It seems like I’m using Twitter more and more every week. I am following tibipuiu and I read his tweet yesterday about Google updating the PR. In the next few minutes I was checking my blog’s PR. Nothing has changed. However yesterday in the early afternoon I noticed that the Live PageRank Firefox addon was showing me a PR2. The next thing I know, I was on Daniel’s blog (because I knew almost for sure that he’ll mention this event) and I was reading his post about it. I decided to let things settle in their place and check them out today. This blog is online for a couple of months and it jumped from PR 0 to PR 2. I know that some of you out there state that Google’s PR, Alexa Rank or other stuff like this are not so important. You all have your share of truth in your opinions but you can’t deny the fact that especially this two are deadly important when it comes to SEO and not only.

I was very curios to find out what would happen to the other blog I was talking about in a past post (click on the link to find out more). I wasn’t surprised by the outcome though: PR0. That blog had a PR3 before the previous PR update. After that, apparently because Google thought so, it’s PR was 0 again. Now, after the update that took place yesterday it still has a PR 0. So, it looks like FeedBurner’s Buzzboost doesn’t hurt your blog (as I suspected). In all this time I browsed a lot of blogs and websites and I saw things very similar to Buzzboost and the PR of that particular blog wasn’t affected. I wonder which is the reason why Google didn’t updated (or did it?) the PR for that blog. How long does it take for Google to update the PR ? Is it over in one day ?

Daniel Scocco over at DailyBlogTips had an admirable idea of entitling 1st of May as the “RSS Awareness Day”. He wrote about his initiative and invited everyone to get involved. Though I found out about this quite some time ago I didn’t had time or I wasn’t in the mood to write about it. However today I’ve said to myself that it’s better later than never.

I think that the best definition for RSS out there is over at Wikipedia so I’m going to quote them:

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts. An RSS document (which is called a “feed” or “web feed” or “channel”) contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text.

RSS keeps you updated with the latest news from your favorite blogs, sites and other web hosted entities that support RSS. Information is a very powerful asset. For example I have a feed list containing about 50 subscriptions. Every day I take some time off and read new articles from different blogs I’m interested in. It is a very effective way of being connected to the news stream. I find RSS way better than e-mail subscriptions (or newsletters) because it helps keeping my e-mail address for private use. Also you have better chances at keeping your Spam folder a little emptier because you don’t go on every blog or site and fill in your e-mail address. Basically you are just an anonymous reader out there and there is nothing that could link you to the articles you read. That, right there my friends is just a terrific possibility.

Related to feeds that display only a preview of the article. That is, in my opinion, a very bad practice. Hoping your subscribers will visit your blog to see all of the post content you forget about what is RSS all about. Provide full feeds of your articles and let your readers choose whether to visit your blog or not.

As you probably noticed the link that takes you to the RSS content of a blog or site is almost every time accompanied by the well known RSS icon. Different RSS icons are available every day as they are relatively easy to design. Check out the following resources links:

• Feed Icons
• Free Glass Style RSS Icons
• RSS: Best design practices and icons
• Free RSS Feed Icons
• Over 35 Different Styles of RSS icons
• 60 Great RSS Icons for your blog
• All the RSS Icons You’ll Ever Need
• 51 Top RSS Buttons for your blog
• Free RSS Icons & Buttons for your Website

Hopefully the above links will take you to some relevant RSS related icons so you’ll can achieve a seamless RSS integration on your blog or site.

I am looking forward finding out what determined this issue.

LE: it crossed my mind to check out their blog and i found out that this was a scheduled maintenance. You can read it on the official AdSense blog. Depending on your time zone you won’t be able to access your account at a certain time.

Basically there are so many Twitter resources out there that you can enhance your Twitter experience just like a pro: addons, scripts, plugins, clients and everything else you might need for different operating systems and platforms. I will try to compile a hopefully useful list for everyone out there who wants to engage in twittering.

• Twitter Fan Wiki / Apps
• Twitter tools and resources
• Twitter Clients for Linux
• Twitter Resource Roundup
• 101 Must See Twitter Resources – Apps, Tools, How-To, plugins, extensions and more
• Twitter Marketing Guide
• How We Tweet: The Definitive List of the Top Twitter Clients
• And of course, the official download page

I’m sure that there are lots of resources out there but for the moment i think that the above list should do the trick. As every day more and more people register a Twitter account i think that this Twitter thing will become pretty valuable. I wonder who will get his hands on Twitter first: Google, Microsoft or Yahoo! ?

I was reading the blog of some great SEO guru (don’t panic, i don’t remember his blog address because i was just hitting the “Stumble!” button) and there was a nice line saying something like nowadays web services come and go very fast. Basically this is what happened with “WhoLinked” as I noticed a couple of days ago that no links were showing up in my footer.

There are plenty of websites that provide the same services (among others) but i just went for it because i liked the idea and the design of the site was kept simple, intuitive yet easy to use. However no page saying something like “We’re sorry but this service is not available anymore” is displayed. This demonstrates how much respect the webmaster had for the users of his site.

5 diggs, PR4 and a few stumbles – that’s the balance of WhoLinked.com

Here’s the original message:

It’s pretty obvious that the message is spam. Mainly because it’s in the Spam directory, Gmail flagged it, and the content is too spam-like. As you probably figured out by now, my PayPal account is in one piece.

I encourage you to have a quick look at what PayPal has to say about this type of fraud.

What a pathetic try…

Regarding the publishers (in this scenario the publishers are the bloggers), as the title of this post states, PayPerPost is an online service that provides numerous possibilities of generating revenue with their blogs.

Regarding the advertisers, PayPerPost helps them build a brand name, ca generate an important amount of traffic to their websites and of course many other. If you are an advertiser and seek more information regarding these aspects, at first be sure to read PayPerPost’s code of ethics.

However in the next few lines we will concentrate on PayPerPost’s capability of being a great friend when it comes to earn some bucks with your work on your blog.

How can I earn revenue with PayPerPost ?

It’s very simple ! All you have to do is to join the program and blog about things you like to get paid ! It’s that simple ! PayPerPost Marketplace is defined as a self-service marketplace where you can get paid for blogging about different services, websites and products.

What PayPerPost Direct practically does is to put you in contact with different advertisers with whom you then can negociate without any third-party interventions. If all goes well and the advertiser hires you for the given task you’re on good path.

Of course you can earn some revenue with the referral program but by far a great opportunity is the “Review my post” option. Here comes the good part. This option basically is one of the best earning sources for bloggers out there ! It adds a badge that says “Review my post” after every post on your blog. When another person clicks that badge and joins PayPerPost network they will have a special opportunity that consists in a review on their blog about your post ! After that person completes the article he will get paid and you also get $7.50 ! It’s like “you scratch my back and i’ll scratch yours”.

When you want to search for new jobs all you need to do is to head to the “Opportunities” section and browse all the opportunities to find the ones that match your profile and get to work.

A great startup resource for the ones who want to learn more about PayPerPost’s marketplace is PayPerPost University.

Conclusion

PayPerPost with it’s marketplace is a rather good choice if you plan to earn some cash with your blog doing with you like. The following image says it all, doesn’t it ?

…And, I think the search engines explicitly understand what a feed is. It’s very simple for them to recognize a feed during their crawl and they act on that by concluding that the feed is not a permanent place for the content, and therefore eliminating the duplicate content concern that you alluded to. It’s not to say that it’s an irrational concern, but in many cases, it’s not one that the publisher should be really concerned about. I think the search engines are increasingly very smart about understanding the difference between a feed and webpage, and understand the purpose of the feed as indicating where the content lives.

Rick Klau, Vice President of Publisher Services at FeedBurner

Source of the interview: StoneTemple

I have removed FeedBurner’s BuzzBoost widget and now I’m waiting to see if my PR will be back again (this should happen in approximately 3-4 weeks or so).

However Google states that articles syndicated with a link back to the original article should not be a problem.
If you wonder if your content has been copied (of course now I am referring to intentionally content copying) you can always use Copyscape to determine who is copying your content.

If you find out that your content is being copied you might want to refer to Google’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act

It’s very hard for me to believe that BuzzBoost is the actual cause of my problem but I can’t imagine anything else being the source of my PR drop. For the moment this is all the information I have and as soon as I find anything else related to this issue I will post it here.

These were my BuzzBoost settings:

If you also encountered PR drops while having FeedBurner’s BuzzBoost installed on your blog/website feel free to leave a comment.

Now lets head to ShoppingAds and their “how it works” page. I must say that they really did a great job explaining the differences between the two types of publishers. Unfortunately they left something behind. Maybe it was deliberately or maybe they considered it too obviously to be mentioned. In this business nothing is “too obviously” and every aspect must be very clear for both parts !

As you can read on their page, after a few months (sometimes even a single day), depending on your traffic sources you might receive an invitation to join the Premium Publisher service (for free). After one month of using their ad service and consulting my report generated by Google Analytics which shows that US and Canadian traffic togheter represents more than 60% of my total traffic, i decide to send them an e-mail regarding the conversion to the Premium account.

It seems that the traffic source isn’t the only thing that stands between the Standard and the Premium accounts as this was the reply i received:

Hello,

I’m sorry, unfortunately we traditionally do not convert non-US or Canadian
based publishers.

Thanks for your inquiry.

So let me get this straight: it doesn’t matter that your site/blog receives substantially more US and Canadian visitors than from other countries, now you have to worry about you being a non-US or Canadian publisher. Say that’s fine with me (though it isn’t) but why didn’t they said so in the first place ? I found this out after a month (because i asked not because they were concerned about sharing this info with me) and i wonder: “What about others who wait… and wait… and wait the invitation to the premium account ?”. Someone should tell them that if they are not from US or Canada there’s not even a chance of getting their standard accounts converted to premium no matter where their traffic comes from !

One thing i can’t get: why does it has any relevance from where you are if you get most of your traffic from US and/or Canada ?

I hope the staff from ShoppingAds will self-notify themselves and correct this issue (or maybe they prefer to let it as it is).