Getting Traffic To Your Blog - How Not To Do It 2

Here's a great investment idea.

Everybody who needs money (which is most likely, everybody reading here) can invest $10 each. Everybody, reading this, can send me $10. Surely, each of you have a spare $10, to invest.

What will I do with the funds received?

1. I will, immediately, take 10% off the top. That's for my retirement account.
2. I will let my friends (don't you wish that you were my friend?) take 5%, each, off the top.
3. As I get investments from more blog owners, I'll send you - and the other initial investors - a token payment.
4. At the end of a week, you, and the other investors, get to divide up the remainder.

Isn't that a great investment idea?

That is a great investment idea - for me, and for my friends. For you, not so great.

That is a simplified description of a Ponzi scheme.

Ponzi schemes exist on the Internet, also. From time to time, we have seen them reported in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken, by people complaining of unknown websites, in their Reading Lists.

Similar to the blog feed redirection scam scheme technique, we have what's called a "traffic exchange". Want more traffic to your blog? Just add a link to the exchange, on your blog. Your blog gets traffic from all of the other blogs and websites, similarly providing links to the exchange.

A traffic exchange pays off, in real time. Your blog contributes traffic to other blogs and websites - and they contribute traffic, to your blog. But who will be contributing traffic, to your blog?

1. Other blog owners - who, like you, have no source of real traffic.
2. Various scammers and spammers.

Who will not be contributing traffic to your blog?

1. Other blog and website owners, who know how to effectively get traffic to their blogs and websites.

People who know how to effectively get traffic to their blogs know to use search engines, for targeted traffic - and to use interesting, unique, and useful blog content, to get indexed by the search engines. Those people know that neither they, nor their readers, will benefit from traffic exchanges, and similar random traffic programmes.

Experienced blog owners know that they won't benefit from linking to blogs with no source of real traffic - either directly (using bloglists or linklists) - or indirectly (using link farms or traffic exchanges).

Only blogs with no source of real traffic benefit from link farms or traffic exchanges. Experienced blog owners know to spend their time publishing interesting, unique, and useful blog content.

Who really benefits from traffic exchanges?

1. The exchange operators (who "take 10% off the top").
2. The various scammers and spammers (who each "take 5% off the top").

Who contributes the traffic?

1. You.
2. Other blog owners, like you, who have no source of real traffic.

If you want relevant and useful traffic to your blog, publish interesting, unique, and useful blog content. Don't waste your readers time, with mazes of random blogs and websites.

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Blogger Blogs Cannot Be Used As Gateways

We see evidence of confusion, from time to time, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I?.

How do I move an established blog to WordPress (or any other platform), while retaining the history, reader interest, search engine reputation?

Some blog owners think blog readers are cattle (to be herded from blog to blog) - or monkeys (to be attracted by shiny things).

We've known for some time, that Blogger blogs cannot be used as gateways, with traffic automatically redirected from one blog to another - or from a blog to a non Google website. Use of traffic redirection scripts is a known cause of blogs classified as malware hosts.

If you wish to relocate a Blogger blog in another hosting service, you can always publish your Blogger blog, and a non Google blog / website, as dual hosts, in a non BlogSpot domain.

With your Blogger blog and non Blogger website published to the same domain, you can then combine the two, dynamically. Just remember to add unique content to each, periodically, to retain search engine reputation.

1. Publish your Blogger blog to a host in your custom domain.
2. Publish your WordPress (or any other platform) blog to a host in your custom domain.
3. Combine the two blogs.
4. Let your readers access either blog, as their choice.
5. Update both blogs, to retain search engine reputation, regularly.
6. When the WordPress (or any other platform) blog receives enough reputation and traffic, make the Blogger blog into a stub blog.

Just don't build a maze of blogs and web sites - and don't waste time or money artificially developing traffic. Blogger blog readers are attracted by interesting and useful content - and are retained by new content, added periodically.

And don't try adding clever code, to shuffle your readers from one blog to another.

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A Template For Virginia USA, #4

As the frustrations about the CC TLD aliases continue to be reported in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken, and some of the details are discovered and resolved, we are seeing suggestions of other, more subtle problems.

Some blog owners claim that their page rank / search engine reputation has taken a nose dive, because their readership is spread out over many different countries. Apparently, canonical resolution by the search engines does not work, for all "blogspot.com" published blogs. Older blogs, including those with Classic (HTML based) templates - and possibly some older Layout templates - seem to lack canonical resolution.

The canonical resolution process, by the search engines, requires a canonical tag which defines the base URL of the blog. Blogs with older templates don't have the canonical tag in the template header - and the search engines can't aggregate the CC alias URLs generated by the many different country code references.

Any blog, indexed by the search engines, separately, under the different CC TLD aliases, is going to have a lower overall search reputation. The different references, under the many aliases, will be indexed - but as each will be more diverse, each reference will appear lower in SERP lists. This will result in less search engine related traffic - and subsequently still lower SERP positioning.

If your blog depends upon search engine generated traffic for publicity, and you have an older blog, you are going to want to check the template header.

<link href='http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/' rel='canonical'/>

If you do not find a similar tag in the template header for your blog, you need to upgrade your template. Your readers will thank you, too.

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