photo credit: permanently scatterbrainedSince moving to a new domain, I have become more and more frustrated with spam monkeys. So much so that I almost followed Scot’s lead in switching to “nofollow” again.

My frustration though was misplaced. There is no question that blogs from No-Nofollow Community are on many “must spam” list. But I think there is still a way to dofollow the comments while keeping the monkeys away.

Since moving to this domain, i have not bothered to install Spam Karma plugin until now. I just decided to go along with Akismet that comes by default with a new WordPress installation. I should have learned from the past and how this collective intelligence plugin had failed me in the past.

So today I have decided to say goodbye to Akismet once again, hopefully forever. Spam Karma is so much better solution for keeping the wrong people out and the right ones in. If you have installed Spam Karma on your blog but are not sure what is the best configuration for the plugin, take a look at Andy’s settings for SK2.

Since most of the US bloggers and affiliates are taking easy today, enjoin their roasted turkeys and preparing for tomorrow’s and Monday’s sale marathons, I have decided to take it easy as well. So today I was doing some vanity search and to my amazement Google is listing me #5 for my name.

Before experimenting with Googlebot, I was occupying 12th position for the term. It is true that my article on how I am planing to beat the “other Vlad” have generated few important links, however I do not believe they were sufficient enough to jump my website to #5 position, especially competing against Wikipedia.

So what happened? I think my entire experiment has caused some what of a confusion on Google’s data centers. But it is only my guess.

I do not know how long this phenomena will last, but it appears that my experiment, although it is over, continues to affect my blog. Not only I have improved position for my name search, I have dramatically improved on some other very competitive keywords in my niche, and I am observing increase in Google’s traffic. The question is how long will this last?

Happy Thanksgiving!

My wife and I are going on a trip to North Carolina tomorrow- of course this will result in things being quiet around here. Before I take this vacation I wanted to post something here on the subject that shook (and shocked) many bloggers the Google PR Update. I am not sure if I am as excited about PR as I used to be, but since I am still writing about it, it must be important.

As most of you, I was wondering about a pattern of what took place. It is only one’s guess why and how penalties were implemented.

So to lighted up the situation I decided to find some fun practices which will keep your Page Rank untouched. Hopefully you can ad your own fun way to please the big G:

1. Link to pornographic websites as much as you can.
2. Kiss up to Google and never tell them they are stupid.
3. If you sell links or write paid reviews make sure to report and snitch on your fellow webmasters who do the same.
4. Yours next…….

Please share some fun ways to keep your websites PR high and untouched. I hope we can come up with a list of at least 10 best practices to do so. Help me out!

The reason I had put a question mark in the title of this post is that I was surprised to find out that Jason Calacanis was confirmed as keynote speaker at Affiliate Summit West.

The surprise factor of course was due to Jason’s view on affiliate marketing. At least on one occasion Jason placed spammers, SEOs and affiliate marketing under one roof- all contribute to pollute the search engine results. Or at least indicating that majority of affiliate websites in search results are bad.

While his intention to provide “unpolluted” search results on Mahalo, may be a noble one, there were however internet marketers that view Mahalo as Jason’s personal propaganda machine, far from being unbiased and far from providing quality and free from ads search results, while some think that Mahalo itself is a spam machine.

So what will Jason have to say to bunch of affiliate marketers? Will it be something like this “spammers”+”SEOs”+”affiliate marketers”=”same thing”?

So what is next? Will Jason begin writing for ReveNews on regular basis?

Update: Affiliate Summit – Jason Calacanis

If you have never heard of Hittail you may know who Mike Levin is- the mastermind behind Hittail. If this is first time you ever hear about Hittial, it’s a service I highly recommend. Soon it will be a year since I have been using Hittail. I really have no idea how do they wok out the algorithms that produce “suggested” keywords, I know one thing- it works.

I have experienced benefits both as affiliate marketer and as a blogger. Bottom line is that Hittail provides you with hints for which keywords your website can rank on the top of search results. I have written a post “Hittail Results” – based on suggestion from Hittail. To this day my blog ranks #1 for the phrase “hittail results” on Google. But one of the best things about Hittail is that it provides me with tons of ideas for the future posts.

Today Mike has posted an “invitation to hittailers” to join the new website where “hittailers” like myself can showcase their websites. I have not signed up yet, but I will as soon as I am finished with this post.