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.