DISQUS

Deas Canada can still butcher horses? Wow. That's something Americans outlawed
before the Canucks! The US used to sell butchered horse meat to the Asian
markets too, but it was made illegal a few years back, if I recall
correctly. It's still horse meat though, right? (And Canada isn't sending
over any gyoza or bamboo shoots...so it won't make the TV news...ha ha.)

Deas Can you type the query you submitted? I had to be careful when linking because sometimes the punctuation / symbols choke the engine and it returns an error. :-) PS - that thread is...evil...and brilliant...

Johannes Totally agree, had the same in mind.
All your ball are belong to us.

David Ken I'm so with you on that one!

Seriously I've not had the chance to really study since I graduated, but my Kanji reading by osmosis has been working fairly well.

Deas Ken - it's funny that you mention it! I had to double check what I typed
over and over, because I'd read back over it and think "wait, that can't be
right, can it?" Ha ha.

Deas Ha ha ha. I guess there is enough variation to screw up local results legitimately, let alone screwing them up with pranks. I live on an island, and the weather for my city is often inaccurate for me - it's colder here due to wind, but it never snows. Makes for some weird clothing adjustments. Sigh.

Interesting point about the ordering. And thanks for the heads-up about the comment flaw. I'll see if I can fix that. The regular #comments was replaced with #disqus_thread when I installed this commenting system. So far it's great - just lost emoticons, really. I just need to tweak the theme, I guess. Thanks for stopping by!

Andy Beard I suppose you can just look at it as another link, or after snooping around a bit a yardstick to compare to other sites.

One of the reasons I like looking at these different sites is examining their implementation.

Andy Beard I am trying to monitor what is going on to get some clear signals.

I have actually thought of a way to plead reinclusion without making too many changes. Say you have gone through your outbound links and removed links (nofollowed) to sites that might be looked on as a bad neighbour.

You removing (with nofollow) TLA is a good idea, maybe also John Chow, but it seems currently that PayPerPost ranks for their own name, and there were lots of blog posts about PayPerPost that were compensated, so obviously based upon that PPP should be ok...
But then in some things Google isn't quite logical.

Andy Beard There are a number of bugs with the original but it isn't GPL. I have mentioned bugs to Denis by email, maybe I should.

I do plan to move over to Lucia's soon anyway

Andy Beard Ken they actually have an interesting directory as well in the right margin.

Making Sales Making Money Is it possible to be more stealthy from Google? My instinct says no. To think all I wanted to do was create a blog/business
To date I have been unaffected but why do I look at that tool bar every time I go to my site?

Andy Beard Ken, I think the future will be selling "press releases"

Andy Beard Ken I am not sure whether I was given a specific referral or that a link was followed from the PPP site and PPP was what I was expecting the interview to be about.
However after I heard the background, I realised that this wasn't really about PPP and I needed to "fill in the chasm" of information in between.

This isn't the first time I have been in the press, but it is regarding things to do with SEO. Previous times have been related to the computer games industry.

Andy Beard Ken I have it placed fairly highly currently, because I want people to read my review of it and sign up, though referral credits can't be used yet.

I will also most likely place it in a lower position in the future, as will many people.

Small Potato over at WPDesigner suggests that this will fail because everyone will place the widget in a low position.
That is possible, it is one of those vicious circles.

The big question is how much traffic have people's sites gained from adding a Google Widget, Widgetbox from another site, or even "How Much Is Your Blog Worth" on their sidebar.

The trick may come from the stats. If people see referring sites in their stats within Blogrush, clean links, they might go and take a look.

John Reese is interesting because he is quite often ahead of the curve. At one time he used to have a very successful service for Ebay users, though in those days it was very hard to monetize and bandwidth was prohibitive, so I think he was forced to close.
He was the first to coin "Virtual Real Estate" and has sites in many markets.
In 2005 he sold over $1,000,000 worth of his Traffic Secrets course in a single day. It had something like a 40 page sales letter written by Michel Fortin, and was among the first promotions run or at least advised by Jeff Walker who later became famous for his Product Launch Formula.
John also ran a very successful marketing forum, and a number of private membership sites.
John has always provided a lot of free information, as shown on his recently launched blog on Income.com

There is a lot of abuse of this widget, but we can hope there will be a crackdown, it is very early days.

Andy Beard Ken whilst I have a lot of faith in John Reese, I too was a little sceptical in my first post, and evaluating the value is important. If you have good monetisation, it might be a bad choice.

Your blog is quite varied, which might even give it an edge. I couldn't believe my gmail story which was only first in my feed performed so well compared to the John Chow post.

I selected the marketing category currently, we will see how it goes. Some of the technology isn't performing too well for targeting, hopefully it will improve over time.

The thing I can't understand is how a site can promote a widgetbox of their feeds, and expect readers to use it, yet criticise a widget which allows everyone to get a little traffic.
There might be some pyramid aspects to this, but it seems the traffic above the pyramid is being shared out fairly evenly, which is great for the smaller blogs.

CTR seems to be around 0.5% - as far as I can tell I am up to 72 visitors now, and from what I can see no referral credits have been used, just the ones I earned plus the free ones distributed.