Written on October 18th, 2005 at 11:10 am by Darren Rowse
Top Ten Blog Design Mistakes
Jakob Nielsen has put together an interesting article with the Top Ten Design Mistakes that he sees bloggers making. It’s a pretty insightful list - not definitive by any means - but definitely helpful in my mind.
1. No Author Biographies - I’m amazed that so many blogs don’t have any information about who is the behind them. Not essential information but common sense in my books to be transparent enough to tell people who you are.
2. No Author Photo - for me this is not a must - but it does add something personal to a blog.
3. Nondescript Posting Titles - regular readers will know about my passion for post titles - enough said
4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go - I agree - it also helps with SEO to use make links more descriptive
5. Classic Hits are Buried - So true - highlight your best posts or they’ll go unseen after dropping from the front page
6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation - has anyone ever used a calendar to navigate a blog or is it just me who avoids them?
7. Irregular Publishing Frequency - again something I’ve written quite a bit about. It’s not about high or low posting frequency - but regular posting. Find your rhythm and stick to it.
8. Mixing Topics - Stick to you niche
9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss - so true. Once you hit publish you lose control over who will ever see what you write. Be careful.
10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service - the quote of this article is ‘Letting somebody else own your name means that they own your destiny on the Internet.’ So true.
What mistakes do you see a lot of bloggers making?
I’ll add a brief one which is related to Jakob’s first one:
No Contact Details - A few weeks ago I was surfing through some blogs in an effort to build some relationships with some new bloggers and I was amazed - not actually I was stunned - but the number of bloggers that have no personal way of contacting them. Most of them had comments - but so many had no way to get an email to them.
The result was that I didn’t/couldn’t contact them and we both missed out on an opportunity to connect.
Written on October 18th, 2005 at 08:10 am by Darren Rowse
Weblogs, Inc. Interviews its Bloggers
Weblogs, Inc. have been redeveloping their home page recently with design changes and more recently the decision to start profiling some of their bloggers via interviews - the first of which is with enternetusers reader - Jay Allen who heads up their Baby Blog.
Written on October 18th, 2005 at 08:10 am by Darren Rowse
Chitika eMiniMalls Affiliate Program Launches
Good news for those of you who have been waiting for the Chitika eMiniMalls (aff link) referral program to go public - today it went live.
Now if you refer a new publisher you stand to make 10% of their audited earnings for the first 12 months of their use of eMiniMalls.
I’ve been using the affiliate program for a couple of weeks now and it’s been working out quite nicely.
To be a part of the affiliate program you need to sign up yourself as a publisher and you’ll automatically become a part of it and get your own referral statistics.
The only downside of it is there is no second tier referral program - but beggers can’t be choosers.
Thanks to all of the readers here who have signed up via my affiliate links. I know many of you have gone out of your way to do so as a way of showing your support to enternetusers.net. I hope that you find them to be as helpful a tool as I have - don’t forget to check out the eMiniMall Tips post I wrote last week which I’m hearing has helped a few Chitika publishers double their income.
On a related side note - I’m seriously considering naming my firstborn after Chitika (Chitika Rowse?) with the earnings they’ve been helping me achieve this week. Even without the referral earnings it’s consistently doubling Adsense revenue and with the holiday season coming the mind boggles at where it could all end up mid December.
Written on October 17th, 2005 at 09:10 pm by Darren Rowse
State of the Blogosphere - October 2005
David Sifry has started another State of the Blogosphere series of posts - his first part looks at the size and growth of the blogosphere as well as the extent of spam blogs. Here’s his summary points which are as usual an interesting read:
- ‘As of October 2005, Technorati is now tracking 19.6 Million weblogs
- The total number of weblogs tracked continues to double about every 5 months
- The blogosphere is now over 30 times as big as it was 3 years ago, with no signs of letup in growth
- About 70,000 new weblogs are created every day
- About a new weblog is created each second
- 2% - 8% of new weblogs per day are fake or spam weblogs
- Between 700,000 and 1.3 Million posts are made each day
- About 33,000 posts are created per hour, or 9.2 posts per second
- An additional 5.8% of posts (or about 50,000 posts/day) seen each day are from spam or fake blogs, on average
Written on October 17th, 2005 at 08:10 pm by Darren Rowse
Sphere Blog Search Engine Review
TechCrunch has a review of the soon to be launched (in beta) Sphere Blog Search Engine:
‘Relevance in blog search is very difficult. Google-type PageRank analysis, which looks at incoming links to a piece of content, simply doesn’t work because new content doesn’t have much in the way of links. Until now, no one has come up with a way to properly sort blog posts by relevance, and the general default way of showing results is “reverse-chrono”, which simply puts the newest stuff at the top.
Sphere appears to have solved the problem, or at least taken big steps in the right direction. Their approach involves three key algorithms - an analysis of links into and out of a blog, an analysis of metadata around a post (links, post frequency, length of posts, etc.), and something Tony calls their “secret sauce”, which is content semantic analysis to filter out spam and to understand what a blog post is talking about.’
I’m quite looking forward to seeing what they’ve come up with over at Sphere (where you can now apply to be a part of the beta).
Written on October 16th, 2005 at 11:10 pm by Darren Rowse
Google PR Update Imminent?
I’ve heard from a number of ‘interesting’ sources that Google will be gearing up for another Page Rank (and maybe a back link) update in the coming fortnight.
There are no guarantees on that - but I’ve heard it from four people now so maybe there is something in the pipeline. Time will tell.
update: Matt has just advised that changes will become visable in the next day or two.
Written on October 16th, 2005 at 04:10 pm by Darren Rowse
Yahoo Y!Q
I’ve been pondering a feature that Yahoo have added to their Yahoo News pages at some point in the last few months.
The feature I’m talking about is Y!Q - an in content link that appears on keywords in News articles that looks like this:
If you click this link a little box opens up over the article you are reading with some results from yahoo search and news like this (click to enlarge):
Obviously Yahoo are beta testing Y!Q in an attempt to integrate their services and push traffic back into their Search and News results - but I’m wondering how long it will be before they add advertisements to the pop up screen and then offer this system to publishers to use in a similar way to YPN or Adsense.
In some ways this would be a cross between Vibrant Media’s IntelliTXT which puts text ads into content as links and the Adsense for Search. I suspect we’ll see more and more advertising options that become more and more deeply linked into sites in the coming years - perhaps this is a step towards this.
Update: I should have dug a little deeper in Y!Q before posting - it seems that publishers can already use it on their sites. There is no integration with any income stream for publishers at this stage (and no mention that i can see of it being added) but you can get more information on using it at Y!Q Beta for Publishers.
Written on October 16th, 2005 at 02:10 am by Darren Rowse
Affiliate Programs - Transparency and Disclaimers
I’d like to see some discussion around the topic of transparency in using affiliate programs.
When you link to one do you indicate that you are benefiting from the link in some way?
I’ll kick us off here and say that I do - and I don’t.
I probably need to come up with a better policy on this - but in general this is how I approach it.
If I’m recommending a product that I’m linking to with an affiliate program then I generally indicate that it is an affiliate link in some way. For example - regular readers will know that I’ve been talking up Chitika’s eMiniMalls recently. I’m obviously very happy with the product and am recommending that bloggers give it a go. In doing so I link to Chitika with an affiliate link. I am part of a group testing an affiliate program that will be launched publicly to all of their publishers shortly.
At the end of each post that I link to Chitika with I place a disclaimer that reads:
Disclaimer: the links to Chitika in this post are affiliate links - if you sign up using these links I earn a small amount as a commission. It does not impact what you earn from Chitika but rather is paid by Chitika. While these links are affiliate links I genuinely believe in the product and have pointed out both its benefits and weaknesses.
I do this because I want people to know that I am genuinely excited by the product - but also that I have some vested in interest in getting them to adopt it. Everyone has seen sleazy examples of people talking up average products in order to make a commission - I don’t want to be seen to be taking this approach so when I make a recommendation I choose to reveal my interests in it.
Of course it’s not always this easy. Some of my blogs have affiliate links deeply linked into the text of my content - more often than not they are with Amazon’s affiliate program. I’ve decided in 99% of these cases not to include a disclaimer. This is largely because the links are not part of a recommendation that I am given - rather they are more informational in function (I usually link to it with the words ‘get the latest price on this product’).
To be honest I’m not completely comfortable with this approach but at this point have decided that the line for me is about whether I’m recommending a product or not. Complicating the problem for me is that I have close to 12,000 posts on my blogs at present - making changes to deep links is a serious job.
The only place where I am stricter on this is here at enternetusers. I always put a disclaimer on affiliate links here these days. I do this because of the nature of this site - it’s about making money and I want people to know exactly what my interests are here.
I’m very interested to hear other’s opinions on the topic of transparency in affiliate programs
I’m aware that many bloggers take different stands on this. As I surfed the web this morning looking at different blogs I noticed that most have no disclaimers at all. For example the majority of people in the Chitika eMiniMall affiliate program don’t acknowledge that they stand to make money from those who sign up. I’m not wanting to impose my own standards on others - it’s a matter of personal choice - but I’m interested to hear people’s thinking on decisions around it.
Written on October 15th, 2005 at 08:10 pm by Darren Rowse
Advice on Moving Blogs to a New Domain
A common problem that many bloggers face is having to work out what to do with a blog that is trapped on a domain that they wish they’d never started it on. An example of this is starting out of a Blogspot or hosted TypePad blog and then realizing that it doesn’t have the features you want (plus a longer unprofessional looking domain) and wanting to move to WordPress of MovableType on your own domain.
The only problem is that you run the risk of messing up your Search Engine Ranking by starting on a new domain - it could be like starting all over again!
I often get questions from readers about how to move domains. To be honest, I have no real idea - except to say that I’ve seen people completely loose all their SE ranking and traffic by trying.
So today when I was surfing by one of my favorite blogger’s blogs - Matt Cutts from Google - I was happy to spot him addressing the question in a post on moving to a new web host. He spends most of the post writing about moving hosts but keeping the same domain name - but ends the post by addressing the question of a new domain (bolding is my emphasis):
‘All other things being equal, I would recommend to stay with the original domain if possible. But if you need to move, the recommended way to do it is to put a 301 (permanent) redirect on every page on mattcutts.com to point to the corresponding page on someotherdomain.com. If you can map mattcutts.com/url1.html to someotherdomain.com/url1.html, that’s better than doing a redirect just to the root page (that is, from mattcutts.com/url1.html to someotherdomain.com). In the olden days, Googlebot would immediately follow a 301 redirect as soon as it found it. These days, I believe Googlebot sees the 301 and puts the destination url back in the queue, so it gets crawled a little later. I have heard some reports of people having issues with doing a 301 from olddomain.com to newdomain.com. I’m happy to hear those reports in the comments and I can pass them on to the crawl/indexing team, but we may be due to replace the code that handles that in the next couple months or so. If it’s really easy for you to wait a couple months or so, you may want to do that; it’s always easier to ask crawl/index folks to examine newer code than code that will be turned off in a while.’
Read the full post at Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO
Written on October 15th, 2005 at 01:10 pm by Darren Rowse
Turning off Blog Comments
Steve Pavlina has taken the step of closing down his blog’s comments system because they were more trouble than they were worth. He writes:
‘The main factor in making this decision was the time and energy freed up by not having to deal with comments. No blog comments means no administration of comments, handling comment spam, legal liability for what people post in comments, having to decide whether to respond to questions or ignore them, people posting false information, commenters flaming other commenters, marketing abuses, tech support for comments (Can you fix my typo? Can you delete my double post?). These are minor problems if you only get a few comments a week, but with more than 10 a day — every day — it quickly adds up.’
So would you ever consider switching off the comments on your blog?
I would answer this question on a blog by blog basis and would make the decision largely around the topic of the blog and the voice in which it is written in.
I have a number of blogs that are focussed upon reporting news and information to readers. These blogs are not about creating community or interactivity - rather they present information. I’ve wondered a few times whether it might be appropriate to switch comments off on these blogs because they rarely get a genuine comment and regularly get spammed. Of course with the increasing effectiveness of comment spam protection features of the main blog platforms I find it is rare that spam gets through.
I have other blogs, like enternetusers.net, which would suffer greatly by switching off comments. I cannot imagine this site without the discussion and community that comments helps create. This blog is read by some very wise bloggers and their opinion and experience is at times more central to what happens here than my own writing. If anything I’d like to find ways of elevating the profile of comments on this blog as they are quite often brilliant.
I guess all I’m arguing is that there are many factors that should be considered before switching comments off. Some of these may include:
• Blog topic - As I write above - some topics create/need more dialogue than others
• Comment spam levels - If its a massive problem for you then turning comments can be a good solution
• Traffic levels - I know of some very highly trafficked blogs who have turned off comments just because they can’t keep up
• Levels of time available by blogger to interact with readers - Comments do take up time. If you don’t have time to interact with readers you’ll just frustrate some of them by not responding to them
• Readers Tone of Commenting - Some blogs tend to breed negative, personally attacking and abusive comments leavers. If things get too heated and start bringing down the tone of your blog maybe its appropriate to turn them off for a while
• Nature of traffic - I find blogs with loads of SE traffic tend to get less comments than those with loyal readers)
• Voice of the Blogger - Some bloggers write in a much more inviting and interActive voice than others
It will be interesting to see what happens to Steve’s blog over the coming months. While some of his readers will no doubt be frustrated by not being able to have a say - there can also be interesting positive side effects.
Seth Godin has talked on numerous occasssions about his decision to turn off comments as being a very positive one because he finds that people tend to respond more to what he writes on their own blogs - which always brings with it a link to his posts. This of course adds to the viral nature of what he’s doing and helps build search engine ranking.
What do you think about turning off comments on a blog? Are you a purist and argue that if there are no comments it’s ‘not a a blog’? Have you been tempted to turn them off? Have you already? In what circumstances would you consider it appropriate?
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