My immediate though was to take a look at Lorelle’s sitemap.xml

• Homepage daily priority
• Every other page updated on a weekly basis?

That seems like a good way to tell the spiders to index your site less often than they currently do.

With Lorelle you would certainly want spiders checking the home page hourly as she is sometimes the source of breaking news.

Then I looked at the sitemap with a little more detail, and in particular the entry for her most recent post, the Cyclical Nature of Blog Stats – a post worthy of a link anyway so this is a 2-in-1.

This entry was written by Lorelle VanFossen and posted on June 16, 2008 at 4:57 am

Ah but I know Lorelle writes posts sometimes in batches and schedules them for publishing. Lets look at the XML

<loc>http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2008/06/16/the-cyclical-nature-of-blog-stats/</loc>
		<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
		<priority>0.6</priority>

		<lastmod>2008-06-11T18:59:24+00:00</lastmod>

Last modified 5 days before it was published.

Just for good measure, lets look at the home page

<loc>http://lorelle.wordpress.com/</loc>
		<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
		<priority>1.0</priority>
		<lastmod>2008-06-12T02:05:56+00:00</lastmod>

Wrong again – today is the 17th, Lorelle published a post on 16th June, which updated the home page, but it is not reflected in the sitemap.

Sometimes you might be better off with no sitemap at all…

5/10 for finally fulfilling a user request
1/10 for implementation (so far)

When announced, Techcrunch were not too hot on the new site.

Mathew Ingram also posted on the subject calling it a tax on the stupid.

Here is what I commented 1 month ago on Mathew’s blog

Hi Mathew

I believe this one will sell out faster than the original and he will make a huge amount more money on this.

The reason website owners buy the pixels is because they want traffic, and maybe a backlink from the site.

The lotto is legal, because the winners are not having to pay for a ticket, they are just visitors who click on adverts, visit sites, and probably have to read the site for a certain number of seconds before they “earn” their lotto prize entry.

Lots of traffic exchange programs work on a similar manual clicking system.

He also has a nice backend… email addresses from subscriptions. I am sure he will be able to use that to promote anything he likes in the future, and to drive additional traffic back to the site over the coming months.

That incentive to click is going to to mean a many fold increase in traffic over the previous incarnation, and I haven’t heard of many complaints about his first effort.

This site is a true next generation of the same idea, unlike many of the copycat sites based on selling pixels, words etc.

I think this time around the advertising will be much better organised, and there will be some much larger players involved from day one.

Analysis of MillionDollarHomepage

Here is the current status. As is easy to judge, it was a massive success, driven heavily by word-of-mouth “grass roots” advertising, with some professional PR at later stages to ensure continued momentum.

Lets have a look at some Alexa data (yes I know it isn’t 100% reliable, but these sites are set up in similar ways with similar traffic sources)

There was only a slow decline in traffic over a number of months, with a significant 2nd major traffic spike when mainstream press got hold of the story.

Pixelotto Analysis

Just 1 month old, but lets look at the Alexa data.

In this case it is a 3 month graph to show more detail.

Lets look at the 2 sites side-by-side

There was a similar initial launch peak, but the traffic has been slowing down far more rapidly, with far fewer people talking about it.

There has also been quite a slow uptake in advertising purchases. At launch (from memory) Pixeloto attained approximately $100,000 worth of advertising. During the following month, only an additional $50,000 have been added to the money pool.

Pixelotto Design Flawed?

I don’t think there are any problems with the overall business model. I stand by what I stated in my initial comments. This site should be viable, the problem lies somewhere else.

Pixelotto Business Implementation Flawed?

It is not just how good an idea is, but how well you execute it.

1. Was the launch too close to Christmas to attract press interest?
2. Alex has a large pool of money to use for promoting his new offering, but doesn’t seem to be using it. He has just relied on free press based on his previous success. He should be spending more money not less. It isn’t as newsworthy this time around.
3. Previously there was a story, with a blog. This time around no blog in sight
4. The mailing list – Alex is building a mailing list, which could be the engine for current and future promotion – a mailing list is useless if you don’t use it
5. Success breeds success sometimes, but if the current venture is not showing legs, it could die very fast. It is necessary to stimulate the success so it becomes newsworthy

Links & Backlinks

Another gauge of success, and ultimately how attractive the site is for advertising.

Links are what bring in the traffic, and what might provide some level of additional search engine benefit.

The following screen shots are taken from MSN Live Search, as they tend to show more links than other services currently.

MillionDollarHomePage was very successful in gaining lots of links from high quality sites.

Pixelotto has gained high quality links, but not very many. I doubt this will represent more than PR5 in the next Google update.

Blogosphere

Blog marketing was certainly one avenue for traffic that Pixelotto should be exploiting better than previously. It isn’t happening.
Here are some current charts for

MillionDollarHomePage:- Source Technorati

Pixelotto:- Source Technorati

What seems amazing is that MillionDollarHomePage seems to still be gaining more blog attention than Pixelotto.

How to Fix Pixelotto

Alex needs to get his finger out and promote the hell out of Pixelotto. He is sure to have some change left over from his previous venture. It is time to leverage all that he learned previously, use press releases extensively and get his PR agency earning their pay checks.
If it costs him a few 100K to make the site a success, it is still a good business. He can’t expect 1000% profit margin this time around, at least until Pixelotto has cycled though once and has a massive mailing list to drive future cycles.
A radical step would be to allocate the first $1,000,000 to prizes rather than to the pocket of Alex.
An additional step would be a custom email system which reminded viewers of the site every 2 days (to get more chance of winning) suggesting sites to visit.
Without press coverage, advertisers are not going to invest and Pixelotto will never achieve the success of its predecessor.

Categories are for storing your documents into nice managable chucks on related topics.

Tagging can and should go far beyond categories in relating content to specific keywords.

Here is a good example:-

WordPress Training
Wordpress Tutorials
Wordpress Tuition

I would suggest you wouldn’t want to have all 3 phrases as a category in your sidebar. You could however be quite justified in tagging a related article with all 3 phrases, if they were appropriate.

There are several reasons for this:-

1. Tag searches do not use LSI. They do however quite often display related tags. The more data you provide related to your article, the more accurately it can be classified, and later found. In many ways your tags should be very tightly related LSI keywords.

2. MYSQL Search – lets face it, it isn’t highly effective. If someone is searching your site, the chances of them finding what they are looking for are remote unless you provide a lot of keywords on a page.

3. Folksonomy provides a better way to search when you use tag clouds to provide visual suggestions for what a reader may be looking for. In my example above, “training”, “tuition” and “tutorials” actually provide different stimulai

4. Better references to related content

Lets say you have a niche blog on dogs.

You might have categories on dog training, dog health, dog accessories etc

You might use tags to interrelate articles on dog training at feeding time, dog food, and dog bowl.

5. Making your website wider – making a better mouse-trap

Does Google really give penalties for duplicate content, or duplicate content that doesn’t have a specific purpose?

It is my belief that Google doesn’t give duplicate content penalties for content that has a specific purpose, that they can easily identify.

Technorati is all duplicate content, but it has a purpose, helping people find what they are looking for. I noted recently that tag pages at WordPress.com which are also full of duplicate content, give great backlinks for the blogs hosted there.

Google Likes Tag Pages

I think Google in some way within their algorithms are allowing duplicate content if it is on a page that is clearly a tag page, whether on an authority site, or on individual websites.

It is easy for people to spot such a page, they normally use tag or tags in the URL. If they wanted to algorithmically wipe out all that duplicate content they could with a wave of their hand.

But they haven’t… in fact pages that Google identifies as a tag page, it might be argued, are sometimes given a boost in search engine results.

I am sure you want some proof

I can’t give you total proof.

This is based upon my observations on multiple domains I own or monitor closely. I am not going to openly reveal all my niche sites (people try all kinds of ways to search for them every day, and they find old sites that have been allowed to be found).

I will give you one example though, which I noticed today.

This example is based upon the following:-

This is quite a new domain, but I do have an existing domain andybeard.name redirecting here with a global 301. I also have an existing blog on blogspot redirecting here with a meta refresh.
I have a few “exposed” niche sites linking back to this site.

That being said, Google doesn’t seem to be showing any backlinks (there are quite a few of them), though other search engines are.
It has been reported recently that Google are giving enhanced results to blog search within their main listings, especially in Europe which is a frequent test location. This isn’t related, because those results were appearing at the bottom of the Google listings.

I am located in Poland, and my IP address is Polish. Someone located in the US might see something different, using the same search URLs.

Here is a screenshot of a search result I noticed today. This one is on Google.com, but I have also tried Google.co.uk, Google.at, Google.pl, Google.de and a few more.
The results were similar. On the foreign language sites I generally held the position for the first English language result.

Google Search for WordPress Training

It isn’t a highly competitive keyword, and the results for “WordPress Tutorials” which is more competitive are different.

Now I do have to admit the tag page that is gaining the result is fairly junky looking. It is a result of the way my content is laid out, and I do need to get it fixed.
I include tags at the start of my content, and those tags appear at the start of any excerpt. This is true for excerpts, whether created by WordPress or by Ultimate Tag Warrior.
As standard there isn’t an easy way to adjust excerpt length unless you create a custom excerpt for every post.

In my defense it is not deliberate keyword spamming, it is something I am aware of, and it will be fixed. I am not a programmer, I just tinker with PHP, and the tag pages and archive pages on this blog are currently “out-of-the-box” configurations.

Specific to Google

This weighting of tag pages seems to be specific to Google.

For instance for the same search on MSN my original content is ranked around 26th position, but they still have lots of tag pages showing, and it is obvious the search is not very LSI based, as lots of dog and horse training pages appear.
Yahoo has fairly similar results to MSN, I have a result in 23rd place, but it is a totally different page.

Folksonomy and LSI

Folksonomy is in many ways the same as LSI.

With folksonomy the relationship between keywords is created by humans.
LSI is meant to be based upon algorithms, but is a lot more complicated. It is however based on words, and it is much easier to start with a list of human word relationships and to then apply additional relationships.

It is my belief that Google is in some way using folksonomy as part of its LSI calculations. It is even possible that they have recently increased the relevance of that part of their calculation.

Going Forward

Tagging is important for folksonomy based search. Tag pages on your own domain seem to be gaining a lot of relevance in Google.

Over the coming weeks I am going to be working to improve the quality of my tag pages, so that they provide unique content, and enhanced value for my readers.

Using tags for all keyword links might add enhanced relevance.
If you were buying textlinks, paid posts etc, would the value of the textlinks be enhanced if they had rel=”tag” ?

I have heard bloggers argue that creating links with relevant keywords is keyword spamming. In my opinion it is actually “best practice” if you are linking to someone to use a relevant keyword to the content you are linking to. It isn’t Google bombing, it is helping the search engines relate different content. If you then include rel=”tag” in the link, you are also helping folksonomy search.

You should maybe think carefully about your tagging strategy for 2007

The press and “A” list bloggers have been constantly touting the use of Google Reader over the past few weeks. Overall it is a useful piece of software, and might even become my permanent rss reader in the future.

But the Google reader has major flaws, which noone is really talking about. In fact I have noticed a growing tendancy for reporting thee flaws as a cool feature, without any emphasis on the negative aspects of using these “features”.

Google Reader Flaw 1

The Google Reader doesn’t currently send readership data to services like Feedburner. If you notice your blog readership go down, it is because you have been touting Google Reader too much.

Google Reader Flaw 2

There has been a few mentions of “Linkblogs”, especially by Robert Scoble on his Scobleizer blog most recently here, but also here here and here.

Sharing a link blog privately with a few people, maybe inside a company isn’t going to have a major consequence.

But if 1000s of people subscribe to Robert Scobles linkblog this will have 2 major effects.

1. For Robert himself, his readership could go down, because people will read the main original story, not his commentary. It would be much better to refeed your linkblog somewhere, to at least monitor subscribers, and maybe monetize the feed.
2. For the original publishers, they don’t get subscribers, but they do maybe get more readers if Robert et al decide their posts are significant. You could potentially have 10000 people reading your content (full post content), and have zero subscribers to your own feed.

Google Reader Flaw 3

Link blogs again but in this case link blog abuse and splogs.

Google have taken some precautions with their linkblogs, unlike many services that offer something similar.

A search in Google for Roberts Link Blog will not find it.

Google isn’t even indexing links to Link Blogs

MSN seem to be in the same ballpark, obviously Google had a chat with them

But Google forgot to have a nice chat with Yahoo

Yahoo don’t list any information relating to the contents of the link blogs, which shows they are obeying some directive not to index the pages, such as robots.txt, though more likely something in .htaccess

Thus the shared pages in Google are not in themselves the same as other splogs that have been causing uproar recently, where websites have been taking full feeds, without permission, and monetizing them with adsense. (I don’t worry if people do that with my feeds, as long as the backlinks don’t contain “no follow”)
The major problem is that quite often thse are full content feeds, that publishers wanted read by their subscribers. Many publishers are currently trying to fight sploggers by installing plugins to their blogs, such as the Antileech plugin for wordpress.

The problem is that Antileech is now useless.

No blogger in their right mind is going to block Google from picking up their feeds to serve Google Reader users.

Each Feed can be assigned a tag automatically. The method to do it is not obvious within the interface, but it is possible.

That automatically grabbed feed quite often will have the full contents, and a plugin like Antileech isn’t going to do anything to stop it.

Once you have a feed available, preferably with full contents, it is very easy for someone to use that content on another site, sometimes without permission. There is nothing legally or ethically wrong with the tools used for this. There are plenty of reasons to use such tools ethically, and quite often the professional, designed for the purpose “splogging tools” actually do a more professional job of using and attributing your content than the simple free tools available.

One example of a simple tool is WP-Autoblog . More sophisticated tools can take a series of excerpts, automatically tag the contents based on keywords, substitute links with “deep linking” affiliate links (and yes that is ethical, because the blog ownes wants you to promote his blog and products). An example of such a tool is Blog Auto Publisher(aff). BAP isn’t a fancy tool, but it is hellish effective and can be used ethically.

Conclusions

Google Reader in itself isn’t evil. The features could quite reasonably for an ethical purpose.

I could quite easily grab all of Robert Scobles linkblog, automatically retag it all, and then feed it to a private blog for my own use, to better be able to find information on tech related subjects from a trusted source.

Something like that on a corporation intranet would be a valuable and possibly ethical use.

But in most such uses, the original author is not going to have subscribers to their feed, and is not going to know that their work is even being read.

My strongest advice is to avoid abusing this feature, and not publish the location of your linkfeed, especially on a high traffic blog.

To ensure I stay on topic, it should be noted that Google Reader is a very powerful tool for the creation of niche websites. I admit to using various tools to reuse and mix 3rd party content, including Blog Auto Publisher, but the content I use is with permission and where necessary with attribution.

Update: Some Supplementary Information

The sharing feature within Google Reader isn’t new. The big point is that until now, very few people have been sharing their feeds with others. It was introduced March 21st 2006 on the Google Reader blog.

Here is a very good technical overview of how feeds can be shared with Google Reader

Here is a nice list of tools that can be used to create splogs, but they can be used to create unique content as well, that has value to the readers of the content. We can add Google Reader to the list.