Devil Works

I just completed an online quiz on a free dating site that rated my knowledge of the internet. At the end of it they gave me a little graphic to put on my site with my score.

Now other people will see my quiz results and visit the site and try and improve on my score and the dating site will get free traffic for the cost of creating the quiz.

That’s viral marketing.

PS The code they gave me to cut and past included a nicely targeted link to their front page. I took it out, does it make me a bad person ?

Sitepoint is reporting Google is doing it’s visible page rank update again and unfortunately I’ve left my run a little too late with no changes happening on any of my sites.

All is not lost though. Google is constantly updating it’s page rank so even though this site might be reporting a PR of 1, It may actually be higher based on the new backlinks I’ve gathered in the last month or so. Therefore my rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s) aren’t being effected just because my visible page rank is so low. Unfortunatley this is the situation across all my sites.

My main frustration from not improving my page rank comes from advertisers reliance on it as a measure of a sites status. Most of the review and text link brokers use it as a measure of how much a link or paid post is worth, so it looks like I’ll be in the doldrums for another quarter.

If you think your Page Rank might be updating then Dig Page Rank will show your PR as it’s been reported by the different Google Data Centers. If there are different numbers being reported from the data centres then it’s likely your visible page rank is about to change.

For a few more SE stats on your site, take a look at Checkpagerank.net.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I don’t believe in the statistical accuracy of Alexa. However there are quite a few advertisers that do, so it’s well worth improving your ranking if you can.

I’ve been doing some reading this morning on what people are calling an Alexa train. I’ve googled “Alexa train results” and I can only find one person that’s bothered to report a positive result to it.

From what I can see, for this to work it’s got to rely on people clicking the links in train.

I’ve come up with another idea I’d like to try.

1. You will need to be using the Firefox Browser
2. You will need to install the Search Status Plug in. According to the privacy policy this reports your site visits to Alexa.
3. Create a new folder in your bookmarks, call it Alexa train or something similar.
4. Bookmark some of your sites and exchange bookmarks with some of your friends. How many you do is up to you, just keep in mind that the more you have the longer it will take to load.
5. Once a day, maybe when you are about to go make a coffee, Open a new Firefox browser, right click on your Alexa train folder and select “open in all tabs”.
6. This will load all the sites in a different tab, leave the window open until all the sites load then close your browser.

This in theory should show as a visit by Alexa. The downside of this method is that it relies on people to remember to visit there Alexa train bookmarks and it’s an honesty system so there is no guarantee that the person that’s put forward a site will visit anyone elses.
Now all I need is some people to test it. If you’d like to take part  leave a comment below and I’ll send you an email as sites get added to the list.

I’ve just spent the morning reading about pay pay per click arbitrage. I used to do this years ago when Adwords first came out. I’d buy clicks at 5 cents each and send them to a landing page with an affiliate offer paying $1.00 per confirmed email address. For the first few months I was spending 30 cents to make $1.00, which is a great return on investment.

Eventually the market got a little saturated and the return dropped to the stage it wasn’t worth my effort in monitoring it so I dropped it like a lead balloon. In hindsight I should have explored some different avenues and tested some different affiliate programs, but hindsight is a wonderful thing.

I tried PPC arbitrage again about 18 months ago, and the volumes I was getting on my handful of test sites didn’t make it worthwhile. But with all the reading I’ve done today I’m starting to think I’ll try it again with a few variations and see what happens.

The worse thing that could happen is I waste a couple of days and turn back to my retirement project.

Just came across some useful SEO tools at Market Leap.

Link Popularity Check will tell you how many links you have in Google, Yahoo and MSN and will also compare your site with 3 others that you can nominate, as well as other sites in your market.

Search Engine Saturation allows you to check how many pages you have indexed in the three search engines, and also compare your numbers with your competitors.

Keyword Verification checks the first three pages of the search results for your chosen keyword to tell you where you are listed for that keyword.

Another site I have (that is powered by wordpress) has a page listed in google that I created three days ago. But the new page and the root index page are the only two listed in google. The sites been up for about two months and has about 20 pages.
I can only think of some kind of wierd partial sandbox effect. Anyone else got any other ideas ?