Guide to buying forums

Over the year I’ve bought a couple of forums, and I’ve certainly learned a few lessons.
I’ll post a quick guide here:
Before you buy
1. Determine *why* you want to buy a forum - what’s your business plan? A forum could involve a significant investment of not only money but also time, and factor this into your […]

Danny Sullivan - the man moves on

I reported Danny Sullivan leaving SearchEngineWatch on Platinax News when the story broke, and over the past couple of its it’s been enlightening to see the responses online.
The marketing industry that has developed around search engines is often a small and intimate one. Open and friendly to new faces, there are no real cliques and […]

The future of viral marketing is personalisation

Gimmicks work on the chance of being different, of being memorable.
In a world where advertising desperately needs the attention of potential consumers, that’s worth something.
It’s been known for a long time that sex gets attention - hence it’s heavier use in increasingly media-saturated markets.
But sex only gets attention, and doesn’t sell the product. Too much […]

SEO predictions

A couple of years back in the Search Engine Watch forums I made various comments that Google was more interested in pushing to rate authority more highly and that we’d not only see this trend continue, but also that we’d see established websites abuse this.
And these things have come to pass.
So I’m going to […]

Now a Big Board admin

I’ve been really busy the past two weeks - I bought up another science fiction and fantasy site - AScifi.com - which had a sizable forum, and merged it with the chronicles network forum.
Oh - and it’s also officially a Big Board. :)
While there are bigger forums out there focused on just science fiction, or […]

Yahoo!s graphic indexing failure

I just checked up on the stats of one of my sites - CR - comparative-religion.com.
It’s the UK’s largest resource on world religions, run as an information website.
It’s not simply “white-hat”, but is also a key authority in it’s area - linked to by over 40 universities, plus a half-dozen UK government websites.
So why has […]

Yahoo! - having serious problems?

Yahoo! seems to be having a lot of technical problems of late.
An update on July 21st has managed to downsize Yahoo! Search results and relevancy.
Frustrated with Google’s increasing irrelevancy, I moved to Yahoo! Search - not sure what the new update is supposed to have achieved, but in practical terms, it seems to have reduced […]

When marketing is too aggressive

Cancellations are a valuable sales lead.
Apparently, that’s the message in the AOL Retention manual:

If you stop and think about it, every Member that calls in to cancel their account is a hot lead. Most other sales jobs require you to create your own leads, but in the Retention Queue the leads come to you! Be […]

Interesting link experiment

I posted an interesting link experiment at SEO Lab recently: When do duplicate links count?
I’ve suspected for some time that if Google sees two links for the same URL on the same page, it will only count one of the links.
What the experiment so far suggests is quite interesting:
1. When Google sees two links to […]