Skip to main content

Timing is Everything

Looking back at our first two article submissions we may have left yesterday's too late - I hadn't noticed the lag because the stats presentation is remarkably positive. We could miss the boat altogether with this one.

Some SEO chat suggests that Google may already be on to this approach and there could even be problems with duplicate copy so we shall not be going overboard on this one. The duplicate copy concern also attaches to press releases and cloned directory entries so I don't think that should be too much of an issue.

Speaking of timing I have also picked on a site called rankpulse.com which claims to keep the pulse of Google rankings by monitoring positions in the top ten for 1000 top key words it monitored the volume of change each day. It seems to run at about 2% per day with a couple of one day spikes of up to 10% during the course of the last year - those spikes don't very obviously coincide with Jagger's various phases but we know that Google release changes progressively and depending how rankpulse accesses data centers that could smooth out the effects. It also suggests that they are being successful in targeting specific 'optimisation' tactics and the relatively small proportion of sites that adopt them. Occasionally it records no changes at all. This is substantially at odds with the approach which used to apply when Google would have a major update each month and fits in better with the image of their using material freshly collected by BoogleBot the following day as we saw with our little experiment earlier this year.

Added later: The submission cycle was much quicker this time and the article is out there now - but not sure if any of them have been picked up and used yet.

Popular posts from this blog

Adding to the collection or ...

There are more opportunities to add to this collection but we think that it is now time to make some additional payment options available. For low cost items, credit card transactions are rather expensive so we will need to trade the benefits to us of larger orders against a premium for individual track purchases. This means adding shopping cart facilities along side the simple BitPass functionality and is going to be a bit of a programming challenge. More of this anon - in the mean time here is another Brandenburg Concerto LoFi streaming sample - first movement of No3 from Johann Sebastian Bach himself and our arrangement on steel drums and marimba - full HiFi track only 0.99$(US).

Shop Re-opens

The PHP upgrade on my server precipitated closure of the shop for a couple of weeks but I finally found the time to work through the backlog of OS Commerce upgrades that I had been putting off and Lo and Behold the shop is working again. I still need to do a bit of testing on the shopping cart arithmetic and make sure that the downloading is still working properly after the changes I have made. I'll also have a look at the recent contributions to see if there are any other improvements I should be making. In the mean time there has been another surge of Ranking changes on Google as reported on Rankpulse and it is evident that our rankings continue to swing around on a daily basis but our overall position and visitor numbers seem pretty stable - even the shop closure didn't seem to have much of an impact.

Out of Beta

Blogger is out of beta and that was pretty painless. The new features look quite interesting so we'll give them a go shortly. No collaborators on the search engine yet so I think we'll do a page on the main site and see what we can achieve from there. My news group post killed the thread I responded to - so nothing from that source either. An index page update was picked up by Google the following day so we seem to have all that part of the system sorted and I finally got round to tidying up the title and description so that might generate more responses. We are ending the year on over 2000 visitors a week on the main site but not many on this blog - I'm really doing it for my personal benefit now but it helps to imagine that anyone could come along and read it. In fact I suspect that we have far more readers of individual pages thrown up by searches than we do regular readers.