B6S.net

Who said blog posts need to have lists anyway?

Well, someone obviously did as they seem to be so common, so here is my list about lists.

1. Choose your title wisely – there’s a thin line here between intriguing and sounding too spammy. Don’t be too pushy. If I read a title that says “X things you absolutely MUST…” I just move on.
2. Don’t make your list items too long. If they become too long consider developing each one into an article or blog post in its own right.
3. Don’t make your lists too long. For myself, if the list has more than 10 items, you probably lost me at the title already. The exception would be actual lists like “50 best selling books” – with no added text.
4. Don’t make your lists too short. “Three ways to increase your creativity” sounds kinda lame. If you have just a couple of things to say about something, use a different format.
5. Really do count the number of bullets you have there. Then count again before you hit “publish” to make sure the number hasn’t changed after editing. It can get embarrassing when your readers are looking for that elusive 7th point that’s mentioned in the title but nowhere in the text.

I switched over from Firefox to Chrome many moons ago (I’d give you the exact date, but who remembers?) Firefox just became too much of a resource hog and I got tired of waiting for minutes for it to load and then hope that it won’t crash on me. Yes, it has become that unreliable on my computer – don’t ask me why.

Chrome is not only faster and more stable, it also offers a de-cluttered surfing space. All in all, it has become my browser of choice.

The problem was with add-ons, or rather, the lack thereof. Firefox has a gazillion plug-ins you can download and add, enhancing user experience in a multitude of ways. Like many webmasters, I relied on its SEO plug-ins. As Firefox became more resource-intensive, I gradually deactivated the plug-ins, but some of them were just too necessary to completely let go of.

I ended up using Chrome for most of my browsing, still switching to Firefox when I had to do SEO work. I limited my Firefox plug-ins to Quirk Search Status – a customizable nifty little tool that highlights nofollow links and also shows you everything from backlinks , indexed pages, pagerank, alexa and all that SEO jazz.

Well, no more. I got fed up with having to wait for the Fox to load. It was time for Chrome to get its own extensions and no more waiting for the official release either. I switched to the Dev edition of Chrome and now I got me a wriggly (yet so far stable!) multi-armed shiny metal browser!

If you want to get your own Chrome extensions, there are a bunch of hoops to jump through. You see, the extensions or add-ons only work with the Developers version of Chrome, so you have to switch over to that, activate the extensions and only then start adding them.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to getting Google Chrome with extensions -

1. If you’re already using Chrome: Make a backup of your Chrome user information by navigating to Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default in your windows XP installation. Don’t freak out if you can’t see it all. Some of these folders are hidden, so you need to go to Tools > Folder Options > View and change the view option to “View all files including hidden”.
2. Download the Dev channel version of Chrome here: http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?extra=devchannel and replace your current version with it.
3. You’re not done yet. You need to manually – and I mean, manually – activate the extensions feature. Go to your desktop and locate the Chrome icon. Right-click on that icon and select properties.
   
   In the target field it should say:
   “C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator.WORK\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe”
   Add one space and this text:
   –enable-extensions –load-extension=”c:\myextension”
   So, now your target field reads:
   “C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator.WORK\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe” –enable-extensions –load-extension=”c:\myextension”
   Apply and re-lauch Chrome.
4. Now comes the fun part. After re-starting Chrome you should see a little message at the bottom that tells you you now have the new extensions feature enabled. Adding an extension is a breeze – just click and add!

I found a good source for Chrome extenstions here: chromeextensions.org . Not a huge selection if you’re used to The Firefox mega collections, but it was good enough for me. I can now see pagerank in a glance using Kuber’s Pagerank checker and I can quickly spot nofollow links using the Chrome nofollow checker.
And so… it’ s bye bye Firefox!

I do actually think that the Thirty Days Challenge run by Ed Dale and his gang is a valuable link to have. You see, now when someone asks me to teach them how to make money online, I can just refer them to Ed’s site and tell them to watch the tutorials.

I have learned over the years that no matter how much you try to teach them, 95% of people will not become web publishers. At most, they’ll play with it for a couple of months and then move on to look for a “real job”. At least this way, I don’t have to waste time teaching them. If they’re serious enough to make it through the tutorials there, then it’s time for me to step in and offer further guidance.

While I do appreciate the work Ed and co. put into the online course, I do have a problem with some of the offers they’re pushing. The latest piece of hype landed in my inbox today and referred me eventually (after collecting and verifying my email address) to this page -

http://bruteforceseo.com/vip.php – finally a link on my blog that I felt the urge to add the nofollow tag to!

Talk about a landing page designed to sell to the masses. It reminded me of that page -

http://www.buymystupidebook.com/

I mean…  honestly…

I love how they try to convince you that this isn’t spam or black hat. Oh no, I’m sure their bots leave meaningful comments on blogs, and only bookmark genuinely relevant information on social networks sites. It’s as smart as a human, dontcha know? (I guess it could be argued that s0me humans can be as dumb as a bot…?)

They do come up with an original argument to justify using a spam bot:

Consider this: Think Google would have grown into a multi BILLION dollar company (on YOUR back, no less) if they ranked every site by hand? If they looked at your site with their eyes and decided what ads to place on it?

No Freaking Way. They use Software to do the heavy lifting.

So Why Exactly Shouldn’t YOU do the same?!

Brilliant, isn’t it?

I received my Google Wave invitation several weeks ago. I have since tried using it several times.

The first time was terrible. It was so early on, I didn’t really know anyone else who has a Wave account. There was no one to talk to, no one to wave at. A few days later, following some tweets, kind people added me into waves. At that point, waves seemed to be all about “testing”. People would do the strangest things, including deleting chains of messages and anonymously editing someone else’s words.

It was a strange experience, and beyond the initial “playing around with a new toy” fun, I really couldn’t see the point in it all. I have tried several times later, and it’s getting a bit better as more people I know have Wave accounts. We can at least experiment with someone we know.

I confess, I still don’t really get the Wave thing.

I read on Mashable today, an article titled
5 Impressive Real-Life Google Wave Use Cases. This tells me two things -

1. Some people have found ways to actually use this thing.
2. Most people have not, hence when some do, it’s making headlines.

Still, if some people are finding uses for it, maybe I will too someday! After all, when Twitter first came out, I was one of those who just “couldn’t see the point in it.” So much so, that I never even gave it a try. I only joined Twitter half a year ago and lo and behold, not only am I addicted, but I find it useful as well.  So, I’ll try and ride the Google Wave for a bit longer – we’ll see where it goes!

In fact, why don’t I try and start a wave for this post? Click to see the wave and join in.

ETA: Apparently the link to this wave isn’t working for other people but myself. I can’t find a way to link directly to a wave – if anyone knows how to, please do add a comment about it.

To find my wave, simply search for “b6s” or “My Google Wave Blog Post Wave ” and you should be able to find it and join
(it is a public wave).

Don’t have Wave yet? They finally gave users invitations, so I’ll be happy to give you one.

Here’s what you need to do -

1. Follow @b6s on Twitter

2. Post a comment here with your Twitter username and let me know that you want a Wave invite. I’ll follow you back on Twitter and you can then DM me your email.

Oh, and almost forgot – anne.moss@googlewave.com on Wave (no email harvesting crawlers spamming Wave yet, right?)

While waiting for the design company I hired to make me a new wordpress theme, I figured I’d play around with existing theme generators to see what they could actually generate. Googling around I came across several Wordpress theme generators and gave some of them a try:

http://pixopoint.com/theme_generator/

http://www.yvoschaap.com/wpthemegen/

http://templatr.cc/

http://www.cssez.com/design.php#

http://www.wordpressthemegen.com/

Basically, what they all do is offer you a choice of several layouts, then provide you with forms where you can select fonts, colors and other design elements. The first four are online applications where you just download the finished theme. The last is an actual .exe file, so I decided to skip it. From the provided screenshot it seems to be very similar to the others.

So, will I be using these? I think not, and here’s why:

1. None of these generators provide any unique graphics – they’re limited to what CSS and HTML can do, or whatever graphics you bring with you to the theme.
2. The two themes I have tried out were not widget-ready. The generators were probably created before the Wordpress  widgets era.
3. I don’t feel comfortable with not knowing what’s inside the code exactly. I know I’ll end up hacking it manually anyway so…
4. I think it will be faster for me to find a basic theme and then model something out of it, working my way around changing graphics, colors, fonts etc.

Figured I’d share them here all the same, in case someone else may find them useful. If you do, or if you know of others, do let me know!

The next BIG Google algorithm update one is named after a very much abused substance (legal, of course, imagine if they were to name this one cocaine instead?)

Much like the real stuff, it’s been driving some web publishers up the wall, especially those who are currently ranked high on the SERP’s for good keywords, waiting to cash on their good positions during the Holidays shopping season.

Well, they can now relax, as Google’s Matt Cutts officially announced that Caffeine won’t be implemented until after the Holidays.

Isn’t it amazing just how powerful Google has become? It is a search engine after all. As such, it  was supposed to reflect what’s hot and what’s not on the web. Instead, we see once again how Google landscapes web traffic patterns rather than merely tracking them.

Not that there is much to be done about that, of course, but such “benevolent” moves by Google towards webmasters do bother me. As a surfer, I don’t want Google to give me what it considers to be “not as useful” results just out of consideration for webmasters. If you think Caffeine generates better search results, by all means, bring it on. Maybe it’s the hundreds of millions of customers you should be considering, not the thousands of merchants?

As a webmaster too, actually. You may be helping some websites, but by definition that means you’re taking traffic away from someone else. People will shop online this year – the question is which sites will be delivered by Google’s top search results to win the jackpot.

Disclaimer: I have dozens of websites and no, I haven’t tested them on the Caffeine sandbox, so I don’t know if I will be making less money or more after the roll out.

Why do people create and distribute Wordpress themes? Well, apart from just being nice, they almost always have a link back to their website at the bottom of the design. A good design can create hundreds and even thousands of backlinks.  It would usually be a fairly gradual link building process, and hopefully one that continues along time.

The official Wordpress site has a fairly large and very popular free themes directory.  It has just over one thousand themes to choose from and reports over 900,000 downloads so far. Just under a thousand downloads per theme – pretty impressive!

The most popular themes get downloaded more often than others, of course. So, I decided to check and see what happened to the most popular themes on the wordpress theme directory – how many backlinks do the sites they link to actually have?

I checked the five top most popular themes and here are the results:

Obviously, this is not a controlled experiment. The main problems:

1. Many of the linked sites have backlinks from other sources as well.
2. Some of these sites are promoted via several templates.

Even taking that into account, I think the numbers speak for themselves. Backlink building through distributing free quality blog templates seems to hold some promise. I am going to give it a try myself soon, and I will be promoting a new website on a fresh domain name. The Wordpress template will be the only method in which that site will be promoted and I will report the results periodically in this blog – so stay tuned!

I’ve started a Twitter account for my B6S persona here, in addition to my regular twitter account @israelimom.

http://twitter.com/bs6 – in case you want to follow me.

However, do not expect me to automatically follow back. I so don’t believe in feed bots accounts that follow other  just for the follow back. If you follow me and I don’t reciprocate, read my blog post about Who NOT to Follow on Twitter, posted earlier this year on my Israeli Mom blog.

When it comes to webmasters, keep in mind that you are dealing with, hopefully, a more sophisticated crowd. Spam just won’t work.

With that in mind, I’ve come up with a list of Twitter Do’s and Dont’s for Webmasters:

Do

• Read other people’s tweets.
• Interact and reply to tweets.
• Tweet your original thoughts and ideas about web development.
• Post links of interest with your own input injected into the tweet.
• Tweet about new blog posts and new projects, with a clear title or added explanation.

Don’t

• Spam with product offers – we all know where to look for products.
• Send out automated ads – if I see a tweet about teeth whitening I will block and possibly report spam.
• Add RSS feeds of other sites to your Twitter account. I know how to add Mashable and TechCrunch to my Reader, and I can follow them directly if I want to.
• Repeat the same tweets promoting your blog posts numerous times. Once or twice is enough.
• Post endless links with no input of your own – what’s the point?
• Post links with no text – smart people just won’t click them.
• DM people with offers or links. That is just pure spam.

I am on Twitter because I want to interact with fellow webmasters. I want to network. I want to learn new things. If your account does nothing but those things listed under “Don’t”, you can be pretty sure I won’t follow back.

I hope you join Twitter for the same reasons I did. It is both effective and fun when done right.

Working on my crochet projects lately, I decided to watch this year’s Thirty Days Challenge videos. I was curious to see what Ed Dale and his people are teaching newbies nowadays and wanted to see if there were any tidbits I might find useful.

I was surprised to see just how much effort was still placed on building backlinks from free hosted services. Dale recommends building pages for your main site from Squidoo, Hub Pages, Weebly, Blogger, Wordpress.com and Scribd. The video guides talk about throwing as many hooks into the water as you can, implying, presumably, that these efforts are focused at getting surfers directly from these services. However, they do mention, quite often, that this should also be part of your link building strategy – getting quality backlinks from your own on-topic pages from these respectable (authority?) websites.

Theoretically, it’s a brilliant idea, and certainly not new. It sounds so good, doesn’t it? By putting in a few hours of work, you can generate on-topic links, all from “good neighborhoods”, with your anchor text of choice. No need to negotiate with other webmasters – just log into your account and create your page and your link.

Is It Worth Your Time Though?

My Own Backlinks from Free Hosted Pages Experiment

I have tried this myself two and a half years ago, launching a series of pages on Squidoo, Blogpost (Blogger), Hub Pages and Google Pages. Don’t laugh, but Yahoo Geocities and Angelfire (Lycos) were respectable free hosting services back then too – with many of their pages taking top positions in the SERP’s – so they were incorporated into my linking scheme as well.

Focusing my efforts on promoting three quality content websites, I built these backlinks pages  gradually, over several months. There was nothing spammy about them either. I suck at spam and find it very difficult to write total drivel (although I suppose some might disgree!), so each of these pages, whether moderated ones on Hub Pages or Free-For-All on Angelfire, got my full attention. They were beautiful pages, with rich meaningful text, pictures and even some design where necessary. They were interlinked to some extent, and I threw in some more links for good measure from my own directories (that was back when directory links still carried some weight).

I monitored the results for a while and still take a peak every now and again.

The results were mixed and, as far as I’m concerned, disappointing:

1. All of the pages were indexed and still are.
2. The links to my main pages are still there and counted as backlinks to my main sites.
3. Naturally, the amount of traffic to these free-hosted pages is minimal. They target some long-tail search phrases, and as far as I can tell, have very limited success in scoring high on the SERP’s for those (with the exception of a few of them, mainly the ones on Hub Pages).
4. Most importantly, I could see little to no effect on the main sites they were supposed to push forward.

So Was It Worth My Time?

Well, you could say that a backlink is a backlink, but I really don’t think this works as a viable long-term link building strategy. It is too time-consuming to be worth the effort, especially when you consider you will need to promote these “satellite pages” to give them any SEO significance as a source of links.

For myself, I feel that my time is better spent creating natural organic links and keeping my quality content in my own network.

In my previous post, I explained why I disable the nofollow tag on blog comments and why I seek out similar blogs to interact with and add my insightful, intelligent, useful comments (does that sound vain or what?)

Looks like I’m not the only one looking for dofollow blogs. Google’s own keyword research tool shows that there are tens of thousands of searches for various combinations of the word “dofollow” every month. So, how does a webmaster find these dofollow blogs?

First Things First – Recognizing the Curse

Pretty but cursed?

I was telling my 8 year old son about SEO the other day, describing it all as this fascinating game with battles to fight and scores to win. After explaining pagerank and “link juice” I got to the “nofollow” part. “You see, Ron, a link with a nofollow has an invisible curse on it and so it cannot pass on the link points,” I told him.

For regular surfers, there is no way to know when a link has a nofollow tag. As a webmaster you could, of course, look at the source code, but you probably prefer a faster way to tell which is which.

Fortunately, Firefox has several plug-ins that do just that. These are mostly SEO plug-ins that have lots of bells and whistles, but they all perform one simple function as well: they highlight nofollow links so you can easily tell which blog “cursed” the comment links. I use Quirk Search Status Add-on for Firefox but you can search around and see if something else suits your needs better.

Dofollow Lists and Directories

With Wordpress, the most popular blogging platform, having nofollow turned on by default, how do you find those blogs that enable comment affection?

Googling for dofollow brings up quite a few websites and pages that try to create lists of dofollow blogs. Some of them move on to create an entire directory around this, sorting the blogs out by PageRank and/or topic. Here’s the problem though -

• Lists are not up to date – For whatever reason, blog owners change their settings and switch nofollow back on.
• Lists have mostly SEO/webmasters blogs in them. That’s fine if that happens to be your area, but if you’re looking to interact with other kinds of blogs, you’re out of luck.

Actively Searching for DoFollow Blogs

How can you find Dofollow blogs through a search engine like Google? After all, not only are we looking for an attribute in the source code, we are actually looking for blogs that do not have that attribute.

What we can look for is an image that some bloggers (myself included) display on their blogs to tell the world that they dofollow. You can look for the image files through Google, or use the Google image search for “U comment, I follow”. The file names to look for are -

ifollowblue.gif, ifollowgreen.gif, ifollowltgreen.gif, ifollowpink.gif, ifollowpurple.gif, ifolloworange.gif, ifollowwhite.gif, ifollowmagenta.gif.

Remember: always check to make sure these really are dofollow blogs. Watch out for blog owners who don’t even know what dofollow means and put up the image to indicate that they will comment back on blog posts in your blog. Yes, some bloggers think that “u comment, I follow”, means that they will personally follow your blog link to comment back on your blog…

Putting it All Together

So, here is my own strategy for finding dofollow blogs that work for me:

1. Start by going over existing lists/directories of dofollow blogs and find the ones that are on-topic and are indeed dofollow. This is a time consuming phase and in my experience, most of the blogs listed are in fact nofollow.
2. Searching Google for the IFollow images (as explained above) and finding the gems.
3. Make a list of quality blogs that are indeed worth interacting with. These should be blogs that are on-topic and actually worth reading. Make sure that the comments are well-moderated. I have yet to see a dofollow blog with spam comments that retained its Pagerank!
4. Keep track by visiting regularly (I add them to my Google Reader to track new posts) and when a post of interest comes up, read, comment and interact.

It may be time consuming, but look at the benefits. You get to know people and truly interact with fellow bloggers that cover the same topic as you. Hopefully, these people monitor their comments carefully and weed out anything spammy, so you get quality backlinks too.

Now, if you decide to do that and want to share some of your findings, or if you want to offer your blog as a fellow dofollow blog, do leave me a comment about it. After all, if it’s good… you get a link back