How Many Google Astores Do You Have?

Since the holiday buying season is upon us, I figured I would begin to create as many AStores as possible to help generate additional revenue. The stores are fairly easy to set up and populate. they also provide a second benefit of allowing a link-back to your related pages. Some of my stores are as follows:

Our AStores
Adriana Lima Books, Gifts & Products
American Presidents Books & Products
Angelina Jolie Books, DVDs, Gifts & Products
Anna Kournikova Books, Gifts & Products
Anna Nicole Smith Books, DVDs, Gifts & Products
Books & Gifts About and For Anniversaries
Ashton Kutcher Books, DVDs, Gifts & Products
Beyonce Books, CDs, Gifts & Products
Biographical Books and DVDs
Birthday Books and Gifts
Brad Pitt Books, DVDs, Gifts and Products
Britney Spears CDs, Books, Gifts & Products
Brooke Burke Books, DVDs, Gifts & Products
Candice Michelle Books, DVDs, Gifts and Products
Carmen Electra Books, DVDs, Gifts and Products
Books and Products relating to Chanukah
The Cheetah Girls CDs, Books, Gifts and Products
Chris Brown CDs, Gifts, Books & Products
Christina Aguilera CDs, Books, Gifts and Products
Christmas Books and Gifts
Christmas Books and Gifts (2)
Clay Aiken CDs, Books, Gifts & Products
Books and Gifts relating to Dating
Books and Products for Dieting and Diets
Dragonball Z Books, DVDs, Gifts and Products
Drake Josh Books, DVDs, CDs, Gifts and Products
Books and Products for Enhancing Your Education
Books and Gifts For and About Father's Day
Geography Books and Products
Books & Gifts
Gina Wild Books, DVDs, Gifts and Products
Halloween Books, Movies, Gifts, Costumes and Products
Hannah Montana CDs, Books, DVDs, Gifts and Products
Harry Potter Books, DVDs, Movies, Gifts and Products
Books, Gifts and Products for a Healthier Body and Mind
High School Musical DVDs, CDs, Books, Gifts, Books and Movies
Hilary Duff CDs, Books, DVDs, Gifts and Products
History Books, Gift and Products
Books, Videos and Products on How To Make Money
Jamie Lynn Spears Books, DVDs, Gifts & Products
Jennifer Hawking Books, DVDs, Gifts & Products
Jennife Lopez CDs, Books, DVDs, Gifts and Products
Jeremy Sumpter Books, DVDs, Gifts and Products
Jessica Alba Books, DVDs, Movies, Gifts and Products
Jessica Simpson CDs, DVDs, Books, Gifts and Products
Jesse McCartney CDs, DVDs, Books, Gifts and Products
Katie Holmes Books, DVDs, Gifts & Products
Books and Products on Being Kosher
Lindsay Lohan CDs, DVDs, Books, Movies, Gifts and Products
Books, Products and Gifts about Love
LoveThyNeighbor Books, Gifts and Products
Mandy Moore Books, DVDs, Movies, Gifts and Products
Miley Cyrus CDs, Books, DVDs, Gifts and Products
Mother's Day Gifts, Books & Products
A Selection of Music CDs Highlighted on PopStarsPlus.com
Baseball Books, DVDs, Movies, Gifts and Products
Pamela Anderson Books, DVDs, Movies, Gifts and Products
Pokemon Books, Gifts, DVDs and Products
How To Play and Win at Poker: Books, DVDs, Gifts and Products
Diabetes Books, DVDs, Gifts and Products
Playstation 3 Games and Products
Pussycat Dolls CDs, Books, DVDs, Gifts and Products
Rachael Ray Books, DVDs, Gifts and Products
Religion: Books, Gifts, DVDs and Products
Rock Music CDs, Books, Gifts and Products
Sailor Moon Books, DVDs, Gifts and Products
Scarlett Johansson Books, DVDs, Movies, Gifts and Products
Shakira CDs, Books, DVDs, Gifts and Products
Stacey Keibler Books, DVDs, Gifts and Products
Thanksgiving Books, DVDs, Gifts and Products
The Beatles CDs, DVDs, Movies, Books, Gifts and Products
The Simpsons DVDs, Books, Gifts and Products
Tom Cruise DVDs, Books, Movies, Gifts and Products
Trish Stratus Books, DVDs, Posters, Gifts and Products
Valentine's Day Books, DVDs, Gifts and Products
Weddings and Marriage Books, Gifts and Products
Wii Games and Gifts
Wrestling Divas Books, DVDs, Posters, Gifts and Products
X-Box Games and Gifts
The Yankees Books, DVDs, Gifts and Products
Zoey 101 DVDs, Books, Gifts and Products

Ian Ripley . . . until next time.

BiographyPlus.com Update

BiographyPlus.com Deep Index Experiment

About two weeks ago I said that I was going to begin experiementing on how to raise the number of indexed pages on the www.biographyplus.com website. I did create a new index and submitted it to Google. I am now up to 277 indexed pages (up from about 110-120). It seems to be rising about 3-7 links every day. In the mean time I have also been working on expanding the site so that I now have about 1300 pages on the site (about 6 pages per person for A thru B so far). None of those new deeper pages have been indexed so far. I have not submitted the URLs for any reciprocal links yet. No, I do not know what I am waiting for. Actually, I will wait until the number of indexed pages begin to slow down or do not rais at all, this way I can try to measure if getting reciprocal links does have any affect on the site.

Top Five with Popular Terms for Christmas Music CDs

I was able to make the top five on Google for a search for "music recommendations for Christmas" and "CD recommendations for Christmas" - I know the term is a little long, but it is a very common term that hopefully people will use in their searches. Hopefully it will lead to additional revenues. How did I do it? I must have just hit on the perfect combination of keywords in the content and in the meta tags (yes, I believe that all the search engines do look at the meta tags.)

What Happened to Kate Middleton?

For about 3 days, my Kate Middleton page on www.PopStarsplus.com was in the top 5 in Google for searches on her name. Now it is not even indexed. What a crazy search engine world we live in. I also noticed that all of the other "Celebrities" I had added over the last month have also dissapeared from the index. Google taketh with one spider and taketh away with another.

Ian Ripley . . . until next time.

Google Deep Index Experiment

As you have been reading, Google hates me. Well, really, it hates my site, www.BiographyPlus.com. It does not want to spider and index my entire site. It gets the top pages, but unsystematically does not index others. I have looked at the page's html between an indexed page and a non-indexed page and I cannot find anything, I re-submitted a new site-map to Google two weeks ago and no change since it was last indexed on 11/8. I have two things I am going to do. First, I will spend an hour or so tonight submitting the page to other sites. I should have done this a long time ago. I am not interested in page ranking with this sight yet, so I did not worry about it. However, if I can get links to some of the deeper pages, then maybe it can index me via those links. Secondly, I am going to be adding some deep links onto this blog to see what happens.

Experiment Links:

Biographies Beginning with "C" -- http://www.biographyplus.com/c.htm

Fidel Castro News -- http://www.biographyplus.com/fidel_castro_news.htm

Crazy Horse -- http://www.biographyplus.com/crazy_horse.htm

Peter Abelard Biography -- http://www.biographyplus.com/peter_abelard_biography.htm

Thomas Aquinas Auction Items -- http://www.biographyplus.com/thomas_aquinas_auction_items.htm

Queen -- http://www.biographyplus.com/queen.htm

50 Cent Biography -- http://www.biographyplus.com/50_cent.htm

Actors in Harry Potter -- http://www.biographyplus.com/index_movies_h_harrypotter.htm

Biographies of Rock Musicians -- http://www.biographyplus.com/index_music_rock.htm

Okay, now we will see if this works.

Until next time . . . Ian Ripley

A Grittier Celebrity Website Added

I have begun to create another free-web based side for celebrities called Celebrity Voice. I created it on FreeWebs. Its purpose is to be able to speak freely and candidly about the celebrities and how trashy or hot they are. If you are interested, you can check it out at: Celebrity Voice <http://www.freewebs.com/celebrityvoice/>.

What's Up With Google Site Maps?

Google just doesn't like me. It does not matter what I do with www.BiographyPlus.com, Google just does not seem to want to Index further than the second level of the site and only a few select third level pages. There is no rhyme or reason for what pages it indexes. The reasoning is all computer generated through their algorythm, but it is a machine and not a human. My pages on BiographyPlus.com and www.PopStarsplus.com are set up the same way, but the Pop Stars site is fully indexed, although I do not know why it takes anywhere from 1 to 6 days sometimes to cache.

How to Make a Google Sitemap

Anyway, I went back to my Google Sitemap and re-created a new map. I used NeuroticWeb (http://www.neuroticweb.com/recursos/sitemap/) to create the new map. For those of you that have not done this before, you need to Go to Google and Set up an account. Once you do that, verify your website (the instructions are on Google). Use the Sitemap generator on Google or use a free service such as NeuroticWeb above. Once you ahve the text, copy it to your notepad and save the file in UTF-8. Add it to your website as a file named sitemap.xml and then go back to Google and tell it that you are ready to be mapped. Google will then look at your site and sitemap file and tell you if it is good or not. This could be a pain and require you to continously "parse" (find and correct errors) the file. Once it accepts the file you wait. Unfortunately for me, I wait and wait and wait to no avail. Google still only indexes about 150 page out of over 800 (it leaves out most of the pages with the content). I am also working on changing the site, but if it is not indexed, what's the use?

Till next time, Ian Ripley

How Important Are Backlinks?

How Important Are Backlinks?

With the last two Google re-indexing in June and September, backlinks seem to play an important role in Google Page Rank and search results. For those who say that page rank means nothing - phooey. I see a definite correlation in my sites between page ranking and traffic. When one of my sites goes up in page rank, I see more traffic. If the page rank goes down, so does traffic. One think to keep in mind, however, is that this is only true for comparing a web site to itself. For instance, you may have a web site with a Google Page Rank (GPR) of 6 and I have a site with a GPR of 4, however, I appear higher in the search results. So saying "my page rank is higher than yours" means little, but saying "my page rank went up, so I will probably get more traffic" has been true with my own sites so far.

Backlinks In Celebrity Web Sites

When Google looks at backlinks, I think they look at links to each individual page. For instance in www.PopStarsPlus.com or www.BiographyPlus.com I try to get links to the individual artist or celebrity. So Lindsay Lohan pages link to other Lindsay Lohan pages, Zac Efron Pages link to other Zac Efron Pages, Michael Jordan pages link to Michael Jordan pages, etc. So when the Google spideers take a look at the home pages, they do not see most of the back links to the site, only the ones that go directly to the home page itself. Yes, the back links do help the internal celebrity pages which supposedly will help the home page it links to, but there are hundreds or thousands of backlinks that are not accounted for in the home page. Maybe Google needs to re-work its own algorithm to take this into consideration.

As a strategy, I could just have all reciprocal links go to the home page, but that would be a disservice to the individuals that want a specific celebrity. I guess I will probably keep on doing what I am doing and eventually Google will benefit websites that actually try to provide information and links to its users as opposed to sites that provide information and links that will obtain the best rankings. Hopefully I will win out in the end, but being right does not always mean success. Ultimately, when there is time, I will try to get some more "quality" backlinks, but for now, adding content and making my sites the best they can be is a priority.