Massive Page Impressions

My main blog has Google AdSense on it. So I check in daily to see how many clicks and dollars I have made for the day. While I am there, I also check the page impressions for my blog. Something strange is going on today. The page impression count is up 16 times the normal amount. And the day is not even over yet. If this were normal traffic I would be excited, since on average I would also get a lot more clicks and cash. However I don't have a corresponding increase in clicks on my blog.

What could be causing this unusually high impression count? I figure it could be Google crawling my site. But Google Toolbar says my pages were cached a couple days ago. I would not think that Google would be back again that soon. I could be wrong. Or maybe it is Yahoo or MSN crawling the site. I think I did submit my URL to all three of these. Could it be some rogue search engine like Ask.com? My mind is racing with different theories.

In the big scheme of things, this is not really all that important. It is only interesting. The real goal of the blog and the associated Search Engine Optimization is profit. I am hoping that, regardless of page impressions, my click through rate (and therefore profit) shall continue to increase.

Good and Bad Business

I heard about a developer sharing a story where his application got cracked. Luckily his app "phoned home" and he knew who had stolen a copy of his application. He was now looking for advice on what to do. Many ideas were presented on how to gain this cracker as a customer. One of the best ideas I heard was to list this cracker's company on the developers customers page. LOL. How is that for a good idea?

On a more serious note, I tried downloading a free copy of a book from Microsoft. Turns out you need an MSN Live account. So I went through the pain of creating one. It requires that you provide a valid e-mail address. Since I hate span, I decided to create a new throw-away Yahoo mail account. This is where I ran into what I believe to be a very poor user interface. You type in the account name that you would like. And there is a "Check" button next to the name. So I assume that means this will check if somebody else has taken the name you have chosen. But I find that, no matter how random of a name I enter, I always get back some type of error message. Either Yahoo recommends a different name, or says it cannot choose a different name for me.

After a while I determine there is some type of bug on this page. Not sure if it is some bad look up code, or just poor user interface design. I proceed to try to create the account anyway. And what do you know? It actually works. Luckily this is just a throw-away account. I had created a long and hard to remember name to get past the "Check it" stage. Come on Yahoo. I know you provide e-mail for free. But you got to provide a better sign up experience please.

Download.com

I had mentioned previously that I submitted a couple of my applications to be listed on Download.com. At first it seemed like I needed to pay to get my applications moved to the front of the processing queue. But I did not pay for premium processing. After a while, all three of my apps got listed on Download.com.

It was frustrating at first. The statistics on Download.com stated that I had zero downloads for all of my apps. Then I started to question these statistics. I downloaded my own applications just to test out the download and see if the statistics were getting updated. They were not. At least not in real time.

Eventually I started seeing my statistics rise ever so slowly. Here is a summary of the number of downloads from Download.com as of today:


Analyzing these numbers all depends on the perspective. I have submitted all of these applications to other sites. The Download.com numbers seem to be higher than any of the other popular sites. Here is a sampling of the download numbers for Britview from some other sites:

  • Soft Pedia - 73 downloads
  • Best Software 4 Download - 22 downloads
  • Best Freeware Download - 52 downloads

However when I look at the other Britney Spears screen saver and theme software hosted on Download.com, my numbers appear very weak:

  • Top theme - 116,273 downloadsd
  • Top screen saver - 71,861 downloads

All of the download statistics may be moot, since what I am really after is profit. But that is a topic for another post. For now why don't you go to Download.com and get the latest version of Britview. Better yet, get Britview from my web site.

Getting Indexed

I have been churning out small web sites. Each page of every site links to my blogs. And the web sites link to each other. I am hoping to build up some inbound link equity with this process. There is only one problem. It seems to be taking Google forever to index my pages.

For some of my web sites it has been over 10 days since I submitted the URLs to Google. They still have not been indexed. Maybe I am a bit impatient. I do not expect the web sites to rank highly in the SERPs. But I am hoping that they donate the link power to my blogs which I do want to rank highly.

Anybody got any ideas on how to encourage Google to hurry up and scan my sites? I made sure to put Google AdSense on each of my pages. Not sure if anybody is going to come and click on those ads. But I reckon that Google wants to make money, and if some submitted sites have their AdSense ads, then maybe they will be more anxious to index those pages and server them up.

In Bound Links

I continue on my plan to generate web sites based on free content which link to my blogs. My pilot web site was easy. It had about 50 pages. Google Page Creator worked fine for this. Each pages linked to my blogs. When I was done I submitted my web site to Google.

Given this initial success, I figured why not turn up the volume. So I chose a second web site with 500 pages. I got all the raw data entered. Now I need to link up all the pages on my site. And I still need to do some formatting and add the links to my blogs. The good news is that this should provide 10 times as many links as my previous site. The down side is that this is 10 times the work too.

I really need to get some software to automate this web site building. Since I am a programmer this should not be that difficult. I can't imagine me spending my whole life publishing web pages just to get a little SEO. So far I am waiting for my first web site to be indexed to give me a higher inbound link count.
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