Posts Tagged ‘Blogging’

Blog Comments – To Follow Or Not To Follow?

Friday, April 18th, 2008

I have been a bit confused on which side to be in the controversial “DoFollow” and “NoFollow” debate. Each proponents have cogent reasons why their idea is the best for a blogger.

The term “nofollow” is an instruction to search engines such as Google that a hyperlink should not influence the link owner’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to discourage spammers, thereby improving the quality of search engine results. Unfortunately, it makes nonsense of the potential benefit that bloggers who drop comments on a site would have had since the links to their site adds no value to the popularity of their sites.
I read convincing points in the post of Mehul, I encourage you to read the full post (I do not want to reproduce the whole article here).

However, today after reading Jeff and Hardley Jane’s arguments, I have decided to join the “DoFollow” group.
In order to still take advantage of some of the points listed by the “NoFollow” group, I installed a plugin NoFollow Free that gives me some control on who I will allow to have a “DoFollow” and those I will deny. I will be experimenting with this decision for a month. If the result is undesirable, I will change and make an update to this post.

I sure will love to learn from your experience via your comments 😉 . Thanks for visiting. Cheers.

New Alexa Rankings System

Thursday, April 17th, 2008

I got online this morning and I was greeted with a drastic drop in my Alexa ranking. Yesterday it was reading 315,865 but this morning I saw 102,798 that was too drastic a drop and I was wondering what happened overnight. Is there a sudden surge in traffic to my site (I wish that was the case)? When I visited the Alexa site, I was greeted with a banner announcing that the Ranking System has been changed.

Yesterday, a blogger, A Nairobian’s Perspective!, blogged about my ranking being 88 for Nigeria. I was excited then, but when I checked my ranking for Nigeria today, I discovered that it has dropped from 88 down to 157. So I guess the new system has modify the old algorithm that was being used for calculating site rankings. The Alexa team explained that the new Ranking System is more reflective of the popularity of the sites being ranked. Also the ranking is not restricted to the Alexa Users Community. I believe this is a welcome idea. You can read more about the new system on their website here.

The Million Blog List & Wiki Blog Directory

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

I have often wondered how many blogs actually exist online (just curious). Some claim there are over 70million (that sounds like a very huge figure). While surfing today, I discovered that I am not alone. Some people have decided to find out how long it will take to get 1,000,000 blogs to list themselves on their site, Million Blog List. That to me is a herculean task.

Well, since it cost me nothing to get listed, I hopped in and listed NaijaEcash, it is number 390. From there I also visited their wiki site Wiki Blog Directory and listed NaijaEcash for free. If you are a newbie looking for traffic, I will suggest you try this out. I am positive that it will do no harm. It might possibly do some good. Remember it is free.

When you are through checking it out, I will like to hear your view. Who knows you may teach me something I never knew. Thanks in advance!

Network With Your Peers – Stop Bootlicking!

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

As a newbie blogger, it is natural that you may have little or no audience with the big shots in your market niche. 🙁 Instead of running around the big shots trying to catch their attention you will be better off building relationship with your peers 🙂 . Start making friends with bloggers who are newbies like yourself, they are in need of friends just like you, so you will not need so much effort to catch their attention. They tend to be more friendly and willing to reciprocate love.
When I first started blogging (Saved By Jesus), I wanted desperately to establish links with well known bloggers. I embarked on what is commonly refer to as “bootlicking”(I visited the famous blogs daily, and put so much effort in dropping quality comments in a bid to catch the attention of the blogger). After some months, I got angry because all the effort brought no result whatsoever. Later, I read some tips given by Yaro Starak, I applied it and lo and behold, I discovered that it works. Now I have friends online who relate to me as their peer. They show me so much respect. Every visit I make to their blog is reciprocated eventually, if not immediately. And you know what, the circle is growing. I even have someone who wants me to be his mentor (quite interesting, considering the fact that I am a newbie myself) 😉 . (more…)

Site Statistics Can Ruin The Fun Of Blogging

Monday, April 14th, 2008

Constant checking of your site statistics can ruin the fun of blogging. If you look at the statistics frequently enough, it will change your attitude towards blogging. When the graph is climbing up, you will feel on top and naturally more ideas will flow, however when it starts going down, you may suffer writer block. The ideas seems to cease and you feel like packing up the blog.

So is it wrong to check the site statistics? No, that is not what I mean. I just want to point out that the daily movement of your site statistics should not be allowed to discourage you from working towards your goal.

I have observed that every blog or website, no matter how popular, suffers the same fluctuations in site statistics. Ask successful bloggers, they will tell you that some days, week and months are better than others (sometimes the fluctuation has no correlation with the quality of posts on your site).

A post that did not receive attention when you wrote it may suddenly become a traffic puller because its content addresses an issue that is currently among the hot topics in the blogging community.

However, you need to study the trend being shown by the statistics at least once a week so that you will know what the trend has been like. The statistics is meant to be a tool (for improving on your effort), not a verdict on the success or failure of your blog!

If you have a goal and you are working on it, then you are already succeeding. It does not matter if Google Analytics, Alexa, FeedBurner and other statistic tools think otherwise. 🙂