can narrow the sites you want to compare by category. This would help make it a fair comparison since most webmasters prefer comparing their sites to other sites that are similar in genre.

Though, this benchmarking service only gathers information from sites where owners have chosen to opt-in for the benchmarking service.

Note: Apparently, Google accidentally introduced a glitch in its chart. This glitch prevents users from seeing information on a certain day via the Flash chart. It can be temporarily fixed by clicking on the drop-down arrow, click on “Compare to Site”, and then click on “One Metric”.

Entrecard screwing Alexa rank

Posted by multippt

Entrecard has certain ballooned its way to the top, now having even Problogger using Entrecard as well. Entrecard is a known way of getting quick traffic, but is it worth it? Sure, Entrecard’s going to give you traffic, but it’s known that Entrecarders rarely spend over a minute in a site, often choosing the option of drop-and-run. Then again, the traffic comes in a swarm, and guess what? Alexa rank will also rise, making your site look more heavily trafficked than it would have been.

Most Entrecarders have the Alexa toolbar installed. That’s because these users are webmasters, and webmasters often compete each other by traffic. Alexa is one of the most easiest and publicly places to view traffic stats for almost every site that have existed. In the hopes of boosting their Alexa rank (or viewing it conveniently for that matter), the users would install the Alexa toolbar. There you have it - a population with at least 60% of users with Alexa toolbar installed. That’s compared to the usual 10% of visitors with Alexa toolbar. Let’s not forget that on Alexa, Entrecard’s traffic increased by a hundredth-fold within a month. Not so sure about actual statistics though.

So, if you managed to tap some traffic from Entrecard, your Alexa rank would increase by a lot, even if as few as 20 to 50 (same/reciprocal/etc.) visitors come from Entrecard. Getting those visitors doesn’t require much work - all you need to do is to allocate about a few hours and start mass-clicking those “drop” links. Sooner or later, reciprocal dropping will occur, and presto… you have your Entrecard-driven traffic. Though, that traffic is like stumble - you’ll need to keep the ball rolling. On average, an Entrecard that is worth over 100 Entrecard credits would get a chance to appear in Alexa’s top 100,000. That’s nice… only if Entrecard traffic were not as bad as Digg traffic.

Of course, not forgetting the sites that are not able to participate in Entrecard. While Entrecard doesn’t actually restrict what sites can be submitted, it is generally blogs that are accepted by the community. In addition, due to the bulky design of the Entrecard, the Entrecard looks modestly unsightly on anything that is not a blog, but looks cool on blogs. 

These non-blogging-related sites are disadvantaged, because they won’t be able to tap to Entrecard’s “potent” traffic. One by one, sites that were formally once in the top 100,000 are slowly being displaced from their position by blogs that had the luck of having owners that are willing to spend hours each day clicking on “drop”. The winners - Hyper-active Entrecarders, the losers - everyone else. These blogs need not have great content, just owners with a lot of spare time.

Lastly, let’s not forget that Alexa is fairly accurate, but inaccurate as well. Measuring only 10% of Internet traffic, you can’t really say it gives a fair picture of a site’s traffic, especially if a large chunk of Alexa users participates in Entrecard.