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Thats just funny. Read More Here

In an article pointed out by Seth Godin, a company, Kinderstart, is suing the search giant because their search rankings dropped for no apparant reason. The drop in search rankings caused a huge drop in revenue, since they can’t charge as much for advertising if they aren’t bringing in the traffic.

What’s wrong with these people? Why can’t they stop acting like little kids and suck it up. If they wanted a consistent source of revenue, then they probably shouldn’t have built their revenue model on an inconsisten, uncontrollable source such as search traffic.

I’ve been pretty lucky so far. Up until recently, I’ve averaged a couple spam comments per week on my blog. For some reason or another, things have changed and now I receive several per day. What happened? I’m not too sure. It happened roughly the same time I started blogging more frequently. Along with the traffic increase, the comment spam also increased. So how do I stop comment spam? Easy, right? Just install a wordpress plugin that handles comment spam protection. But wait, that’s a long frikkin list! Which one is the best? What do other bloggers recommend?

I have yet to figure out what the real value is in comment spam. Most Wordpress blogs use the rel=nofollow tag, which will prevent any search engine from following links in the comments, and any pagerank from being distributed. Are comment spambots created for the sole purpose of frustration? Or is it really a secret plot of the pharmaceutical companies to increase brand awareness by any means necessary?

Google unofficially announced that anyone using their AdWords program that has suffered from click-fraud, since the start of their program, will be eligible for reimbursement for those clicks. I don’t know the details of the original case that spawned this proposed settlement, but it sounds like the settlement is beneficial for those who have suffered from click-fraud, and comforting for those of us who have not. And since the reimbursement is in the form of future credit in Google’s AdWords program, Google has a chance to redeem themselves to those advertisers.

So if I were to click on one of my own ads (whether it be due to my distrust of their software, or testing my own tracking software), would those clicks be eligible for reimbursement? And if so, I want my money back! (Google, if you are reading this, I’ll settle for a $25 Starbucks card)

There are probably millions of blogs out there that I have never read, and thousands that I would probably enjoy reading. It’s a shame that I don’t have the resources to find all of them, or the time to read them (if I could find all of them). When I read John Scott’s $10k Blog Challenge, I figured it would be a good opportunity for me to take the plunge and seek out many of these undiscovered blogs…and if I won the contest doing it, that would be the icing on the cake.

Here is how I will be approaching this task:

• First of all, I have to actually enjoy reading the blogs. I think that good blogs should be rewarded, and bad blogs shouldn’t.
• The blog has to focus more on content than on advertising. If the site has more Google ads and banner ads than it has content, then I’m not interested.
• The blog cannot be in Technorati’s Top 100. I’m looking for the lesser known bloggers of the world. I’m also going to try and stay away from blogs that belong to blog networks, but its not a deal-breaker.

I will be searching for blogs on my own, but if you have a blog, or know of a good blog that fits my above requirements, put the blog’s name and url in the comments below.

Am I an expert at this? No Way! I’ve done my share of research on the subject, and now it’s time to put some of these methods to the test.

My goal is to get 1k unique visitors per day. I want my visitors to visit my site on a Volunteer basis (not through some forced clickthrough scheme that many Increase Your Traffic sites might try to sell you). Currently my site hits an average of 50 unique visitors per day, and around 300-500 total page views.

How can you accomplish your goal?

• Writing solid content about stuff that interests you, that other people might find useful as well.
• Connecting with other like-minded bloggers
• When referencing another blog, utilizing the Trackback feature
• Find out why your visitors are reading your blog, and cater more to their interests
• Try to offer your visitors something that they won’t find anywhere else