You really have to be on the ball to keep up with the latest in social sites. Right now a lot of stuff is happening. I was recommended this site called Quassia and its a revenue sharing 2.0 site. I am just getting into it but it drives traffic and it is good to get in on these things early. Here is what they say about themselves:

Qassia is fantastic because you get credit for sharing your intelligence. The more credit you earn, the better your websites will rank. And you get a backlink to your website for every intel you add - only Qassia gives you unlimited quality backlinks.

Last but not least, Qassia also has the best ad revenue sharing system on the Internet, so in effect you get paid for promoting your websites. Qassia rocks!

The more people join Qassia, the more everyone will benefit, so give Qassia a spin. Signing up takes less than a minute, so you’ve got nothing to lose. See ya around!

I may post a review of Quassia in the next couple days but until then you can use my Quassia Sigup link and try it out for yourself.

When you get a site that starts to do good traffic, little differences can go a long way. With the increase in mobile handsets that enable internet browsing, and also video game consoles like the psp, you need to make sure your site is compatible for mobile browsers. Such one popular browser is Opera Mini. Even if you can`t visit your sites on your own phone, you can use Opera`s Mini Simulator to see how your site would look on a mobile device. If you have problems, fix them!

Most webmasters are using advanced analytics programs these days, and all serious affiliate marketers are. There are several good choices, with the most popular being Google Analytics. You need to get into the finer details of your web traffic to know what’s working and not working, and how to make the most of your existing traffic to convert more.

For those of us that want to know more about what a visitor does on our site, there are some very decent tools to do the trick. One idea that is not new but very useful is using heat maps - one of the best being crazyegg.com which also has other unique options such as their “confetti feature”.

Want even more detail than heat maps? I will let you in on something I have been using and it is one of the most useful tools I have seen since becoming a webmaster. It is called Clicktale. I know a few of you are already using it as well - and finding it just as useful as me.

Unfortunately that’s not an affiliate link because it doesn’t seem they have an affiliate program. They do have a free version which has a very low weekly cap on data. It’s a good enough software for me to review for free anyhow. Clicktale will record the exact movement of random users on your site and allow you to watch a video of any user it recorded.

What you do is put the code that they provide you into your site, similar to google analytics. You can set how often to record a user’s movements so it doesn’t just record the first 1000 then be done for the day, but spread them out. (Even the highest package has a 1000/day limit). I have found this to be an invaluable tool - it is much more than just a heat map where you can see on average who is clicking where - you get to watch various users actually navigating your site. There are a few different levels of membership ranging from free (100 free recordings/week) to Gold (1000 recordings/day) at $99/month.

Not only has Clicktale helped me realize where converting points on my websites are, it has provided some entertainment a couple of times too. One visitor who was on for about 2 minutes couldn’t seem to figure out where to click. There was several links on the page but he managed to click in between words, on all images that weren’t links, and randomly all over the page at least 50 times before finally clicking on a blogroll link to leave

This type of site may have been cool 10 years ago and even 5 years ago it wasn’t THAT bad. But if you can believe it, this company is actually still in business and even worse have an office in the tech savvy L.A. How on earth do you expect to come across as an authority and actually grab clients with this???

Caution: May cause a seizure (Oh, and don’t try to steal their source code because right click is disabled!)
http://www.videosoniclab.com/

Finding a good logo designer is not always an easy task. I would like to recommend a great logo and site designer named Lorne Fade. The designs are clean and professional, you can see his logo gallery here. Mention you heard about him through my site for a discount on a professional logo.

Most have you already heard the news. For those of you that didn’t, a Polish 23 year old guy has been arrested for google bowling the Polish President’s official site for the word “kutas”.

Well if you ever wondered who major registrars bow down to at the end of the day, think the highly popular Vbulletin Forums. Even more specific, the 3rd party fraud control they employ in Croatia. Yes, a simple e-mail complaining of an expired VB license, and echoes of “how high?” ring throughout Godaddy. The following story happened to a friend of mine, with his site being pulled down late last week (and for the record, the license was valid bought on the owned $160 option)

I recently noticed a post by a friend of mine who owns a site called Highstakesreport.com. He was furious, because Godaddy had pulled his site down due to a copyright infringement complaint, issued by Vbulletin. Apparently there was a missing plural on the VB licensed URL so whatever automated process that they run picked it up as
invalid.

For the record, I happen to know it was a valid license as this site was my creation once upon a time before selling it to the MacPokerOnline Network. This is not the issue, however, that should be concerning. What bothered
me the most was how Godaddy would just shut down the site on a whim without so much as contacting the owner of the site in question.

Now, I am a fan of Godaddy and have been for a long time, but I only use them for a registrar these days. They do have hosting solutions that are right for some people as well, but I wouldn’t recommend hosting your site at the same place the domain is registered at. With that being said, I am disapointed with Godaddy’s actions here.
Godaddy’s rash decision negatively affected HSR in 3 ways.

1. The owner of HighStakesReport lost traffic, qualified and targeted, and possibly money making life-time clients.

2. The site may now be adversley affected in the search engines. Any SEO knows how long it takes to gain quality organic search positions and it is hard work, let alone how much harder it is in the highly competitive Poker SEO industry. In my experience f a site is down when search engine spiders try to connect to it, there are negative reprecussions in the SERPS, aka losing rankings. This is because the search engines are in the business of pleasing users, and a user is not
pleased when they hit a blank error page.

3. The site’s branding took a hit, with their loyal readers wondering why they can’t afford to keep up their site which is a common assumption with an error page.

My friend tried multiple times and multiple angles for them to put the site back up, and after exhausting all his options made the post on the forums. The main point is that Godaddy pulled the site without a warning, which gave the site unneccassary downtime.

Why does VB have such clout at Godaddy for? Why wasn’t the owner of HSR notified of the infraction, and given a time period to respond or defend himself? What happened to innocent until proven guilty? These are questions we have to ask ourselves, as webmasters, as business people. If Godaddy is a partner to us, then
they should act like one, and not like big brother plucking sites off the net for no good reason.

If you would like to read the entire first post by the owner of HighStakesReport and continued discussion, visit it here at PAW.

And they will always matter. You see, for every person that says tool bar pagerank or alexa ranking doesn’t matter, there is somebody who says it does. And those people tell other people it matters and there are always new breeds of people coming in obsessed with pagerank or alexa.

Many of us agree that it in fact pagerank and alexa doesn’t matter when trying to rank our websites. Much more important is the perceived authority of your website in the eyes of google, much of that resulting from the quality of authoritative links pointing to your site. There is so much more than just ranking, however, in a web entrepreneur’s life. There is of course (gasp) selling links on our high pageranked sites and high traffic alexa ranked sites, whether through private sales or text link brokers.

More importantly, many of us are in the game of buying websites or developing them from scratch, building them into revenue making websites and selling them off for a profit. In my opinion this is why pagerank and alexa ranking still matter alot to webmasters. I have sold many sites in the past. Some were high earners that I never should have let go of but did due to various circumstances, while others were sites I just didn’t have time for and leveled off to a point where if I didn’t start maintaining them, the money would start going down. I can tell you the number of times is high that I’ve had buyers shy away from a site because they were a) suspect of high alexa ranking not “matching” the analytics or b) turned off by a low pagerank.

Now I know you are thinking they just don’t know what they are talking about, but it does work both ways. I’ve also sold webmaster related sites for far more than they are worth because a couple of bidders obsessed with the pagerank and more importantly the alexa rank that the sale went through the roof. Of course we all know that webmaster related sites have inflated alexa numbers due to the high volume of alexa tool bars or accompanying firefox extensions that people have on their browsers.

The bottom line is people are still lined up, opening up their wallets for reasons based on pagerank or alexa ranking - and savvy webmasters are still cashing in off of it. As long as this cycle continues, I don’t see why sellers shouldn’t capitalize on it. The debate between whether or not alexa and pagerank matters has been going on for years and that debate isn’t going away anytime soon. So until the people who think pagerank and alexa is important run out of money, it still matters to me.

Lately I have realized why clean code and being compliant with the W3C Markup is so important. Currently we have one site doing around 25,000 uniques a day, which normally isn’t very much. However, the script it is running on was a modded turnkey which was nothing pretty to begin with.

The script calls images and other information through mysql databases and it’s gotten to a point that at peak hours (9pm -11pm) the site has managed to crash the server at hostgator three nights in a row.

I hear you saying now, hostgator web hosting is crap and that’s the reason… well I’d believe it but I have another server with hostgator that can handle that kind of traffic no problem, and it’s less expensive than the dedicated server that keeps crashing. It is all to be blamed on the script, which will remain nameless (not that it matters though, they already closed up shop and released “version 2.0″ under a new company name.

Always make sure you are working with scripts that can handle high traffic once you get there, and a good lesson to be learned from my experience is to start off with a custom script that does everything you want before you start instead of using a turnkey and trying to mod it yourself.

The old posts have been imported but the dates are wrong so all new posts after this are current. Thanks for stopping by.