Thursday, December 20, 2007

My next update

So all four of my pages are indexed at the moment. Buut, currently only one is actually being displayed (the part 2 page) the others have been omitted due to being "very similar". Clearly a demonstration that the googlebot isn't very intelligent. Each page is very different. I can only guess that it's saying that because the anchor text for the links is almost identical and the meta tag description is exactly the same. To try to fix this I've changed the meta tag stuff. I really don't want to change the links, mainly because I don't feel like having to go back and manually change the listings on all those social bookmarking sites. I actually made these changes a few days ago, but google hasn't updated anything. From looking at the webmaster site on my google account, I know that their bot revisited the site after I made the changes, but they aren't showing up in the main listing. I've either been "sandboxed" or I haven't done enough poking at google to convince it that it needs to pay attention. And as I've said before, it's a real drag doing this manually. I've been keeping up with the reading on various blackhat sites so I don't waste too much time doing things that don't matter. But lately, rather than being a motivating force, I find all that info being more of a discouragement. There is soooo much to learn it is easy to get overwhelmed and be paralyzed into inaction. Since I wasn't a computer science guy in college and my normal life has nothing to do with this kind of stuff aaand I'm looking at this as kind of a hobby, I find myself asking if all this effort is going to be worth it. At this point, I'm not even sure I know what the endgame is here. I don't know about you, but it's hard to keep at something if you can't see the point in it. But for now, the motivation is still there and I suppose if I do manage to get a decent ranking, get the site monetized and get some cash trickling in, that will keep my interest up.

I have decided to try a different strategy. Even though I should probably keep the scraped content on another blog rather than pollute this one, I'm not (combination of laziness and, again, doing all this manually). So to keep the garbage down, I think I'll post the junk I've scraped off my own site, leave it here for a few days and then delete it. That way I'll have at most maybe 5-7 posts of scraped stuff at any one time, but it'll just be new scrapings. I was considering not doing any more, seeing as how google (and apparently yahoo) have found the "money" site, but since it isn't getting updated in the index I'll have to keep doing it to try and get google to pay attention.

I've started trying to learn php (using the manual off of the php.net site) doesn't seem too bad. I think it'll just be a matter of working through it. Fortunately for blackhat, you don't have to learn everything about the language. But again, is this really worth it? Try looking at some of the stuffs real blackhatters are doing with PHP. Depressing. I don't think I'm ever going to get as good as these guys. And, of course, this is the problem. Blackhat pays off through sheer scale. Scale takes automation. Automation requires something like PHP. Again, is the effort going to be worth it? For now, I think so.

Saturday, December 08, 2007

Got indexed in Google

So I was able to get the site indexed with google. Not a big deal, just submitted a sitemap to google using their "webmaster tools". All you need to do is have an account with them, sign in, and you will see it. It was about 24 h after I submitted it that the site was indexed. Odd thing though, the first indexing only included the third article I wrote (I wrote 4 articles, each on a separate, static page) and the sitemap itself. Yesterday, only the index page showed up. Now, the index page and the 3rd are showing. Mmm. This is an extremely small site at the moment so I don't understand why only 2 pages stuck. My understanding is that it's the really large sites that have problems getting fully indexed. Mmmmm. I suppose I could try uploading another sitemap. Whatever. Time for more social bookmarking! CHARGE!!

Saturday, December 01, 2007

Uhh, slow going

So I've been at this for a few days. Uhh, slow going. The spiders have yet to find my Finepix f50fd site. As you can see, I haven't made too many posts here. I've mainly been putting stuff on my wordpress blog. Mainly because that one is a bit older and the spiders know it exists. Although it seems to only be the Google spiders for some reason. I guess I'm going to have to look up how to get Yahoo and MSN to pay attention. Does any care about Ask.com? I don't know about that one. Ya they've done some commercials on the old boob-tube, but I see that one flailing around, maybe going down for the count. But they do have a good concept going (the whole integrating everything one the web into one search result). Buut with the big hitters moving in that direction already, I think they are going to have a tough time sticking it out. Ah, what do I know.

What I do know is that it is a royal pain in the posterior making SEO pages by hand, uhhh. I told myself in the beginning I was going to do everything by hand, but this is shear torture. I think I'm going to look into one of those content creation scripts. RSSGM is one, people seem to like it. Just one more thing to learn though, joy. On a more interesting note, there seem to be some tools coming on-line that will generate original content every time. No more stealing someone else's stuff (although I would never do that - 1) I like being able to look at myself in the mirror and 2) After making content on my own, I know how much time and effort is put into it... just can't do it) or spinning your own content. These new tools work off of a database of words and use syntax rules for making almost (or seemingly almost) coherent sentences. The product reads like something translated into English using a bad translation program. Just give the program a list of keywords you want it to include along with the frequency and presto-chango, you can have hundreds of genuinely unique content packed with words (or more specifically people) you are trying to target. Unfortunately, the only tool that I am specifically aware of at the moment is a paid service, uhh. I suppose not an issue if you are a full-time pirate racking in the cash, but I'm a small fry and want to try doing this stuff with free resources at first. Perhaps if I get around to learning PHP, I'll just make the tools myself. I guess that's it for now.