Rodney’s 404 Handler Wordpress Plugin – Be Aware of hidden link
I have been using Rodney’s 404 Handler Wordpress plugin on almost all my sites until today. While working on a site of mine I had to look at the source code of a page and guess what – a hidden link was showing up. I don’t do hidden links, but apparently someone else still thinks this is a way to do business on the Internet.
Rodney Shupe of shupe.ca is publishing his Wordpress plugin with a hidden link back to his website. One of his other plugins apparently did the same, but it was uncovered and he implemented the option to at least turn this off. Well, even if that option is there, it still stinks.
This dude is putting other people’s hard work at risk by embedding a hidden link. We all know how Google hates that kind of stuff and I hope this posting helps to have Google delist his page from the index.Other plugins I use have a visible link and that is fair game, but this hidden stuff .. argh, burn in hell. Screenshot of Source code
I have submitted a report to Google’s SPAM team. If you are running the same plugin, please do the same through the Google Webmaster tools so that Rodney Shupe will no longer be able to get traffic to his website through spamming the search engines.
Yahoo! Directory Website Application Accepted
I received word from Yahoo! tonight via email that my website has been accepted into their directory. The listing should show up in 2-4 days. So, this will be interesting to see if it can drive some traffic to my site – either directly from the listing or from an added trust factor for search engines. We will see how that goes.
I am also in the middle of a major deal. Too early to talk about details, but that’s why things have been a little bit quiet over here (and why this posting is more short and sweet …). Once that deal is hopefully completed I will provide more details and an analysis. 
Crazy SEO Offer
I was looking for some SEO work to be done and contacted a reputable company about one of their offers. After asking some questions, this is what I got offered. Just by looking at the steps they mention below, I really had to laugh. 4 articles per month? Basic submission to Ezinearticles and a handful of other free article directories? $600 per month?
With the basic option, we now hand submit four separate articles to ten different article sites. These sites are the basic sites, like you mentioned Ezine and such, with no specific focus. However, at each site we are careful to submit the articles into appropriate categories.
The advanced option requires more time with the ultimate goal being to have the four articles submitted to high-end industry specific article sites. If we are not able to get the articles accepted to industry specific sites (we spent up to 4 hours in this effort) we move ahead and submit them to the ten article sites used in the basic option. Once the articles are accepted and published, they are socialized on Digg, Mixx and Propeller, as well as bookmarked using several user accounts.
The basic option for article marketing is a flat rate of $600, and the advanced option is a flat rate of $950. These rates are per month, and we do still require a 3 month commitment.
Hm, let me think. Even if I overpay a content writer and pay $30 per article I would spend $120 per month. If I then either submit it myself or hire someone to submit the articles for me, this would be maybe 1 hour of time – value maybe $60/hr (I am generous here). Let’s round it up to $200.00 for the writing and submission of four articles. 3 month minimum commitment. Crazy, eh?! And this is not from some guy offering service at Digitalpoint.com or – this is supposed to be a reputable company here in the US (mentioned in many blogs, seen at conferences, etc.). Wow …
I do not mind paying for good SEO work and I am actually really looking for some (honest/white hat) SEO work to be done and I have up to $3,000 budgeted for this, but the offer above … I would consider that a ripoff.
Are 301 Redirects losing their Power?
Hm, I am used to read that if you permanently redirect content or domains on the Web, you should use a 301 redirect to tell the search engines that the content or domain has permanently been moved. I merged 2 websites into one and did a 301 redirect, but what I am seeing in regards to traffic numbers makes me believe that the 301 redirect is not working.
I did the same on another website. And again, I merged the 2 websites and I am seeing the same thing. I verified my 301’s and they are setup correctly. Given that my domains are in fairly competitive niches and eventually trigger a manual review by Google (main source of traffic), I am still disappointed how a correctly implemented 301 redirect is not working as anticipated. In both cases I own(ed) both domain names and I made sure I am not having duplicate content out there. So, I am not sure what is going on.
I am using the 301 redirects to consolidate some of my websites and domains to a) save money and b) to save work and c) to use combined forces of 2 websites to increase my exposure of the content.
If you are looking for an example – here you go. This blog was initially hosted on my domain “seoker.com” and I did a 1-to-1 move to this domain you are reading this article on (smartmoneymarketing.com). If you try to access anything on seoker.com you are redirected to the other website with a 301 redirect. However, traffic is 30%-50% compared to what seoker.com had before – even though I am fairly active with posting new content here.
I am getting ready to consolidate 2 more domains/websites into 1 and now I am concerned that I am losing out by doing so. So, what would you recommend? Be more patient?
Migrating from Evo Articles to Wordpress
I run several content websites based on the Evo Articles Content Management System. The software was great and support was good until 2 years ago the developers trashed the entire thing and closed shop. I don’t know why as the reasoning seemed odd, but I guess it does not matter anymore. The software went Open Source for a little bit to then completely disappear. Things worked Ok and my sites were well established and thriving and so I pushed out what needed to be done one day – migrate to a new and supported platform.
One of my 2009 projects is to migrate the 2 biggest Evo Articles based websites of mine to a new supported software platform. I started looking at Joomla and Wordpress and did a few experiments on trying to import the data. Imports worked for both platforms, which is good. However, Joomla’s support for the static URLs would make it impossible to properly redirect the pages one for one. Then I played with the permalinks function in Wordpress and discovered how easy it is to get a one for one site structure in place. So, I increased my efforts to migrate the database and made some big progress already. All my content comes over fine and properly formatted – including external links. My first test site looks good content-wise and the project is actually further down the road of progress than I expected. So, Wordpress will be my solution for this.
One issue is the post date. Right now I cannot migrate the date between the 2 MySQL database due to different ways how the post date is stored. All dates show up as “0000-00-00 00:00:00” inside the Wordpress database after migration. That leaves with few options.
Option #1 is to develop a MySQL query that replaces the 0000-00-00 00:00:00 date with the start time of my website. As I do not use a date-based archive the result would good enough for the site. I could then manually update the last articles and let it go. It’s an Ok option.
Option #2 would be finding a way to migrate the date over programmatically. That would give me a one for one match and would be the best possible solution.
Option #3 would be to manually compare and update the post date for hundreds of articles. Yuck. I could outsource that task to some poor soul in India or some other emerging country though.
So, I am close with the migration I’d say. I also leaned out to some Wordpress design service to get a quote for a top notch Wordpress design for my 2 websites in this case. I feel it is worth spending some money on these sites as they generate solid income and are due for an overhaul anyway. I am good enough with Wordpress SEO and plugins so that the final piece of the migration should not be too hard. I’ll keep you posted on the progress of my migration from Evo Articles to Wordpress.
Blogging Contests and Building Brand Awareness
Not too long ago a crazy blogging contest rocked the Internet World with prizes way over $14K. One of my websites donated a prize and I think it was a great way to increase brand awareness. I have been contacted several times now by other websites to sponsor additional contests, but most of the offers I declined because they were just copycats and I did not see a chance for repeat success.
One inquiry by John of dnxpert.com however looked different and so I decided to offer a cash prize to take part in this blogging contest. The website John is running this contest from is topic/industry related to my website I am using for the sponsorship and so I hope this is another great way to build brand awareness and to get some visitors of John’s website to check out my own website. John’s contest is just shy a few bucks from reaching $9,000.00 in prizes (at least at the time of this writing) and I think that you should check it out and participate because some of the prizes are a great way to get your online business efforts jumpstarted.
Building a brand should be your ultimate goal to separate yourself from the Internet crowd. The advantages are that more people will refer to your website as an authoritive source of information. This will result in extremely targeted inbound links and extremely targeted visitor/content combination – which in return can result in higher sales. Not every website is deemed to become a brand name. If your content is shitty, forget it and go back to enjoy short-term success eventually. You can mix really good content with affiliate marketing and success can be yours, but make sure your content and the website presentation are superior.