kipdraper.com

Thought for sure he would do a small (or big) vacation post on this monumental change. I finally quit checking his feed for the month, knowing he has his toes in the sand somewhere and is smiling like a Cheshire Cat.

My Webmaster Tools link isn’t where it used to be (”My Account” is a bit confusing now, a first for Google & me) so I searched “google webmaster tools”, and there’s the 5-star spam general at #3, reaching out to webmasters with a headshot vid grab as his image, a nice instructional video, and some oh so subtle, inexpensive marketing finesse. Think he’s spanking the #1 and #2 spots for click-throughs?

I posted about this at a forum I won’t mention, but you can go ahead and deactivate your Captchas & worthless Akismet; this plugin stops it all and requires zero intervention from the mod.

You know how Akismet always shows the last few thousand spams it has blocked? After months of using the SpamBam plugin it still says “Akismet (0)”. Clear out Akismet and install this plugin: when they say “No more comment spam” they mean it, and all you do is install and forget: SpamBam

Site slow? Another good one is Bad Behavior. A few good must-haves are here also.

No not with AdWords. Perhaps this has been going on for awhile and many have noticed, but it finally has my undivided attention. For instance, lately when my wife enters a new listing as a blog post, she’s usually ranking on the first couple of pages with a few of the terms taken from the title of that post—IN 5-MINUTES. And I’m talking about main Google SERPs, not a “blog search”.

For example, she did a post on trail trees this morning. I made a cup of coffee and searched for bear face trail tree. Well what do you know, there’s the root at the top of page two (of course it could drop or move up). And note that keyword-rich title tag.

Granted they’re only showing the root and not the actual post yet, and results will vary based upon the domain and the competitiveness of the search, but Bear face trail tree is nicely highlighted, and it’s the right up top of the blog when they arrive. Not saying it works every time; it doesn’t, but things are obviously heading in that direction. Something to show your sellers in five minutes? I’ll take it.

Is this a blog-specific phenomenon? Feed-specific? It’s been so long since I uploaded/tested a new static page.

So much for this being all about Advanced Access sites. Reportedly, many Real Estate Webmaster (REW) sites have now taken the fall. And on the heels of that, LinkURealty templates, and now most recently, AgentImage sites are reporting penalties.

An penalized Advanced Access user informed me that by removing his state pages and doing a reinclusion request, his site is starting to appear again in the Google SERPs (only 2 weeks post-penalty). I would think that this approach would work for other affected template sites.