I visited a website the other day and as I was about to leave a comment I read, “If you’re from a DO Follow list, please don’t comment.” What could this mean? Why would anyone not want comments? I love comments. Well, relative comments, anyway.

Although The Blog World is do follow, I’m not on any lists. Could this be a good thing? Is traffic worth getting if it’s not quality traffic? People have taken to spamming do follow lists to increase their link back rate, which ranks them higher when it comes to selling ads or posts on their site. This is a great method to cheat the system and drag down others, if that’s your thing. Personally, I like to take a slightly more honest route. Probably why I don’t have a high rank and low Alexa.

I’m not going to mention any names, but I’ve observed someone who follows any do follow list she can and comments on hundreds of pages a day. I’ve commented after her on some sites and wondered if she actually read the post. Now, I’ve heard that Google realizes this type of thing and lowers your page rank because they feel like you don’t deserve these links. Which is great, in my opinion. However, other systems depend on how many backlinks you have, like Yahoo!, and in that case it’s helping her tremendously.

So it looks like this is a method people are using, but they’re not reading your posts, or not reading them thoroughly. People take off the no follow from their comment links to “Thank” their readers and commenters, not to be spammed by people. Consider that it should take you at least 3 minutes to read a post, think about it, and come up with a proper response. Then maybe another 2 minutes to comment. That’s if you have any interest in the post at all. At this rate if you had interest in 100 sites it should take you a minimum of 500 minutes to comment on those 100 sites (that’s 8 hours).

I’m all about making money online and about getting yourself out there and known. But be honest about it.

I signed up with a new service I was referred to called Blog Rush. It’s basically a link exchange between other related blogs. If you take a look over on the sidebar to the right (and down a little) you’ll see my Blog Rush with links to other blogs with similar content. It’s the same idea as Google, but instead of making or paying money, you gain exposure on other relative blogs by linking to them. This is all set up by them, all you need to do is add a code.

Get Traffic To Your Blog, Free

Because you’re getting visitors from other blogs like yours, they’re already interested. So all you need to do is keep their interest and earn their bookmark or subscription. It’s a great way to promote your website and retain high quality links on your blog. I’ve seen my stats go up 15% since I began using it only a week ago.

Have a Blog? Get more readers, Click Here

I had a post I was planning about page rank and how some sites have gone down. But yesterday morning I got an email from another webmaster who mentioned that her page rank went down again, as well as other “big” sites, and even The Blog World has dropped.

It seems common sense to me that Google Page Rank is based on the incoming links and the quality of their website. This means if you have 10 sites with a page rank of 5 linking to you, you’re better off than if you had 100 sites with no page rank linking to you. Right? So some of my friends are going around and commenting on sites that don’t have “no follow” to try and go up the ranks by getting more linkbacks. This helps with the quality rating on your site, but it doesn’t help with Google’s Page Rank. Why?

Well, if you pay attention to the page rank on the comments/entry pages, you’ll see they have none. So your site has just earned 100 links from 0 Page Rank websites. Is this good for you? No. It is technically a “vote” for your website, but when there are a lot out of nowhere it starts to become a negative vote.

So now all the major sites have gone down in page rank. I have a theory on why this is happening. Google didn’t update their Page Rank back in July and now people are dropping like mad. It seems, to me, that they’re trying to raise the “quality” of the page rank. I think they’ve caught on to what everyone is doing and they’re adjusting it to make it so that those that are purposely trying to get page rank aren’t any more special than those who have earned it.

Has your page rank gone down? What effect has it had on your site?

Company branding can be one of the most important parts of marketing a product or website. Have you ever watched a movie and they’ve taken the name of the company off a sticker, but the design is still there, and you know exactly who that company is? That company has been successful in creating their brand where it’s identifiable without the need for words.

I’ve been considering branding The Blog World for this same reason. Making this site recognizable is a huge key to its success. The truth of the matter is, I don’t have a clue how I would do this. Kolbrener, a branding agency, has a very insightful website that I’ve been inspired by. I’m not sure if they realize exactly how much helpful information their website is giving away - for free. Definitely worth checking out.