Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

Googles pagerank review was due in the Summer but didn’t arrive with us until a few weeks ago and it still seems to be in progress.

I suspect that this is one review that they may end up wishing they’d thought some more about as so much money has been lost as a consequence of it that law suits are sure to follow in its wake.

What did they do though?

Well, it would appear that in addition to the normal juggling of sites up and down as their popularity changes over time, they have added a downgrade to sites that accept paid posts. They haven’t hit all such sites though as many are sailing on unaffected, at least for now, whilst others have dropped as many as five points in some cases (PR5 to PR0).

So great are the drops seen that one wonders if they’ve screwed it up completely this time. After all, the majority of the paid posting sites insist that their blogs aren’t 100% paid ie that there is some “normal” content as well. In fact, the advice is that your blog should be able to stand alone should all the paid posts be stripped out. So, blogs that accept paid posts have substantial non-paid for content.

The impact on the income of the pro-bloggers is quite substantial in many cases. For example, take that PR5 blog which is now PR0. The author could have clocked up around $100 to $150 per day easily ie something around $3000 per month. That’s a large enough sum to live on and that particular author is now effectively out of work as at best he can now manage around $15 per day. That’s an extreme case, of course, but many other blogs have gone from PR3 or PR2 down to PR0. Even that equates to a drop from perhaps $30/day to $15.

Google would argue that paid links devalues the worth of their index. Perhaps it does, but does that mean that they will similarly be downgrading the pagerank of all paid directories too? There certainly are a great many of these around and none of the links that they provide are in context as the links within paid posts are.

Of course, none of these changes affect the worlds largest paid for link business. Yes, of course, googles adwords programme isn’t affected by this downgrade.

The category cloud on the blog is probably the best indicator of the direction which the blog is taking.

I tidied it up a little this morning and it’s interesting to observe the difference in emphasis that it has now as compared to what it was like even as recently as six months ago.

France is still way up there as a topic but primarily for historical reasons and it’s quite striking how fast both America and the UK have started to catch up on it in terms of sheer number of posts. Six months ago neither were even in there as categories!

Holidays seem to be really important and may soon topple France from its perch. Of course, most of the early topics have dropped out of the running. There’s no sign of Buying a House in France anymore of course and French Administration is only just holding onto its position.

Web development has overtaken Working in France and indeed Blogging is quite a major topic as you’d expect given the amount of it that I seem to do these days.

I wonder what it’ll look like in six months time?

Don’t know why, but today is turning out to be the best day for income from the blog ever and by a long way too.

If I’m quick enough, it looks like I might be able to double my previous record at a stroke.

Still, no doubt tomorrow will be pretty dry in comparison as indeed was the weekend.

Wendy’s about to make a start on Mums Finance after finding out that there’s money in tham thar hills, especially if you’re writing a finance related blog.

I imagine that it’ll be a day or two before she gets going in that we don’t even have the software loaded nor the database set up as yet. She’s busy picking out a new template for it at the moment though.

Sometimes I think we’re getting a bit carried away with the blogs but then we look at the money flowing in from them.

I’m sure that it’s an incredibly misleading statistic but I’m dead chuffed to read that I’ve had over 11,000 readers via Reuters in the last week alone.

Still, it’s a very encouraging statistic and indeed the number of readers of the blog as recorded by the stats on this site are showing a nice upward trend with almost triple the number of subscribers as it had in the Summer. The international readership is also well up with articles being taken by places as varied as FoxNews and the Palm Beach Post.

All of which I was blissfully unaware of ’til I started getting a rapidly rising number of click-throughs from Reuters over the last few days.

If this keeps up I may have to see about getting a job as a “real” journalist!