Pitfalls of sending forum emails
I use the “mass email members” feature on forums very rarely.
Reason is simple - I don’t want to annoy the members.
And yet, somehow, I usually manage to cock things up most times.
This morning I sent out a mass email from the Platinax forums. It’s about the third mass email in two years, which is a [...]
Moniker vs Platinax
Platinax is currently under sustained attack from a wave of automated blog comment spam, by what looks like one of the most aggressive amateurs I’ve ever had to deal with.
The automated comment spam is all promoting a raft of finance, pharma, and gambling affiliate sites registered - and hosted - with Moniker.com.
The size of the [...]
Don’t run a mediocre forum
I know. I love forums. I think they have a more real sense of community than blogs anyday.
And in terms of marketing, offer far better potential.
But…the same principles of marketing apply to forums.
Creating Passionate Users runs an article called Don’t Give in To Feature Demands.
Although it’s aimed generically in terms of products/services, read the [...]
Big backups can kill a server
So I thought to do a backup of one of my larger forums while I remembered…
A client on the same server called - their site was no longer responding.
I figured it must have been the forum database backup, so I killed the process and everything started to run fine again.
Note to self - only do [...]
Google targeting of link networks
Jagger - revisited
The Jagger update in October 2005 was a major event - it had far reaching consequences that affected a lot of webmasters and SEO’s.
When the fall-out finally settled, it was observed that “authority” sites had better positioning, and that link exchanges appeared to be devalued.
I’m now coming to the speculative conclusion that what [...]
Communities as the future of the internet
Ever since I set up my first attempt at an online community in 2001, I’ve seen online communities - focussed on forums - as a key to internet development.
I’ve repeatedly recommend that clients set up forums - either just for support, or else as a marketing tool in itself.
Why?
Firstly, it helps increase visibility.
If you [...]
Google confirms Adsense adds to index
Shoemoney reports that Matt Cutts has confirmed that the AdSense Mediabot is now collecting content for the Big Daddy search index.
This was something I’d suggested was responsible for Google recently losing part of its index - but hopefully they are through with whatever glitch was causing that problem.
Either way, Platinax is recovering it’s own index [...]
Google loses its index
Seems like Google has lost a section of its index again, especially for newer pages.
I’ve been very busy launching a couple of new forums over the past couple of months, and I’ve seen Google come in and index some of the pages - then waited for the deep crawl to grab the rest of the [...]
Traffic for rankings
Threadwatch raises a discussion on Webmasterworld about Google possibly using traffic figures from the Google toolbar for ranking purposes.
It’s something I suggested would be inevitable last year.
The trouble is - following the traffic simply tells you where the well-trod places are.
And - much as though Google is loathe to see text links because it [...]
submityourarticlesnow.com
Wow, these guys are really going for it with the forum spamming: submityourarticlesnow.com.
What’s even more impressive is that they sign-up multiple user accounts on each forum, all just effectively posting the same message - that submitting articles is a great way to drive traffic and rankings and to use the services of submityourarticlesnow.com.
Anyway, submityourarticlesnow.com - [...]
Beating the internet to a news story
It’s not often Platinax News picks up a news story before the major online news outlets - but it was nice to see that Google’s accidental deletion of the Google Blog was covered on Platinax News before places such as SEW and Threadwatch.
Sometimes Platinax can and does report on stories from experience, which aren’t covered [...]
Open Proxies and spam IPs
NOTE: This list is now being continued here: Blog Spam tracking.
Been getting quite a lot of automated spam recently.
Although Wordpress is generally pretty tooled up for binning spam automatically with a few simple rules, it tends to be reactive rather than proactive.
There is an option to block open proxies, but it doesn’t seem well updated [...]
40 Best Web Directories
Bob Mutch has turned himself into something of a directory specialist, and has been developing evaluated lists of directories for some time now.
He’s just changed his system of appraisal.
Rather than use figures such as PageRank and link volume to determine quality, he’s now set up a list of directories valued according to basic “trust” factors [...]
Google spider *does* find content without links
It’s something I’ve seen suggested on-and-off for a couple of years - both that the Google spider will visit URLs via the Google Toolbar, along with a claim that this may help facilitate spidering.
I’m seeing proof of spider activity on a closed site now - which answers the question quite firmly for me.
I’m setting up [...]
The Power of DMOZ?
I’ve submited various sites to DMOZ in the past.
I found that commercial ones were unlikely to be listed unless I submitted to the regional sections for their category.
I stopped submiting precisely because it was so difficult to get sites listed in major sections that properly reflected their content, in addition to the use of often [...]
Some webmasters are plain dumb
So while on a routine search, I found some of my exclusive articles for my business site had be copied and published on a couple of different websites, including “big board” dnforum.com.
Published in entirely, with no source link.
I sent a polite e-mail to the sites, requesting these be taken down.
Apparently, the webmasters in question [...]
Google News guidelines
Contacted Google News about a couple of issues this week.
The first was a request for inclusion of a news blog site I run as an individual - the response from Google News was that they do not accept submissions from individuals.
The second is a problem Google News has with Platinax News - the source was [...]
AdSense Terms of Use violations
Listen to Matt Cutts and you’ll easily get the impression that creating Spamsense sounds really dangerous - not only will you be delisted from Google, but Google will also cancel your AdSense account and invalidate pending monies. Ooh, the shivers.
However, today I found another site completely copying Platinax - the only difference being they strip [...]
The challenges of database work
I’m working with a set of content databases at the moment.
It’s been a stupidly laborious amount of work so far - uploading the databases has been a nightmare so far, with continual network connection time-outs.
Now that I’m setting up the sites online to work from the databases, I’m having to do a lot of [...]
Chris Beasley kicked out from Sitepoint
Andrew Johnson posts that Christ Beasley of Sitepoint has had his blog removed and moderator privileges revoked from Sitepoint. Chris posts in the thread just linked to, and reports basics of the issue on his new blog.
Overall situation is that he’s been basically pushed out.
I first cut my teeth on SEO at Sitepoint under Chris [...]
