Is it possible for a website to compete with Wikipedia?

I was speaking with a friend of mine today and he said that he doesn’t see a huge future in making informational websites. It was his opinion that before long, Wikipedia will be the first result for pretty much every search term that you could come up with. In short, he was saying that its impossible for websites to compete with Wikipedia when it comes to receiving search engine traffic. With nearly 4 million English articles at this point, he isn’t far off in terms of wikipedia being on the first page for nearly every search term, however I definitely think that he is wrong about informational websites.

Wikipedia is a generic user made encyclopedia, with a vast array of general knowledge on pretty much every topic. However, wikipedia is lacking expert in depth knowledge on most subjects. As the saying goes, Jack of all trades, master of none. Wikipedia has information on just about everything, but if you want to learn more, you’ll have to dig a lot deeper than wikipedia. This is where informational websites come in. For example, say you’re searching for information about a new product. While wikipedia may offer details on that product and its functions, it won’t offer reviews, price information, where to buy it, etc. Encyclopedia style information is great when it comes to scientific or generally knowledge topics, however it isn’t particularly useful if you want info on something a bit more specific.

For that reason, there are actually a surprising number of topics where Wikipedia is far from the first page of google. Not only does this ensure that web users get a good variety of information from different sources, but it also allows users to get more information than can reasonably be provided by Wikipedia.

I personally own upwards of 40 websites, and can state that for every single one of those websites, the primary keyword appears higher in the google search results than wikipedia’s page on similar topics. Don’t believe me? You’re reading this article about competing with wikipedia on Rank Bookmarks… not on Wikipedia. That speaks for itself!

 

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April 16, 2012 Posted by: Leave a comment - Permalink

How do Hide Your IP Address

Have you ever wondered How can I Hide My IP Address? As it turns out, there are a variety of reasons why one would want to hide their IP and luckily there are plenty of solutions available online.

Lets first take a moment and look at the reasons why one might want to hide their IP address.

Security – If a hacker is trying to get into your system, the most critical piece of information that they need is your IP address. With your IP address, a hacker is able to scan your machine for vulnerabilities and open ports. If they manage to find a vulnerability, its almost like finding an unlocked door on your house. In simple terms, they are able to walk right in. By hiding your IP address, you are able to prevent hackers from scanning your computer for vulnerabilities because they don’t know where to start. If simple terms, your house can’t get broken into if no one knows it exists!

Restrictive ISPs – Some internet service providers and networks block certain websites from being accessed. For example, in some countries where the telecom companies also control the internet service, VOIP services are blocked. Others face website restrictions such as those who are using school networks, and are thus unable to visit websites like Facebook without first routing their connection through some sort of proxy network.

Nosey governments – Many government agencies, particularly in countries run by corrupt governments are constantly monitoring their citizens. These countries read every message that is sent by their citizens are log every single website that they visit. If you are located in a country like this, it is best to route your connection through a third party network, such as a VPN.

For more information on how to Hide Your IP, I recommend visiting http://www.howdoihidemyip.com

 

Tagged: Posted in: Internet and Networking
April 11, 2012 Posted by: Leave a comment - Permalink

Dynamic Oxygen Review

In our never ending search to find the best ways to monetize websites, I recently decided to try out a site called Dynamic Oxygen. Dynamic Oxygen is an interesting concept in that they only allow you to monetize your traffic that comes from search engines. When someone visits your site, after being linked there from a major search engine, Dynamic Oxygen provides ads on your site that reflect that user’s search term. In a way its like contextual advertising, but instead of basing the ads on the context of your website, the ads are based on the preceding search.

Since this type of traffic is usually considered the most valuable, you would think that these ads would pay well, however thus far I have yet to see that. Yesterday I applied Dynamic Oxygen’s full page overlay ads to a site of mine that is a celebrity photo gallery. It receives about 2000 hits per day, most of which come from search engines. The traffic is a mix of American, European and South American users.

Last night when Dynamic Oxygen updated their performance statistics at 1am EST, I checked to see how well I had done. Since I had added the ads around noon, there was only half a day’s worth of traffic to rack up earnings, so at the end of the day, there had only been 800 hits to the website that had seen ads (I’m assuming toady that it will be closer to 1500 since it will have the full day to accumulate). Anyway, I was a little disappointed with my earnings. Of the 800 page views that I had received, only 5 people had clicked on the ads. The total earnings from those 5 clicks was 12 cents, just over 2 cents per click.

While I am aware that entertainment type categories don’t have the highest CPC earnings, I was rather surprised to see how low it was. I was also a little turned off by the extremely low click-through rate, despite the fact that the ads are front and centre and users even have to click an [X] to get rid of them. With this type of set up, I would much rather have seen a CPM setup, rather than per click.

I’m going to leave the dynamic oxygen ads on there for a few more days to see if the results improve, otherwise I’m going to be moving onto my next option, which is a pop-under advertising network.

Tagged: Posted in: Internet and Networking
March 5, 2012 Posted by: Leave a comment - Permalink

Google Becoming Clever with High PR Social Bookmarking Sites

A few years ago, one of the best ways to improve your site’s search engine rankings was to build backlinks on High PR social bookmarking websites. Those websites included the old Rankbookmarks, which had a relatively high page rank, and an Alexa ranking of over 40,000.

These days, Google is becoming a little more clever and realizing that these so called “social bookmarking” websites are nothing but link farms that are used to improve search engine results and provide absolutely no actual benefit to internet users. As a result, Google no longer considers these types of links important and does not value them as highly when ranking websites within their search results.

Furthermore, Google has pushed pretty much all of these link farm websites to the back of Google, almost to the point of “sandboxing” them. While they aren’t removed from index all together, most of these sites now appear on the 3rd or 4th page for their full domain names, just because they are that useless.

Another new strategy that Google has developed is a system that identifies whether or not the backlinks that exist for websites are natural. For example, if a new website has a ton of high PR backlinks, but no low PR backllnks, and no links on “no follow” pages, Google realizes that this seems like its being manipulated and punishes the website accordingly. By contrast, if a website is new and its links start building up slowly, on a variety of websites, Google will realize that this is far more legitimate and give the website a higher ranking.

All of this is why we changed the focus here at Rank Bookmarks. While it destroyed our traffic at first, we’re starting to notice our traffic coming back, as we begin providing more useful articles for internet marketers.

Stay tuned as we continued to provide some more useful internet marketing and SEO information.

Tagged: Posted in: Internet and Networking
March 2, 2012 Posted by: Leave a comment - Permalink

WordPress SEO by Yoast Works

A few days ago I wrote about the most recent plugin that I had installed: WordPress SEO by Yoast. At the time I reviewed the workings of the plugin and its ease of use, but had nothing to say regarding its usability, since it obviously isn’t instant.

Today I’m happy to say that Rankbookmarks search engine rankings have begun to increase. At the time of installing the plugin, we ranked on the 6th page of google for the keyword “Rank Bookmarks,” but today we rank 3rd on the main page. While I didn’t track other keywords, I can tell by viewing AW stats that we’re moving up in the rankings. For example, our post about Facebook proxies has been viewed multiple times as has our post about twitter proxies.

Furthermore, we are ranking for multiple search terms, other than our name.

The reason I find this so impressive is because we have done nothing else in terms of Search Engine Optimization. We’ve simply written a few articles about our newly redesigned format, and thats about it.

Anyway, thats all I have to say about it. WordPress SEO by Yoast works!

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February 21, 2012 Posted by: Leave a comment - Permalink

Review of Image Space Media – Is it worth it?

One of the websites in my network is one which posts celebrity images. The site is basically an image gallery, that is visited approximately 1000 to 3000 times per day, depending whether or not the particular celebrity that the site is based around has been in the news recently. Recently I decided to try using Image Space Media to monetize the website, as it wasn’t really getting much earnings from Adsense. So far the results have been already, but nothing to brag about. On average, with the site’s 1500 average pageviews, it earns about $0.10 to $0.15 per day, so in general it earns a CPM rate of $0.10.

While it may not be much, any earnings are good earnings, and theres nothing wrong with raking in an extra $30-40 per year. However the concern I have with Image Space Media is whether or not using the advertising service is worth the tradeoff, when you look at how intrusive the advertisements are. Unlike Google Ads, which sit at the side of the page, without annoying the users, Image Space Media ads cover up the entire image in question and display an ad for approximately 15 seconds, or until the user clicks the X. In many cases, this just annoys users, who have come to the site to view the images. But the real question is whether or not it actually reduces repeat viewers, or results in page bounces.

With the site in question its pretty hard to say. Almost all of the traffic comes either from Google, or Google Image Search. Most of these users are only there to see one picture anyway, so the bounce rate doesn’t really say much. Its also hard to tell if Image Space Media is preventing repeat visits, because most of the people probably wouldn’t bookmark the site for future viewing anyway. I know that when I’m browsing pictures online, I usually look at the picture and hit back, rather than browsing the site for further images.

For now I think I will leave Image Space Media on my site, and perhaps try it on a few other sites. I have heard of people with CPM results as high as $2 from Image Space Media, but I’m not sure if thats just a marketing ploy by ISM itself to make the rest of us think that one day we can achieve such earnings. Hopefully as my site grows, and I consider adding Image Space Media to other sites, I’ll be able to determine whether or not its really worth it, or if I should be using some other in image ad network instead.

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February 16, 2012 Posted by: Leave a comment - Permalink

Review of WordPress SEO by Yoast

As an internet entrepreneur, I own a variety of websites, including a number of websites that are based off of wordpress. While some of these websites are ones that I had purchased and had already had SEO work done on them, a number of them are ones that I built myself from scratch. As it turns out, the ones that I built from scratch weren’t being indexed all that well by Google, primarily because of a lack of descriptions and titles.

As a result, I’ve decided to try out some of the more popular SEO plugins for wordpress, and today I’m reviewing one of them called “WordPress SEO by Yoast”. WordPress SEO by Yoast is a plugin that seems to offer a wide variety of features, including the ability to see snippets of what your google listing will likely look like, as well as keyword tools, and a whole host of other tools to optimize google results. While I haven’t used it long, I will give a quick review for it now, and then I will probably add a longer review in the future

Easy of use: 10/10

This is one of the easiest plugins I have ever used. The best part is that everything is well documented and easy to understand. There are full instructions for almost every aspect of the plugin

Strain on resources; 8/10

So far, the plugin doesn’t seem to be slowing things down too much. If you aren’t careful, there are a number of SEO plugins that will result in your website slowing down to a crawl. It can get so bad that you have to disable plugins remotely as the WordPress dashboard won’t load!

Effectiveness: To be determined

So far, I’m not sure how well its working, as I’ve only been using it for a few days, but I will get back to you in the near future.

I’m also trying a few other SEO plugins that I will also be reviewing once I have some additional information and experience using them.

Tagged: Posted in: Internet and Networking
February 15, 2012 Posted by: Leave a comment - Permalink

Limited amount of spam on the blog

After switching rank bookmarks to a regular blog, where I post all sorts of information that is useful to our readers, I was under the impression that our comments section would be spammed like crazy. Not because I thought we would be highly ranked in google and have thousands of spam robots attacking us, but rather because of our previous users. The majority of our previous users were SEO link builders, who simply came to websites to post links. I felt that when I switched over from the social bookmarking website format, those SEO guys would just start posting their links in all of our comments sections.

Well I’m happy to say that we’re currently only receiving about 2 or 3 spam comments from them each day. The good part is that they’re simple to weed out, as most of them are long descriptions that have absolutely nothing to do with our blog. Unlike other SEO blog spam, which tries to trick the blogger into thinking it was a legitimate comment by saying something like “Wow, I really like your site. Your articles are so interesting to read,” these guys go full out and write posts that have nothing to do with the blog.

So far my experiment to see if you can change a high alexa ranking social bookmarking website into a blog, and make it a success has been going well. Our traffic has dropped to about 200 hits per day, and I’m wondering how many of those are our previous SEO link building workers just returning to our site in an attempt to add links, or how many are actual readers who have found us via search engines.

I guess I won’t know until we have a look at the stats later in the month. Speaking of which, I should add Google Analytics to get a better idea of where our traffic is coming from.

Anyway, in conclusion, I would like to remind the SEO link builders that Rank Bookmarks is no longer a typical link farm, and that if you go around posting your links in our comments section, they will not be approved. Please do not waste your time.

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February 14, 2012 Posted by: Leave a comment - Permalink

Best free image hosting

There are a lot of free image hosting places out there on the internet, including some of the old ones like Image Shack, however the problem I find with most of them is that they are so overloaded with ads that they’re almost impossible to use. If all you want to do is find a place to store your image, so that you can share it with friends, you don’t want to have 50 popups, tons of banner ads, and other nonsense to deal with.

Thats why today, we have searched the internet for the best free image hosting website, and we are proud to say that we have found one. The site is Cloud Pic (http://www.cloud-pic.com)

While the site is fairly new, as you can tell by the number of images that have been uploaded (at the time of writing this article, only 620), I’m pretty sure that it will begin to take off in the coming weeks. Not only do they offer free image hosting, with no strings attached, the site is also easy to use and isn’t covered with ads. Furthermore, they provide a whole host of free image hosting tools, like premade urls, so you can just copy and paste your image into a forum without having to know any of the BB code.

I definitely recommend Cloud Pic for your free image hosting needs.

 

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February 13, 2012 Posted by: Leave a comment - Permalink

Our Google Rankings

It seems that from having a long history as a social bookmarking website has resulted in some pretty brutal side effects on our Google rankings. While we have a relatively high pagerank, as well as a great alexa score, it seems that Google has punished us for essentially being a link farm in the past. To be honest, I don’t really blame them, as thats essentially what Rank Bookmarks was… a link farm. Now that we’ve changed the format of the site, I’m hoping that google’s robots will continue to crawl it, and realize that we now provide a valuable blog with interesting content. Long gone are the days when someone could make a link farm with 3223892398 different topics and hope that google would index the site based on that. Google’s search engine algorithms are brilliant and they continue to get better.

What I find particularly interesting is the fact that if you google “Rank Bookmarks,” you’ll find all sorts of sites about us, but you won’t find us. In fact, you won’t find Rank Bookmarks in the listings until you scroll through numerous pages of nonsense (mostly sites that provide information about sites, Flippa, some other random SEO type sites).  While I’m not specifically trying to rank high with the search term rank bookmarks, I do hope that we begin to rank better on the topics that we cover in our blog. For example, over the past few days I’ve made a few posts regarding proxy sites, such as how to unblock facebook and twitter at school or work. My hope is that Rank Bookmarks SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) will improve, so that when someone searches a term such as Unblock Facebook at school, or The Facebook Proxy, that we’ll end up ranking a bit higher.

Anyway, the transition to our new blog format should be interesting. I currently own about 10 different social book marking websites that I’m looking to transform in the new few months. If this format works out well, I’ll probably work on transitioning them into useful sites, otherwise I’ll just end up selling them off on Flippa, where I originally bought them. Regardless, from what I can tell, Social Bookmarking sites are not profitable. The majority of traffic ends up coming from India, Google rankings end up being awful, and practically no one ends up visiting any of the advertisements. And then even when they do, the earnings from those advertisements are minimal.

Thats enough rambling for today. Basically I’m hoping that quality posts and content will eventually lead to improved rankings for Rank Bookmarks in Google. I’ll check back in a few months and see if my goal comes to fruition.

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February 12, 2012 Posted by: Leave a comment - Permalink