Translation

Microsoft is dumping these blogs anyway, and maybe gaining some other value from giving 30M users to Automattic.

This is like upgrading Windows 7 to Ubuntu (yeah yeah yeah)

Problem?

Of those 30 million live spaces blogs, I bet 15 million of them don’t comply with Automattic’s rather strict terms of service, and of course Automattic don’t support any form of advertising unless you are a V.I.P.

Over a six month period, beginning today, Windows Live Spaces users will have the option to move their blogs to WordPress.com. To make this possible, we’ve created a brand new importer for Windows Live Spaces to WordPress.com. New Windows Live users will also be offered a WordPress.com blog when they choose to create a new blog.

That phrase is a little ambiguous but try this comment by raananbarcohen

@liamdaly — redirects will work forever and you can pick any WordPress.com URL you would like, and then map it with a custom domain.

Free Unrestricted 301 Redirects – Data Portability 101

I have complained in the past quite vocally about how badly Blogger/Blogspot treat people who leave their service by sticking interstitials in the redirects… I ended up a couple of months ago removing 100 pages of historical content back to Blogspot to effectively let it rot because there was no effective way for it to be an integral part of this site.

Microsoft need to find a way to 301 redirect their existing bloggers to whereever they require, as a free service, or WordPress need to provide that service for them. WordPress haven’t done that up until now.

The only way to move from WordPress.com is to pay a $15/year service fee for domain mapping. That is on top of the fees you pay for domain registration.

In many ways the most valuable thing you create when blogging is not the content, but the links to the content. You can always improve content, merge it together, even delete an article totally, but you have the option to redirect a visitor to something more current, and there is a search engine benefit.

Microsoft & WordPress.com need to come up with a better option because I know many real bloggers on Live Spaces who actually make a living from the occasional advert or affiliate link.

The headline from Techcrunch is misleading – this isn’t outsourcing it is selling out.

Their small businesses are effectively being terminated.

• Get one page indexed and ranking
• Write a second post linking to the first (which will also then trackback to the second page)
• Use the same primary keyword in both posts

The second method I use, for topics that get frequent mentions, are tags.

• My post with the highest number of links on a topic will most likely rank well
• My tag page which leads to further posts on the topic will form the secondary listing

Examples Of Title Based Google Indented Listing

I have at least partially recovered my search ranking since yesterday for Players With Money, and achieved a double listing, though how effective depends on which data center you look at, and geographic location.
Players With Money is being promoted to a number of very large email lists currently, and this is bringing me search traffic – as I wrote yesterday, it is a great service, and worth checking out.

I also have a double indented listing for Stompernet Site Seer – but I am not ranking anywhere near as well for Stomper Site Seer – I have tweaked the page, and also added a tag page for that specific search term.

A search just on Site Seer does however bring the results I hoped for.

Another money terms I rank comfortably for is Social Power Linking – this new link will probably help the page which mentions the new price rank in the top spot and add a little more longevity. Jack has to settle for 3rd and 4th place for his own product, but I am sure he doesn’t mind.

Example Of Tag Based Indented Listings

I don’t want to get too graphic heavy on this page, so I will just make a quick list of a few examples

• Blogcatalog
• Dofollow
• SocialSpark

I really should get one for Blogrush and knock Tamar down a couple of spots. Since I wrote about the free traffic from Blogrush that Alex received, I have actually had one day when Blogrush combined with Traffic Jam was my highest referrer.
It is not server breaking traffic, but it is targeted, and 100+ targeted visitors is not to be sneezed at.

You would think I would actually have one for PayPerPost by now – I do have a first page ranking with a tag page, but my most linked to post used “Pay Per Post” in both the headline and title tag – that was easily fixed, and with the additional link I will probably give that post a boost up the SERPs to go knocking on the door of both Wikipedia and Techcrunch.

Techcrunch with their “Crunchbase” in many ways kill their search engine traffic, especially with the way they frequently don’t interlink between posts with keywords. Linking to yourself with keywords is just as important as to other people.
You would think that with all the times they have written about PayPerPost they would have a double listing… they don’t.

Crunchbase is slowly rising up the SERPs but are 2 listings on different domains really a good alternative to a double listing?

Old… Old… Stompernet Video

Ok, so it is not that old, it is from the launch of Stompernet Smarts

Who do you think ranks first for Stompernet Smarts? I do

This video is just 22 minutes, and Andy Jenkins shows you how to get indented listings the scientific way.

Now if Michael Arrington was a member of Stompernet, he or his web developers would know how to get double listings at the top of the search engines.
Currently his team have managed to get a single listing for Facebook… with Crunchbase… just below a 2 year old post from Mashable.

A similar query for Myspace, and both are out of the top30

Lets be a little more topical, the current Microsoft Yahoo deal – all they would probably have to do to have a double listing for a search term like “Microsoft Yahoo”, without quotes would be to do a little interlinking between these 2 posts

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/01/wow-microsoft-offers-446-billion-to-acquire-yahoo/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/04/microsoft-pursues-yahoo-takeover/

Though they should also be getting these newer posts linked in

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/03/breaking-microsoft-walks/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/18/yahoo-microsoft-back-at-the-table/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/19/microsoft-v-yahoo-this-isnt-even-funny-any-more/

Fresh search engine results isn’t just a job for Google to handle, site owners who know what they are doing can heavily influence them too.

There are plugins which can probably do enough interlinking to make a difference, and keep the search listings current, and help these top blogs remain looking fresh in the SERPs, or it can be done manually.
Linking purely off-site to Crunchbase, and then back to newer posts isn’t going to achieve double listings.

Now Techcrunch is doing very well for itself, at the start of the year they were hovering around 600,000 subscribers, and now they are 940k+ – I am sure a huge amount of that is related to the Microsoft / Yahoo deal, and possibly Facebook.

Could they be over 1,000,000 if they had their search results current?

If you look at Google trends data, the number of people searching for “microsoft yahoo” without quotes over the last few months has been very similar, and in some cases more than the people searching for stock quotes with MSFT or YHOO in Google.

For a blog looking to sell advertising, that is an awful lot of potential subscribers left on the table, probably reading their Microsoft Yahoo news… somewhere else.

This is the kind of stuff the guys at Stompernet teach for free, you should see some case studies.

Stompernet will be reopening their doors tomorrow, and it is unlikely I will be mentioning them again. They provide great material for free, but ultimately often it seems like I am beating a dead horse.
I certainly didn’t come close to winning that MacBook Air at the weekend, though I expected as much… in fact over the course of this week I haven’t managed to encourage enough people to sign up for the various locked FREE resources to win… even a digital picture frame

What ultimately is the value of building an authority blog, and dominating search results, if you don’t at the same time leverage your traffic into a responsive email list?

Update

Yesterday Andy Jenkins released a sneak peak inside Stompernet

Now if you haven’t already, make sure you have downloaded all the free videos to your Hard Drive – they are available for download in the right hand navigation.

You never know when you might want to refer to them again – I have lots of Stomper videos recorded on DVD as well.

Also make sure you have signed up for the 100% Free Stomper Site Seer – I know for many the first version might seem a bit basic, but the guys working on it really know their stuff, and I expect it to be immense value in the future.