Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

Blogging reviews seem to come in two basic flavours: 1) nice ones just to get the link and 2) proper ones that are actually useful.

Much as the first type serve their purpose in getting you a link to your site and they’re the safest ones to go for, they’re pretty much useless except for the linkback that they provide. In practice, they’re not overlly useful for that link either as, for the most part, bloggers with really high PR rarely review those with much lower PR who could benefit most.

The second type can be pretty scary though. After all, who among us has a “perfect” blog? Probably 99% of us have just picked the first reasonable looking template and ran with that so there’s usually a lot of scope for criticism on that front (my current one has been described as “Kermit the frog” for instance). Likewise, sod’s law applying as always chances are that they’ll look at your blog when you’ve just written a bunch of posts that are “less than your best” at best and more than likely they’ll be “total ****” even if all your other posts have been Pulitzer material.

But, that second type is far and away the most useful type to get. Sure, there’ll be things that you disagree with either partially or even entirely, but so what? You’re hardly likely to be writing stuff that people will agree with all the time, are you? On the other hand you’ll almost certainly get some useful ideas that you can implement to improve things. For example, about a year ago one one of the “type 2 reviews” that I got pointed out that it was a pain to have to page through endless posts on how to move to France and that I should collect them in one place, so there’s now a link to a compilation of them under “Series Collections” as you can see.

What a “type 2” review doesn’t have to be is nasty. Yes, you may well get a review where someone basically criticises everything on your blog (unlikely, but possible) but they don’t have to be nasty about it and I’ve yet to see one where they were out and out nasty.

Anyway, if anyone’s interested in a review from me, and will review this blog in return, let me know!

One thing that continues to amaze me is just how long some blog promotion efforts continue to run.

Almost a year ago, I started off on the Technorati Favourites Exchange and even now hardly a week goes by that I don’t get a little note to say that someone has added me to their favourites and can I reciprocate? You’d think that it would have petered out by now but it looks like one that could still be running in a few years time.

Others which you’d have thought should have been just as successful have indeed petered out or not really gotten going in the first place. I’d have thought that the mutual blog reviews movement would have really taken off but in reality it’s rare to see more than a handful on any blog that you see doing them.

Now what I need to do is to find the next Technorati Favourites Exchange and get in on it at the start.

As you know, we’ve been tootling along with over two hundred thousand readers per week, mostly via Reuters.

I’m sure that’s an incredibly misleading statistic but it certainly sounds good. What I didn’t know until now was quite how good it was in comparison to the competition as everyone seems rather cagey with their statistics.

Anyway, I’m dead chuffed to see this morning that I have both this blog and An Age of Magic in the top 100 of the Blogburst network. In fact Magic is doing rather better than this one thanks to an experiment that I tried a few weeks back which I’ll be building on here over the coming months.

Definitely a great start to the year for the blogs!

Actually, this post is about none of those at all. They’re just some of the keywords that have been picked up recently by various news aggregation services that scan this blog so I can be fairly confident that this particular post will do well in terms of collecting inbound links for me.

The growth in news aggregators has led to a steady growth in the number of inbound links that I’ll collect for particular posts. Some are obvious: mention “Ireland” and I get picked up by the Irish blogs, “travel”, “credit” or “loans” and you get picked up by loads of financial aggregators. “Travel” is more hit and miss though as the travel aggregators tend to target particular destinations rather than “travel” in general.

“People search” is a peculiar one. Apparently it’s a very popular search term though I only came across it by chance.

I’m actually only throwing “sex” in for curiosity value. Rumour has it that it’s one of the most popular search terms on the Internet but, so far, I’ve never had a single inbound link from it!

Surprisingly, there are quite a number of blog aggregators which collect immigration information and it’s a topic that I touch on quite regularly.

Last, but not least, this particular post will mess with google’s algorithm in respect of this blog. Their algorithm relies on “natural” incoming links and this particular post will create quite a lot of them for me over the next few days. None will be paid for so on google’s argument they are legit incoming links which’ll boost my pagerank a little bit. Will any of them be  truly legitimate incoming links? Somehow, I doubt it.

Things were trundling along quite nicely with the business of sponsored posts until a couple of weeks ago when google decided to pull the rug from under a promising cottage industry and downgrade the pagerank of thousands of blogs to zero.

Ordinarily, pagerank (the little green bar you see if you have the google toolbar loaded) for a particular site would typically go up or down by one each time google loaded the revised pageranks ie usually about once a quarter. However, this time around they decided to target bloggers who wrote paid posts and dropped those targetted down to PR0.

The effect of that to those bloggers hit by such a downgrade can be quite devastating. For example, a typical PR2 domain would be able to make around $20/day vs $5/day for a PR0 domain and that’s just the bottom end of blogs. A PR4 domain can pull in $40, PR5 perhaps $100 per day and remember that some blogs went from PR7 to PR0 overnight. Remember too that many bloggers run multiple blogs. Say they were pulling in $500/month per blog with four blogs running that would equate to a reasonable wage of $2000/month which may have dropped to more like $200/month if all their blogs were targetted by google.

The biggest player in this market is PayPerPost with over 100, 000 bloggers signed up for their service and they’ve hit the panic button of course. Ironically, they were about to roll out a new blog ranking scheme just as google struck and that’s been speeded up somewhat. Unfortunately, the other players in the market probably won’t be able to access the stats from that ranking system directly and certainly wouldn’t be keen to use a competitors ranking.

Google’s answer? Add nofollow to your links. I did that a few days ago and now find that already one other blogging service won’t accept my posts anymore. Shame really as their posts were almost always interesting to do. I suspect that effect will roll out across a number of other sites too which’ll just serve to concentrate the power with PPP. Surely that can’t be a good effect from googles actions?