Linkrain Articles

After changing my robots.txt to disallow the Google Bot to spider some duplicate pages, I finally see the first results. A while back I wrote about how to get your site out of Google’s supplemental result index and since than I made only some small changes to my robots.txt file. After one month, my supplemental pages went down from 1.200 to 1.030. This does not seem to be a lot, but one month ago Linkrain was counting 150 pages less than now (new links added in the directory, new categories, new articles). So that’s a total of 320 pages less in the supplemental index. Also Google’s webmaster tools start to show first results about pages that were not allowed to be spidered by Google.

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TouchGraph is a free tool which I came across a few days ago, that can be used to find the leading website for a certain niche.
The TouchGraph Google Browser reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google’s database of related sites. This tool is only useful if you want to make some research about keywords related to your website and if you have a website that is at least one year old (you won’t get any results for “related:www.yoursite.com” if your website is quite new). This tool is using Google’s “related:” function to display the top websites for certain keyword queries and makes a graph listing the major related websites.

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Do you remember the article I wrote about how to increase your feed readers by not updating a blog? At the end of the article I wrote that I could achieve some more detailed information about this experiment if I would stop to write for a whole week. Finally, due to a lot of travelling, I was not able to post for 6 days. These 6 days proved that everything written in that articles is true and that your feed readers will probably increase if you don’t post!

The maximum number of feed readers I’ve ever reached, was 41. After not writing for 6 long days, the readership increased and went up to 49! This is really an astonishing result. It also seems that not only your feed readership will increase if you stop writing for a few days, but also your Mybloglog community. Before my blogging break, I had 43 members. Now Linkrain is counting 51 community members!

In the meanwhile I also managed to get into Technorati’s TOP 10k at position 8,931! Linkrain is now between the 10.000 most famous blogs on the Internet.

Also the Alexa Rank got better and better. I’m very close to get the rank below 40.000!

And what do you think about a Free Wordpress Theme released only 9 days ago that already got 2.260 downloads? This is going to become a very popular one.

Finally, the most important update: I’m back from my travels and I have time to blog again :D

Today I was doing some research on Google Image Search results to find ways about how to get traffic through image search queries, and I noticed a very strange thing. If you search for “Web Directory” you will get this result as output:

The first result, is a screenshot of Dmoz, Google’s Web Directory. After a closer look at the website hosting this image, I noticed that it’s name is “dmoz.jpg” and it’s ALT text is “open directory”. This is not exactly the result I would expect to see if I’m an internet user searching fo “Web Directory” on Google Image Search. It looks like Google is placing it on the first position because it considers the words “dmoz” and “web directory” the same thing. I would call this “cheating on search results”.
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Acid Green Pro is very stylish and professional free Wordpress Theme. Main colors are Green,white and grey (header looks similar to Technorati). It has a three column layout optimized for FireFox, IE7, IE6, IE5.5 and IE5.0 . It is also featuring a very user friendly structure: fixed width, centered layout, right and left widget ready sidebar. You can download it for free here: Acid Green Pro
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In the most recent article I wrote about search engine optimization i described the techniques I’m using to rank high in search engines for certain keyword,s and stated that I was going to target a very difficult one: “Web Directory“. After only three weeks I was able to get on the second of Google’s search result pages at position 17. This week I was able to achieve position 12 (!!) for a couple of days but than I was kicked back to position 17. Ranking on the second page for a certain keyword is not bad, and here is the proof:
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I will have to travel a lot the next days (until the 12th of july), so I don’t know yet if I’ll be able to write a new article every day like I’m doing since the end of April.  Anyway, I’ll try my best to make a new entry every day. Blogging frequency should be normal again the 13th of July. If I don’t succeed in writing an article a day, I will make more entries after the 13th of july to keep my average blogging frequency at 30 articles/month.

I will also try to answer all the emails and comments I receive, and to approve every submitted link (in the Directory) within 24 hours.

Cheers

Andreas

“@rctic Business” is a professional, very clean and light Business Wordpress theme. It has a three column layout optimized for FireFox, IE7, IE6, IE5.5 and IE5.0 . Fixed width, centered layout, right and left widget ready sidebar makes it easily customizable. You can download it for free here: @arctic Business

License: design is released under the Creative Commons license:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/

Preview:

Checkout the LIVE DEMO

The theme is free and does not contain any sponsor links (only the designer link)

Yes, the title is right, I did not make any mistake. The first time I noticed this was three weeks ago when I came across a blog called Mubinahmed.com. He had nearly 130 feed readers and was writing in average 1 post a day. Than he stopped writing for some days and his feed readers increased. He wrote a short post after one week and than he disappeared again for other 2 weeks. The strange thing is that his readership did not decrease in those 2 weeks. He had always between 130-140 readers (reached even 155 when he was not writing) although he was not delivering any valuable content to them. My feed reader number is always bouncing between 35 and 45. Two days ago it was 36 and than I wrote an article about search engine optimisation which brought it up to 43. Yesterday I decided to not write any article and see what would  happen to my feed reader number. As I expected, it stayed the same.
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Today I came across two very useful PageRank tools . The first will list your backlinks (max 2500) with PageRank. This seems to be nothing new, there are a lot of backlink checkers you can find only by searching for “backlink checker” in Google. But at a closer look I noticed that this tool is featuring some functions that make it better and more useful than others:

• Sort backlinks by PageRank
• Get anchor text of backlinks

This is actually the first tool I’ve found that is able to sort website backlinks by PageRank. This function combined with the abilty to get the anchor text of each backlink makes it very powerful.
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