Oscar Winners

What kind of a celebrity blogger would I be if I did not mention the Academy Awards? However, it was not the most exciting of awards show this year (or even compared to other academy Awards shows of the past). This is my opinion - take it or leave it. However, I am not here to talk about the show it self or the endless hours of red carpet interviews -- but I am here to talk about the buzz of the show on the net and what it means to our celeb sites.

Award winners will obviously gain momentum in searches over the next few days, but many of the winners were not the most "popular" with the fans. For instance, Philip Seymour Hoffman (in my opinion) deservedly won for best performance in a leading role - however, his fan base is not as large as lets say nominee Heath Ledger. Winner Rachel Weisz is one to watch - put her on your site if you have not already done so, in our opinion her popularity will begin to rise big time over the next year or two.

Some of the big buzz winners were Reese Witherspoon got the nod for best leading actress (it should have gone to Judi Dench) and will increase her already large popularity and George Clooney's popularity will rise even greater from taking home an Oscar.

The cast of Crash will get some buzz from the Oscars by winning the big prize for a movie, especially ex-teen idol Matt Dillon. I must admit, I did not see this movie (along with most other people), but will now try to see it on DVD as soon as it comes out. So if you do not have pages for the cast members on your site, last week was the time to add them (no, we did not add them either).

Results of the award show will also be a popular search this week, especially today -- so get up the results as soon as possible. Unfortunately for us, my partner was not feeling well and fell asleep early on and was unable to post the results last night -- but not to worry, they will be up on www.PopStarsPlus.com by this evening. I'll forgive him this time.

I.R.

Zac Efron, Emma Roberts and Other Teens are Hot

Teens and pre-teens are usually overlooked when promoting an ecommerce site. They do not have credit cards, so they cannot buy your items, so why bother? However, many of today's youth are actively surfing the internet (hopefully with some parental locks or better yet, parental guidance).

The big problem is that most web content developers are older than these Gen80-90 (born in the (late) 1980s and 90s) web users and may not know what is "hot" or who is popular. Well, let's go down a quick list:

• Cast of Harry Potter - The buzz of the last movie may have calmed down, but all of the main characters are still fan favorites and heavily searched.
• Disney Channel, Nickelodeon and other Youth stations - The stars of their biggest shows are also very popular on the web, especially Jamie Lynn Spears of Zoey 101 (yes, Britney's kid sister), Emma Roberts of Unfabulous (niece of Julia Roberts), Zac Efron from Disney's TV movie High School Musical (the movie was surprisingly well produced) and Drake Bell of Drake and Josh (Josh isn't as popular, but a talented natural comic/actor).
• The "kid" musicians - There is a whole list of them, now that Jessica, Justin and Britney are getting older a new group of hot stars are coming in such as: Teddy Geiger, The Cheetah Girls, Aly and AJ, Drake Bell, Zac Efron - also worth a mention are the older teens/tweens such as Hilary Duff, Lindsay Lohan, Ciara, Omarion and Chris Brown.
• Cast of Aquamarine - The latest movie for teens starring three talented young actresses: Emma Roberts, Jojo and Sara Paxton.
• Cast of Outsiders - Just kidding - I guess I am dating myself, but that movie had a young cast of many future stars.

Well, this is a good start if you are trying to add a younger crowd to your site. But of course this list changes from year to year as the next new hot thing comes up or as the old thing just gets too "old."

In another post, I think I am going to discuss the appropriateness of having kid celebrities on our websites and if we do include a page for them, how much information should we include -- they are kids, after all.

Why Isn't Google Indexing Deep Pages?

Google has not been very freindly to our site [http://www.PopStarsPlus.com/] over the last few weeks. Because of all of the re-indexing and shuffling around of their rankings, we seemed to have been shuffled around - and not in a good way.

During 2005 our site has been increasing by 10% to 15% in unique users each month. But then skidded to a halt in January. Even with the addition of several pages the number of uniques has remained the same. The same is true for February. What is going on here?

The indexing of the site has also gotten progressively worse. In December, the home page was indexed at least once every two days with about a four day lag between going deep into the website. In fact, today, March 2nd I have some pages that have not been indexed for one whole month (February 3rd) with any new page not showing up at all (luckily most were picked up by on Yahoo and MSN).

What I find strange is that on February 19th or 20th, all of the pages on the site were indexed (and given new page page ranks) but dissapeared within a half a day -- and still have not returned.

Being fans of many celebs, we originally started this site to provide information about celebrities for others on the web to enjoy. We did not really want to concern ourselves with SEO (search engine optimization), we have other sites that are specifically for e-commerce and we have tried to do every kind of SEO imaginable. But for this site we tried to take a modified Field of Dreams approach - not just "If you build it, they will come," but "If you build a site with good information and resources, they will come." Until the beginning of the year, that has been the case -- but it seems that the power of Google has taken hold.

Over the past few months we have had requests from other celebrity sites to swap links -- in most cases we have said no. Remember, we do not merely put the link on our page, but we have to go to each of the celebrity pages and review them so that we can give them our own rating. This takes a lot of time -- especially if the other site has 400-500+ celebrities that match ours. We have decided that it would be of a much better use of our time to add more content on our site. [Content is "King" and all that jazz] But it looks like reciprocal links with other "quality" and "relevant" sites would give us better ranking, which would give us a large numer of visitors. Does it pay to add content to a site that no one would read? So over the next few months our readers will begin to see less content being added and more reciprocal links.

We have also found this true on one of our new sites - www.BiographyPlus.com, which is based on PopStarsPlus, but will include many more celebs and non-so celebrity individuals such as historical, social and political figures. We have also decided to hold off on a rated links section for that site so we can add more people a lot quicker.

I do not know if you have learned anything from my scriblings today, but if you have a website of your own, you may be going through some of the same troubles as we are.

I.R.

Dennis Weaver and Don Knotts bite the bullet

Death of a celebrity brings about a buzz on the net. We have had two celebrity deaths recently of two well liked stars, Don Knotts and Dennis Weaver. Knotts always played the bumbling, yet endearing funny man and was most know for his role as Barney on the Andy Griffith Show. Weaver has had many different Marlboro man type roles throughout his long career. Both have a large fan base who are curious as to find out about their demise, even if they are not "big fans." For instance, I have always enjoyed Don Knott's movies and television shows (I saw Pleasantville just the other day -- one of my favorite movies), but if I was not involved with an entertainment site, I would probably not have looked up information about him online until his death.

So what does this mean to search engines and other celebrity sites? If you already had a Don Knotts/Dennis Weaver page or site and it was indexed by the major search engines prior to their deaths, then you have probably seen an increase in traffic over the past week. A few months ago, when Don Knotts was in the hospital, it caught my attention and I put up a web page in his honor. Yup, we got a nice amount of hits over the past few days. However, we did not put up a Dennis Weaver page. Even if we put it up the day he died, it would still take time to be indexed by the major search engines, so by the time the buzz wears down, the page will be accessible.

Ian

Are celebrity nipple slips good for the Internet?

A strange question? Not really. We humans are curious people. We are also yentas and voyeurs. I think that the Internet would be successful in business even if it were not for celebrities, but the fact that people want to know more about what is behind the celluloid exteriors of their favorite stars is what has really driven the web to its current height of success. This is not a new phenomenon - VCRs would have never made it big if it were not for the porn industry. But where you had to pay for a movie of a porn star on the Internet you may be able to find a picture (or even a video) of your favorite celebrity for free (or for a small monthly fee). For instance when Tara Reid, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and a number of other famous celebrities had public nipple slips, it was up on the net and shown around the globe in hours. Even if you want to see some of your favorite celebs having sex (Paris Hilton and others) -- there are websites out there that will show you it as well. [Note: the links are to my website, PopStarsPlus.com -- which does not contain links to nude photos or sex videos -- to find those just enter a search into your favorite search engine with the name of the celebrity and what you are looking for, such as "sex video" and you will find thousands of sites that are more than willing to show you what you are looking for.] What, you do not care about all of this sex stuff? That's cool. Then you are probably into the latest news and rumors about your favorite star. Then you probably want to know the answers to one of the following questions: Who are they dating? Who did they just break up with? Are they pregnant? Why did they hit that cop while in a drunken rage? Are they really anorexic? Did they really say or do that? -- etc. Yes you all want to know this and much more --- and I am just as guilty as the rest of you. I am going to try to approach this blog with the intent of relating the celebrity and their relationship to the Internet and to you, the Internet user (for now on - celeb surfers). I'll try to be as consistent as possible and as up-to-date as possible - however, believe it or not, I do have a life, a family, websites (e.g., PopStarsPlus.com) and a real "daytime" job. Welcome celeb surfers to this new blog and hope to see you around again. Ian Ripley