Ben Tremblay

I took the weird habit of analyzing every single website I go to. I do it because it’s so easy with the SEO-Quake Firefox toolbar (also available for IE…?). This toolbar contains a lot of useful information that get automatically updated when you visit a website and you can do a quick analysis of a website’s popularity within only a couple of seconds.

What’s in SEOQuake?

What’s better than an example? I took a screen shot of the toolbar while visiting ShoeMoney and broke it down in different parts (Shoe is my website of choice when it comes to examples I know…).

For statistics lover like me, we get this part of the toolbar:

From left to right we have

• PR: PageRank
• I: Number of indexed pages in Google
• L: Number of links pointing to that that SINGLE page
• LD: Link Domain, which is the total number of backlinks for the domain
• I: Number of pages indexed in MSN
• Rank: Alexa Rank

In a fraction of seconds, you can see if the website you visit is a serious website. I particularly like the Alexa Rank and the number of backlinks. These are usually good indicators of a website popularity. I know I wrote about the Alexa ranking and how it is inaccurate sometimes, but it’s still a good metric.

Then, we have some other interesting options:

From left to right we have:

• Age: domain age (which ShoeMoney blocks so that’s why we don’t see it.)
• I: The Delicious Index or the number of times the page was bookmarked on delicious.
• whois: The domain’s whois information.

The domain age is provided by The web archive and the button will bring you to the domain’s history.

Finally, some very useful options for your own website:

Source will of course bring you the source code of the page and it is very useful to access the page’s source code faster. Then we have Internal links and External links: Internal links is the number of links on the current page linking to the same domain and External links is the number of links on the current page linking to an external domain. This can be quite useful when you want to control your precious link juice! Finally, a feature I really enjoy to do keyword optimization is the density feature. This feature will give you a lot of information about the keywords on the page:

This way, you can optimize your keywords by checking how many time each of them appears on the page. The keyword density tool can go to 4 keywords phrases, which is really cool because we don’t necessarily always target individual keywords.

Get SEO-Quake

So that’s it, I use this toolbar all the time and check it for every site I visit. It’s a little addictive to be honest and I feel like I’m missing something when I’m on a computer that doen’t have the toolbar. It’s free so there really is no reasons not to try it Get it here.

I want to follow up on my last week (Maybe more) post “Google loves fast hosts“. In that post I talked about how switching to a HostGator reseller account helped me increase the number of pages crawled everyday by Google, but also cut by more than half the average load time of a page. Some people asked for a follow up on that to make sure Google wasn’t just very nice with me. Even if Google is rarely nice just for the fun of being nice, I’ll provide a little more to you guys.

I’m covering something I don’t think has been covered a lot before. Most people don’t care about database performance because most people don’t use 1% of their host capabilities. The website I’m talking about in this article was extremely resources hungry and was reaching the limits of the host. I think that’s why I didn’t find a single database performance review of HostGator when I wanted to switch host, but here it is. (more…)

I was wondering if it was a good idea to publish that one and finally came to the conclusion that I had to share this so everyone can understand how easy it is to fake the feedburner subscriber’s count and win any subscriber contest, anytime…It’s ridiculous. I’m posting this more so that everyone realize that it’s important to trust the person you are competing against or you could end up losing for stupid reasons.

I’m not posting this for people to do it, go out there and win contests or whatever: It’s not worth it because it is a FAKE subscriber count and won’t give you more readers, so don’t think about more traffic. I’m posting this because I’m sure you’ve asked yourself in the past: how the hell can that website have 100, 200 or 500 subscribers? How the hell did that website beat me in that contest? How the hell did that website increased its subscriber count by 100 overnight? Well folks, it’s easy as hell and that’s why the RSS subscribers count can really be BS.

You will also find some packages on DigitalPoint like “500 subscribers for 50$”. You can do shit alone, no need to pay. In fact, you don’t even want to do it alone because there really are NO ADVANTAGES and here’s why. (more…)

I thought I would just drop a line about this: my friend ZK at WebTrafficROI.com asked me if I would be interested by sponsoring the contest going on on his website at the moment. I accepted to sponsor it by offering a 125×125 ad spot here on frogstr for 30 days. It’s a pleasure for me to sponsor the contest and there are some other cool prizes there if you guys are interested. That’s it, head to WebTrafficROI.com if you want to see what this is all about.

This is very weird. I never or rarely get into online contests because you always have to do a bunch of things to earn credits and get more chances of winning. It’s not that I’m lazy and I don’t want to do it, it’s just that the usual mandatory step is to subscribe by email and I really hate email subscriptions: I receive enough bloody emails and that’s why I use Google Reader to read my feeds. Then, you have to blog about the contest because let’s face it, subscribing by email will give you 1 entry and blogging about the contest something like 10-20 entries. So you better blog about it if you want to win a little something, right? That’s the second part I hate! I mean, if the contest is any good, people will blog about it anyway! No?

I’m not saying I’ll never blog about a contest, I’m just saying I kinda feel like a contest bitch if I blog about it just for more entries. In fact, I don’t see any problems, I just don’t want to feel like I’m “forced” to do it if I want to win anything. Anyway, it doesn’t matter I guess and I’m going off topic here so let’s get back on track. (more…)

After, “Do I look like a comment bitch?”, here’s “Are you a web prostitute?“. I came up with the idea to write this post by reading an article on John Chow’s blog (Not to confuse with The Cow here…) because John Chow is one of the best web prostitute out there.

I used to hate John Chow

I used to really hate John Chow. Not because he makes 400K a year with his blog and I don’t, but just because of the way he makes that 400K. You know, his blog is filled with hundred of ads, it’s hard to find the content and more than half of the posts are damn sponsored reviews. ShoeMoney makes the same amount of money out of his blog, but it looks so much cleaner and he actually writes very good content. I then analyzed Chow as the web marketer, not as the person and I have to admit he’s a damn good web marketer. He’s good at driving controversy and he knows how to make things turn viral. There is a lot we can learn from John Chow and I finally ended up respecting him because I think he knows his stuff.

The Web Prostitute

Let’s get to the core of this article: Are you a web prostitute? Would you do anything for a couple of bucks and some traffic to your blog? Personally, I wouldn’t, so we can say I’m not a web prostitute. Unfortunately, this isn’t about me, so the question is not cleared. I occasionally read johnchow.com and the day I ended up reading him in the week, he was writing a sponsored review. It wasn’t a review about some cool WP plugin, some good website to drive traffic or whatever, it was about a natural sleep aid and fat burner. What? I was so pissed off when I read that post.

I receive tons of spam comments everyday with anchor text like ‘Burn fat’ and ‘one rule for fat stomach’ and then what? These bloody products get into my Google Reader inbox because one of the biggest blogger out there is a Web prostitute.

This is really bad. I don’t subscribe to a web marketing blog to be spammed by these fat burner products. It’s OK to do sponsored reviews, but IT HAS to be related to your niche.

Did Chow really needed that 500$ he charges for a review? No, but it’s an easy 500$ I guess and he wanted to check what the reaction would be. I can tell you, the readers weren’t very happy.

Being a web prostitute will hurt your business

Being a web prostitute will hurt your business in many different ways. First of all, accepting money from everybody is a great way to make money in the short term, but it’s a sure loss in the long term. Your readers will lose faith in you and will go away. Also, your readers won’t see you as a respected authority in your niche, but more as a greedy blogger. It is also disrespectful to your readers to think you can just write any crap and they’ll enjoy. As examples, let’s have a look at some of the comments on the fat burner pills article:

This has to be the oddest post I’ve seen so far on your blog. I know it’s a review, but it was definitely surprising to see a post about a sleep aid. I thought I had clicked a wrong link.

See? People not recognizing your website anymore.

Unfortunately the quality of the site starts decreasing once products like this one start getting reviewed. But for $500.. If would do it too.

You are a frickin’ web prostitute too.

Just before I doze off… I read this, and while the review is reasonably honest, I really think that accepting these kind of sites for reviews here is stretching things a bit.

This is really bad and I think it degrades the quality if this normally excellent blog. The whole thing reads like an infomercial and the author then adds that final paragraph to try and add a bit of balance, which is too late. I hope John will remove this article from his site. Sad day for this blog

Ok, this go on and on and on. Probably this won’t affect Chow too much because he’s one of the big guy, but he certainly can’t do it on a regular basis or people will start to go away. It’s the same for you, your readers will go away if you do stupid things like that.

Paid reviews are OK

As I said earlier, paid reviews are OK and are a good way for bloggers to make money. Always remember it’s YOUR blog, you can always refuse offers if you think this will hurt your business.

So, are YOU a web prostitute?

It’s going to be a quick one guys as it’s getting late here and I didn’t have time to post today. At least I’m honest with you guys, I won’t try to fill space!

I will point you back to a little something I posted a while ago about how to increase your technorati authority. It’s a neat trick that really works well at the beginning of the month because it relies on the top commentator plugin. Anyway, it’s all in the post, so have a look and take this opportunity to increase your authority!

I personnaly really need to work on this because my authority got all screwed up when I switched the domain name from seohorror.com to frogstr.com!

Happy commenting! (oh, I’m sorry I don’t have the top commentator plugin on here…Will try to work this out!)

You know these days when something really pisses you off for no obvious or particular reasons? I was just getting back from work today when it kind of hit me…I’m not a frickin’ comment bitch.

I started to get a little more involved in the community recently by increasing my amount of comments on blogs and I’m shocked by the amount of bloggers who don’t answer comments. What’s the point of commenting if there’s no feedback at all? I’m not asking every blog owners out there to answer every single comment and I personally don’t even care if these bloggers answer my comments personally or not, I just want them to act like they are a little interested in their readers!

Answering every comment

I answer most of the comments personally on here. I’m surprised when I go to other blogs with like 1,000 rss subscribers and I see things like 1 or 2 comments on each post. You know why? Because the blogger doesn’t care about his readers. Some people will comment for sure, but they’ll get bored eventually. A blog is much more than writing content, it’s about interacting with the community. It’s no surprise if I get at least 10 comments on every post even if the blog is kind of new: I answer comments. That’s my vision as a blogger, but I’m also a reader: don’t expect me to comment on your blog every day if you don’t answer a single comment.

Drop a comment on your readers’ blogs

So you have people commenting on every single post of yours and you’re not even dropping a comment once in a while on their blog? Blogging is a two way business and you have to share a little bit if you want people to stick around.

The big guys don’t answer

Of course the big guys like ShoeMoney or JohnChow don’t answer every single comment. First of all, they have way too many comments to handle and people go completely crazy when they jump in the discussion. Shoe once explained how it feels when he posts on DigitalPoint forums with the name ShoeMoney: people actually start to argue about whether or not it’s the real ShoeMoney instead of talking about what’s important. I can understand how this can get really annoying.

Please answer some comments…

I’m just asking every blogger out there to answer some of their comments. Your readers don’t expect to be answered personally on every comment, but it’s nice for them to see you actually care about what’s going on. So, even if you answer someone else’s comment, it’s good!

I talked about the Google bot recently and how the bastard killed one of my website even on a decent reseller account. Seriously, I love the Google bot, it helps me get indexed What I want to talk about today is how a new host positively impacted my website and how it can positively impact your website.

Resources hungry

I talked about it, the reason I bought a reseller account is because one of my website is terribly resources hungry. Before I got on the new host, a page could easily take 4-5 seconds to load and I thought this was a pain. In fact, I’m pretty sure I lost some traffic because of that: people would just go away! The main bottleneck was the mysql performance which is SO much faster on the new host: it now only takes 1-2 seconds to load a page. To my great surprised, not only my visitors are happier, but the Google bot seems to like me a little more!

Google loves it

Let’s have a look at these two charts from Google Webmaster tools:

• Number of pages crawled per day

• Average time to download a page

The red arrow marks the point where I switched host. See how the average time spent to download a page significantly dropped AND the number of pages crawled per day significantly increased! I mean, Google spend less time downloading a single page, so it uses the same total time available to download more pages! Isn’t it great?

How does that helps your website?

This will help your website because even if Google spends the same total time on your website, it actually does a lot more during that time. Not only your new pages will get indexed faster, but your other pages will get updated more often.

Some stats?

The site went from 500 uniques a day to 1000 uniques a day in a single week, and it’s increasing a little everyday since them. That’s what I call a good result.

Do I have to go with a better host?

It all depends the type of website you run. If you run a blog with not much traffic and you don’t update very often, that probably won’t make a difference. On the opposite, if you feel your website is really slow to load, you are getting some decent traffic and you update quite often then I’d say go for it!

Be aware that a reseller hosting is something around 25$ a month, so if you’re website doesn’t make 25$ a month, don’t do the upgrade!

I’m still surprised to see the amount of people not using a Gravatar, that little image you see next to a comment in the comment section of a blog. It’s easy to think it’s useless and having one is just a ‘nice to have’, but in fact I think that if you comment a lot on blogs, it is a must to establish your brand out there.

How to create a Gravatar?

I think the main reason people don’t use it is because they don’t know how to have one! But in fact, to have your brand next to every comment you post on blogs like that is pretty simple:

Gravatar comment example

Just head to gravatar.com and create an account! There, you will be able to assiciate an email address with an image you will upload. That is how a blog will be able to retrieve your gravatar image when you comment: with your email address. Of course, you can associate many email addresses with many images, so if you have multiple blogs, simply add an email address to your account with a new image and you’re done!

How will this help me establish my brand?

If you don’t comment on blogs, this won’t help you establish your brand. But, if you write 1,000 thousands comments every month and you have a nice little image next to your comments every time with your website logo or something like that, your brand will be well known across the blogosphere. For instance, my goal with putting the frogstr frog all over the place is that I want people to think: “What’s that damn blue frog I see all over the place?” and then visit the blog and get addicted to it

It takes five minutes

Even if you don’t really comment a lot, the process takes five minutes and it’s really a nice addition to your comments, so create one!

Blog owners like it

Blog owners usually like people to have a Gravatar because it adds a little something to the comments section: personality.

Conclusion, just create a Gravatar.