Over the years since I launched this site, there have been periods of highs (when I was highly motivated) and lows (when I was just too busy), but overall, I’ve been committed to sharing my thoughts, insight, ideas, and some tips with all of you. I never paid too much attention to the traffic or rankings of the site, but when I was in my active posting phases, this thing was starting to rock. New articles quickly got posted to Google, and brought in new readers.

It seems that times have changed.

With other sites that I run, blog content is indexed almost instantly. On the other hand, my latest article on this site – a review of my experience with the new Skype 5.0 Beta – posted yesterday morning, still hasn’t been indexed from what I can tell.

I’m guessing that I got the infamous Google Bitchslap, but as we all know, there is just no way to know for sure. For a brief while, I did succumb to the demon inside me and sold a few dollars worth of text ads on the site, but it has been a long time since I’ve removed these (they made me no real money and when I realized that it was against the will of Google, I put a kibosh on it)

So . . . with that in mind, I’ve decided to file a website reconsideration request.

To submit a request, you simply need to sign into Google Webmaster Tools, click on the Site Reconsideration link, and fill out the form. Of course, you want to make sure you’re in compliance with Google’s Quality Guidelines before submitting the request.

Here’s the context of my message; hopefully I have as much as success as Amit (Digital Inspiration ROCKS!) did with his request.

Hello –
I believe that the rankings on this blog have declined significantly over the past years, and have noticed that new articles aren’t being indexed.

For a period, the blog hasn’t been updated as regularly as when it was first launched (when we did very well in the Google results), but I believe that the reason that we saw a decline in our PageRank is that we had a small handful of text ads on the site through a link broker – specifically TextLinkAds.com. These were added a few years ago when it was common practice online, but we haven’t had any kind of text ad on the site in a long time.

The only way this blog is monetized currently is through Google Ads, and we have NO intention of trying to undertake any practices to manipulate the search engines like buying or selling links. Otherwise, we do not employ any kind of SEO service, and have not, nor would we ever, employ any kind of blackhat techniques on the site.

I hope that you’ll re-evaluate this site and can attest that my intent is to follow the Google quality guidelines going forward. If you’d like any supplemental information, I’d be happy to provide it.

Thank you for the reconsideration,
Joshua Dorkin

I’ll keep you all posted of any developments . . . wish me luck!

Update 11/16/10:
I noticed while checking Google Webmaster Tools that I had a message in my inbox from sometime yesterday (same day I posted my request). Google has acknowledged that they received my message, and supposedly they will be reviewing the request in the next weeks. Since I’m doing nothing wrong, I do sincerely hope that they remove any penalty that may currently be applied to the site.

We’ve received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: http://www.timeforblogging.com/

We’ll review the site. If we find that it’s no longer in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines, we’ll reconsider our indexing of the site. Please allow several weeks for the reconsideration request. We do review all requests, but unfortunately we can’t reply individually to each request.

Photo: IntangibleArts

I just learned about a new video from Matt Cutts, thanks to Darren Monroe, that confirms once and for all that Google is NOT using the META KEYWORDS tag in their main search results.

Check it out and keep it in mind as you move forward with your website development and SEO efforts.

Well it seems that Google isn’t finished handing out the pain. After another update in the past day or so, we got kicked to the ground and curbed! I had forgotten what the days of PR2 felt like, but after getting knocked from a PR5 to a PR3 in recent days, it seems like Google is out to strip me of my soul.

How about an announcement letting us all know what the hell is going on here?

There is a Buzz in the air, and it isn’t very good . . .

It seems that in the past few days, Google has changed their PR algorithm, affecting major corporations, webmasters and bloggers alike. In this case, size just doesn’t matter . . . everyone from The Washington Post to Problogger to Engadget to me has been affected by this.

What Was this PR Change All About?
Not sure. The word on the street is that sites are being penalized for selling links. Experts contend that Google has been manually reviewing sites and changing PR as a result of what they find. Has the Big G verified this? There might be evidence, but it seems that no one is 100% certain.

Bloggers and others have been theorizing that this is a ploy by Google to further consolidate power and to force people to use them for advertising, but that’s just one of thousands of theories out there. Until Google comes out and tells us what they have done and why, we have no way of knowing anything.

What does it mean?
I don’t think anyone really knows yet. As PR is one of many factors in Google’s results, this drop, in theory, should have major effects around the globe. So far, it seems, the experts contend that this has not affected traffic or AdSense. On the other hand, as many advertisers and ad networks rely on PR for setting prices, this could have a devastating effect on the revenues of websites around the planet.

Sounds all negative. Are there any positives to this PR Change?
I’ve been reading up on this for 2 days now and have yet to hear anything good about this situation. I have heard rumblings from people that they have seen PR upgrades, but haven’t found any proof. I’d love to hear from anyone who has seen an increase. Maybe we can learn from exploring these sites what has really happened.

What Next?
Keep reading! As time goes on, we’ll certainly learn more about this major update. As Google is the 800 pound gorilla in the world of search, every move they make can have major effects on everyone online. This is an event that is going to be talked about until Google’s next major move.

Is there anything you can do to avoid being harmed by moves like these?
Common sense would say to rely less on Google for everything, but that is not an easy thing to do. Sure there are other Search providers out there, but until one of them starts to seriously compete with Google, the smart thing to do would be to diversify, but also focus on what we’re all doing to make the beast angry. With so much power in the hands of one company, we are all forced to comply or suffer, it seems.

Important Reading on the Topic
If you’re interested in the topic, these articles should give some insight on the developments I’ve just written about:

• Google Page Rank is dead and has been for quite some time – Robert Scoble
• Google Drops PageRank For Many Sites : Paid Links or New Algorithm? – Search Engine Journal
• Google Changing the PageRank Algorithm? – Daily Blog Tips
• Google PageRank Update and its All Down – John Chow
• Google Declares Jihad On Blog Link Farms – TechCrunch
• Google algorithm tweak spooks WWW – TheAge
• ProBlogger – PageRank 4 – Darren Rowse
• Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google – Search Engine Land
• Have you been hit with a Pagerank drop ? – gHacks
• Thanks Google – CopyBlogger
• Google Slams Paid Links? Good or Bad? – WebProNews
• Google PageRank Update In Google Toolbars Worldwide!!! – Aaron Wall
• Nothing Official from Matt Cutts – Yet

Thoughts????

Hey all. After a much needed vacation, I returned home to be bombarded by various headaches that popped out of nowhere. I have been dealing with these and am now ready to jump back in! I’m back!

Breaking News: Google Sued Over Sponsored Links

I must mention an article that I just came upon, titled Google faces landmark lawsuit over sponsored links. This article talks about a lawsuit facing Google, that could alter the way many of us make money online. If you use Google Adsense / Adwords, I suggest you read it and familiarize yourself with what is going on. Keeping up with news like that presented in this piece is essential for anyone who uses the internet as a tool to make money.

We’ll see you again very soon . . .

• I’d like to thanks CNN for sharing with me the incredible AvoidDelays, which is brought to all of us from our nation’s air controllers. This site is chock full of awesome data about flying in the US, including airports to avoid, worst time to fly to certain cities, and much more. If you travel at all, this site is a must for your bookmarks!
• Thanks to ComputerWorld, I learned that Google recently launched Google Trends, an improved version of their previous Zeitgeist. Googe Trends has an awesome feature that allows you to search the 100 fastest rising search terms in the US, which should come in very handy for those bloggers and others who target popular keywords. You can also look at cool trend & historical charts of different terms, something that is pretty fun to fool around with.
• On the other hand, in a more ominous story, apparently, Google doesn’t think it has invaded our personal lives enough, and wants to delve deeper. In a story I learned about from Drudge, the Financial Times interviewed the Google guys and they revealed their EXTREMELY FRIGHTENING plan to take over the world:
  Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand and the company believes that is the logical extension of its stated mission to organise the world’s information.

  Asked how Google might look in five years’ time, Mr Schmidt said: “We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation.

  “The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”

  I’m not sure about the rest of you, but I’m absolutely more afraid of Google then I am the US government under the Bush/Cheney regime. If the government knew as much about everyone as Google did, we’d all be up in arms! I already discussed how they use private data to get better results from Google Blogsearch in the past, and this is just another step towards a complete invasion of all of our privacy. Sadly, people are embracing their efforts instead of fighting them.

  Do you really want any one company to know that much about you? It is indeed a Brave New World and we don’t even realize it!

Non-Existent Free Templates

As many of you now know, I’ve been working on getting an ecommerce website up and running. I decided to use OScommerce for my shopping cart, but now I’m beginning to have second thoughts. I’ve been looking for a few days now and have not been able to find any even half-decent free templates.

I’ve worked with many different web-based programs (wordpress, phpbb, etc.) and have never had a difficult time finding great free templates. I’m just amazed that no one out there is offering them for OSCommerce. My guess is that if someone did, they’d do quite well financially from ads served on their site.

Poor Search Engine Results for “Free OSCommerce Templates

The worst part of it all is that when doing a Google or Yahoo search for “Free OSCommerce Templates” all you get are results from companies offering limited trials to their templates, which expire; you then have to pay to get anything. These guys have worked the SERPs to get themselves high priority rankings. I’d have to say that I haven’t seen a worse set of results from the search engines then this.

Does Anyone Know Where to Find Any Free OSCommerce Templates?
If you do, please help me out here! I’d love to create a large master list of these resources, but so far I’ve struck out.

The Master List – As Begun 5/7/07 – Know of Any Others?

http://how2make.blogspot.com/

In a guest assignment for Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger, Alister Cameron writes an incredible post detailing how Google Blogsearch ranks your blog posts. Using the Google Blogsearch patent application, Alister reveals some incredible information about the data Google uses to determine the quality of a blog or blog post.

He mentions how it looks like Big Brother, and it really does. It appears as though Google is taking data from not only their search results, but from blogrolls, from the qualit of a site lnking to you, from feed subscriptions on the Google Feed Reader, from chats on GTalk, from emails on Gmail, etc. They then use their fancy algorithms to determine weight and ranking. I’m not sure about you, but it looks to me like we have to worry less about the government spying on us then we do Google. Orwell was somewhat correct, but in the real future, it is big business, not governments that are truly to be feared (thanks Charles).

That said, there is much to learn from examining the article on Problogger, as the insight it provides is invaluable. If you haven’t done so already, be sure to bookmark the site, as it is one of the top blogs out there about the “sport” of blogging.

Looking to increase traffic for your website? For a little over a year, the use of linkbait has exploded across the net. People have figured out little tricks for building traffic. some of which are very clever, but at some point, doesn’t it dilute the quality of ranking results?

Gaming the Search Engines is Too Easy!
Sure, you can do something inventive to bring a mass of traffic to your site, but if the traffic is not targeted or if the post is unrelated to your site’s purpose, you’re still building up backlinks and authority in the eyes of the search engines. This doesn’t make any sense. In addition, I think it just shows how easily the Search engines can be gamed.

In the “clever” example mentioned earlier, a webmaster posted a political cartoon on a webpage for a cabinetry company. The posting brough him thousands of visitors through social bookmarking and social media sites. He gained at least 40 backlinks from it (according to him), and as a result will score higher in the rankings by the engines.

Does he deserve the traffic that ge gets from the stunt? Sure. Does his carpentry site deserve all the extra buzz it will get as a result? Probably not, but because the SEs allow themselves to be manipulated, he is set. Now all he has to do is duplicate the experiment and he’ll start to see some gaina in search results.

I have nothing against people getting traffic to their sites and being creative, but I just wonder if linkbaiting will get out of hand and really reduce the quality of results from the search providers.

There is nothing worse for a webmaster than finding out that your site has been copied. Every time I find out that someone has stolen my intellectual property my blood boils! Instead of just getting angry, there are steps you can take to stop the violations of your Copyright, which I’ve outlined in this article.

First, you should know that the US Government has written a law, the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA), the content of which you can find on the U.S. Copyright Office‘s Web Site (http://www.copyright.gov). This law protects, amongst other things, intellectual property online.

If you are already aware that someone copied your site, you can just skip ahead to the section market “What to Do When You Discover Someone Has Violated Your Copyright and Stolen Your Website’s Content”. If you’re not sure if someone is copying your site, keep on reading.

How to Find Sites That Are Stealing Your Content

There is one tool that is essential for bloggers and webmasters called CopyScape. CopyScape allows webmasters to enter the URL of their individual pages, and will conduct a search for content from within those pages.

The site will show results indicating other websites that may have identical content. Depending on the popularity of your site, you may find that there are no copyright infringements, or you may find many (last night I found 5 sites that had stolen material from one of my sites).

Who Can Help Stop the Copyright Violators?

The first line of defense you have is the host of the site. Hosting companied do not want to be sued for letting one of the sites on their server violate your copyright. They usually act very quickly if you provide proper evidence.

Sometimes, you’ll find that the offending site is hosting on their own servers. If this is the case, you will have to go through the site’s Registrar. Registrars are also protective of copyright violations. A registrar will also be helpful in stopping the site from stealing your content.

The Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.) are also helpful when it all comes down. They have the ability to remove a site from their results if it is breaking the law.

What to Do When You Discover Someone Has Violated Your Copyright and Stolen Your Website’s Content

Once you’ve discovered that someone is stealing your website’s content there are several things you can do. I’ll share what has worked for me.

Step 1: Find the Owner, Host, and Registrar of the Offending Website
You want to find out who runs the site that is stealing your content. Start by doing a WHOIS search of that site. I use whois.sc, but sometimes the site will not give you all the details you need.

There are a few key pieces of information you want to look for, that will help you deal with the situation:

1. Registrant – This is typically the owner of the site. You will need this information.
2. Registrar – This is the company that the site is registered with. You will also need this information.
3. Domain Servers – This information will give you an idea of who is the host of the site
Although you have this information, you are still not finished doing your research. If there is not a lot of information about the Registrant, you may need to check another WHOIS site. I will look at the Registrar and then use their WHOIS tool (just do a search for “registrar name whois”).

You will need to do another whois search for the information listed as “Domain Servers”. If the servers end up being a webhost, you will need to keep their information.

Step 2: Visit The Offending Site’s Host’s TOS or Legal Page
If you’ve found that this site has a host (and is not hosting their own site), you need to visit that host’s Legal Page or Terms of Service (TOS) page. Here, you will find what their requirements are for dealing with copyright violations. Keep this page handy and write down any email address for the legal department for the host.

Step 3: Visit The Offending Site’s Registrar’s TOS or Legal Page
Most registrars like Network Solutions or GoDaddy wil also have requirements for dealing with copyright infringement. You want to keep their page handy and write down any email for their legal departments.

Step 4: Find a Contact Email for the Offending Website
Using either the Registrant info from WHOIS, you want to keep the email address of the site’s owner handy. You can also look around their site for their information.

Step 5: Take Screenshot’s of All Material That Has Been Stolen
Now you want to keep all proof that they actually violated your copyright. Use your computer’s screenshot capabilities to take images of their site with your material. I will also take shots of my site, including the places where this material was taken from. Keep this information in a folder on your computer and name the files so you know what is what. This info may come in handy down the line if there is any question.

Now that you’ve done your research, it is time to put together an email.

Step 6: Email The Copyright Violator, Their Host, Their Registrar, and/or The Search Engines
The next thing I recommend doing is contacting via email the owner of the site (if you can find their info), their host (if they aren’t hosting their own site), and their registrar. I also email my lawyer (and recommend you do the same) to be sure they are in the loop and that they have all evidence.

I have an email that I adjust for all cases, but you can use it as a template:

TO: COPYRIGHT VIOLATOR
CC. YOUR ATTORNEY, THEIR HOST & REGISTRAR’s Legal department

SUBJECT: Copyright Claim DOMAIN NAME OF COPYRIGHT VIOLATOR Is Violating YOURDOMAIN’s Copyright

Dear DOMAIN NAME OF COPYRIGHT VIOLATOR Owners, (or put their name here)

It has come to my attention that you, DOMAIN NAME OF COPYRIGHT VIOLATOR.COM, have made unauthorized use of copyright protected material owned by BiggerPockets.com.
Your page, located at: URL OF THEIR PAGE , blatantly copied our page located at: URL OF THE PAGE THEY COPIED

I have reserved all rights to the domain and registered the copyright. You are in violation of your host HOST’s NAME, your registrar, REGISTRAR’s NAME’s Terms of Service, and of The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA)

You neither asked for nor received permission to use the work nor to make or distribute copies of it. Therefore, I believe you have willfully infringed my rights under 17 USC § 101, et seq. and could be liable for statutory damages as high as $100,000.

You are asked to immediately cease the use and distribution of all infringing works derived from YOURDOMAIN.com, and all copies of it, and destroy such copies immediately, and that you desist from this or any other infringement of my rights in the future.

If I have not received an affirmative response from you within 72 hours indicating that you have fully complied with these requirements, I shall consider taking the full legal remedies available to rectify this situation. Please note, your registrar information is noted in the message below.

Your prompt reply is appreciated.

Sincerely,

YOUR NAME
Domain Owner of YOUR DOMAIN

So far, I’ve found over 10 websites who have stolen material from my site. In every case so far, this letter has worked. If either the host or registrar are not helpful, there is still hope.

In the event that it doesn’t work in the future, I plan on following up with my attorney and letting him take over, but I will not stop my efforts there . . .

Step 7: Contact the Search Engines
The search engines aren’t fond of people who violate copyright. Just follow the directions on their legal pages.

Google’s Intellectual Property Policy
It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. For directions and more information, please click here.”

Yahoo’s Copyright and Intellectual Property Policy

Conclusion
By following the above steps, you should be able to deal with those scumbags who think they can just steal your intellectual property. Although this is not “legal advice”, it should be very helpful if you’re having problems.

You should check CopyScape a few times a year just to make sure that no one else is breaking the law!

Please let me know if you end up following my advice and if it helps or not!

I shot a video of my dog Brooklyn this afternoon at the farm, hanging out with some pigs. You have to see the video. It is hysterical!

I’ve got a few more and will post them online soon!

I just found out from Google Blogoscoped that you can now ping Google with blog updates. Of course, this is to update the new Google Blog Search.