I’ll normally leave the link building tips to Mixed Market Arts but the other day I came across a neat use of Google and CommentLuv that I wanted to share. This technique is pretty smooth and I’m upset that I didn’t think of this myself weeks, if not months, ago when I first wrote about CommentLuv.

For those of you who don’t remember, CommentLuv is a plugin for WordPress that will append a link to the latest blog post a person has made to any comment they leave on your site. I use the plugin here so if anyone wants to see how it works just leave a comment on this or any other post.

It’s a cool little plugin that may or may not inspire more people to leave comments on your posts. The clever trick though is something I came upon while going through my stat logs here. It turns out with a really simple Google query you can find blog posts related to specific keywords you are interested in that have CommentLuv enabled.

In the Google search box type something like this: commentluv inurl:golf

Replace the word golf with whatever keyword you’re looking for and you’ll be presented with a list of blog posts that have that word in the URL and have CommentLuv enabled. Visit one of the posts and leave a comment to get an easy link to your latest post. It’s that simple.

With the recent PageRank update, the auction forums have exploded with activity as people try to sell their domains and sites that have fresh PR.

This is all fine and good and is pretty typical of how the webmaster marketplace cycles each update. The danger during these times is with people selling sites that have a fake PageRank.

What is fake PageRank?

A site has a fake PageRank when the PR returned from the Google servers is actually the PR of a different site. A site with fake PageRank has basically “tricked” Google into thinking it’s actually another site on the web and then Google assigns both sites a matching PageRank score.

How does this work?

I’m not going to get into the technical specifics but here’s a very general overview of the means to “steal” another site’s PageRank.

A script is written on the stealing site that automatically redirects any incoming requests from Google’s webcrawler to another site with PageRank. This effectively confuses the Google spider into thinking the site’s are the same and the stealing site eventually, with enough redirects, inherits the other site’s PageRank.

What’s the problem? This sounds great.

The problem is that as soon as Google figures out what’s happening or the redirection described above is stopped (say, when the new owner takes control of the domain) then the PageRank will be removed and you’ll have a penalized site in Google’s index. And a penalized site in Google’s index is practically worthless.

How do I protect myself?

There are literally hundreds of sites on the web that will tell you what PageRank a site has. The problem is that very few of them will tell you if that PageRank is actually valid.

My personal preference is to run any sites I’m curious about through the service provided at Check Page Rank as they give you a really thorough breakdown of not only a site’s PR (whether it’s valid or not) but also information on the site’s indexed pages in various search engines.

If you want to see it in action, check out the stats for iamjacksdesign.com

The Bottom Line

Whenever you’re thinking about purchasing a site or a domain (particularly if you mainly are interested/concerned with its PageRank) be sure to do your own research.

That’s really the best advice I can give. Every single day someone gets ripped off by a fake PageRank scam because they don’t do their own fact finding and instead get lazy and trust someone’s word.

There’s absolutely no reason that the same thing should happen to you after reading this post.

SHAMELESS PLUG: This Monday’s edition of Jack’s Newsletter is going to be exclusively about PageRank and the issues/benefits surrounding it. If that sounds interesting to you then you might want to subscribe now.

There appears to be a new PageRank update this weekend or possibly this morning. I bet this comes a little sooner than most people expected.

PageRank Update Day is always fun for me. Anyone who tells you that PageRank is dead is fooling themselves or just hasn’t learned how to take full advantage of it.

Here’s the newest scores for the sites throughout Jack’s Empire:

This update was full of surprises. Here’s some quick analysis:

• As usual, each update comes with some sacrificial lambs and this time around it was the Michigan Sports Report and New York City Sports Report. And, as usual, the reason for their drop should be more than obvious to anyone who visits the sites.
• The biggest leaper in the bunch was the Northwest Sports Report going from 0 to 4. I have no logical explanation for that except that it was well linked between all the sites in the empire. Conventional wisdom from SEO experts says that inter-linking like that doesn’t pass much Google juice so believe what you want.
• It’s nice to see my free WordPress themes site get a small bump. I’ve been trying to do a bit more recently to get the word out and it seems to be paying off both in the number of theme downloads and this small PR boost.

I’m actually focusing next week’s newsletter on my thoughts and approaches concerning PageRank and utilizing it to your advantage. If you haven’t subscribed yet and are interested in that kind of information sign up when you get a chance. There’s a form in the upper right hand corner right now to make it easier on you.

When I decided to launch Jack’s Newsletter last week I thought I would give the banner advertising system called Project Wonderful a try.

Project Wonderful is, in short, an advertising platform for advertisers and publishers based on an auction system. The system is slightly complex so I suggest that, if you’re interested, you head on over to their explanation page and learn more. Basically you bid on a spot for a set amount of money and as long as you aren’t outbid by another advertiser your banner remains displayed until you either run out of money or a certain time limit you define has been met.

I first came across Project Wonderful on the Entrecard blog and I initially only planned to bid on one of their six banner spots. Of course, once I got registered my account, deposited some funds via PayPal and got into using the system I decided to expand my advertising a bit.

I chose the Entrecard site and also a handful of blogs that had the term “wordpress” tagged as one of their topics. The banner I used is on the right and it led directly to the signup page for Jack’s Newsletter.

I’m going to now give you exact details on what I spent, the views my banner received and the clicks that came through. In an effort to keep the sites I used private I’ll only be describing their topic/niche and not reveal the actual name of the site (except for Entrecard, who are fair game in my eyes).

As you can see from my table, the cost per click was pretty good. I received targeted traffic for prices similar or even lower than what I would have gotten through a more traditional advertising platform such as AdWords.

As far as actual conversions on the traffic… well, my hunch is that the only really good converter was the Entrecard banner. I didn’t have any really good means of tracking this in place because I kind of jumped right into using Project Wonderful without a lot of preparation.

Bottom Line

I think I’m going to be using Project Wonderful again in the very near future. I’ll definitely give it one more run promoting the newsletter before the premium WordPress theme giveaway is over.

Another neat twist to using this system that I hadn’t initially planned on is the spying factor involved. You can obviously quite easily get an idea of the kind of traffic sites are getting by just looking at your banner stats. I wonder how many publishers stop to think how much information about their traffic they’re giving away by being a member of Project Wonderful.

Project Wonderful has a slightly intimidating concept and a rather difficult interface but if you’re willing to take the time and chance a few dollars on it you might see some pretty nice results. It’s officially recommended.

A lot of people believe that the true way to quantify the popularity and success of a blog is by its number of RSS subscribers. The argument has two parts: traffic numbers are easily inflated and anyone who subscribes to your RSS feed is obviously a fan interested in what you have to say.

Well, my friends, let me tell you about the reality of RSS subscribers. It’s just as easy, or even easier, to inflate your subscriber count than it is your traffic stats.

I’m going to tell you about two of the easiest ways I can think of just off the top of my head, but I’m sure there are other means as well.

FeedBurner Is The Key

I love FeedBurner as a service but it’s a bit limited in how it distinguishes real subscribers from robots and scrapers. The easiest way to artificially boost your subscriber count is to just submit your feed to as many RSS directories and search engines as you possibly can. As the spiders and bots from the directories periodically crawl your site they will boost your count. It’s that simple.

Things are even easier to manipulate with FeedBurner’s Subscribe By Email feature. Here again FeedBurner has developed an easy way to cheat their own system. Any Entrecard user can hop over to the shop right now and find people offering to subscribe to your blog via email for a fee. You could take this farther by just setting up dummy email accounts on your own domains and subscribing to your feed as well.

You’d be naive to think that this kind of stuff isn’t going on at some of the blogs you read everyday. It’s especially tragic because a lot of blogs are using their RSS subscriber counts as a stat to justify/explain their advertising costs.

How Do You Really Measure A Blog’s Success?

I’m not entirely sure.

Dosh Dosh made the argument last month that the best metric to measure a site’s success is in dollar bills. I suppose that is a valid point if you are coming from the viewpoint of blogging as a means to “make money online.” In the web site auction world, income is especially important because site pricing is based on multiples of monthly revenue.

Every conceivable metric for a blog or site can be manipulated. I can pay for traffic. I can buy PageRank. I can make automatic splogs to build back links. The list is endless.

In the end, maybe money is the best way.

I’ve written about Web Auctions Daily, my auction aggregator aimed at Internet marketers, before but it’s time to mention it again after a recent refresh the site was given.

I’m calling it Web Auctions Daily 1.5. The general idea of the site has stayed the same but now there are additional sources for more web site, domain and template listings. I’ve also included Facebook Application auctions to the site as well, for those of you looking to get into that game. I’ve tightened up the look a bit to hopefully make it easier to navigate and find what you want.

The search feature is brutally basic so when I find time I’ll be working on that a bit. That’ll be the main improvement for version 2.0 I think.

A Promised Look Back

I literally put the original version of Web Auctions Daily together in about three hours on December 1st of last year. I wrote a post about it afterwards and promised to follow up later on detailing my methods of promoting it. This site isn’t a money making venture for me as much as it was a technical/educational exercise so my marketing strategy was just to get eyeballs and not necessarily turn a profit. As it stands today, there are no means of generating revenue on the site.

With that in mind… my marketing efforts were a complete disaster. I’ll be honest with you when I say I’m not really good at driving traffic because I’m generally too lazy to do all of the grunt work that is required. All of my side projects rely on automation to run and generate income regardless of large traffic volume.

As a web developer, my job is to build a site and then hand it off to its new owner. I’m not used to or very experienced in post-launch promotion. I didn’t have a lot of time to go around building up backlinks and whatnot so I made the classic mistake of trying to take the easy way out with marketing.

With that in mind, here’s what I did to advertise my auction aggregator…

My Failed Advertising Methods

I did try a few of the regular, link building means to start with. Right out of the gate I made an announcement post at Digital Point that promptly fell on deaf ears. The thread is exactly 60 days old as of today and it has 0 replies and only 83 views. Needless to say I haven’t seen a lot of referral traffic from Digital Point.

At this point I was back knee-deep into a freelance programming gig so my time was extremely limited. I decided I would try and advertise with some small banner ads on a few blogs. This proved to be a waste of dollars.

I chose three blogs that were either entirely focused on making money online or mentioned it frequently. They all had reasonably sized audiences. I’ll not reveal the names of the blogs I advertised on but my CPC averaged out to be about $0.67 between all three of them over the course of a month. I don’t think that’s very good. I also advertised on an RSS feed related to domaining. This was the cheapest method I tried and it also didn’t lead to much traffic.

Wrap This Up

I’m droning on here a bit so I’ll sum it all up for you. I took the easy way out and it cost me a bit of pocket money but I learned a lot. It was definitely worth the money. I’m going to try one more advertising method in the upcoming weeks that I think might be a bit better but we’ll see.

The bottom line is that Web Auctions Daily was built for my own personal use and I just happen to think other people might find it as useful and interesting as I do. I’m not really hell bent on making the site popular but I certainly learned a lot trying to move things along. The lesson, as always, is to not be lazy and get out there and do the dirty work to generate backlinks and traffic to your site.

If anyone has any personal experience with banner advertising (and managed to stick around and read this far) let me know about it in the comments.

I saw this auction for a StumbleUpon account come across my Web Auctions Daily feed yesterday and felt the need to comment.

The StumbleUpon account in question allegedly has 100,000 stumbles and 300 fans and is about a year and a half old. With an account like that you could quite easily drive massive amounts of traffic to any site you would stumble.

I’m not sure of the ethics of this kind of deal but, if that auction (now closed, and quite possibly bogus to begin with) is any indication, there seems to be quite a lot of interest in an account with those kinds of stats.

A Dangerous Weapon

I think I’ve made it clear in the past that I’m not really impressed with StumbleUpon traffic but having your very own power user account at SU would certainly be beneficial.

Everything you stumbled would turn into a traffic machine for at least a short amount of time. You could probably sell stumbles to the highest bidder with that much power. Maybe that’s why the seller on the auction had a “buy it now” of $10,000.

What Would You Do?

Now $10,000 for a user account at an otherwise free service is a bit extreme for most people. But here’s my question to you. If you had a chance to buy an existing StumbleUpon account (or Digg, Design Float, whatever) that had some leverage with the system would you do it?