Hittail is one of my favorite analytical tools. Since the time I have joined Hittial, it was able to collect over 5000 keywords used to find my blog on various search engines. Top ten keywords are responsible only for 9.7% of all search traffic my blog received in the past. Of course this sort of statistics can be produced by other tools. What makes Hittail unique is its ability to identify keywords for which you have a good chance to improve your rankings on search engines. In the time wen I was still friendly with Google, Hittail has produced excellent results. Now I am hoping to employ it’s magic during my extreme experimentation.
I have to admit thought that placing Hittail code on your website or blog is only first tiny step for achieving better results. The magic comes to life when you begin acting on Hittial’s suggestions. Unfortunately I failed in that respect- I have currently 67 keywords sitting in my “To Do” list. Even if I write an article a day, I have two months of work to catch up. To be honest, being that English is not my first language, I always wanted to outsource “article marketing”. But I could not find a product good enough to do what I want it… until I was introduced to Content Spooling Network. The video below explains why
I imagine that Googlebot must be some what confused with my blog lately, since it is not welcomed here while inbound links continue to grow.
The most recent page rank reduction, that hit heavily Malaysian bloggers, tells me that Google employees in charge of the “punishing stick” must be as confused as their little bot. There is no doubt in my mid that penalties are carried out manually, and I think that for the most part on a random basis, although there are claims that Google targets blogs based on certain keywords.
Since I have made certain prediction I shall begin by analyzing those predictions. I am happy to say that I have been proven wrong in everything I have predicted. You should take my findings with a grain of salt since my experiment is only 12 days old.
I have predited decrease a 30% loss of traffic to my blog. I probably could have turn out to be a correct prediction, but after my original article where I announced the Googleban had been sphan, stumbled and link to from bloggers with a huge traffic, I have actually seen an increase of traffic by at least 40% comparing to the 12 days preceding my experiment.
Since my website was about to removed from Google index, I have predicted a considerable decrease in the amount of spam. The simple digest report by Spam Karma 2 indicates otherwise. To my amazement the amount of spam (both human and generated by bots) almost tripled. I guess Google can take this as a compliment.
I predicted that bloggers, especially those unfamiliar with my blog, would hesitate to link to me since there will be no trace of my site in Google index- thus potentially indicate of my blog not being safe to link to. To my surprise I received links from blogs that have never linked to me in the past. And of course I am thankful to all those who linked to me out of solidarity.
When I have restricted the Googlebot from this website, I did not know that the penalties where yet to come. My Web Hosting Review Blog‘s page rank is reduced to 0 from 2. It was reduced from PR3 to PR2 in the previous round. The interesting thing about that blog is that there is not a single sponsored review on that blog. Although that blog was listed in ReviewMe, Sponsored Reviews and TLA. I have similar websites that were not listed there and those have seen an increase of page rank, although they have nothing but affiliate datafeeds in them. Since few of these websites where listed in Google Sitemaps, it does not appear that Google is penalizing websites across the Sitemaps accounts. They do it manually and many I add they do a terrible job detecting which websites deserves the penalty and in the short term potentially hurting smaller bloggers and leaving the biggest offenders untouched.
It may be way to early to draw any conclusions from my experiment. For now I am just saying to simply not to trust Google. If you write good content and are working on growing your subscribers number you may very well survive without Google. More updates on the way.
Few days ago it was Google – today it is Microsoft. I have been running Ubuntu on my PCs for a few months. On my desktop Ubuntu is the only OS, however my laptop currently can run Windows and two versions of Ubuntu.
The only reason I was hanging onto Windows was the Widnows Movie Maker. However today or maybe yesterday, Microsoft did something that pushed my patience to its limit. Evidently the most recent Microfots update pack screwed the GRUB and I am no longer able to choose my OS on startup. I am sure there is a way to correct this but instead I went on and tried to take a closer look at Kino- the Linux video editor.
What I have discovered surprised me:
Kino is as good as the Microsoft Movie Maker. Actually it may be even better.
Kino integrates perfectly with Blip.tv.
Bye bye Windows!
Update: After writing this post I came across Dan Dennedy’s Blog- a must read blog if you have chosen Kino as your video editing software.
No? What about a new start up? Wish us luck! The video bellow is of my wife making a fondant cake. I am not sure why people go so crazy about these sort of cakes. It taste terrible. Unfortunately my wife did not tell me that no one eats fondant. Oh well.
If you browser allows for a any tool bar that shows you Google PR, you may have noticed that there is no green (or whatever other color might be used) in that little bar. I have expected that to happened and am just a little bit surprised by a slight delay between the time my website began to disappear from Google’s index to the time when PR went down to 0. I would suspect these things would happen simultaneously.
So, I guess every one should congratulate me now on my new milestone while saying goodbye to Google. My experiment is turning into a very interesting adventure and the more hours pass by the more I realize that you do not need Google at all today to market your website and that the social media websites along with the RSS technology constitute the biggest threat to Google, as well as to other search engines. They (the search engines) should be working very hard on some sort of kick ass technology in order to survive in the business. I am not a prophet but if you are an investor you should think twice whether or not to hold on to a stock of some companies even if they trade $800 a share. You do not need a crystal ball to see that some companies will be struggle for survival even though they may be soaring high today.
“Build your websites as if there were no search engines”- you’ve probably heard this slogan many times. Now you can hear it from me, now that I am experiencing it in a more realistic way- “Do yourself a favor and build your websites as if there were no search engines!”
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