BlogTides

Welcome back to Blog Tides. I’ve been thinking on some ideas for this blog and it struck me that there is a lot of scope for expansion into the areas of specialized topics. I’ve noticed a lot of sites or blogs appearing that have taken the stance that they will grow by accepting guest posters to boost the site’s page count and content volume. That’s good from the user point of view as it provides search traffic with a more worthwhile landing page where there is relevant and hopefully interesting and well written content for them to read.

Will I be doing this here on this site?

I’m considering it as an option for boosting the site’s content for sure, but there is one drawback that I can see. That is one of trust.

Generally, bloggers are looking out for one person, and that’s themselves, so when they get a chance to gust post on someone else’s blog, they are going to place at least one link in that post back to their own blog. Now there’s nothing wrong with that and its the least the hosting blog can do for getting some free content.

But that trust is more often than not abused by the posting blogger. Horror stories abound, where the guest posts a badly spun article that is showing up on a multitude of other blogs, thereby attracting a duplicate content penalty for the hosting blog. Then their linking strategy leaves a lot to be desired.

Why bloggers think that they have to place three links in every post they submit to other blogs is beyond me!

That practice screams “paid post” to the search engines who will come looking to scrutinize the hosting blog and maybe even give it a penalty. Whether the links are to legitimate sites is another cause for concern. Some bloggers who submit bad articles all over the place are little more than spammers themselves and care not one whit that they might also be linking to bad neighborhood sites. Yup, another penalty or worse, the hosting blog gets deindexed for its trouble.

So allowing guest posters on here at the moment is not all that attractive to me. Unless there is an easy way to moderate what is being posted, I’m not interested in hosting duplicate crap that is full of links to other people’s crap sites.

So my alternative is to write my own articles, which is what I do anyway, being a writer! To this end, I don’t have to link out to anywhere if I don’t want to and I know my content is original, relevant and interesting.

So I have made a tentative start by creating the first of my topics with a main article, called Zone Diets under which I will publish a series of closely related articles. Once done, I’ll move onto another topic and build up that way.

Sure, its slower and more ponderous and it’ll likely take a while to build this site up to anything like the content powerhouse it’ll need to be in order to rank well in the SERPs for the terms it will be targeting. But at least it’ll be all me and under my control.

Admin
BlogTides

Where is BlogTides heading? This is a question that I’m often asked and it gets me thinking about the direction I want to take this blog and its hosted blogs. Well, the hosted blogs will go wherever they will go as they are are on a variety of different subjects and the owners will take them to where they need to be.

But as for the home base, or more specifically this blog, it needs some direction other than just being a admin info blog. After all, there’s only so much you can write about as a site admin especially when there are not many changes coming along. Ok, there was the recent upgrade to the WP software to bring it right up to date. There are plans to further upgrade the site with new plugins, new themes and a more robust revenue sharing program that will allow chikita and amazon ads to be served as well as adsense, ebay and kontera. These are in the testing stage and will be rolled out quite soon once the bugs are ironed out. You probably won’t notice the difference right away unless you’re looking to change themes or happen to chech your revenue share.

On that note, ebay of course is now not allowed (unless you happen to be the host domain owner) as EPN have changed the rules forbidding their ads to be shown on any domain you don’t personally own. That includes WPmu hosts, Blogger blogs, Wordpress blogs (not that you could ever show ads on there), geocites, blinkweb, blogetery and any of the other free blogging platforms. You can still serve ebay ads on hub pages and squidoo lenses, but you must use their own module and not the rss feeds that gave you 100% of the revenue.

Ok, thats about all for now. I’ll post again when the new updates take effect and in the meantime will have a long hard think about the direction of this blog!

Admin
BlogTides

Here at BlogTides, we’re as concerned as anyone else that all blogs created on this host are of good standard and comply with Google’s quality guidelines. When everything is ship shape and orderly, then there can be no reason for getting your blog penalized or even de-indexed from the search engine’s pages. So here are some thing you can do to make sure your blog is clean:

Do’s:

Write good, readable and relevant content in your blog. This is probably one of Google’s main reasons for indexing your blog and placing it in the index, because their aim is to bring quality to the people searching their index. While we know having lots of quality backlinks is also a deciding factor in getting good placement in the SERPs, this is part of SEO and nothing to do with Google’s quality guidelines. So do your blog a favour and write some good articles!

Do link out to authority sites if you make a reference to information that can be found there.

Do make friends with other bloggers in social networks as this will bring you valuable links to increase the authority of your blog.

Do optimize your blog for its main and long tail keywords so that you’ll feature in the right place in Google’s index.

Don’t’s:

Don’t go linking to bad neighbourhood websites/blogs. This is one of the fastest ways of getting your blog de-indexed because Google hates spam as much as you do.

Don’t put up paid links. If you do, you’ll get found out and penalized for doing so.

Don’t keyword stuff your posts. Too high a density of keywords will trigger a flag that could prevent your post being indexed and could hurt the SERPs placement of your blog.

Don’t duplicate content from other blogs. This is plagiarizing and no one likes a thief. You could also be violating copyright laws so don’t do it. Write your own articles or at least re-write other peoples’ so the finished item will pass Copyscape. You could always get a ghost writer to write your content for you as well, as long as its original.

Ok, these are the main points that will keep your blog above board and legitimate. As long as you keep Google happy, they will be kind to you and your blog can go far with plenty of work from you. So don’t go and spoil it by doing something stupid!

Admin
BlogTides