Last November, Myspace announced that it would be releasing a self-serve ad platform in early 2008. The ad platform would resemble Facebook’s current self serve social ad system. Early news indicated that the platform would only allow for promotion of a user’s myspace page, however, things can change quite a bit.
Next week Myspace will be launching their long awaited (yawn…zzzzz) Developer Platform, which Nickycakes can only assume is supposed to be their version of Facebook Applications. As everyone knows, facebook applications pretty much ruined facebook’s clean functionality, but it’s hard to imagine a crappy site like myspace getting any worse, so maybe it will bring on some sort of improvement.
The dev platform was announced in October, and the self serve ad platform was announced in early November. So one can only hope that the ad platform will be right on the heels of next week’s release.
Get your curl scripts ready boys. It may be party time once again.
Published by nickycakes //
Almost exactly one year ago, Eli from BluehatSEO made a post on MadLib sites. The basic idea behind a MadLib site is this: You make a script that will randomly (or not so randomly) generate pages from a database of information by inserting different pieces of information into each post to make them unique. For example: Today I saw *girlsname* go into *storename* and buy *productname*. You can generate thousands and thousands of unique pages this way with very little effort and get indexed by google without duplicate content penalty if you do a decent job.
Well, the problem is, not everyone has the ability to code their own madlib system, and not everyone owns large databases to use for the process. That’s where Datapresser comes in.
About 6 months ago, Rob at Seocracy started working on Datapresser. It’s a comprehensive madlib blog generating package. All you have to do is enter your madlib text and title using their formatting system using their huge databases of information, and it will generate thousands of unique content pages, in wordpress format, for you to slap on your wordpress blog and let ‘er go.
Saturday morning, Rob launched Datapresser.com with a fee of a modest $45 a month and 60 available signups. The 60 signups were gone in under 30 minutes. $2700 in 30 minutes ain’t bad, to be honest. If you weren’t able to get an account on Saturday, don’t worry. Rob is working on getting more server’s up to be able to handle more users, so there will still be opportunity to get your spot.
Anyway, Nickycakes is extremely grateful to have been given an account to check out Datapresser and see what it’s all about. At first blush, it’s great. The interface is clean, which the Cakes loves. The help file is…..well…helpful. And it works damn quick. There are 3 output formats for the data, including 2 for wordpress, and one is text output for use with pretty much anything.
If you don’t understand the scope of a tool like this, think about it a little harder. With Datapresser, or any madlib script, you can automatically generate thousands of unique articles for ANY niche you can think of. Go to your favorite affiliate network, open up the offers, and pick one. Want to make a site with thousands of keyword content rich pages related to that offer? Want to do it in under an hour? No prob!
So anyway, if you’re interested, keep checking seocracy and datapresser for updates on when the next batch of signups will be available.
And thanks again Rob. Great tool.
Published by nickycakes //
This may seem elementary to a few, but many times Nickycakes writes posts because it’s something he needs a refresher on as well. Not to mention there was no Moron Monday post this week due to unforeseen circumstances, so this will have to do.
If you run a blog or other site, you NEED to find a way to add new content daily if you want to be successful. Either by posting manually, autoposting, adding an aggregated RSS feed, whatever, your page needs to change daily. There are many reasons why this will help you. Here are just a few:
First, and one of the most important, is crawl rate. Google sends it’s bots to look at your page at regularly scheduled intervals. These intervals are different for each page. You can view how often your site is being crawled by signing up for google webmaster tools. When G first indexes your site, the crawl rate will be rather slow, maybe once a week or something, maybe slower. When it returns and finds new content, it will increase the crawl rate and come back sooner the next time. If there is no new content, it will decrease the rate, and wait a little longer before checking back with you. Some sites, like Digg are indexed almost constantly by google because the content is constantly changing, whereas static sites may only be checked every month or so, maybe longer. There has been quite a bit of recent speculation that newer content is given a lot of favor in google search rankings, so it’s really important to have your crawl rate high to take full advantage.
Next, indexing. This follows along with crawl rate, and seems fairly obvious. If your site is getting crawled more often by google, then your site will be fully indexed faster. For large database sites, this is key as you are likely relying on mass pages getting indexed to reach your goals.
Another important reason to update your site daily is for unique content and longtail keywords. If you’re manually updating your site with blog posts, this will hit home for you after a while. Sometimes you will write a post that you don’t think is that great, and after a week you’ll see tons of traffic pouring into your site from some keyword combination you posted that you weren’t even expecting to rank for. But even if you aren’t manually updating your site, and using rss feed aggregation or another automatic content generation method, the more new content sources you have going into your site, the less likely you are to be penalized by google for using copied content.
Finally, and most importantly (for blogs anyway) is return users and subscriptions. When a reader finds a new site, they will check it two times. The first time they check it will be when they find it in a search engine result, or recommended by a friend, or forum, or link, or whatever. The second time they come back, will be to see if there’s anything new. If there isn’t, they most likely won’t be returning again. If there IS new content, they’ll probably add it to their RSS feed reader, or bookmarks and come back often (assuming you’re not running a site full of retarded useless information).
A note about RSS Subscribers:
Nickycakes may make an entire post about this, but it’s been beaten to death already by others. RSS Subscribers are so key in running a successful blog. If you have 1000 subscribers, you know that when you post something new, you’re going to be getting a good number of those hits automatically coming to your site. Make absolutely sure it’s easy for people to subscribe to your feed.
Published by nickycakes //
When you visit a website, several pieces of information are usually recorded by that site. Your IP, Browser, and Referer address are a few of them. The Referer address is the address of the page you just came from. Most webmasters, from time to time, check their Referer log to see where their traffic is coming from. When they see traffic coming from a website they haven’t heard of, they go to check it out to see why this website linked to them.Using this to your advantage to build a little extra traffic for your site is easy. If you use Firefox (and you should, because IE is for morons), you can go grab a plugin called RefControl. Refcontrol allows you to overwrite the referer url that your browser normally sends to webpages with whatever you want. So just put in your site address and browse the web normally. Keep in mind that this will, in some cases, annoy the crap out of people, but if you know anything about Nickycakes, annoying the crap out of people is a benefit and not a drawback.
If you were so inclined, you could also write a curl script to go to random pages all day spamming your referer url all over the place. This will actually serve 2 purposes. First, as already mentioned, webmasters will check you out to see why you’re linking to them. Second, some statistics packages keep a public log of traffic, indexed by google. By spamming your referer all over the place, you will end up on some of these lists and generate backlinks for yourself. This is sometimes referred to as “Referer Bombing”.
And for the ultimate Rickroll, use http://www.internetisseriousbusiness.com as your referer at all times.
Published by nickycakes //
If you haven’t read last week’s Moron Monday about creating your first site, take a sec to do so. This week Nickycakes will talk about getting Google to index your website, and a little more.
Well, it’s Christmas eve, so this one is going to be a little short, simply because spending time with the family is more important than writing blog posts.
For a new blog, getting indexed by Google is key. Getting indexed means Google (or whatever search engine) sends a bot to your site to record your info, and adds your site to their index to be listed when people search for stuff. The visitors to your website from search engines is called Organic Traffic. The problem with getting a new site indexed is Google has no way of knowing about it, so you need to figure out ways to let them know you have a website that needs indexing.
Here are a few tips to getting your website indexed:
Submit a Sitemap to Google
For a wordpress blog, this is a two-part process. First, you need to download and install the Google Sitemap Generator for wordpress. Then you need to head over to Google Webmaster Tools and follow their instructions for verifying your site and submitting your new sitemap.
Submit Your Site to Directories
There are a ton of free web directories online. You can either pay someone to do this for you, or do it yourself for free. A google search for “free web directory” should bring up enough results to keep you occupied for a while. Some retards think it’s cute to charge you to be included in their directory. With the exception of maybe the yahoo business directory, you probably never want to pay to be included in one of these things.
Submit Your Site to Social Bookmarking Sites
Go to sites like Digg, backflip, and magnolia and submit a story about your site. This will create links to your site that google can follow to find it. Do this on a bunch of social bookmarking sites. You’ll want to have accounts on them for later when you want to generate backlinks (next week’s moron monday).
Put Your Site in Your Sig and Yap on Forums
Blow the dust off that digital point bookmark and go put your website in your sig. Then proceed to make a few worthless posts in a few popular topics. This entire process should only take about 10 minutes.
Ping Google Blogsearch
Under Options -> Writing in your wordpress admin console, there should be a box at the bottom called Update Services. Add http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 to the list so your blog automatically tells google blogsearch there is new content every time you make a post.
This should be enough to get google to start showing your page in the search engine result pages (SERPS) in a day or two.
Next week Cakes will talk about backlinks and getting your site ranked higher in the search engines.
Published by nickycakes //
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