Are you going to stop selling links?
October 27, 2007
I can’t believe how much people are talking about the latest Google PageRank update! It even made the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper in Australia (at least the online version).
It’s not going to stop me selling links, at least on this blog. I am still making money with Text Link Ads and Linkworth, so it is going to be interesting to see how this income goes.
One thing I can see happening is that there are going to be more sponsored posts in blogs and linking from articles rather than from links in sidebars and blogrolls. Google kind of made the market for buying and selling links and now they are trying to close the market. Perhaps it is a good thing, I am not really sure right now. Selling links has become a very good source of income for many bloggers, especially where Adsense didn’t work so well.
I agree with what Darren has written on the subject:
I think that what Google has done this last week means that we’ll see more and more of the text link selling go further underground. We’ll see it happen less using systems like TextLinkAds and more happening in less transparent ways.
And if Darren is right, which I think he is, the internet is going to become an even less trustworthy source of information.
Mail from a Forbes reporter
June 22, 2007
Back in April I received an email from Andrew Greenberg from Forbes. He was writing an article on Google’s supplemental index. He found me through a comment I made on Aaron Wall’s blog. He wanted me to call him to discuss his story. (I need to get a phone one of these days!)
I was in Cambodia at the time so it would have been difficult to call him. The finished article was published some time ago “Condemned To Google Hell“.
I at least got close to getting a mention in mainstream press, but the point of this post is that journalists are going beyond the usual sources of information to research their stories and you never know when you might benefit from something you did months ago.
Blogger merged with Google accounts
January 7, 2007
I logged into blogger today and got a message asking if I wanted to merge my blogger account with my google account. I don’t use blogger for much these days, but I still have the original acccount where this blog started.
My old blog still has a page rank of 4, so it is useful getting links and getting Google to index new sites.
I always recommend people creating a new blog to use their own domain with Wordpress, but there is probably a good case for using blogger in some instances. For starters it is operated by Google, so there is a good chance they will rank their hosted blogs higher. It is very easy to apply for an Adsense account if you don’t already have one. A great deal of the blogs that appear in Google alerts seem to be hosted on blogger. It is also very easy to add images.
The downside is that you have little control over the blog and the database if you run into problems. Google has cleaned up a lot of the spam blogs out there, but it is a never ending battle. No-one is really going to take you seriously, especially if you are trying to create a professional, money generating site.
The Google Story
November 25, 2006
After not being able to find anything that looked vaguely interesting, I picked up a copy of ‘The Google Story’ by David Vise and Mark Malseed. It is a fast pace read and is interesting to think what you were doing as the company evovled and when exactly you started using it for search.
I can’t really using anything else - I was very late to get onto the world wide web, even though I was using some kind of text version when I was at university.
People love to bag Google for whatever reason, but they have paid me several thousands of dollars of the past year or so, so I cannot really complain.
Even though most people would be familiar with their story, it still makes an interesting read and it is definitely required reading for any webmaster.
Google and Microsoft go head to head
April 18, 2006
The competition between Microsoft and Google is becoming greater as they both try to cross into one another’s domains.
Google have released their own on-line calendar and just when I thought I would stop using Hotmail, I clicked on the “try new beta” in my account and found Microsoft’s new web mail offering.
It has an Outlook-like interface, with calendar and contacts. I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, but I am sure it will be a hit. More and more corporations are running Outlook so it is going to be nice and familiar for most people.
