For the longest time I kept hoping that promoting these old chestnuts on my Twitter feed might promote more interest, but it never really happened (that I can see). I have also tried to create “Best of:” posts where I include the old post and a link back to the old post, but that seemed redundant (and might actually contravene Google’s rules about duplicate content).

I finally tripped over another use of the Redirection WordPress Plug In and that is to use it for its actual design and have it point old posts to new posts.

Given I have an archive of over 2000 posts, I now have plenty of “content” I can pull from.

Methodology is quite simple:

1. Find an old post that I like (that has few or no comments), and note the URL it currently has in the system
2. Go to the “Publish” sub menu and edit the “PUBLISH” date to be in the future. Doing this changes the posts URL and it’s status back to “Scheduled”. Note the new URL
3. Go to the Redirect plug-in, pop in the old and new URL and it will set up a “Moved To” Http command

There you have it, what is old becomes new. Most of the time I will at least edit the post, and sometimes put a new header block stating that it is an old post with some background, much like I did with: Pension or LIRA? A decision (redux) .

Zombie posts? I guess you can resurrect content.

ShareThis

My post about How to Get a Better Deal with Telecomm Companies went viral when Rob Carrick mentioned it in his on-line Globe and Mail Carrick on Money weekly post.  How viral (to me viral is relative to my regular readership)? Look at the following graphic:

Note Jump at Start of January

That mention alone took me from about 500 page views a day to 3000 for a few days.

Will I keep these new readers? I will keep a few, but it is still nice to get these jumps every once in a while to make me feel like I am actually being heard a little out there.

It’s funny, when I wrote that post, I didn’t think much of it, it was more of a note to myself to remember how I got a good deal, the next time I have to deal with the Customer Retention monster.

Oh and I did publish my Year End Stats as well. Need to make some inroads here, time to try to grow my site some more.

ShareThis

The year started pretty quietly, with a nice bit of income from Text Link Ads (the service not the concept) of about $70 a month, and a little bit of income from Adsense and other site advertising. The site continued to look like crap, but I kept thinking I’d get around to that, but circumstances forced my hand in that situation.

About June Google decided to use another algorithm for doing Page Ranking and with that new methodology came a smack down to Page Rank Zero (again). This happened about 2 years ago, and it eventually came back after a long time (I think I was a Page Rank 5 before). Evidently I was doing unnatural linking to external sites and such.  I tried some initial silly things, asked for a reconsideration and was told that I had not done enough.

What are YOU looking at

During this time I also noted some very odd reading patterns and came up with Freakish Posts and Who Reads What? I have yet to come up with a fool-proof way to get a lot of readers other than getting mentioned in the main line media (or even on a popular website).

I also managed to get past 2000 posts on my site, which was exciting, except that I more likely celebrated at my 2060th post, but I had also deleted about 50 posts in an attempt to appease the Google Overlords (I did not succeed). Hard to believe I have over 2000 posts, I suppose I should put them into an E-book format however that sounds like hard work.

As part of my clean up to regain Page Rank, I found a useful plug-in to find broken links, and boy did I have a lot of them. I cleaned up all of them, but it took a long time and it was quite messy. I believe I have sworn off hosting Blog Carnivals as well.

I did finally get Back to Page Rank 4 after doing many things but the most important thing was to go with the Thesis WordPress Theme. With all of the work done:

• Removing all the broken links
• Installing a new theme
• Removing Text Link Ads from the site

Were the major fixes that seems to have fixed my page rank. This does mean I have given back about $840 a year in income from Text Link Ads, but luckily with my Page Rank returned the number of Guest Post Requests and Spam comments has sky rocketed! (yes that is sarcasm).

I am still spending a great deal of time wrestling with the Thesis theme, and since its update to 2.0 has been a real pain in my behind, but that sounds like a challenge for 2013!

Happy New Year!

ShareThis

The Greatest Turkey Story Ever Told

by Walter McInnis, excerpted from Thong-baked Cookies, all rights reserved to Walter McInnis, book is available from the author, contact me and he’ll sell you a copy, this is not the funniest story in the book either. Walter is a technical writer and project manager by trade but also lives an exciting and interesting life, this is the story of why we should buy all turkeys at the store.

Friends of ours own a hobby farm up around the corner from us. One of their hobbies was to raise a few turkeys for the oven. Only one survived to adulthood, and as he was growing they became attached to him. They would let him out and he would just follow them around the yard or sit quietly beside them on the steps. Their children became quite attached to him, and the mother just couldn’t picture him naked and golden brown on their dining room table. They could have just kept him except that he was already bigger than the kids, and they wanted to clean out the building they had him in to use as a machine shed, and no one wants to work on machinery while ankle deep in turkey guano.

So what to do? Well, fortunately they know someone who has no compunction about murdering helpless creatures, ripping their guts out, stripping them of their outer layers, and cooking and eating them. Namely, me. They call me and tell me that I can have the turkey to do with as I see fit, just don’t tell them about it. Suits me. So I head over one day mid-December to pick him up. “Pick him up” turns out to be impossible. He’s too frigging big. We’re talking big enough for a child to ride. Typically you feed turkeys regular food all summer and then put the high octane food to them just a short while before slaughter. But not this bird. He’s been getting the good stuff his whole life, and the result is that he’s too big to make him do anything he doesn’t want to. What he does want to do is eat continuously, so I lure him into the car with food. No problem.

As I drive back home I speculate on the pet possibilities for the kids. They could walk him around the block or take him to school for show and tell. Talk abut a unique pet! But I abandoned that possibility faster than an ugly woman the morning after (not that I would have any first-hand experience in that area). In the two minutes it took to drive him home, he shit on the back seat of my car three times! And if you have never experienced turkey guano, just go inhale a bottle of ammonia and you’ll get some slight idea of the smell, but without the chunky bits in yellow fluid.

So he won’t be a pet. Maybe I’ll keep him around for a few days just to show him to the neighbourhood kids. I put him in the garage and go in for dinner. I come out after dinner to check on him only to find that he’s been wandering the garage, as evidenced by the piles of frozen turkey crap that have bonded to the garage floor at 15-inch intervals! I go inside and start sharpening my knives.

The next morning my wife takes the kids out so they won’t be traumatized by seeing the gruesome details of how food actually gets to your table. I call up my buddy who grew up on a farm and who was made to kill chickens by the hundreds (and who won’t eat chicken anymore as a result) to see if he has any pointers. He says, “Just whack him over the head to stun him, and then he won’t give you any trouble while you kill and dress him.” No problem.

I go out to the garage and set up. It’s -25°C out so I dress warmly and keep the garage door shut to keep out the wind. In retrospect, it’s a good thing I did keep the door shut, else I would most probably had a visit of an official nature shortly afterwards. I set out my butchering board, a cleaver, a thin knife, a sharpening stone, and a camp stool. My plan is to stun him, and then hoist him into the rafters by the feet so I can bleed him into a bucket and prevent a big mess. So I throw a rope over the rafters and place a bucket handy. One last thing before I’m ready. I turn on the radio. All set. I pick up an iron snow shovel, good and heavy, and approach the bird.

CLANNNNNGGGGGGG!!!!!

The bird is stunned alright, lying on the cold asphalt and flapping feebly. I hog tie him and start the hoisting process. Now I’m no peewee (friends’ protestations to the contrary aside) but it was all I could do to get him high enough that his head was two inches off the floor. Not ideal, but enough to slip the bucket under him. Next step, I run the knife across his throat.

I guess the stunning blow I delivered was effective because he never even blinked, he just starting pumping blood into the bucket. I stand back and admire my handiwork. Everything was going according to plan.

Well, almost. The bird bleeds into the bucket for about two minutes and I’m figuring that it must be just about over. Just then he blinks. Then he blinks some more. Then he starts looking around and I can see that he’s starting to realize that, from his point of view, which is upside down, and obscured by a red haze, that things are not normal, and, in fact, pretty darn scary. And what do birds do when they get scared? They flap. And birds with four-foot wing spans can flap pretty darn hard. So he makes a few tentative flaps which causes him to start swaying back and forth. This in turn causes his head to bang into the sides of the bucket, which then tips over spilling all of the considerable volume of warm blood which had collected onto my garage floor. My mouth falls open as I watch this little two-inch wave of blood wash along the length of my garage, which is sloped just enough to facilitate a nice even spread. It being -25°C, this turns my once clean garage floor into a crimson skating rink inside of thirty seconds.

“Oh crap!” Suddenly I’m not so impressed with my accomplishment, and I’m more than a little pissed off with the friend who told me that stunning the bird would take care of everything. It’s not that I didn’t hit him hard enough. His head is imprinted on the shovel I used. I found out later from a professional that that technique doesn’t work with turkeys.

So I’m pissed off, but I guess I can handle it. Nothing ever goes perfectly. But things seldom go as totally wrong as the situation did just then. Not content with merely knocking over the bucket of his blood, the turkey starts flapping full bore. He’s so big and strong, even in his death throes, that I can’t get close enough to restrain him, and so he flaps like he’s making south for the winter. Tethered as he is by the feet, his flapping gets him spinning in circles, and in seconds he’s whipping around like a giant feathery centrifuge. This causes what blood remains in his body to come flying out of the slit in his throat and spray around the garage like a paint shop operator gone psycho. It splashes on the walls. It splashes on the snowblower. It splashes on the ceiling (yes the ceiling) and it splashes on me like a scene out of a cheap slasher movie. I can feel its sticky warmth congealing on my face.

The stupid bird does this two more times before finally succumbing, and I pause for a moment to try and remember why I agreed to this in the first place. Also, I swear a lot. If the kids had been here to see this, I’d have to re-mortgage the house to finance their therapy and I would end up living with a bunch of vegetarians (a fate worse than death [hanging from your feet in a cold garage notwithstanding]).
So here I have this dead animal hanging in my garage and not the least remnant of interest in completing the job. But I know that I must. And I do. I get him all cleaned up and take him into the house. Then I try to clean up the garage. Dried blood just doesn’t clean up very well (as many a convicted murderer will certainly tell you), and freeze-dried blood should be used to coat our tanks, ships, aircraft, and fighting men, because there’s nothing of this earth, or in any of the known galaxies, that will even touch it. I tell visitors that I dropped a can of paint while up in the rafters one day. Some of them believe me.

I am waiting for you Walter

I give up and go back into the house to rinse off the bird and get him into the freezer. Midway through the doorbell rings. Probably someone looking for party tickets, my wife is on the social committee. I answer the door and there’s a guy there with a couple of kids. He looks at me for a second and then shakes himself and asks for tickets. I’ve forgotten where my wife told me the tickets were and so I’m scrambling around and running back and forth.

It still being brass-monkey cold out I tell the guy to bring his kids in where it’s warm. He declines. Suit yourself you masochist, but I’m sure your kids are thinking what a dork their father is for making them stand outside in the cold. I finally find the tickets and hand them over, take his money, and try to indulge in some small talk. The guy turns, and forcefully pushes his kids off the steps, down the walk, and away from the house. Anti-social.

As I turn back into the house and down the hallway I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror. Oh, My, GOD! I’d forgotten about the blood on my face. No wonder the guy wouldn’t come in.

Nobody else came to our house for party tickets.

Oh yeah. The bird was delicious.

 

What can I say after that, except, Merry Christmas!!

ShareThis

I have had some reasonable success with titles that have created big numbers, I Blame the Refs got a huge pop the day after the NFL game where the referees blew the call at the end of the game, and my post about What Does the 4th of July Mean goes crazy every year around the 4th of July.

The new theme seems to have helped a great deal with Google rankings popping up for many of my older posts, and I do seem to be getting a 100-150 page view push every day from old posts (which helps a bit).

I will continue to try to think up more catchy titles for my post, especially with my sarcastic top 10 lists that continue to appear willy nilly as well.

For Technorati: NHW6H48AFUK6

ShareThis

The Guest Post was from a client who was looking to post something that would lead more folks to their website, and thus the post Why You Need to Consider Lifestyle in Your Retirement Planning, which seemed fairly innocuous to me, if not a bit boring, but nothing to get excited about.

I figured to be a good host, I actually submitted this post to a couple of Blog Carnivals to help with traffic generation for the post, and that is where the problem arose. I submitted it to the Carnival of Wealth, which then caused the following to be included in the Carnival:

Big Cajun Man had an even bigger layoff than Shailesh Kumar, we think (have to check the records.) The former returns with a…oh wait, it’s a guest post by “journalistically trained” Miranda Marquit. Take it away, Miranda:

keyword keyword incredibly basic thought keyword SEO phrase link to sponsor keyword keyword pap keyword SEO phrase pablum keyword pabulum keyword keyword insultingly rudimentary advice keyword SEO phrase unnecessary adverb to keep the word count up keyword

I read that and laughed out loud and hence came my thought that this might actually help the post by adding controversy to the post.  I have actually spoken to Control Your Cash and I don’t really have any problem with the comment (I might even agree with it, but I wouldn’t say that on the record).

This then caused me to write another post Insultingly Rudimentary Advice, which caused a great deal of supportive comments from my regular readers. It also had links all over the place, so it couldn’t hurt the whole SEO Mojo of things, and I actually have submitted this to the next Carnival of Wealth, we shall see what comments it creates.

Does controversy still sell? It might, we shall see.

ShareThis

Fast forward to Tuesday morning this past week where the most horrificly badly NFL refereed game ever transpired, and on Tuesday I guess one of the most chosen searches in Bing was I Blame the Refs, because I surely got an 800% readership spike that day (no real increase in income, but a very large spike to show in my stats).

When I first saw the spike, I wondered if I had been mentioned in the mainstream media again, however, thanks to Jetpack for WordPress the stats clearly showed that a lot of traffic came from Bing and it was for my referees post, which makes me laugh, but it’s never a bad thing either.

I guess this is what they call “Long Tail” pick up, but I do have this happen every 4th of July with the What Does the 4th of July Mean to Me, post as well. I suppose sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good when it comes to Keyword searches.

ShareThis

• Another Page Rank Slap Down, where I talked about my initial ranking drop to Zero.
• Once You  Have 2000 posts, which shows some of the grungy things I have undertaken.
• Take These Broken Links where I spent countless hours repairing and removing the 2000 broken links on my site (well it felt like that many).
• Don’t Follow or You Will Be in Trouble which outlined the response from my first attempt at reinstatement, where Google accused me of being a link farm.

The final steps that I took that seem to have fixed the final issues were to:

1. Disassociate myself with Text Link Ads, which is painful, because they actually paid more than Adsense ever did, but to get Page Rank I will sacrifice this income stream in hopes of creating other income streams.
2. Changing my site theme to The Thesis Theme for WordPress which is very flexible and just great for THE Canadian Personal Finance Site, and I am still learning what I can do with it.

The new Theme ideas are still percolating in my mind, however, it was dead simple to make the site look very similar to what the site was previously.

Now I have a good Page Rank, I guess it’s time to start a marketing campaign for the site, and have a real advertising page as well!

ShareThis

1. I have a bunch of things on my page template which linked to sites directly, but I have added Rel=NoFollow tags to many of those (since these links are really courtesy links to friends of mine).
2. I have told TextLinkAds that I will be removing them in 30 days (I told them that a while ago), so that may be a big fix, but I might be mistaken.
3. Hacking the Commenters plug-in to create links with Rel=NoFollow was also kind of fun, and that should cut down on the spurious looking links too.
4. I have gone through many of my older carnival links and done bulk changes to the links there to Rel=NoFollow as well, which should make my site look less like a “link whore” site.

I continue cleaning up the broken links, since they keep coming up, but I will also be changing my page theme, and I may kick some more things out when that happens too.

The last reconsider request I sent to Google took only two days to get a response of NO! so I will wait a while before asking for a reconsideration (maybe after I have a new theme in place as well).

ShareThis

Evidently with the new Google algorithm, lots of broken links are a big No-No, so when I started my clean up I used a Broken Link Plug In and it said I had over 900 broken links (that it could find), so I have spent countless hours remedying that situation, but it now has me thinking:

1. Carnivals are a bitch once the post is over 6 months old (especially the Carnival of Personal Finance which is just too darn big), because inevitably links die off, when folks change their sites! I have spent countless hours cleaning up that mess, but it has me thinking that maybe I don’t want to host any more carnivals.
2. My weekly Friday post which includes links to a whole bunch of other sites for the week is yet another headache, because things change, and there are countless stale links in those posts too! Also when I change anything on these posts I fire out hundreds of link messages to these sites, so I must be really popular with those folks too.
3. When Stats Canada moved their site, it screwed up a TON of my posts, and they seem to remove information older than a few months as well

This is making me think that I may need to rethink my whole link-building concept, because part of it needs to be the constant maintenance of these links as well.

The other interesting thing I found out this week, is thanks to being put into Google’s Penalty Box, I got an e-mail asking me to REMOVE COMMENTS from a bunch of my articles, by a fellow blogger. I was not linking to his site(s), he left comments, however, I guess Google’s new algorithm takes into account whether you leave comments on “naughty sites” like mine. I have removed a few of the comments, but that is a bit much to ask (IMHO).

This whole thing is quite interesting, but now I am thinking that as part of my duties for running my site I am going to have to add in “site maintenance” every week to keep things, “fit and trim”.

ShareThis