Five days is a long time in the blogoshpere. I’m sure some of you are seeing this in your feed reader trying to remember what this site is about and why you subscribed.

This site is about online business. It leans on a few topics like website promotion through SEO. And with that comes the inevitable “see, Google is evil” posts. And the “make (more) money with Adsense” posts so I think it balances out.

So what’s with the title? Is 5 days really too long between posts? For this site it is. Continue Do you think it has been too long since I posted? I do. Here’s why. »

This story broke in August but it’s heating up again because MSN is still up to something.

MSN has been referral spamming websites. This means they “ping” a site with a bot acting like a human and leaving a link in the referral logs back to MSN’s website.

Spammers do this hoping you will check your logs and follow the links back to their site where you will make a purchase, click an ad, etc. MSN claims this is a “quality check” but what kind of QC wreaks havoc on your primary competitor’s ad program?

Microsoft’s bots are triggering some javascript including the one used for Google Adsense. You may recall that the click through rate determines the quality (value per click) of ads placed on your sites. With MSN’s referral spamming they are racking up impressions but not clicks damaging your CTR and ultimately, income. Continue Microsoft still referral spamming, jacking Adsense »

Ron Paul has taken over social websites like Reddit. Conquered the poles of Fox News. And spammed thousands of other websites and email addresses.

The “Ron Paul Effect” has created mainstream media attention. And people are wondering if winning online will mean votes at the primary election.

Most politicians treat online promotion as part of their offline PR. Online calls to action are not like their offline counterparts. This means online political activities don’t turn into action – votes - by viewers.

Ron Paul’s campaign is for internet users. Paul’s tactics are producing results, online and off.

Through online efforts, his campaign has raised millions of dollars. The buzz has poured into the offline world and claimed attention from international news programs and political pundits.

Will Ron Paul take his online victory to the offline world? Continue Can the internet win the presidential election? »

It’s been a couple weeks since the website redesign was launched and I’ve put together some preliminary data on what effect the new look has had on traffic.

First, unique visits are down… barely. There’s was a 2% drop between September and October. Part of this is the tiny bit viewers lost in transition. And part is because there hasn’t been much new, exciting content to bring people in through the RSS feed (though subscriptions increased 12%) or social networks.

Second, return visits and page views are way up. Return visitors increased by 40% over the previous month and page views increased 72%.

I attribute this to the new look and better organization. Less clutter and more white space makes reading easier for the viewer. Related post lists at the end of each article and the enhanced footer have pulled viewers to content they missed in the past.

I’ve also been using the “more” feature from WordPress on lengthy posts so viewers hitting an article from the home page have to click through to get the whole story. I’m using this sparingly as I don’t want it to take away from the overall experience, but that has definitely increased the number of page views.

Adsense earnings are down. Part of this is because some ads were “hidden” when viewers used the “more” feature and jumped past the ads. Also, I took Adsense offline for about a week while I tried Bidvertiser. That was an expensive test.

Over the next month you’ll see minor changes in structure as the logs tell me what needs adjusting. And improved writing as I’ve been brushing up. My goal is an improved experience for you. If you have any suggestions, drop them in the comments below.

PS. The advertising program is getting off to a slow start. Prices are low - check it out!

Google was built around PageRank. For a long time, SEOs would focus on getting high PR scores to rank well but that ended a few years ago when Google’s algorithm advanced. Now PR does have an effect on several things but it hasn’t been the place to focus legitimate SEO efforts for a while.

The question was recently raised, “should we care about PR?” My answer is “very little.” Here’s why:

If a website has PR it is most likely ok with Google and included in the index and results pages. That means it has influence within Google’s system and can be useful for getting relevant links.

Pages with PR stay out of the supplemental results… but we can’t see which pages are in the supplemental results anymore so I don’t think that is worth worrying about.

There’s some disagreement about this but pages with high PR scores get crawled more often than pages with low PR scores. This makes sense as PR is a metric of popularity and Google’s algo depends on popularity so they may as well focus their resources on these “valued” pages.

Mostly PR is considered valuable because people think it is! Most of the people buying links based on PR don’t really understand what it is or what the influence of PR is on the search results. SEOs call this “chasing the green tail”.

Over the last week Google has been dropping the PR scores of suspected link sellers. I suppose the idea is that if these sites are selling links based on PR Google can cut into their profits. Fair enough, but this trick hurts the credibility of PR more than anything because now we know the scores can be manually altered. These sites still show some PR. We know they aren’t banned. And so far all reports say Google referral traffic is steady so there is no real penalty. Continue The further devaluation of Google PR »