iamned.com Blog

A few months ago I read of a new social networking site that was lanched : Admish.com

I performed a google search of admish.com and the homepage isn’t anywhere in the top 10 results in google. I found this to be very odd.

As you can see from the search below, admish.com appears to have been heavily penalized. Although over 8000 sources reference the site, the homepage admish.com is nowhere to be found.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=admish&btnG=Search

A search for admish.com also shows nothing:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=admish.com&btnG=Search

Only when you perform a search for the ENTIRE domain http://www.admish.com do you get results:

http://www.google.com/search?q=http://www.admish.com&hl=en&filter=0

So at least the site isn’t banned.

The yahoo site explorer tool shows only 320 or so inbound links so that pretty much rules out a penalty triggered by having ‘too many’ links for a new site.
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=

http%3A%2F%2Fwww.admish.com&bwm=i&bwms=p&bwmf=u&fr=yfp-t-501&fr2=seo-rd-se

A scan of the homepage doesn’t reveal any anomalies that could trigger such a harsh penalty. A review of the html doesn’t show any evidence of search engine gaming such as keyword stuffing.

The cause of this penalty is still a mystery considering there is no compelling and substantial evidence that admish.com has violated any of the google webmaster guidelines.

This is yet further proof of how confounding google can be.

Related reading:

Google penalties Are Permanent

It looks like the doom and gloom ‘we’re in a bubble’ crowd has struck again. Here is a satirical montage that tries to illustrate that web 2.0 is a reincarnation of the dotcom bubble of 1999. Being that we’re in a new era of economic and social perpetualism and that there is no bubble I completely disagree with the web 2.0 doomsayers. Anyway, the video is fun to watch because it oozes with jealousy, envy, and resentment. Winners go out and create stuff. Losers just bitch and complain about ‘bubbles’ ‘irrational exuberance’ ‘wealth gaps’ ‘houses in Bay Area too expensive’ and so on.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi4fzvQ6I-o&eurl=

(can’t embed the video cause it causes wordpress to load verrrry slow)

Instead of complaining about a so called bubble, why not just go make money instead? Enjoy.

Last week in my extended segment about blogging I wrote about Five Reasons Why Blogs Fail, and one of those reasons is censorship. A real example of censorship that I recently expierenced was on December 4th when I merely posted an opposing view on Tim Knight’s Slopeofhope stock trading blog. My comments were innocuous and non-inflammatory, but Tim got his panties in a bunch and decided to censor me by blocking my IP after making a few ad hominem attacks.

Here is a visual timeline of the events that unfolded (my user name is in the red circle, Tim Knight is in the blue circle):

First I made a post in opposition ot the prevailing bear market mentality:

I then follow up with another post recommending that someone cover their Apple short:

Fianlly Tim decides to censor me and blocks my IP which is why I am unable to make a follow up post:

There you have it folks! Censorship in action.

As a lot of people know johncow.com is a popular internet marketing blog. It never fails amaze me how johncow is able to retain such a strong readership in spite of the fact that ninety percent of the content is so boring it could cure insomnia. No insight or commentary regarding internet marketing, SEO or internet business; just updates about various odd gift cards, givaways, pointless videos, advertising promos, fundraisers, and other vacuous filler.

The site is also misleading. Aside from the lackluster content, johncow doesn’t actually help you make mooney online. Under the logo it says ‘make mooney online’ yet none of the articles seem to pertain to this theme. What a ripoff.

But as long as johncow pays the bills and then some, I don’t see the creative direction of the blog changing anytime soon. Perhaps a few readers of johncow.com will grow tired of the sour, expired content and mooooove to iamned.com

Myeeos.com is a new social network created by gregj and and various business associates over at Myspacepros.com. Although it hasn’t been officially lanched to the public the site is functional, and it remains to be seen whether myeeos can achieve sufficient market share to be a success.

It is innevitabe that myeeos faces a long uphill battle ahead. In 2003-04 myeeos could easily become an overnight success like myspace and facebook, but times have changed. There are probably 1000’s of social networking sites- each one is vying for your attention, while in 2004 there were perhaps only a few such sites. Myspace and facebook dominte but there are many other smaller sites which are consuming marketshare; linkedin, bebo, taggworld, myyearbook and so on. The main issue is oversaturation, a barrier which I describe in more detail in my post Why web 2.0 kinda sucks.

But what if myeeos is able to capture just .01% of the social neworking marketshare? That would still be a lot of users. How hard could that be? But that is a huge if. The problem is attracting that .01% of usuers required A LOT of marketing. Millions of young people already use myspace and facebook, so the myeeos team will have to market a compelling reason for some of those users to switch over. As I have written in my post Are the most popular sites at risk for being displaced? I argue that trying to annex marketshare from a saturated pool of internet users is very difficult, if not unfeasible.

Unfortunately, from my preliminary review myeeos lacks a unique selling point that separates it from myspace. The layout, the profiles, the blogs, the friend system, the comment system all imitate of a stripped down version of Myspace. This doesn’t bode too well for myeeos future because why are Myspace users going to switch to myeeos when there is no advantage or special features that distinguish it from myspace? Myeeos can’t win a war against myspace on a feature by feature basis, but thats what it appears like myeeos is trying to do.

Overall, for myeeos prevent becoming an afterthought in the fiecely competitive world of web 2.0 it needs to find a unique selling point as soon as possible, and then accentuate that unique selling point in its marketing efforts. Trying to go toe to toe against the aready established social networking sites is futile.

All else being equal the number one impediment I have found to website success is the ranking barrier. Unless you can rank well in google and yahoo for fairly competitive terms your ability to make money online will be severely hindered, in most cases. While there are many exceptions of sites that are able to archive success virally without search engines, this isn’t the norm.

The gurus and experts who are able to rake in thousands of dollars a month in profit from their sites often have very good search engine rankings. The benefits of good rankings are irrefutable; free, targeted, continuous, human traffic.

On the other hand buying advertising is often a loser’s game. Adwords is expensive cause you got to pay BY THE CLICK. Text link ads, link partnerships, sponsored links don’t deliver the same ROI (return on investment) as superb search engine rankings. While many people are able to convert their ad dollar into a positive ROI, the majority of webmasters simply lack the ability to do this, and thus squander thousands of dollars in a what is an exercise of futility. This also ties into my prior post of why making money online generally sucks. There is too much competition and ranking is becoming increasingly difficult for most people due to the huge influx of new sites and arbitrary google penalties and filters.
So how do you break the ranking barrier? If the answer were easy I wouldn’t be writing this blog; instead I would have already ranked my sites for high traffic keywords and be counting my money.

So there is no answer besides what you probably already know about seo.

In conclusion: 

-Older indexed domains tend to rank higher than newer domains
-Strong AGED links copunt more then low PR new links

-Original content is important but it isn’t essential to ranking well
-Use anchor text for keywords your trying to rank

-Target multiple keyword phrases that are less competitive than two word phrases.

I with I could write a more detailed writup but I don’t have the answers.