Seriously Google WTF is a Content Farm?

March 24, 2011 by

The Google Farmer Update has been in effect for a few weeks now. Many new and relatively unknown sites seemed to have seen an increase in traffic while a good percentage of sites that are older and established (aka more broad) actually lost traffic.

This update was apparently designed to penalize content farms – the problem is that the web is one giant content farm according to the current definition. One could argue that AOL, CNN, Yahoo and many authority bloggers pump out just as much low quality content as Demand Media.

I’m sure that Google understands this, which is probably why they’ve avoided using the phrase content farm to officially describe this update. Considering the catastrophic amount of collateral damage that has been done to many prominent blogs I expected that the big G would have had some more information for those effected by now.

Instead however many site owners are left scratching their heads. I think it’s fairly obvious by now that the “quality” of a sites content actually had very little to do with this recent update. Just look at askthebuilder.com, a site that was hit very hard by the farmer update. Tim Carter has built a phenomenal site, and become an authority in his niche.

AskTheBuilder has even been featured on the official Google Adsense site as a case study and example of how to build a quality site and monetize it with Adsense correctly.

[Read More]

Save Time Monitoring Your Site Traffic With Google Intelligence

March 23, 2011 by

Many website owners get in the habit of checking their stats religiously hoping for a big spike in traffic. The amount of time wasted checking stats collectively could probably put a man on the moon 5 times over.

The solution to this major time sink is a fairly unknown feature of Google Analytics currently in beta called “Intelligence” Google Intelligence allows you to set up alerts that will automatically notify you via email or text message when you have a spike in traffic (or a major decrease) as well as changes in visitors, bounce rate, etc..

If you have an e-commerce site you can automatically receive alerts for an increase or decrease in sales, and if you have Google Adsense linked to your Analytics account you can set up alerts to monitor changes in revenue.

Setting up custom alerts with Google Analytics only takes a few minutes and will free up many hours over the course of a year.

[Read More]

The Complete Guide To Google’s New Search Algorithm

February 25, 2011 by

This story is still breaking and we will be continuing to update this article with new information when it becomes available.

Google’s war on content farms and low quality websites has officially been launched in the form of a major update to the search engine’s algorithm. The changes, which went live this week, impact 11.8 percent of all search results, meaning that this will have an impact on most site owners, for better or worse.

The blogosphere was buzzing this morning with many site owners complaining about a major decrease in traffic from Google search. Some have seen search traffic decrease over 50 percent, essentially overnight. When Google first announced their war on content farms I suspected that the changes would have a negative effect on many bloggers as well. However I did not expect the changes to hit authoritative sources as hard as they have.

[Read More]

Bruce Wayne by Day, Batman at Night

February 3, 2011 by

The key to success with any business is to put in the hours. Anyone who claims you can work 2 hours a day online and build a successful business is full of bs. If you get really lucky you can make a “living” but that is far from running a successful business in my book at least. If you really want to make it big, you need to be Bruce Wayne during the day, and Batman at night.

I still manage to maintain a very comfortable work / life balance following this routine, take lots of vacations and avoid working on weekends.

However – my philosophy has always been, if you’re going to take the time to do something, do it right – don’t waste your time giving it any less than 110% of what you have to give.

[Read More]

I’ll Be Home For Christmas (But Until Then I’m Off To The Florida Keys!)

December 17, 2010 by

As many of you know I live in the northeast, and this winter has been off to a brutal start.

People often ask me why I live in the northeast when I could run my business from anywhere in the world. There are a few factors that keep me here, mainly my family but I also love the variety of seasons. I’ve had the privilege of traveling to many parts of the country but have yet to find somewhere with a better balance of all four seasons. I’m not opposed to having a vacation house somewhere else but I for now I’m fairly content with where I spend most of the year.

However every now and then I need a break from the cold and a few days my girlfriend sent me a text saying that she wished we could go somewhere warm for her winter break (she’s still in college). Sounded to me like the perfect excuse to get away for a few days and I think I managed to pull it off. I made reservations at a beautiful resort in Key West, literally 1000 feet from the southern most part of the continental United States. Hopefully this gives us the best chance to escape the cold without leaving the country.

So I’ll be home for Christmas – but until then I’m off to the Keys!

Why I’m Removing Twitter From All of My Sites

December 14, 2010 by

A few days ago I decided to take some time and focus on increasing the speed and load time of my sites. To accomplish this I used the popular Firebug addon for Firefox alongside of the Google Page Speed addon which analyzes every element of a webpage and gives you performance recommendations.

Even though my sites are on dedicated hosting and I have spent a lot of time on optimization after I ran the test my pages would only score 75 / 100 at BEST.

This bothered me because my competitors were scoring much higher than that, and Google is now factoring in site speed to some degree so it’s more important than ever to have a quick site.

After adding W3 Total Cache and doing more optimization I raised my score 7 points to 82/100, however this was still lower than many of my competitors so I decided to dig a little deeper. I noticed that the “tweet this” button at the top of each post (you can see an example at the top of this post because I haven’t removed it on this site yet) was having a fairly dramatic impact on my sites speed so I wanted to see what would happen if I removed it.

Once I removed the tweet button from the equation my score jumped from 82/100 to 89/100 and my pages loaded 25% faster!

Going forward I’m just going to have a self hosted static Twitter button on all of my sites, so technically I’m removing Twitter but still linking out to it. Hopefully one day, when the fail whale is an endangered species the fully functioning Twitter button and widgets can return – but until then – good riddance.

Has Twitter (or other third party services) impacted your site’s performance? If so what have you done about it?

« Older Posts
Newer Posts »