Just got a very interesting email:

Dear Stakeholders and Partners in Higher Education:

We regret to inform you that the State’s web domain name, “ca.gov”, has been temporarily suspended by the federal government’s .GOV domain registrar. As a result of this suspension, it is our understanding that access to all ca.gov websites will progressively diminish during the next several hours until all access to ca.gov sites are blocked. Additionally, all external email traffic directed to ca.gov email addresses will begin to bounce back since the ca.gov domain name will be blocked.

Until further notice, all email sent to The California Student Aid Commission will be bounced back and all CSAC websites, including the following, will be inaccessible until this problem is resolved:

https://www.chafee.csac.ca.gov

http://www.csac.ca.gov

https://webgrants.csac.ca.gov

State and Federal Officials are taking every step possible to reverse the suspension, but it is possible the suspension may not be reversed for several days. After resolution, there will be a lag time between the reversal of the suspension and restoration of normal Internet and email traffic since it will take several hours for the Internet domain name services to repopulate their registries.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

WTF is going on with that? The email was definitely real as far as I can tell!

So, the last refresh meeting was focused on how to make money online, with websites mainly. It’s such a vast topic that it becomes hard to discuss the matter in a way which appeals to the majority of people. The methods for making money with websites can be as myriad as making money period. Just making money.

Web Site Monetization methods which I’m most familiar with are:

1. Driving leads for my consulting services or my company’s offerings.
2. Driving leads to other companies for a fee, commission, or to a CPA network which can pay serious money for each “action” (generally a form being filled out).
3. Pay Per Click programs for publishers such as Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network or other similar ads which you earn revenue from based on how many clicks your pages generate for the ads within.
4. Doing any/all of the above, or others, and selling the website at a healthy multiple.

The most important considerations for Making Money with Websites are:

1. Who is going to provide the necessary ingredients to have a successful, monetizable website? Who is going to fund this endeavor?
2. How are you going to obtain traffic and how long will it likely take to obtain a level of traffic which sustains the continued efforts to build and improve the offerings of the website?
3. How important is usability vs. monetization vs. credibility, etc. - ads and certain monetization methods can affect your site’s value in the eyes of your visitors.
4. Who is your target market? If you’re getting traffic currently are you sure you really know those visitors and can match them to advertisements that they would find useful?

People asked about what level of traffic is required to make real money. People asked about what industry or topic is best for making money. Both questions are rigged as you can make money from any amount of traffic (other than zero!) and you can make money in any niche. It’s really the combination of how much traffic you are getting, the value of the traffic, and the conversion rate of your site or landing page.

1. If you have very general traffic it’s likely that you will need a lot of traffic to make serious money (serious money meaning more than ~$200/day). That’s because your traffic is not really targeted for any specific action. However, I’m quite confident that many serious marketers could argue against that statement quite well. If you know your traffic and you are creative it’s likely you can find offers (affiliate deals, etc) that will convert well. It just depends on how far you’re willing to go with testing, searching for offers/partnerships, etc.
2. In general, if you have a site about a high-value topic such as auto insurance, diamond jewelry, attorneys and law, telecommunications, dating, diet and health, or similar subjects you need much less traffic to make substantial amounts of money. However this in no way means that writing 6 articles about these subjects and slapping together a site is going to net you a huge cash cow. To the inexperienced SEO/Internet marketer, these are insanely competitive industries. Your best bet if you don’t have the expertise as a writer or developer to create a truly valuable website on high-dollar subjects is to pick a close niche which is being underserved and become the authority on that. Or focus on a controversial aspect of those industries (diamond jewelry scams, dangers of online dating, beware of fad diets, etc, etc).
3. In most cases it’s far easier to improve your conversion rate than it is to increase traffic. So, one of the things you should be constantly working on is increasing your conversion rate. Your conversion rate is basically the percentage of visitors which convert to an action. That action can be any number of goals such as clicking an ad, signing up for your newsletter, filling out a lead form, or even adding a review (free content) to your site. I recommend starting with something like crazyegg.com which is very easy to setup in order to start experimenting with conversion rates and analyzing your visitors’ actions.

My earlier list items warrant full posts themselves. I unfortunately don’t have the time for that right now but hope that some of this information puts you on the right path if you’re serious about making money on the web.

Some useful resources for making money online:

• http://www.problogger.net/
• http://stefanjuhl.com/tags/monetization/
• http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/how-to-make-money-from-your-blog/
• http://www.shoemoney.com/
• http://www.webmasterworld.com/advertising/

So we know it’s fun to hate microsoft and all but this isn’t exaclty their fault. It appears that a contextual ad which they bought seems to be coming up on a rather innopportune article on newsfactor.com. You may or may not see this add on the first page load, but the article is about the death of a woman who was participating in a “Hold your wee for wii” radio contest. Essentially she drank herself to death… but from water.

So what is this contextual ad all about? Well it’s an ad for SQL server 2005 that begins with an animated video of someone filling a water cup from a water cooler. That’s pretty bad, in this particular case.

The video literally shows them filling the whole cup up. Pretty bad ad for this content… really horrible story. My condolences to the three children left behind due to this idiotic contest.

For the January 9th, 2007 refreshsandiego.org meeting, our topic of focus was how to gain website traffic. We touched on SEO, Social Media Marketing/Optimization, and possibly a few other methodologies.

Search Engine Optimization Related Matters:

Mostly we discussed links which are obviously the lifeblood of any attempt at high rankings for anything at least mildly competitive. We discussed what defines a natural link (1 - 2) , what are reasonable levels of anchor text densities, and article directories and syndication.

Some Conclusions:

• Generally a natural link is something that doesn’t appear to be nepotistic; it should look like it was given freely and not paid for or commercial so to speak. There is so much grey area here it’s like the (rare bad) San Diego weather the last two days… but understand that I’m just being straightforward and telling you that this stuff is being looked at, and engines have/are finding ways to detect these relationships even when you think it’s so arbitrary they couldn’t. Have a look at Detecting Nepotistic Links by Language Model Disagreement by researchers at the Computer and Automation Research Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA SZTAKI) and
  Eötvös University, Budapest.
• Try to avoid submitting content you’ve published on your website as article syndications. Instead of submitting your articles to superezinemegaarticle-2007-best-articleweb.com you should try to find relevant, but obviously non-competing sites, which would consider publishing the article. If you can get it linked well (and remember you can also do link building directly to this pageA) internally from their site you could end up with a super relevant backlink for yourself (preferably to your homepage as well as a few deep links).
• It’s hard to be really general as different tactics work differently depending on the sector. Also, things change relatively quickly, for instance there is some great advice and methods for a great “link equation” here. But even though Todd is an expert by all means, it’s near impossible to be a 100% accurate prognosticator in matters related to search (meaning, that post is only 5 months old but I don’t think it’s 100% on target anymore).

In reference to the last point above, somebody asked if we could define a few things that you could safely say “Always Do” and “Never Do”. That’s a dangerous line to walk, but I’ll try:

Always:

• Try to gain links from relevant web pages in the body area with anchor text targeted to your page’s keywords and/or words which will draw click-thrus.
• Have content that is worth linking to.
• Implement the basic 301 redirects to prevent duplicate content issues. Here are some great examples of how to prevent duplicate content problems.
• Use your targeted keywords in your title, heading and body text in a way that is legible and useful to the reader. Don’t write for Google, Yahoo or even MSNLiveSearchBadAlgo.
• Also, if you’re going to be redeveloping a site, make sure to take the basic SEO precautions for relaunching a site.
• Participate actively in forums, blogs, and other websites (social sites especially) that pertain to your area of expertise and which relate to your website. Use your URL where the opportunity exists but don’t be self-promotional. Just participate the best way possible, by adding great content, answering questions, and posing interesting questions to start debate, etc.

Never:

• Go on a binge of reciprocal linking or go after tons of low quality links; especially user-generated ones.
• Go link crazy linking to every site under the sun hoping they’ll link back to you.
• Never link to any sites besides mine. Ahhem, sorry, that one just crept in. That should have been: never link to sites which are super unreasonably ad heavy, seem to be completely autogenerated (not in a good way, re: spam), seem to be engaged in search engine optimization or other practices that are blatantly nefarious.
• Host content (we’ll give you this page to upload to your server) or do things which an SEO/Marketer approaching you suggests will “boost your rankings” unless you really understand what he or she is talking about and also understand what risks are involved and what gain/benefit they are after.
• Have a high percentage of your site’s content appear on other sites which are indexable. This is debatable, although not with me. I’m a firm believer that you should keep at least 90% of your original content on your site, unduplicated elsewhere.
• Create very thin-content pages which clearly have no purpose other than acting as doorway pages to attract search referrals.

Actually, I was a little surprised that I couldn’t come up with more Always/Never items. It’s just so hard to be that finite; afterall “always” doesn’t include “99% of the time you should…”.

Social Media Marketing/Optmization:

Most of this, as discussed at the meeting, overlaps with SEO. The other benefits are mainly branding, bursts of traffic, RSS subscribers, etc. In terms of getting links, which translates to getting traffic through search referrals here are some examples from Princess Neil Patel on how digg/social web can be effective, which was redelivered in-person at our group meeting.

I grabbed some coffee and was fidgeting with a meeting attendee form that I prepared so I missed a lot of this (oh and of course I had to catch an important call outside pre-meeting which made me late)… but some of the things I believe were suggested were to:

• Write a how-to series of articles for various levels of users of a product/service/technology/whatever that you are familiar with. Include video.
• Hold contests, scholarships, and anything with a Prize to get attention. If possible include prizes that most every person with a blog or website wants. Generally these start with lower case i’s.
• Learn how your product/service can fit into the social web by exploring sites like digg.com, technorati.com, myspace.com, del.icio.us, and other tagging/sharing sites.

In any of the above scenarios, you should consider your audience when calculating the likelihood of the intended result coming to fruition. If you’re targeting beginner web users for your “San Diego PC Repair” business you should be aware that you aren’t likely to get a ton of backlinks as users who find this useful aren’t able to create links let alone open a browser in some cases.

However, and this is really the crux of understanding how to position your linkbait/potentially-viral-content, consider that if you can get that article series the attention of some advanced techies with the slant “Refer your mom, uncle, grandfather, boss, and auto-mechanic to this and never have to worry about being their “computer guy” again” (visit coppyblogger.com to figure out a way more “killer headline” than that, please) it just may get a good deal of link love.

If anyone can chime in and add anything to the SEO or particularly the social marketing side of this, it would be great!

Thanks to everyone who attended, for great questions and answers, and great conversation.

These days there is nary a site which is being redesigned or redeveloped without at least some measure of concern for its search engine friendliness and optimization. The equation is simple, you have content which there is likely free, relevant youb traffic for… and you want it. Even if you don’t want to pursue an aggressive strategy for building links and doing heavy on-page optimization, you should make sure to cover your bases so that at some point, should you wish to make search optimization a priority, you will have an appropriate foundation to do so.

In order to not make this the “seo site health bible for re-launching a site”, I’m going to focus on four pillars of a smooth transition which should preserve or improve your site’s search engine positioning, and set things up to stay in good search engine health, all other things considered.

Trying to Maintain the Previous Site’s URLs
This basically means that if the current site has decent, static (looking) URLs it is usually best to just stick with those, adding new URLs only according to what “brand new” pages are going to be added. Doing this means that you won’t have to 301 redirect as many pages (the search engine benefit of 301 redirects can take months to kick-in in some cases), and you will maintain any ranking benefit that may occur due to the age of a URL, etc. This also decreases pageload times as your server won’t be under stress from tons of redirects (like one recent client with 17,000 unique articles which had to be redirected).

If the current URLs are not looking pretty and especially if you deem them to be causing indexing problems, please see below: “Redirecting Old URLs…”.

Launching with Static URLs
In order to never let on to a search engine that your site is dynamic and what the dynamic locations (URLs) of our pages are, you need to be careful not to launch a site before creating the proper URL rewriting so that all pages use a static looking URL and also you must be sure that all internal linkage points to these static versions ONLY.

Once you get pages indexed the search engines can be very steadfast in holding onto them. Trust me, I know you told your client you’d launch the site tonight… but explain to them that there are a few last-minute SEO related issues that you must cleanup in order to maintain site health; finish getting all of the URL rewriting done, then launch.

No Duplicate Content
You must always insure that no two URLs show the same content. This often includes instances like http://www.example.com/index.html and http://www.example.com/ (the correct URL if you want the www. included.). This also includes instances like http://example.com/ which again, should be http://www.example.com/. Please note that if you try doing that with http://websandiego.org/ it will correctly redirect all versions to http://www.websandiego.org/.

So, the important steps for checking this issue off our list when developing/redeveloping a site are:

1. Implementing /index.htm, /index.html, /index.php (or other default pages) 301 redirects to / (please note that this should occur if you use directory index pages as well like http://www.example.com/main-category/ [you do not want the same content to be accessible at /main-category/index.html])
2. Implementing non-www. to www. 301 redirects (in some cases like http://performancing.com/ you would do the opposite since for a long period of time the non-www. version has been the preferred URL).
3. Make sure that all internal linking reflects these preferences (e.g. a common mistake is that the sitewide homepage link points to /index.html or some equivalent of that. It should at least be / but more preferably should be an absolute URL like http://www.example.com/. So, as you can see, if you’re going to do absolute internal links you must also be sure to reflect the preference for either www. or non-www.
4. Make sure there are no internal links referencing the dynamic version of any URL. You can do this by using something free like xenu link sleuth to crawl the site.
5. Preferably make sure that the dynamic versions of URLs are not allowed to be accessed. This means that you should either 404 them or 301 redirect them to the correct version. This may not always be realistic with some CMSs and budgets that don’t support the effort, but this would ensure that there is no SEO sabotage done by competitors who maliciously link to these URLs to cause duplicate content penalties (or by any other means of someone accidentally linking to these URLs).

Redirecting Old URLs which are not Used on the New Site + Custom 404 Pages
This issue requires a few steps. Basically our goal here is to 1) conserve existing PageRank (link popularity) by avoiding losing (404ing) any pages which have external inbound links pointed towards them; 2) having visitors which do get 404 error (page not found) be presented with a page containing links and graphics, etc so they don’t simply hit back (assuming they came from a link, search engine, or anywhere externally).

**Note*** The method described below is actually describing what we have a bot built to do. So, the point of displaying is it is that you should interpret what we are doing and what we’re trying to accomplish and do as much of this by hand as possible (or as you can bear). If you have a large website hopefully the client’s budget supports building a script like what we have.

The steps are as follows:

1. Crawl all the backlinks (up to 1,000, or get creative by adding in various terms to uncover more, then remove duplicates) pointing to the site you’re launching.
• Then will crawl each result to determine which exact page, on the site you’re launching, the link is pointing to.
• Then create a list of redirects (you will redirect these pages to their relevant counterparts or to a sitemap type page) for you to implement.
2. Attempt to find all known URLs and Existing URLs
• Spider the current site for a list of all URLs (with something like Xenu).
• Do a Google or other search engine “site:” search and create a list.
• Analyze and determine what, if anything to do with this URL list (possibly some specific redirects) .
3. Create a custom 404 page.
• This page will basically be a page which matches the site’s design, displays a simple message saying the page could not be found and may no longer exist. This page will have all the standard links so that visitors can quickly get where they want to go.

These are the pillars of starting off with good search engine health. Anything else can go into effect very quickly so long as this stuff is totally taken care of by launch, so don’t worry about getting it all done if there are crucial deadlines (that way us SEO guys aren’t getting blamed for everything).

Ok, the former part of the headline is old news obviously. But what I’m wondering is what this will mean for the site in terms of improvements. Things function rather well, no real complaints there. But there are a few pretty simple modifications/fixes that would be nice to see sooner rather than later:

• The homepage’s link to what should be the main directory page for blogs/sites beginning with numbers (perhaps characters as well) points to  http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/#/ which isn’t exactly a working URL.
  
• I also don’t like the fact that besides email notifications, there really isn’t a differentiation or a way to visibly (even if just for the member’s eyes only) tell who has added you as a contact if you initiated the contact-adding to begin with.
• I think they’re in “let’s fluff the numbers mode, it makes us look HUGE” by not requiring any type of email confirmation. I mean, if not for the boost in “membership” numbers, then why else make it that easy for spammers? Frofiles, sprofiles, whatever you call ‘em there’s tons of fake ones.
• Would be nice if there was a link to “more hot communities” and “more new communities” rather than just the few they link to with the thumbnails.
• I have a feeling that once they’ve sufficiently used blogs to gain enough members, they’ll allow people to require that members be part of their community before those members images shows on the bloglogroll or whatever that thing is called. Then, site/blog owners could permanently just ban people from their groups. Makes it a little harder for people to do things like put cute little images in mybloglog blog rolls.
  
• Would be nice if there was a clear way to add multiple authors to one blog/site. It does say “Authors” above the picture area for the author.
  

As far as dealing with spam they can easily flag accounts or take other measures when they see too many consecutive page reloads. But obviously anyone worth their weight in canned spam is going to take a differen approach. You can just load the URL that triggers your image to appear on a blogroll and counts as a visit to the blog (I assume on that last part), so that has to be watched for as well.

From yesterday, an announcement which I think is very cool. There truly is a ton of opportunity for nonprofits to harness the social web as well as build their own communities. These communities will further strengthen the bond between them and their supporters as well as offer a way for the supporters to network as well. IMO, the later is leaps and bounds the most valuable part. You give them another reason to champion your cause; because they love the likeminded people they meet through your social network.

It’s also a great way to generate relevant content which with the search engines and other ways of sharing (tagging, bookmarking, rating, etc) that’s more chances for interested parties to find your site/organization.

SAN DIEGO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Kintera Inc. (NASDAQ:KNTA - News) today announced Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), will be the keynote speaker at the annual Kintera User Conference 2007: “Unleashing the Power of Social Accountability.”

To be held Feb. 4-7, 2007, in San Diego, Kintera’s User Conference offers three days of provocative strategy, implementation and best practices sessions designed to advance nonprofit clients’ ability to reach their objectives for the coming year. Conference attendees will also learn from keynote speaker Larry Sanger how nonprofits can use Web 2.0 to develop their own collaborative communities, leveraging user-generated content to rapidly grow their fundraising and constituent engagement efforts.

Info available at: http://www.kintera.com/userconf2007

Alternate Title: At Least it’s not Porn, Pills, or Casino.
So, as of right now, this is what I was seeing on Shoemoney.com via his blog-log-roll-whatever-it’s-called. You know, where all the pictures of visitors are? Well, at least it’s this and not anything naughty

This will obviously be gone in no time flat as anyone visiting to see it (with a mbl account) will cause it to go away. Nice work on the timing though.

What other spam is making it’s way onto MBL?

• http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/spammers-have-caught-wind-of-mybloglog.html
• http://www.soloseo.com/blog/2007/01/10/free-advertising-on-techcrunch-with-mybloglog-flaw/
• http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/10/mybloglog-got-spammed-and-so-did-we/
• http://www.cornwallseo.com/search/index.php/2007/01/11/what-the-hell-is-going-on-with-all-this-widget-spam/

Update: That was squashed quickly! Wonder if it was fixed, blocked, or banned… or what?

Nope. That’s not a typo. The S is purposely injected into BS. After having paid and setup nearly 25 listings with MSN bCentral (their small business directory) we heard they were shutting down the bcentral directory. Ok, so before rushing to judgement, I decided to figure out what that would mean for our listings.First, I found that we still had our listings, had access to our control panel, and could even submit more listings! (more on that in a minute). Great news. I mean, I understood that this was likely to mean that the directory pages (business cards) would remain online, and that since we had pre-paid for a large listing package we would be able to submit the remainder of our listings as well.

Ok, so the first strange thing was that I submitted 3 sites and all of them were approved within 2-3 minutes. I’ve had a near instant approval before but never 3 so quickly. Then, I started wondering if they were basically just anxious to process (by accepting) all the listings that were paid up front so that they could discontinue the need for the staff which reviews submissions, sooner rather than later. That would make sense to some degree.

Now, if they’re not upholding as much of a quality standard as they once might have… does this mean they may also scrap a lot of internal links to the directory as well, thereby cutting off most of its pagerank (linkjuice if you will)?

So, now I’m a little bummed at that prospect, but at least we still have the links (what I’m about to say will enforce my reasons for ranting), and we have went out and done link development for these directory pages (business cards as they call them) as well. So, they should stay indexed regardless and should also continue to rank well in some cases themselves, sending targeted visitors.

So today, when checking these listings, we find that the business card pages all redirect to the main bCentral page.

I login to see if it’s isolated to a few of them. Nope, every single one went back into the pending approval status. Some of these are 2+ years old!!! So obviously I’m not very ecstatic about this. We had top3 rankings for important terms with some of these pages aside from the fact that they were valuable links to the sites which they were submitted for.

I’ve fired off an unhappy email to support… chances are they’ll reinstate them; I would assume this is by error as the sites are mostly unrelated and totally different from one another. They are real websites, very nice I might add, and not affiliate or content-thin sites. Of course with the way these things tend to go they will probably end up with new URLs based on a newly approved ID for the listings… which would completely blow our efforts at directly promoting these pages.

Hmm, strike that. I’m feeling more like Bf’ingScentral.

Anybody else had this happen? It’s not all listings, plenty are still there working fine. 

Discussions of bCentral Closing:

• http://www.platinax.co.uk/news/04-12-2006/micrsoft-bcentral-directory-to-close/
• http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/2006/11/25/msn-small-biz-directory-closed/

Exciting times! At some point, before year’s end, we’ll be launching an all new Web San Diego. As Joe moved away from San Diego relatively long ago, this site simply isn’t what it used to be. We strongly hope that changes with the re-launch.
So what can be expected you ask? Well, we have a number of things in store. For starters we thought we know San Diego pretty well and while there are certainly plenty of directories out there which feature San Diego Business listings, we thought we could add just one more… that hopefully differentiates itself from the pack. Starting with over 200 categories and 700 or so listings, each hand-picked by our editorial staff, including a completely original (no scrapers!) editorial description, we will launch a directory which allows each business or organization listed:

• Picture Galleries
• Product Galleries
• Visitor Reviews with Rating of Multiple Aspects
• Comments on Visitor Reviews (for rebuttals and all!)
• A Mail Form to Contact the Business/Organization Listed
• Export to PDF of the Listing (I’m sure there’s some reason that’s useful)
• A Document Gallery (for menus, proposals, etc)
• Printer Friendly Version
• Easy Add to MyYahoo and Del.icio.us Tagging
• Google Maps
• Ability to Create Coupons
• What Else Can We Add?

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