And that is putting it very very pleasantly indeed, the sons of god knows what have just wiped the pagerank of this blog to zero, they have done this because I scrape a living making sponsored blog posts, I am really rather angry at them

It seems they have done this to thousands of people who use a certain blog marketing website, I wouldn’t mind but the site in question uses pagerank as a system to allocate paid post opportunities. So now I am doubly stuffed, no pagerank and no paid blog opportunities. This really is very annoying, please not I have not used a single swear word in this post, although I am definitely thinking them.

I really am sick of using Dragonfly CMS over at Koh Phangan Parties, the support from the developers is terrible, the code itself is complete garbage in places and the style sheets are a complete joke.

I would like to switch to using WordPress, ok I would have to customise it quite significantly but I think it would be a better solution in the long run. Also I like the fact I can make WordPress a lot more SEO friendly than Dragonfly, it took me 2 weeks of pain just to get the on the page issues sorted with my Dragonfly install.

The real problem will be maintaining the posts and the image gallery, I may have to back the whole lot up and re-write the news items as WordPress posts on a fresh install. That’s just a complete pain, plus the downtime whilst I did it would be less than beneficial.

Maybe I could write some custom SQL scripts to convert the news items but that’s likely to take longer than just re-writing them.

I swear I am more and more impressed with WordPress the more I use it. I have been looking into some SEO type tweaks for my sites, nothing much new except for some tagging but I was forced to review what I had done so far which is:

1. Change post titles to something more friendly- Obviously Google and friends take the page title pretty seriously as we all know.
2. Change the permalink structure – This give a more readable URL and once again we know that the major search engines like to use the content of the URL as a big chunk of SERP weight.
3. Create a sitemap – this is probably the single most useful thing I have done for my WordPress pages, it is completely automated and gets pinged to Google every time I write or update a post.

Now, there is nothing very special with either of those three things I have done to improve my on the page SEO, where it gets really cool is in the fact this took me a total of around 30 minutes to do.

The only code change I had to make was to the header.php to change the way the page title is displayed at the top of the browser, this was a 2 minute fix really, nothing difficult at all.

When I run my pages through my SEO optimisation software now I get much better results, let’s hope the search engines feel the same way! I really should get around to sorting out the SEO for a couple more of my pages, the problem is finding the time to get it done.

I have been keeping a very close eye on my Google AdSense logs lately, I know I have had a much improved rate of traffic to at least three of my websites. What I am not seeing is any real gain in AdSense page impressions.

Quite frankly I think I am going to remove AdSense completely from my pages, the revenue I am earning from it is minimal, ever since Google introduced smart pricing it’s been getting worse and worse, what is the point of leaving advertising up that if you are lucky and Google don’t decide it’s a fake click (don’t get me started on what I think about the way they decide what is and isn’t a fake click) that you might just might make $0.03 for?

I have tried AdBrite, they are even worse, they have a habit of letting their customers cancel a per 1000 page impression advert just before it actually hits 1000 impressions, really quite a stupid way to do business.

The picking are getting very slim for those of us who like to sell clicks and impressions, it used to be you could make a decent living out of it but not anymore, that’s all gone now, too many people trying to get a slice of a decreasing pie.