Diversification of your websites

June is almost over, so I think it is time for me to make at least one post on this blog. It has been a very busy month for me, however, I have not been spending much time on web work. My partner is really upset at me, but since he is such a nice guy, really has bothered me very much about it -- YET.

Anyway -- Things are going good with www.PopStarsPlus.com. We had way over 1.1 MILLION UNIQUE visitors for two months straight. This month looks like we may hit 1.25 million, but it is going to be close. However, the eCPM for our Google banners is still way down from last year (less than half), which means that we need to increase our traffic about 110% in order to make the revenues we should be doing. Some of the updates to the site are also going a bit slow because I am not there and unfortunately, he has had to cut out on most of the celebrity news updates. If anyone reading this wants to send us celebrity news summaries, email us at info@popstarsplus.com. Sorry, but we are not paying for submissions.

I have not had much of a chance to update www.BiographyPlus.com, but hope to have some time this summer. It just takes so much time to get things right.

My partner, although he is wearing himself thin doing his updating and mine has also decided to diversify a little bit. He has created a website for a new trading card game coming out called Chaotic. To visit the site, go to www.ChaoticGamePlus.com. I do not think he is going to be making much money from it, but he is enjoying it, and that is the reason why we got into making these websites in the first place.

In total contrast to that, I have also been consulting on an adult site called Celebrity T & A [*for mature viewers only*. Please do not mock me, but a freind of mine wants to try his hand at website development, so I am helping him out. This is the topic he picked since he thinks he can make a lot of money and I think he likes doing it just a little too much.

Celebrity sites - Remember to update your sites for the award ceremonies this month (which we have to do on Pop Stars Plus).

If no one reads this blog, then did I really write it?

Until next time . . . .

Ian Ripley

Maxim's 100 Hottest Women List

If you have a celebrity website, Maxim's list of the hottest 100 women should be of interest to you. Basically, you should check their list and make sure that you have all of these women on your site. Regardless of whether you think that they are sexy or not, these are the women you need to include.


I was dissapointed with Maxim's list of the 100 hottest women. I mean, Lindsay Lohan came in #1? She's cute and could be pretty foxy at times, but she does not have most of the curves and moves to even be in the top 50. To me, hot is hot. Another one that does not belong there is Cameron Diaz - there are times when she is absolutely beautiful, but does not exactly make it in the body department. Maybe they do not understand what hot or sexy means. Jessica Alba is up there and deservingly so -- she's got the look, got the bod and if you ever saw her dance, she's got the moves.

Most of these women are "popular" which is great, but this is not a popularity poll. It seems like the major corporate players for movies & music got together to create this list -- it plays very well well for them, but is just not reality. The dissapointing thing is that Maxim has all kinds of real hotties on their pages - not just the popular celebrities and should know the difference. AskMen.com has a more realistic list.

The important thing is, use this list of women to include on your site.

Until next time . . .
Ian Ripley

Traffic Up, CPM Down

Traffic Up -- Google Adsense eCPM is Down

First, the traffic to www.popstarsplus.com is back up to pre-950 levels and I hope it is going to stay that way.

On the other hand, the eCPM levels for Google Adsense have been reduced to more than half of my "normal" average. It may be partly due to "smart pricing" since the numbers were up in March, but it may also be due to the time of year. March had a number of Award ceremonies - which meanth that celebrity related stuff was hot. Nothing is happening in April, so advertisers are not spending as much on celebritiy related advertising.

It hurts me in the pocket book, but overall, it if something is going to be down, I would rather it be the CPM. With the higher traffic my other revenue streams compensate somewhat. It is also nicer to give prospective advertisers higher monthly numbers.

Out of the Google Doghouse

Ta da!!!!!

www.popstarsplus.com is finally out of the Google SERP doghouse -- at least for now. Our numbers are not up to our all time high levels, but we are coming back gradually. Hooray for us!!!! Hopefully this celebration will not be short lived.

Anyway, using Alexa.com as my guide, I went checking other celebrity websites to see if their numbers were affected as well. Although not all were affected, there were a bunch that did see some type of traffic drop in January. There were a few that actually saw their numbers rise during this time period as well. I still have no clue what triggered Google's new algos to kill my site or to restore it to health, but for now we are happy!!!!

As I have stated in the past that we really dislike exchanging links with other sites, I am going to be adding sites this weekend for recipricols for a large site that I recently communicated with and another smaller site that I have been putting off for a few weeks, most because of the issues relating to Google. Google likes relevant links to your site, so, that is what I am going to give them.

For those of you that have celbrity sites that are kid freindly, do not forget about the upcoming Nickelodeon Awards. Its the biggest awards show for the tween and teen crowd. Justin Timberlake is hosting, and a a lot of the young stars will be honored, performing and in the crowd.

Speaking about sites for young people, if you like role playing card games and animated TV shows, check out the new Chaotic game by 4Kids. We created a sister site www.ChaoticGamePlus.com specially for this game/program. The TV show is now airing, but the game is forthcoming in May.

Until next time . . . .

Ian Ripley

I should have posted about the Academy Awards

Sorry, once again, I have not posted in a while.

Yeah, I stayed up and watched the Academy Awards as did many of you. If you have a celebrity website, it only pays to make sure that you at least mentioned the awards - especially if you have any of the actors/actresses that were nominated (or won).

I was not thrilled with the winners. I saw "The Departed" and was not completely thrilled with it. It was not even Scorcese's best film - but he finally recieved his overdue award for Best Director. There was some very good acting by some great actors, but not Academy Award winning performances. Forest Whitaker and Helen Mirren were excellent and well deserving choices. I did not see Little Miss Sunshine, so I cannot really comment on the supporting actor award, but I heard Alan Arkin was very good. However, Jennifer Hudson was not the best choice in her category. Not that the past American Idol contestant is a bad actress, but still not up-to-par with others in the category (but I guess the Association had to give "Dreamgirls" at least one of the major awards).

The award ceremony was not very exciting this year and could have been half as long.

Anyway, the reason why I have not been posting is because I have been spending so much time trying to work on issues with Google and the "950 Penalty." It comes, it goes, it comes, it goes. Now, besides the penalty, at least one of my pages - Jordan Pruitt at http://www.popstarsplus.com/music_jordanpruitt.htm has been pushed into the supplementals.

This blog had begun as a site to help other celebrity webowners with their own sites based on my sucesses. Next, it began to be my own personal complaint forum regarding how to get a site indexed. Then over the past two months, it has become a site about me complaining about Google changing their algo and killing me in the Serps (Search Engine Result Page). With a sided flavor of supplementals. Is there any rest for the weary? I just want to go back to creating a website that visitors will like. Instead, I have been spending half of my time worrying about SEO. Which, by the way, is exactly what the "officials" at Google say you should not do. If you create a good user freindly website with good content, you should be fine (they say). I did, now I am getting killed for it. Thank goodness I have a large number of returning visitors or else I would be sunk right now. My toal visitor ship is down by half of what it was in December. My numbers are almost going back to what they were a year ago.

What to do now?

Until next time . . . .
Ian Ripley

Did I Watch The Same Grammy's As Everyone Else?

The last few months this blog has been full of stuff about how I am (or am not) ranking in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). I was going to write something about how, you as a webmaster for a celebrity site, need to pay attention to the Grammy Awards as well as the rest of the shows during this awards season. However, after reading a few reviews of the Grammys, I was wondering if I saw the same show as the rest of them.

First off, one writer puts that the night sometimes "it seemed more like the Grannies than the Grammies." That was what prompted me to write my own review. It may be my age showing, but it was those "old" artists that made the night for me. In one set of "R&B" songs by three different artists, it began with Smokey Robinson singng "Tracks of My Tears" followed by Lionel Richie. Both singing their classics with little accompanyment. This was immediately followed by Chris Brown, who brought out all the bells and whistles with some big production number that included many backup dancers, masks, slides, lights and kids - and from my TV set, could not even hold a candle to his two predecesors -- I do not even remember what song he sang. I will admit, he has some pretty good songs on his debut album, but his "performance" was about the glitz and not the music. The Grammys are supposed to be about the music.

To repeat that sentiment, "The Grammys are supposed to be about the music" why were there so many actors/actresses presenting and in the audience? What was up with that? They did not belong their. They mentioned that Scarlett Johansson was going to record something, but has not as of yet -- I can only imagine what favors were being called in to get her to present a top award. And what was the lame banter between her and Don Henley? She asks him for advice and he say's "no." If it was a joke, I completely missed it.

The one thing that I do agree with most of the other reviews out there is that the show was not extremely entertaining. The Justin Timberlake performance with the unkown girl was kind of stupid and after a few seconds I stopped listening (although she was kind of cute). I was happy to see Mary J. Blige get an award, although I am not sure she deserved three - at least in that category. To me she has become more "pop" than R&B. In my opinion, her live performance was lacking. If I was only able to purchase one ticket to a performance by any of the performers last night, it would have to be Christina Aguilera. I said "wow" to myself after hearing her sing her powerful rendition of "It's A Man's World" (by the late great James Brown). She put all of the other performers to shame. It was good to see the Police together, and they sounded good (I hope I can get tickets to their upcoming concert), John Mayer was not bad either. Although I am not a big fan of country, the Dixie Chicks put up a strong performance as well.

The most talked about performance of last night was about the music, but about the performance. You could have watched Shakira without the sound on and got the same effect. She looked good -- really good. She does have a good voice, but it is her body and sexy videos/performances that will sell the albums. If Britney Spears was 30 pound overweight when she began recording, do you think she would have made it to the superstar diva level she had attained a few years ago?

The one thing I wanted to see the most last night was Stevie Wonder and Tony Bennet do a duet. Unfortunately, no such luck.

Why did the Dixie Chicks win so many awards? It is either because they are so head and tails above everyone else that they deserve the awards, or, it is because their is really no competition out there. I would argue for the later point. The talent pool out their is thin. More groups want to grab the spotlight with a lot of splash and bling-bling and forgot about the music. If you went to any of the early rap and hip-hop concerts in the 1980s (now I am really dating myself), you had guys like Run DMC, LL Cool J, and even the Beasty Boys that sang their hearts out and cared about what they sang, not how much it would make. Even groups like Public Enemy had a message in their songs. There seems to be no feeling in the work of today's artists singing bubble-gum type of music, but because it is given a dance beat or rapped, the masses eat it up. Well I guess you cannot really blame the musicians if the buying public can't distinguish between music and garbage.

Well, I guess when I very rarely watch music videos, and only listen to music on CDs, music only IPod or Radio, I miss all of that glam that goes into the whole image thing. Well, maybe it is just my taste, but when an artist of any genre is good, they are good, but there are too many out there that are surviving on everything but talent.

Out Of The Google -950 Penalty

How To Get Out Of The Google 950 Penalty

Once upon a time, a young boy created a Sitseeing attraction (site) for fun. The website grew and grew. The young boy was not an siteseeing optimization expert, and the little he knew, he used on his businesses. He ignored the optimization stuff for this fun site because it was working - it was making him happy and making his visitors happy as well. Then a G[oogle]iant tries to mess with his site and all his visitors were scared away. After never making any kind of changes to help enhance the site, he was faced with a dilema. After a few days of worrying about losing MORE than half his visitors (and revenues), he got out his slingshot and began to make changes to his site and get rid of the menace. A few days later the G[oogle]iant left as suddenly as he came. Although only a small percentage of the site was fixed, the problems had seemed to go away. The little boy wishes that the G[oogle]iant never comes back. However, the G[oogle] is still looming out there and has not finished terrorizing everyone.

The little boy found out later that the G[oogle]iant was set upon the land by the King himself to rid the kingdom of Internetia of Spamogres. Unfortunately for the little boy, the G[oogle]iant was unable to determine between the spamogres and the good guys. The little boy really appreciates the King's efforts of getting rid of the vermin, but would have like the King to take less drastic steps to do so, unless he knows it is going to work.

Future scenario #1: The little boy's site continues to get more popular, the land is rid of spamogres, dupers and all of the other evils in the land. The boy makes enough gold to retire and live in a castle of his own.

Future scenario #2: A new Giant comes back to menace the land. This time, the loss of visitors and continous fighting with the Giant made his tasks a lot less fun. He left his siteseeing attaction and never returned again.

----------------

When I began www.popstarsplus.com two years ago, I never envisioned it getting this big. It will reach over 900,000 Unique Users (over 2 million hits) this month. The site began when I was bored working on my eCommerce sites such as www.GiftIdeasPlus.com. That old site is still around, but does not have nearly as many visitors. Pop Stars Plus began as a personal hobby site and I did what I thought was right on the site, not really ever worrying about search engine optimization (SEO). In fact, I remember when another site owner asked me for contacts to trade reciprocal links with other like sites. I told him that besides his, I only traded sites with three or four other places. I have a lot of links going out that I never asked for a reciprocal, but I have received many links coming in from other places that like my content. The fact that I have so many links on my pages is against standard SEO, but I never cared, because having and rating those outgoing links is part of my original content (the rankings and order, not the site). This is why people come, link, and come back.

Anyway . . . when I began PSP, I created the initial templates with the HTML knowledge I had, and with the very, very little SEO knowledge I happened to come across. The pages remained like this until now. There was never any reason to change them, until now. What is interesting, is that I knew very little about SEO, but managed to create a well ranking site. Google supposedly likes that. However, I was being penalized for my SEO ignorance and for the first time, needed to make changes to better optimize my site (through deoptmizing keywords).

Anyway, I am very glad the site is mostly back. My traffic is increasing to normal rates each day. There is only one very peculiar thing. One of the key phrases for a page is not working. My Ashley Tisdale page is still stuck in the 950s. It was one of the pages that has been de-optimized and has since been reindexed by Google, but the page was put into Google detention and has not been released. Some people at Webmaster world have suggested changing the title/description tags to fix the 950 problem - however, I do not see that as a problem. All my other pages are okay (at least the ones I tried).

Until next time . . .

Ian Ripley

-950 Penalty

I've Been Hit With the -950 Penalty by Google.

First they kill me with bad stats at AdSense, now after the smoke clears, it seems that I have been hit with the -950 penalty. That is the reason my traffic is so far down - no one can find my site - www.popstarsplus.com

What really sucks about this is that I have not intentionally done anything to this or my other sites to warrant a penalty. I created a good site that was good for my visitors. Yes, I had begun to make money on my site - however, as I keep on saying, it has been to enhance the visitor's experience. Why not show a copy of the DVD/movie in a filmography. If they want to purchase it, it is their option. I have painstakenly spent hundreds and hundreds of hours going through thousands of web pages to rank and find the best ones for each celebrity. I have spend many hours enhancing the site and adding content such as news stories. Yet, Google, penalizes me.

It would have been nice to get at least a warning since I have not been penalized before. It would be nice for Google to say something about it to myself and all the other webmasters out there that have been affected -- at least tell us why we may have recieved penalties. We know that they are not going to go into specifics, but at least say something like, "we have provided penalties based on over optimization of words/terms" or anything else. Their guidelines are not what you can really call detailed. A general "penalties were given to websites not following our guidelines." Still not great, but at least we will know if it is something that we can do to correct the problem, or if it was an error on their part that they will be fixing.

I have already made a change to navigation bar on my site. It used to show all pages on the same level, now it is just showing all pages under home. No, this is not a benefit to my visitors, but if my pages remain in the 900s, I will not have any visitors. So, after not doing any of the SEO stuff - I have resorted to making changes to boost up page ranking becasue of a penalty from Google that I do not deserve.

I guess making a website that is both good for my customers and good for Google is impossible. That is what is so frustrating about all of this, I think I am doing good, then out of nowhere, without providing any reason, the rug has been taken out from under me.

Reading many of the posts on WebmasterWorld.com, you have to wonder what is going on. Most of these people, like me, are trying to create good websites for our visitors. We have not done anything wrong, yet we have been punished.

If any webmasters who are techs out there are listening. Let's get together and create a search engine that will not only rival, but surpass Google. Google is good, but is not great. In fact, with this recent update, many of the results are not as relevant as they used to be. So, lets make a better search engine that finds relevant information and remembers the little guys, filters out the spammers and gets around the beurocratic red tape of multimillion dollar businesses such as Google.

Not really very harsh words, but now that I have said them, Google can take me for a ride and basically kill all of my other sites as well.

Google: All I am saying is that you are not being very fair. Please communicate and tell us what is going on. If we knew, we would fix it - we just need a little direction.

Until next time?

Ian Ripley

What Is Google Doing To Me?

What the heck is Google doing to me? It seems that every time I take two steps forward with my www.popstarsplus.com site, I am always pushed back a step.

First, my Google Adsense impressions go way down last week, although my traffic & unique users are going up. A few days ago my traffic took a huge hit. By surfing around the web, you can read a number of discussions by webmasters complaining or trying to theorize what is happening. What I have gathered is that Google made an update to its algorithm. This tweaking by Google has made vast changes to websites throughout the Internet. There are many theories out there as to what types of changes were actually being made, but no one is sure and it may not be over yet. Some ideas floating around are the penalizing of sites that: have affiliate links, have too dense keyword populations, have too many internal links, have a navigation with too great of a heirarcy, and/or have duplicated content.

Personally, I think the people at Google have a lot of nerve doing this. My PopStarsPlus.com is mostly original content. Even the pages where I do copy or "license" the biographies from Wikipedia.org, I enhance it so that it provides the user with a better experience than they would have recieved by just going to Wikipedia alone. I "lost" a few high result pages from the SERP (which means Search Engine Results Page). Which is very interesting, since, not to be modest, were some of the best information out there on the web. The content was original (not from Wikipedia) and recently updated. For instance, my Jordan Pruitt page had more information about her than almost anything else you could find and was the #1 result for her name. Now there are a bunch of lyrics sites for her that rank in the top 10. The page fell to #161 in the SERP. For the most part, on the 16th page is almost like not having it listed at all. There are other articles that just mention her name, or just the word "Pruitt" that have nothing to do with her that appear before my page. If I was looking for information on her, my page should be the first in results because it deserves to be there. However, I must say that if you do use her name with either "biography" or "information" after it in a Google search, my site does come up first (which it should).

Let's hope that this chance is temporary. I spend a lot of time on my sites to make sure that they are the best they can be. I try to provide usefull information to my users. Why must I be penalized? Yes, I have a lot of outgoing links. Thpse links are necessary because I rank other websites based on the information about that particular celebrity. It takes at least an hour to go through websites and sometimes more. Yes, I might have a discography of a musician, and list their albums. So what if I add an Amazon link to that album. Google may say that it ads to value. I say BS, this does add value. First of all, it provides the user with a picture of that album (which was actually my original intention of putting these links on my site) and if a visitor wants to purchase the particular album, I have it listed in a chronological order with the artist's other albums, and I also list the tracks. This, from my own purchasing experience, is very helpful. Even when you try to purchase an album on Amazon itself and seach by date, it is not usually consistent - for example, if a CD of a 1977 album was published in 2002, it would be listed as 2002 in the chronology search results. So Google, if you are listening, there is value added by having affiliate links.

I am just so frustrated right now. All of the work done, and no one will see it. I will admit, the higher traffic meant higher revenues and it was nice to bring in some extra money. If none of my pages will be seen, maybe it is not even worth it for me to continue to update the site so frequently. I'll still do it for fun, but if I put down that celebrity X flashed went into rehab for a third time six months after the fact - what's the difference, since no one will read it anyway.

Until next time . . .

Ian Ripley

Why Are My Google Adsense Page Impressions Getting Lower

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Over 1000 pages Indexed

In the never ending saga of getting my pages for www.biographyplus.com indexed on Google, I can happily say that over 1000 links have been added. 1014 to be exact (Although, a few more pages still need to be added).

As to reciprocal linking, I have added links to one of two sites on BiographyPlus, but then had computer issues and vacation and have not added the links to the second site. In the mean time, I still have not emailed them back to say that the links have been added. So what I have learned so far is that you do not need all of these link backs to added to the index.

My next task is to increase the amount of traffic to the site so I can begin to make some money. Yes, this is a web site I want to make money with. If you want to go to one of my sites that I maintain for public information then you can visit my www.IHaveDiabetes.net site. If you have diabetes or know someone who has it, it might be of some benefit to you.

Right now the pages have not been rated by Google, so I will track to see how the reciprocal links improve (or not improve) the page rank. Hopefully Google will give out new page ranks soon so that the test would be of more value. However, I could still monitor those few pages that had already been given PR values.

We shall see.

Until next time . . . .

Ian Ripley