Stéphane Lee

I think that TLA (aff) is a good source of revenue for casual bloggers. It helps pay the webhosting and other bills. However, from an advertiser point of view, I think it is a bit overpriced and does not bring the benefits that one would expect. The clickthrough from real visitors is minimal. The link juice is not that powerful. Google is now intelligent enough to recognize a paid text links and a spam blog among other thinks. The anti-spam group has done a lot of progress. Power to the blogger/publisher for TLA.

I have a domain name that has been wiped from the main index and gone in the supplemental index for over a week now. There have been numerous reports about other websites being yanked. Google, get you act together with your bigdaddy thing now!

You may have read the New York Times article or other news sources about Google buying 5% stake in AOL for $1 Bn and $300m in advertising money on Adwords.

“Finally, around 9 p.m., Richard D. Parsons, chief executive of Time Warner told Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, that he would accept Google’s recently sweetened offer. Google, which prides itself on the purity of its search results, agreed to give favored placement to content from AOL throughout its site, something it has never done before.”

If this is not evil, what is evil then? If, for them, “favored placement” means Adwords ads, it’s OK with me. However, if they start playing with the SERPs, this may have dire consequences and may be the beginning of the end. That’s my take on this.

Good to know: SERP word has been invented by Brett Tabke.

I have to admit that Wordpress is the best blog software for any content publisher. Its template is very optimized for search engines. For example, h1 tags, various useful plugins like Technotag or Ultimate Tag Warrior. We have now a lot of templates. The initial “classic” template was quite ugly. Wordpress has definitely replaced Movable Type in the free market.