MickMel SEO

Like most blog software, WordPress will ping a list of services each time you write a post.  I’ve spent the last hour or two refining my list and I think it’s pretty solid. Feel free to use this on your own blog if you’d like.  in WordPress, just go to [settings] and then [writing], and there is a box near the bottom that says “Update Services”.  Just copy and paste this list into there and you’re done!

If you have any other additions that you feel deserve to be on the list (or if you think some should be removed), please leave a comment and let me know.

The list:

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.feedsky.com/ping
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

The last few days aside, AdSense tends to keep a pretty consistent pace for me each day. Over the last month, I’ve tried to keep track of my earnings every 30 minutes throughout the day so I could chart them. On 10 different days I was able to get at least 10 different numbers to plot.  Most days started at 6am and ended around midnight.  The missing data was simply interpolated from the surrounding data and the zero hour of 3AM EST (midnight PST).

I figured having this chart would help to me to get a better idea of how the current day is doing, rather than just saying “it feels high” or “it seems low”. The few gems I’ve been able to pull out of it:

• When I get up at 6am, AdSense is between 5-10% of my daily total.
• The halfway point of my day is between 1:15pm and 3:00pm, with the average being right around 2:00.
• When I go to bed (usually around midnight), we’re just over 90% of the daily total.

I’m making a big effort to check the stats less often now, but I thought it’d be fun to generate a chart like that. I hope you find it useful!

My stats looked decent at 6am (EST), and haven’t moved much since.  I just saw a tiny bump a few minutes ago, but that’s about it.  You’re probably seeing the same thing.

There’s still no official word from the AdSense folks, but the AdWords engineers have spoken.  As posted on JenSense and the WMW forums:

Yes - some advertisers are seeing a delay in their stats today. The engineering teams are aware of this and, as you might imagine, are working to resolve it as a priority.

Please know that ads have continued to run as normal. This issue revolves around the reporting of statistics only, and does not impact ad delivery.

I’ll post again when I have anything of substance to add - and, in the meantime, my apology for the inconvenience this is causing you.

AWA

I find it interesting that they said “some” advertisers are seeing a delay, because it appears that all AdSense publishers are.  The thread at WMW has over 75 replies, and all of them are publishers that aren’t seeing any updates.

For more info, you can also check out this long thread at the DP forums.  I’ll post an update in the comments here and on my twitter feed when I hear anything else.

As reported by Darren Rowse, it appears that AdSense ads will be finding their way into Feedburner feeds pretty soon.

There is a feed (Inhabitat) that is showing some ads. They’re being served as image maps, as opposed to JavaScript, which hopefully will help them work with a wider variety of feed readers. I’ve not had much luck with Feedburner FAN (feed advertising network), and not many people had much luck with the older “AdSense for RSS” system either. Hopefully this new format will perform well.

The hot thing for the last year or so is to proclaim “PageRank is useless!  Ignore it!“.  Some of the dumbest things I hear are statements like “A PR2 site can outrank a PR7 site, therefore PageRank is meaningless.“  Duh!  If a higher PR site always ranked better, then Google.com (PR10) would rank first for every query.  There are certainly other factors in play, and PageRank is just a piece of it.

I’ll certainly admit that PageRank isn’t as valuable as it once was.  However, it is still presumed to be a small piece of the Google algorithm (along with 100+ other factors), making it not completely worthless.  It might not help much, but if it helps at all then it can’t be considered “worthless”.

More importantly, it’s crucial to understand what PageRank represents.  It’s the little things that contribute to your PageRank that are worthwhile, and the green bar is a representation of that.

Let’s use a football analogy.  Suppose your team is 10-0, and you’re about to play the team that’s 0-10.  Chances are good that you’ll win.  However, you aren’t going to win based on the fact that you’re 10-0.  In fact, your previous record is of no value in this game.  What is of value are the things that contributed to that 10-0 record.  For example, your team would likely have:

• a big offensive line
• a smart quarterback
• a talented defense
• a clutch kicker

The green PageRank bar is like your 10-0 record.  It won’t help much on it’s own, but it represents other things about your site.  If a site has a PR7 and is ranking well, it’s not ranking there because of the PageRank itself, but because of what that PageRank represents — lots of inbound links, many coming from other quality sites.

This site is a great example of that.  I’ve watched traffic slowly grow since I started writing, and our PageRank has gone up as well.  The PageRank is an indication of the growing number of inbound links that we’ve earned, and those links are helping us rank better, thus increasing our traffic.

Is this a fair assessment of the current state of PageRank?  Do you think it still means more?  Or do you maybe think it’s been pulled from the algorithm and is indeed worthless?

If you’re like me and you’ve been using WordPress since before 2.5 came out, your wp-config file is probably missing a “SECRET_KEY”.  This is a new, one-line entry to the config file that generates a unique cookie for your site.  Some of the recent WordPress attacks have involved cookie spoofing, and this will help prevent that kind of thing.

As far as I can understand, WordPress 2.5.1 is completely secure even without a secret key.  I think this is just a pre-emptive move to prevent cookie-based attacks in the future.  Extra security is always a good thing.

Adding a key is very simple.  Just open up your wp-config.php file and add something like this:

define(’SECRET_KEY’, ‘8675309 abc 123 secret key dont hack me’);

You don’t need to remember the phrase, so make it as long and complex as you can.  If you want, you can visit this WordPress page which will generate a unique key every time you load the page.

WordPress 2.5.1 has just been released, and it’s strongly suggested that you upgrade as soon as possible, due to some security concerns.

Other fixes include:

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

Go download it now, or read about the full list of fixes (over 70 of them) here.

John Lamansky, the “WordPress Expert” has noticed a little snippet of text from WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg that implies we may see WordPress in the next iPhone.  The quote John used:

Mobile is really important. Blackberries, iPhones… and other things… are coming. And I’d like that to be in a core cell phone. They were hoping to do it in time for WordCamp and announce it here, but there is a device maker who is working on actually building WordPress into the device, so it’ll come bundled with it — which will be pretty interesting. I can’t say who it is yet, but there’s only a few out there so you can probably guess.

It sure sounds like the iPhone, doesn’t it?  As John said, even if it’s not bundled with the 2.0 firmware, it’s quite likely we’ll see a third party app that handles it.

We’ll find out soon - probably around June 9.

I think this is a first.  I was looking for a domain name for a new project that I’m working on and came across Red Clay Media.  I really only cared that the URL was taken, but I was curious about the site.  Wow!  It’s a brilliant example of why you should never use mystery meat navigation.

What surprised me even more was the random RSS icon they had on the left side of the screen (I drew the awesome yellow arrow pointing at it in the screen shot above).  You can’t click it!

Anyhow, just had to share that.  Don’t try to be so cool that you forget about basic usability and standards.

Last month I posted some revenue stats about my sites, along with a few goals.  I thought I’d try to re-visit that data at the beginning of each month.

My goals were to diversify better among my sites, diversify better in terms of revenue sources, and then to obviously generate more total revenue.  I only managed to improve one out of three, but for good reason.

My largest site saw a significant boost in AdSense revenue, thanks to some changes that I made.  As a result, that site now has even more of my total revenue, and AdSense still has about the same amount.

Generate more revenue

This is the biggest one, and it’s trending up.  Total revenue across my sites was up by 10.1% from February to March. Woo-hoo!

Diversify among my sites

This month, my largest site accounted for 90.8% of my total revenue.  Again, this is due to some AdSense changes that I made, which I’ll dig into in a later post.

Diversify away from AdSense

I have no problem with them, but I don’t like keeping all of my eggs in the same basket.

• In February, AdSense accounted for 89.7% of my total revenue.  This month it creeped up to 89.8%.
• FastClick’s share increased from 7.3% to 8.4%, as I made a few small changes there.
• FeedBurner revenue fell from 1.6% to just 0.5%.  I can’t explain that one, as the feed that I use for it is only getting larger.
• In an effort to diversify, I ran some ads from Kontera and Chitika.  They were both pitiful, each earning less than 0.1% of my total revenue.  Kontera is now gone from my sites, and Chitika is just about there.

I still would like to diversity a bit more, but it’s tough.  AdSense is doing so well that I hate to turn away from it at all.  The areas I really need to work on expanding are:

• Direct ad sales.
• Affiliate ads.

My overall goals remain the same — have my largest site generate less than 50% of my total revenue, and have AdSense account for less than 50% of my total revenue.  As soon as some of my smaller sites start gaining momentum, I should see some progress toward those goals.