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.

I’m considering setting up a full blown money making blog using it. I’ve been working recently with the guy who owns Online Tech Tips and he has promised to give me a few pointers in getting stertep with blogging for money.

I would really liek to move more into this type of work and drop some of the junk copywriting I have to do these days, some of it I will keep becasue it is enjoyable to do but the normal SEO optimised articles will be gone for sure.

I was checking one of my websites today, looking at some traffic graphs. I was interrogating search keyword data and I discovered something quite surprising.

It seems that for this particular website Yahoo are giving me 40% of my organic traffic, I have never seen a percentage this high from Yahoo before.

So I delved a little deeper, Yahoo doesn’t seem to have a vast quantity of the website spidered and the Yahoo rankings for the search terms I got traffic from are not particularly well placed, I really have no idea what’s going on or why Yahoo is feeding me so many hits. Certainly my Google rankings are fine, nothing has changed there. I haven’t changed anything on the website for weeks apart from adding new content, some of this content hasn’t even been spidered by Yahoo yet so it has to be historic content that is bringing me traffic. This theory holds true if I look at the entry pages the people reached from Yahoo.

I’m going to start checking this for all of my sites, it puzzles me and I want to understand why it has happened.

We are starting to see them everywhere, you just cannot escape them these days it seems, tags are the most trendy way of identifying and categorising everything, blog posts, bookmarks, even your entire file system.

I can’t help but think they are negative in some ways, using tags is a fairly sloppy way of organising data, they may work well for categorising websites but tagging files? Surely this will lead to bad naming conventions and a disorganised file structure as people begin to rely on tags to find their files and folders?

Personally I think they are very useful for categorising articles on a website or some other type of web content that needs to be grouped together for easy reference but it seems to me that people are trying to find excuses to use tags everything they can think of.

Maybe I’m just old fashioned, I am used to strict naming conventions and careful data management, it comes with my background. Personally I would never consider using tags as a way to organise my file system.

I’m pretty pleased that some of my new sites have come back with a pagerank even though I did very little actual link building, just linked from my own sites to them. This is really a nice little bonus for things like my sponsored blog and my Koh Phangan party site, a nice little bump I wasn’t expecting.

As a last resort I have created sitemaps for them and submitted them to Google, we shall see what happens now. I’m not keen on using sitemaps this way, it just seems to me Google are being lazy and requiring webmasters to feed their spider.

No idea how long it will be until the next PageRank update though, it could be months.

The thing is I’m not much of a salesman, I can do the job but I really do dislike it, so I was sitting here yesterday thinking about what I can do to get my SEO products into businesses owned by westerners in Thailand.

What I did was write a simple job advertisement and post it on a well known Thailand expat forum, this morning I woke up to a very good job application by a Chinese guy living here. He speaks several languages and his CV is quite impressive.

So I have decided to employ him on a freelance, commission only basis, if he manages to sell my company into even a few businesses over here then I’ll consider putting him on a salary as well.