29 August, 2008

Are Porn Links Good for SEO?

Ever since I started becoming more knowledgeable about search engine optimization, I've started trying out different things to see how it would affect my traffic. I even did a test run of doing nothing but gathering links to a static blog that wasn't updated (amazingly, the traffic generated was quite impressive, given the fact that the blog had no new content).
But perhaps nothing I've done thus far is quite as noticeable as getting a link from Fleshbot, a fairly popular porn site with a pagerank of 7. (Even the nonprofit I work as a webmaster for (Share Our Strength) only has a pagerank of 6.) As of now, I'm linked from their front page, which is actually pretty cool. (Although the anchored keyword they linked with is pretty lame.)
Of course, it's the search engine spiders' view of the link that's important to me, so it doesn't even matter that no one who reads fleshbot will bother clicking through.
Which makes me wonder: Has anybody from fleshbot actually clicked through? If so, please post a comment. In the meantime, I'll update later with stats on how many referrals one can get from a porn site.


Oh, and also, I think the images fleshbot used were very poor. Here are two better ones I found with a quick google search:

Thanks to KNX News Radio and Progressive Alaska for the photos.

21 August, 2008

My Morning Ritual

4:45 AM
The alarm goes off.
4:54 AM
The alarm goes off again.
5:00 AM
My alarm goes off -- it is distinctively less pleasant than the one Rosina uses.
5:03 AM
Rosina's alarm goes off yet again.
...
Skip forward more than a half-hour of repeated alarms going off.
5:33 AM
Absently, I hug Rosina gently as I attempt to wake thoroughly enough for morning sex.
5:42 AM
The alarm goes off at the worst possible time.
6:04 AM
After loading boxes of books into the car, we are finally ready to go. I hold my green laptop bag in my arms and rub the sleep from my eyes as she drives me to the train station.
6:09 AM
As Rosina drops me off, the train is just arriving. I wish her well on her upcoming day at the high school and pull out Anthem while I walk to the train.
6:55 AM
The train pulls into Union Station, as I write in my physical journal about the book I'd just read.
7:09 AM
Breakfast at Au Bon Pain is purchased.
7:20 AM
I walk into my building at work. No one else will arrive for at least an hour and a half. Most will not arrive until 9:30 AM.
8:30 AM
I close google reader and start planning my day of work.
8:31 AM
I pull up facebook scrabble.
8:54 AM
I restart planning my day of work.
8:55 AM
I pull up blogger.com to start writing this entry.

18 August, 2008

Feedity: Unethical RSS?

In my position as webmaster of Share Our Strength, I am constantly on the lookout for better and easier methods of generating content to drive visitors to our many websites. One exceedingly easy method is to grab content from outside RSS feeds, allowing a page on our site to have constantly updating content from another site. Working with RSS is so easy that when I'm in a rush, I sometimes grab our own content through RSS, just to save time.
Grabbing rss content to post on your own page is perfectly permissible, both legally and ethically. Firstly, because when you grab a feed, you are not only linking to them, but also driving visitors to their site, but, more importantly, because by publishing an rss feed, they are inviting users to use that content. (People can even monetize their feeds by using Google Adsense for Feeds.)
But what if you find regularly updated content that doesn't use a feed?
I recently found a site that had data that I wanted to pull, but no RSS feed existed of the content I wanted. The webpage is American Towns, and it shows regularly updated local events content for a specific city. (The content in particular that I am interested in is "Local Events", on the left.)
So, after a bit of thought, I did a quick google search and found Feedity.com. In less than five minutes, I had created an RSS feed that takes JUST the info I want from the American Towns site.
Feedity allows you to define the opening and closing tags of anything yo want turned into RSS; in this case, I chose <div class="event"> to begin each RSS link, and </a> to end it. This allows me to get just what I want in the feed I'm creating: the event name with a hyperlink to more info on the event.
From there, feedity did the rest, and I had an RSS feed ready to go.
Had I been making the feed for my private use, I would not feel s weird about it, but since I was creating this feed for the purpose of making dynamic content on one of my sites, I realized that perhaps this kind of feed was not quite as ethical as feeds that are put out by the content owner. After all, the feed I am pulling here was not intended to be pulled by the content owner. Even though I am linking to their site while pulling the events list American Towns publishes, at no point did I get even an implicit nod concerning the usage of this data on my own site. I was, in a way, just framing their content without their permission.
Because of this moral quandary, I decided not to go through with using feedity in this way. But now that I am aware that the possibility exists of taking content straight from other sources like this, it occurs to me that one could mass produce sites that could be automatically generated from ANY site, just using completely customized RSS from feedity. Each site would literally take less than thirty minutes to create, once the general design was chosen. Pop a few adsense fields on the page, and tailor it to a specific audience who would find the info useful, and profit inevitably results. Hell, I've done testing on this site where I go for multiple months without posting a single blog entry, and I STILL take in a few dollars each month from adsense. Yet what I'm describing through feedity is upwardly scalable in terms of the number of sites, and requires absolutely no upkeep to maintain.
In short, Feedity makes it possible to easily create completely unethical sites that can consistently generate income in the aggregate without maintenance. This makes me almost want to mark my link to them as nofollow, but since most users of feedity probably use the feeds for their personal use rather than for website creation, I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. After all, I use feedity to keep track of my thirteen year old sister's fan website, TwilifyMe.com, and that's a lifesaver all in itself.
Also, in case you're interested, I did NOT get paid to write this entry.

08 August, 2008

Feedity: Unethical RSS?

In my position as webmaster of Share Our Strength, I am constantly on the lookout for better and easier methods of generating content to drive visitors to our many websites. One exceedingly easy method is to grab content from outside RSS feeds, allowing a page on our site to have constantly updating content from another site. Working with RSS is so easy that when I'm in a rush, I sometimes grab our own content through RSS, just to save time.
Grabbing rss content to post on your own page is perfectly permissible, both legally and ethically. Firstly, because when you grab a feed, you are not only linking to them, but also driving visitors to their site, but, more importantly, because by publishing an rss feed, they are inviting users to use that content. (People can even monetize their feeds by using Google Adsense for Feeds.)
But what if you find regularly updated content that doesn't use a feed?

Feedity is a service that creates an rss feed from a regularly updated page that does not utilize an rss feed. This means you could grab another site's content automatically without their consent.

[EDIT: Entry never finished, but I'm publishing as is anyway, in case it helps others flesh out this concept.]