So in doing various readings and checking out new things online I came across a new search engine called Scour.  This is an online search engine that collects search results from Google, Yahoo and MSN and displays them on one page.  However this search engine does something very unique in that it creates an account for you and gives you points for every search you do.  In addition you can rate Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down the search results based on whether they were helpful to you.   You get a point for each rating and a point for each search, you also gain 150 points for signing up, and 25% of the points if you get your friends to sign up and link to you.

So what do these points get you?  Well you get Visa Gift Cards once you accumulate enough points, 6500 points gets you a $25 Visa Gift card which can be used anywhere.  Think about it, if you do 30 google searches a day and you use Scour instead of Google itself you would get 1 free $25 gift card per year just from using scour.  Since you can gain up to 300 points per day by searching and voting in theory if you do heavy amounts of internet browsing and searching you can earn a $25 gift card every few weeks if you use your max points per day.

This to me is totally worth it, so I have set Scour as my homepage, and intend to use it to replace my normal google queries.  You can even download the Scour Toolbar for Firefox and use it instead of your Google Toolbar, so you remember to get points for your searches.  So far I have only been using the service for four days, and I am very curious to see how fast I accumulate my first $25 gift card.

Let me know what you think of it, and if anybody already uses it.  If you don’t use it, it already queries the top 3 search engines, so there is no reason not to use it really.

Here is what the basic screen looks like showing you your points:

This is what your home profile page looks like showing you how many points you have earned and where they have accumulated from:

If you have a large friend network, I encourage you to invite them to use scour, if you know 10 people who join through you and do 10 searches per day, you would be getting an extra 25 points per day just from them using the service.  This could add up pretty quickly if you actually have many friends who don’t mind switching their search engine.

So if this interests you, sign up for SCOUR HERE and let me consider you one of my friends for referring you.

-Dragon Blogger

So I had set my goals for October 2008 and posted them previously, here is a reprint of my goals for October 2008 vs what I actually achieved.

Keep my Blog < 1000 IzeaRank

I have met this goal and in fact my blog has been in the 300 range for the entire month.

Keep my Blog < 500,000 Alexa Rank\

Again, my 3 month average is in the 200,000 range and this is because my blog only existed for 2 months.  I am the 100,000 range weekly average.

20 new Back Links

I only managed to achieve 11 new back links for the month of October for this blog.

Average Unique Visits to 200 consistently, this means I am shooting for 6000 Visits for the month on GA

I have averaged 318 unique visitors per day and hit 8095 unique visits for the month.

Dragon Blogger try to earn $100

I have made a total of $110 in payments for the month of October, not pending payments but actual paypal received payments.  ($17.50 from SocialSpark, $5 from PayPerPost, $87.50 from PayU2Blog)

So I had exceeded all of my goals except the number of back links, in the spirit of adjusting my goals I will set my November goals for reasonable growth.  I have seen my blog taper off quite a bit so I won’t be unrealistic.  Note each of my blogs has their own goals, and my other blogs have their own goals and income.  My personal site Justin Germino has actually started making some money as well.

• Goals for Dragonblogger.com for November 2008.

• 10 New Back Links

• GA Visits Keep Average 320 per day / 9,000 Unique for the Month

• Try to earn at least $100.00 for DragonBlogger.com

• RealRank (Izea Rank stays < 400)

• Alexa Rank below 200,000

Wish me luck in meeting my blog goals.

-Dragon Blogger

In spending the last several weeks leveraging and learning Google Web Master Tools, I have found and delved quite deeper into the “Content Analysis” section of Web Master Tools. This is under the “Diagnostics” section of Web Master Tools.

When clicking on Content Analysis you will be presented with a list of Meta Description Issues and Title Tag Issues. Listed will be the number of pages listed by Google as not being optimized or having most efficiency.

Here is the summary list:

Now, I decided to investigate the Short Meta Descriptions which for my Dragonblogger site had 13 listed. In clicking on the 13, I am now taken to each page that Google thinks does not have long enough Meta Description as seen here:

Now I can go in an edit each one of these posts and increase the meta description length to where it falls in the optimum range.

Using this tool you can make sure that all of your posts are optimized, if you start seeing many errors you may find you are making a pattern mistake that may cost your site a little bit. I would make sure you keep your errors to less than 10% of your total site POSTS. If you have 150 posts, and you have 60 pages with issues, you know you have a problem with how you are doing titles, tags and/or descriptions.

Hope this information helps my fellow bloggers.

-Dragon Blogger

I started this blog on August 23rd 2008, which is less than two months ago.  I also started 3 other blogs (Rock Along Productions, Wanderer Thoughts and Justin Germino) in September.  Each of these blogs has a target audience, Dragon Blogger still crosses a few categories and isn’t in a niche category yet.  This is because I write about so much different content and categories, I would have to run 10 blogs in order to properly silo out each one to be its own set category.

Dragon Blogger is by far my most famous and heavily promoted blog so far, in less than two months my RealRank is consistently under 350, my Alexa rank is under 200k (3 month average), but higher because my blog hasn’t existed for 3 months so you have to look at my weekly average to see that is is actually much better than the 3 month average list.   My Page Rank was 2, but dropped to 0 due to paid posts.

Part of my success has been my varied content, I have people who visit my blogs just for the internet and blogging posts, some who visit for my Heroes posts, others for my Movie Reviews.  But I have also lost readers, people who have seen my paid posts and split, or people who only wanted Internet & Blogging content and ditched readership when they saw my content vary.  I can’t please everyone, I try to make every post I write a quality post.  Even my paid posts I don’t just cheaply sell, I write as I would use the product and if I can’t buy into it, I won’t even bother to ask my readers to.

I started using Google Adsense in August right away, I was told that some people have massive success, and others just rake in some chump change.  So far I see a steady increase in earnings, you can see from this screenshot below that I earned $2.23 cents in August and $5.70 cents in September.  Yesterday was a big day for me, I earned a whopping $1.15 cents in a single day.

I find it funny that Google owns PayPal, yet you cannot setup Adsense to directly transfer into your paypal account, instead it can direct deposit into one of your bank accounts or you can get a check.  This seems kind of odd when almost every payment service supports Paypal which Google owns.

One thing I did do is link all 4 of my blogs to use the same adsense account, this way one account grew faster than having 4 separate accounts.  So as each of my blogs get more popular it may increase my earnings faster.  Hey, Google only pays out when it reaches $100, but even if it takes 4 or 6 months to get that $100 payout, that was $100 just for leaving some ads up on my blog?   Not too bad in my opinion, especially since I am at a current balance of $11 so far.

Let me know what my fellow readers and bloggers think of Adsense and if they use it.  Also, I want to know your opinions on blog specialization, and if you feel my blog is too varied in content and topic?

-Dragon Blogger

I have been doing a ton of research on SEO Optimization and how to restore my Google PageRank and avoid having my PageRank whacked in the future. I want to point out that this link tracks a conversation between SEO Scoop, Matt Cutts from Google, and other bloggers who were all penalized from having paid content on their site. This is a must read link:
Matt Cuts Why Am I Still Being Penalized

In summary, every single paid or sponsored post you do, you need to try and use a rel=”nofollow” inside the link itself. If you do SocialSpark or PayPerPost links you will find that they automatically have the <a rel=”nofollow” right at the beginning of the link, but PayU2Blog does not, and I am certain that by me doing 8 PayU2Blog Posts with links to the sponsor’s without rel=nofollow is why my Google PR was whacked from 2 to 0.

By default when linking to any other site, unless it is a fellow blogger that you want to give “props” to.  Make sure you use a “nofollow” tag.  This appears to be the consensus from what I can determine by reading over 3 dozen web sites and scouring the web the last few days on Google.

Google is especially sensitive to paid posts and doesn’t like Text Link Ads (that aren’t Google’s own Adsense).  I am still learning more my friends and attempting to make my blog more “Google Friendly” yet still qualify and monetize my blog.  It is a catch-22 when many opportunities on SocialSpark and PayPerPost require your blog to be a PR of 3 or above, and yet you lose your PR if you do paid posts.

How Ironic

-Dragon Blogger

• Update

Just a note to my readers, PayU2Blog prohibits adding nofollow to the links in their paid advertisements.  I had asked them prior to doing anything.  I am sure you can add nofollow after a certain “archive period” of time has elapsed, but don’t use nofollow on new paid assignments.

I have been using Google Chrome as my primary browser when using SocialSpark or Entrecard because it loads the pages faster, and I can open many tabs to many profiles and sites and they all load faster than Firefox.  However, when something goes wrong it can be a real pain in the behind.

Supposedly Google Claims that each tab is an independent process, yet when one tab fails they all fail as is evident here (click to enlarge)

In the meantime, I only use it for casual browsing, as the lack of plug-ins and the constant crashing make it useful only for doing various quick tasks that involve multiple tabs, but you can’t leave Google Chrome open for extended periods of time without having issues.

-Dragon Blogger

I have been reading many other blogs who have reported the same google ranking loss, and it seems that one thing that is apparent.  Google clearly penalizes blogs who try to do some paid posts for money.  I did do about 10 paid posts over the past two weeks, and even though I have over 120+ posts and less than 10% are paid content, the paid links are what everyone has said kills your pagerank.

Makes it hard to figure how to monetize your blog when many paid opps require a PR of 3, 4 or 5+ and yet to do paid opps you lose your PR.  Kind of like a double edged sword in my opinion.

So I am stuck just doing my promotion and networking as usual, my paid opp’s have dried up at this point.  Gonna be real hard to make some extra money this month it would seem.  However, I am not going to be discouraged, I enjoy blogging and would do it even if there was no way to make money at it.  I am hooked now and doing it for the enjoyment of doing it, and meeting new people along the way.

First off, I have only been blogging for about 40 days now and I have heard other people rant about the Google Pagerank instability and having been “hit” by Google Pagerank.  I don’t believe how yesterday and for the last two weeks my blogs was a PR2 and then today bam I am now slammed with a PR0.  I didn’t convert my site from http://dragonblogger.com to http://www.dragonblogger.com, my backlinks, and all external links are growing and not shrinking.

My IZEARank is <400, my Alexa rank is 300,000 3 month average and <150,000 1 week average.  So what gives, how does something like this happen?

The bad thing is now my blog won’t qualify for many of the opps that require PR2 or above, so my blog goals just got a lot harder to achieve.

So, go ahead my fellow bloggers, rant here about your Google Pagerank story.  Who else has been burned?

Okay, so I was playing around with Google Web Master tools tonight some more, and have decided to look at the google searches that take place and what my site lists at when people do searches.
The first graph GWT (Google WebMaster Tools) shows you is “Impressions” these are the queries where your site gets listed.  (Not user’s who arrive at your site, but what queries, and what place your site gets listed in the results).  This is important, because you want to know what queries your site is showing up under.

So you will see in this image (you can click to make it larger) that”Heroes” related queries account for many my blog showing up in google search quite a bit.  Some queries my blog is as low as the 4th or 3rd position which I think anything in the first 5 is pretty good for a start.

Ubuntu related posts and iPod related posts are my next ones.  Ironically if someone searches for “Dragonfly Poems” my blog is the 9th site listed since I have a few posts that link to and talk about that site.

The next statistic is traffic, traffic is actual users who end up on your site based on the query they searched in google.  This is extremely important as it will help you craft your site’s “tags” to be more google search friendly.  Learn the pattern of queries so you can adjust your tags accordingly.

Here you will see thatagain ipod and ubuntu, and heroes related queries are very big for my blog.  But someone who searched for “Detailed Hardware Information” arrived on my blog, and I was the #2 position on that query.  This was probably my CPU-Z post, where I actually used the tag “Detailed Hardware Information”

So if you make your tags match what you think somebody would search in google to arrive at your site, you can bet better rankings and matches and therefore be in the top listings.  Obviously the popularity of a site also affects your listing, so if 10,000 sites matched the same tag, the popular ones would get the top slots, but still.  I am surprised that my blog only 30 days has any queries that match the top 3-9 queries on Google, so its a good start.

Just thought I would share this with the world, how many other blogger’s out there do this kind of Query Analysis of their blog on a regular basis?

-Dragon Blogger

Now that we are at October 1st 2008, it is time for me to set goals for my blog’s second month of life.  I have achieved quite a bit with my first month and am going to realistically pace myself a little better for the second month.

Rather than try to achieve some rediculously low IzeaRank I will set this purpose:

1. Keep my Blog < 1000 IzeaRank
2. Keep my Blog < 500,000 Alexa Rank
3. 20 new Back Links
4. Average Unique Visits to 200 consistantly, this means I am shooting for 6000 Visits for the month on GA
5. Dragon Blogger try to earn $100

I go into these goals with renewed spirit and realize how much I not only enjoy blogging, but browsing around getting to know others in my blogging community.  Some of you are my regulars, and some of you are just visiting my blog for Heroes posts, or Blogging Tips and such.

If anyone has any topic, they would like me to share or talk about be sure and let me know.  Especially if you need help with your blogging, or any sort of internet related technology.

-Dragon Blogger