Brent Wilson

I made a post a few weeks ago on Seobook about how my main site was receiving basically no traffic from Google, even though I had a forum that was active and a content site that was full of useful content. Yahoo was sending me 500+ referrals a day and Google was sending me less than 20. Aaron replied, which I did appreciate greatly, but I have to disagree with his assessment of the ads killing my site. The ads had nothing to do with my bad Google referrals. Over a year ago I was running Digital Point Co Op and selling text links on my site. I made a mistake by listing on my site advertising page that I was selling site wide links. Google picked up on this whether it be manually or with their algorithm and penalized my site. Matt Cutts commented on my post and gave me a run down of what he saw on his side of things. Two days later my Google rankings returned and my traffic shot through the roof. My earnings are up and registrations are up.

I had a friend point out that Aaron made a new post using my site as an example of sites that were being overly aggressive with ad placement and it was killing them in the process. I’m going to have to disagree with him to an extent. Having those ads under my navigation has not prevented me from landing on Digg.com, Autoblog.com and Jalopnik to name a few. In the past week I have been covered 2 times by Autoblog on news items I have written. If you have good content that people want to link to then the majority won’t care about two ads above the fold. As each year passes people are upgrading their monitors to support higher resolutions which will allow them to view more of the page without scrolling. I use 1920×1200 and have no problem seeing the content on my site (Example). While I understand there is still a large amount of people on 1024×768 and even 800×600 the trend is not moving towards more people using these resolutions.

Here is a screen shot of my current Google referrals for a day:

and my uniques for the month:

This month is my best month since I started the site in 2003 for revenue and traffic.

I don’t have any problem with him using my site in his video. It’s his opinion and he is generally right with the assumption that over zealous ads can kill sites. If you have the content to back up the ads then the impact the ads will have on your traffic are minimal. That’s at least what my experience has found running my web sites.

Just wanted to make a quick post letting everyone know that my Google situation has been cleared up. My site has found it’s way back into the Google SERPs and my traffic has increased substantially. Thanks to Matt Cutts for the help.

Click the image for a larger version:

I’ve been with vBulletin since January 2004. I love the product and the add ons that it provides on vBulletin.org. I absolutely can’t stand the development pace. MyBB recently made an announcement that MyBB will be losing PHP4 and going with PHP 5.2 as a minimum requirement. They also will be suggesting users use MySQL 5.1 once it becomes the stable recommended release. MyBB is looking more and more like a legitimate competitor to vBulletin with every new release they put out. I’m actually considering using it for a new board I am considering starting. Especially once the new release comes out removing all the support for PHP 4.

Come on vBulletin. I’m paying you 160 dollars for the license and 30 bucks to renew for what? One new release every year and a half? Not cool at all.

I’m not denying that vBulletin 4 will be a great product, it’s just the development time for vBulletin has gotten worse and worse over the years it seems.

VBSEO 3.1.0 has been released for everyone. It’s the first unencrypted version of the software and includes many other performance improvements such as caching with Memcached and xCache. It also includes built in support for vBulletin Blogs if you’re into that kind of thing ;)

Oh and Branding Free is now available for those that have been crying for it for years :) This should make many people happy. Glad to see they finally got around to releasing it. It’s been in the Pre-Release’s hands for quite some time now.

Official announcement here: VBSEO 3.1.0 Released.

The pre-release team is also testing a new version of the sitemap generator as well which includes support for blogs and a few bug fixes.

If it’s one thing I hate seeing on a webmaster or forum admin forum is a thread asking if VBSEO works or how to tell if it works. Especially when that topic has been discussed to death on that particular forum. These threads also usually end up being a pissing match between two or three people with me usually being involved. I recently made a post on Admin Fusion that I think will benefit others looking at VBSEO. The last part of my reply is what I want everyone to think about before they buy VBSEO and expect to see results within x amount of days/weeks/months/years. You can view the post here.

This is the part that I want to stress:

If you get anything out of this post I hope it is this: I bought VBSEO knowing that everything it claimed to do was good for a sites seo. Removing duplicate content is good. Removing duplicate urls is good. These are things I didn’t want to trust a free modification for. I paid for VBSEO knowing what it was going to do and then I went on about my business building my site. Not caring if VBSEO was the reason my site grew or not. My goal was accomplished. My site was properly SEO’d and ready for me to start aggressively building links.

VBSEO is not a miracle program. It’s a tool among many tools that can be used to have a successful forum.

There are two very interesting threads on vBulletin.com right now that deal with the direction vBulletin is heading with their next minor vBulletin version (3.7) and major vBulletin version (4.0). There have been many complaints over the past few months regarding vBulletins slow development pace which has been further frustrating due to the secrecy that they have regarding future versions/products. The first thread deals with vBulletin’s style and template manager and the direction that it will go with 4.0. We finally got some word from Kier on how 4.0 will look as far as semantics and the template manager goes.

However, moving forward to vBulletin 4, I have (and have always had) every intention of moving to a system of semantic, well-formed markup with a hugely more extensive use of CSS for layout. CSS is now a widely-used and well-documented system and I am confident that both experts and novice webmasters alike will be able to handle it. I am still undecided on how to present the vast number of classes and id-based selectors that this system will require (clearly the current vBulletin CSS editor will not be up to the task) but I’m sure that the system we come up with will be flexible and user-friendly enough to suit just about everyone.

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Yes! It’s about time Wordpress took a hard look at performance for a new version. One of the things that are being implemented include better use of the built in caching so that more queries are cached. This also will be applied to those that use the memcached backend for Wordpress. I use that on my largest site. This site isn’t running any caching because it’s not worthy of it yet :p

For the complete run down check out the announcement here: Wordpress 2.4 Performance Profiling

I’m a TV show nut so I figured I’d post up current TV Shows that I am watching.

• 24
• Lost
• The Office
• The Unit
• Heroes
• Big Bang Theory
• Jericho
• Weeds
• Californication
• Dexter
• The Dead Zone
• Family Guy
• South Park

That about sums it up. I’m pretty much addicted to all of those. Thank God for DVR.

After my last two slightly negative posts I thought I’d make this post a little bit more on the positive side. November 6th Ford released official information and pictures on the new 2008 Bullitt Mustang so all that night I was busy getting my Mustang site updated with the pictures and news. I knew that this news was going to be every where. CNN had already done an article on it and I knew people were going to be searching for it. I rank number 1 in Yahoo for 2008 Bullitt Mustang (guess where I rank in Google…). I also know that Yahoo has a section on their main page that highlights the days top 10 searched items. So about 5PM Nov. 7th my site starts feeling a bit sluggish. I log in to the server and run a quick top stats to see my server load over 10. What I thought had happened initially was that I had hit the main page of Digg because I submitted my article to it. After I confirmed that wasn’t the case I opened up Mint and saw nothing but search referrals coming in from Yahoo. To make a long story short this is what it ended up looking like as far as earnings:

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I’m sure many of you have heard about or even received an email from your Google rep regarding the new changes that will be coming for all ads. The changes have to do with where a click gets registered on the ad. Before this change you could click anywhere on the ad and it would register a click. Now they have changed it where you have to click the URL or the ad heading for it to register.

Blogoscope has a great image showing how the changes will look. It makes me sick to my stomach to see how drastic it is going to be.

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