Bloggasm

It’s getting to the point that when I see a picture lacking a caption of successful Web 2.0 website owners I can recognize and name the people in the picture the same way a person might be able to name celebrities just by face-recognition. I’m guessing this is a good thing.

This is my first Sunday that I have almost completely to myself (most weekends I travel to see my girlfriend an hour away) and I’ve taken the opportunity to do some house cleaning, both figuratively and literally. Part of that house cleaning involves shooing these media-related links out the door.

1. Have you ever wondered the difference between marketing, advertising, PR, and branding? Well, now you have this hilarious illustration to spell it out for you.

2. For weeks now, Tor Books has been giving away free ebooks of its print titles. Every week a new ebook is sent out to their mailing list. What’s most interesting (to me) about these mailings is that some of the authors are posting updates on their book sales and how giving away free ebooks affected their print sales. Tobias Buckell, whose novel Crystal Rain was recently given away in the mailing, posts graphs that show a recent spike in sales after the giveaway.

3. On a slightly related note, remember how Google has completely fucked me over in its recent indexing? Well, to find my Bloggasm article linked above about Tor’s ebooks, I Googled the words “Bloggasm” and “tor books” assuming that that post would come up first. I ended up having to skip through two or three pages of search results before I found it. Fucking ridiculous. And you know what showed up first in the search results before the actual article? All the dozens of blog posts that linked to the article.

4. This article makes me extremely jealous. It’s about a newspaper media critic who took a buyout and now runs a media website full time. My pipe dreams have become this guy’s reality.

5. More and more social networking scandals are breaking every week, these sites are likely going to create a whole new field of study for sociologists. This week’s scandal comes to us via New York, an article about school systems struggling to respond to libelous teacher attacks on Facebook.

6. Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald tries his hand at satire by summarizing a recent AP profile on Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

So since Bloggasm’s creation I’ve written 799 posts. Now that I’ve been harshly downgraded in Google’s index for most posts, apparently the only thing I’ve produced of any worth in those two years is a post about nerdy pick-up lines and one about feminist porn. At least that’s the only thing I can conclude when I see that probably 95% of my Google traffic now goes to those two posts. Why did they remain at the top while practically everything else got hit? I mean, that post on Feminist porn is nearly two years old and I don’t even remember if anybody linked to it.

Sorry, I don’t mean to obsess over this. One bit of good news is that I read at least one SEO post today that predicted that Google is still in mid-dance and that the rankings will improve once again when it finishes updating. I guess I’ll give it until the end of April to judge whether this is permanent.

Google is all about doling out authority.

Measuring the number of links coming into your website, it gives you authority on any number of subjects and keywords. So when your website suddenly gets downgraded within its index, it’s effectively taking your authority away. It’s coldly telling you that you’re not the expert that you previously were, that you’ve been toppled from the castle from which you had previously ruled.

As I wrote here previously, I noticed about a week ago that I had been harshly and inexplicably downgraded in Google’s index for several keywords, a move that effectively cut my traffic from the search engine by half. This, of course, upset me, because I had worked very diligently to write quality content –content that has been linked to by thousands of blogs and websites — only to have my authority whisked away in such a short span of time.

Over the next few days, I began exchanging emails with SEO expert and friend Stephen Ward. He determined that Google bots were able to still crawl my website and therefore theorized that I was experiencing something called “Google Dance,” which means that as Google updates its algorithm websites tend to get thrown through a loop. He advised me to sit still and eventually the dust would settle and my posts would rank well once again.

Well, Stephen emailed me today with confirmation that Google has completed a major algorithm change, and that I shouldn’t be surprised if this trend continues for a long time. For whatever reason, Google has likely thrown me into a hole that I will have to somehow slowly crawl out of.

So how harsh was this downgrading that I experienced? As I wrote to Stephen in an email:

For instance, let’s return to my name “Simon Owens.” There is no doubt in my mind that based off the thousands of links that bloggasm has gotten, many with the anchor text of my name, I am the most prominent Simon Owens on the internet, and of my different websites (my livejournal, an old livejournal account, and bloggasm), Bloggasm has seen by far the most links with that anchor text. Why then is it ranked third, when obviously anyone searching my name would most likely be looking for Bloggasm? Why is it ranked behind a livejournal account I haven’t updated regularly since 2005, one that probably hasn’t seen any fresh links in that amount of time? It’s absolutely silly.

Since Bloggasm was first created, I have had my posts linked to by over a dozen of Technorati’s 100 most popular blogs on the internet. I’ve made it onto the front page of both Digg and Reddit. I’ve been interviewed and featured in articles in The Washington Post, ABC News, and several other major news outlets. I’m currently ranked within the top 10,000 on Technorati.

And on top of all this, I produce a good bit of original content. I actually conduct original research and publish feature-length articles — all in my spare time.

But despite all this, despite the fact that I don’t engage in any questionable website practices (selling links, link exchanges, spamming other websites with links), Google has for some reason determined that many of my posts aren’t worthy of a decent ranking.

It’s absolutely maddening when you really think about it. All false modesty aside (and obviously I’m biased on this), Google’s new algorithm change has actually weakened its search results in regard to this website. There is absolutely no excuse for why Bloggasm should come up in third place, behind a livejournal that hasn’t been updated or linked to in years, when you Google my name.

So in an effort to spread whatever Google love this front page may still have, here are some links to original articles I wrote for this site — articles that gathered tons of links and should have plenty of authority but sadly don’t:

1. Youeditor: Anthology Builder and the self-selected table of contents

2. Tor Books to offer social networking, original short fiction and nonfiction online — this was one of the posts that were harshly downgraded, despite the fact that it was linked to on BoingBoing and dozens of other websites.

3. The rise of the genre ezine: Will it ever find a profitable model?

4. Is journalist burnout on the rise? — this article got harshly downgraded despite the fact that it was linked to by Romenesko and dozens of other websites.

5. Readership of major liberal blogs declined in 2007 while conservative blog readership increased — this post was harshly downgraded despite the fact that it was linked to by some of the most popular blogs on the internet, including Andrew Sullivan, Think Progress, Little Green Footballs, Crooks and Liars, Newsbustors, Salon.com. Are you getting the point yet how fucking stupid this algorithm shift has been?

6. The Dawkins Effect: How The God Delusion mainstreamed atheism — this one was harshly downgraded even though it was linked to by at least two A-list blogs and dozens of smaller ones.

7. Harriet Klausner: the publishing industry’s secret weapon?

8. The Sideways offensive: Will Merlot sales ever recover?

9. The Million Writers Award: raising the profile of online literary journals — this one doesn’t even come up first if you google the words “Bloggasm” and “million writers award” in the search field. Pathetic.

10. When “webscabs” unite: Celebrating International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day

11. The Creative Commons Confound: Whether releasing your book for free will help boost your sales — this one, like all the others, was harshly downgraded despite the fact that it got linked to by dozens of sites and at least two A list blogs.

Well there you have it. Thanks a lot Google for rewarding my hours of hard work and thousands of links with the ranking I deserve.

If you read any blog or website that focuses on search engine optimization, you consistently come across stories of websites that basked in Google’s sunlight only to wither and die when they were suddenly downgraded or shunned from its index.

As someone who has operated a website for years, I know first-hand how fickle Google can be. As I documented previously, Bloggasm was completely wiped off the web for several hours the other day because my account with my server had been suspended. They had been sending me emails to an address I never check telling me I was overusing my bandwidth and if I didn’t upgrade,they’d have to take down my site. Luckily, I was able to get hold of a sales representative fairly quickly and begrudgingly agreed to pay more in monthly fees to host my site.

My site went back online that same day, but I immediately noticed a huge drop in traffic, particularly traffic coming from Google. Well, today I decided to do some Google searches for some of my most popular articles, and as I expected, I found them to be harshly diminished within the Google index. To give you an idea of the severity — several of the websites that popped up first were blog posts that were linking to my blog post.

So what does this mean? It means that articles that I spent sometimes hours working on — articles that gathered dozens of links from other websites — barely rank at all on Google. Hell, even a search for my name doesn’t even put this website at the top. Because my website was down for less than 24 hours, I’m now looking at decreased traffic and decreased potential ad revenue.

It’s times like these that you wonder if the hours you put into a blog are really worth it. I can only hope that in the coming weeks those blog posts that collected so many links will slowly be re-indexed in such a way so that they actually get the page rank they deserve.

Some of you may have noticed that Bloggasm was down for about six hours yesterday. As it turns out, because of large amounts of traffic over the last few months I’ve been exceeding my bandwidth for awhile. My server company has been sending me emails for a few weeks telling me to upgrade before my account gets suspended, but unfortunately it was to an email address I check maybe once every three months. So I didn’t think to check it until my site was suddenly non-existent.

So yesterday I reluctantly upgraded — I’m now paying $27 a month instead of $7 a month, making this website a much more expensive hobby. I have to be honest, there were a few moments when I really just considered letting it die. Other bloggers have talked about the guilt associated with not blogging regularly: You put in a lot of work to bring in a lot of links and traffic, and then you know that you have to maintain steady posting in order to make all the effort seem worth it. Some weeks, steady posting is easy. On others, the last thing you feel like doing after a long day of writing for other outlets is dragging yourself back to the computer to write.

But in the end, I decided to keep the website. It’s been around for over two years now and in that time I’ve published some high-quality online journalism. And something tells me that as the journalism industry continues to shift further and further online, this blog will serve as an asset to me for future career opportunities.

So onward. Keep your eyes out for a new feature article to be published next week. Hopefully I can get back into the groove here and start publishing more original content once more.

Though I’ve done a number of call-in interviews with radio and TV shows, last night I had my first on-camera interview. I went on G4’s Attack of the Show and talked about the newly-launched Myspace developer platforms and whether they would save Myspace. You can find the video over here and also embedded below.

If I had to grade my performance I would give myself a low C. My eyes were darting all over the place because I wasn’t very good at looking directly at the camera and there were definitely times I stuttered way too much and didn’t make my points very concisely. I must say it isn’t easy staring into the camera and relying solely on an ear piece to try and understand what’s going on (I couldn’t actually see the people I was talking to.) I’m hoping that these faults are only due to me being a newcomer to this and not an indicator that my on-air persona totally sucks.