Some of you may have noticed over the past few days that there have been some major problems here at SEOlogs. Most of them are currently in the tools section, but the blog was also down for a bit.

This is because of a major failure on the part of the site I was hosting with. I’m not going to name any names, because they seem like nice enough guys, but if you’ve been reading the blog, you probably know who.

The reason I switched to this most recent host was because I was having a lot of problems with the prior hosting company (same reason as the time before ). There was just way too much down time, and if it wasn’t going down, it was just slowing down to a snail’s pace.

I was stubborn about switching hosts the first time, but after reading some really good reviews about this company, and speaking to some of the guys that work there, I was pretty much sold, and went ahead and made the switch.

Before I go any further, let me just say that moving SEOlogs.com is not easy. It’s actually extremely difficult. First there’s dealing with the size limits of moving the wordpress posts to a the new database. That’s a pain, but it’s nothing compared to getting all the seo tools up and functioning properly again.

Ok. Back to the story.

After making the switch, and getting all the tools working again, the new host was great. The site was loading noticeably faster, I liked the new admin interface, it was all peaches, until about a week later when I went to check something out on the site, and it was down. No long loading delay, just plain straight to the “Server Not Found” screen.

I called, and immediately reached tech support. Just like when I spoke with sales, this was a real person at the company, not outsourced tech support, and though I was alarmed about the site being down, I was really impressed with the fast response. They had it working again pretty quickly, so I decided to let that one slide.

About 2 weeks later, it happened again, and this time support wasn’t so great, I couldn’t get anyone on the phone. I also couldn’t get anyone via their “24 hour live chat”. The site was down for over an hour this time. This was just not good at all, so at this point, I decided to go ahead and start the process of moving the site to my dedicated machine that I already host dnscoop.com on.

I did everything except for pulling the nameserver entries. I seriously considered it, but I thought I’d give them one more chance.

That chance came last Tuesday when I just happened to check out the tools page, and noticed that I could see the PHP code on the page.

There it was. All of the code from my 20 plus SEO tools there on the screen for the taking. I’m not sure how long this was going on for, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some new SEO tools sites start to pop up soon. Not to mention, people got to see how sloppy my PHP coding is.

I made the call, and got someone on the phone. He told me that they had upgraded the PHP install on the server, and that they had seen this problem with a few other sites. But unfortunately, the guy who could help wouldn’t be in for another 30 minutes.

That definitely was not the right answer. I redirected all traffic to my personal site, with a message explaining what was happening, then I went ahead and updated the name server entries.

So now, SEOlogs.com lives with his little brother, dnScoop.com on their own private island of dedicated hosting happiness. It’s what I should have done in the first place, but I had my reasons for keeping them separate (It has nothing to do with SEO).

I am seriously considering just doing what Aaron Wall has done, and going open source with most of my tools. That way, maybe some others could help with keeping the code working.

The moral of the story is that good hosting is hard to come by. Just because a host is great for someone else, doesn’t mean that it will be great for you too. The opposite is also true, just because a lot of people say it’s no good, doesn’t mean it’s true.

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I’ve had several requests over the past week to give up some of the info that I learned at last week’s WebmasterWorld Pubcon Vegas conference.

Well, I’m definitely not going to go over every single session, because:
A) I didn’t attend every session. I only attended about 1/5 of the sessions.
B) It’s already been done. If you’re looking fore complete coverage, then your best bet is over at Search Engine Roundtable: PubCon Day 1, PubCon Day 2, and PubCon Day 3.

I’m going to just share, 3 topics here that I felt were the most important things I heard at PubCon 2007. Basically, 3 things that I’m definitely going to be trying to implement more the months to come.

1. Social Marketing
   The topic of Social Media Marketing, or at least some aspect of it, seemed to pop up in a lot of the sessions at Pubcon.

   A. Social Marketing is not just Digg.com, Reddit.com, Stumbleupon.com and Del.icio.us.
   There are now scores of active Social Bookmarking sites available. I posted a list of Social Bookmarking Sites last month, which contains over 30 sites, organized by category, that you can submit to.

   B. You don’t need tech blog, or funny pictures/ videos blog, to be popular on sites like Digg.com
   I hear a lot of people say, “But I have a (Fill in the blank) site. It could never be featured on Digg”.

   For those people, I would say that you just need to think more outside the box. I’ve heard so many great ideas for submitting topics that you would never expect to be on Digg. Michael Gray of Wolf-Howl.com gave a great example of what sort of articles that a site that sells paint could create to submit to several big Social sites.

        1. Article targeted for digg.com : “How to paint the digg logo on your wall”
        2. Article targeted for propeller.com: “What does the color of your walls say about your personality?”
        3. Article targeted for lifehacker.com: “How to paint your living room in a weekend”
        4. Article targeted for hugg.com: “how to pick environmental paint”

2. Multivariate Testing and Conversion Tweaking
   If you’re not doing it, then you’re stupid… Just kidding

   A. Testing and Improving conversion rates is 100x easier than increasing traffic.
   Rand Fishkin gave a great presentation on testing, and spoke about the SEOmoz Landing Page Contest, which is just a great example of why you should be testing multiple versions of your content. Read it.

   B. Use Google Website Optimizer. It’s free, and is an amazing tool for multivariate testing.
   You may have to do some reading and learning to get started, but it is well worth the time.

   I recently wrote an article on using Google Website Optimizer to improve conversions, which shows a test I did, and the results.

3. Web 2.0 and User Generatd Content

   A. Widgets
   I know that Pubcon isn’t a Web 2.0 conference by any means, but there were a lot of people attending and speaking (the Forums and Communities: Building Management and Optimization session) who live in the hub of Web 2.0 activity (The San Francisco, Silicon valley area). It was very interesting to get a glimpse of how different things in that world are.

   I think it was Lawrence Coburn who said that there are some Web 2.0 Purists who think that sites like Stumbleupon.com and RateItAll.com shouldn’t even have a website. They should only exist in widgets. Pretty extreme.

   Widgets, even the most simple, like my dnscoop widget (bottom right of this page), are extremely powerful tools. Think about it. You make a widget, and it gets put on a site that gets hundreds, thousands, or even millions of pageviews per day. You can imagine the benefits.

   Facebook Apps is one huge opportunity that is pretty much wide open. Anyone can submit an app, and you immediately be put in front of the entire Facebook community.

   B. User Generated Content
   If you’re using WordPress, or some other blog, that’s a start, but if you are a programmer, and have the skills to build your own web apps, you should take advantage of that. Build a better Digg, craigslist, or mySpace. Or at least try to implement some of the features from these sites into your own site.

   If you are struggling in a competitive niche or market (retail or selling some product that a thousand other people sell), you absolutely must add value to your site to even stand a chance to copete with other sites. User comments and reviews are one of the best ways to stand out from the crowd in a positive way.

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If anyone has any specific questions about Pubcon, feel free to shoot me an email via the contact form. Otherwise, start planning right now to go to the next PubCon. I am.

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Yeah, I know the whole “Images near adsense ads” is last year’s news, but I thought I’d post this anyway. Partly because it’s sort of funny, and also partly because it made me think again about what is acceptable, and what is not acceptable when it comes to placing images near Adsense ads.

When I do a search for [Bakersfield hotels] , this is what comes up:
(you may or may not see this from where you are, and also, this may work for other searches too)

The Adsense Terms of Service clearly state

- May not direct user attention to the ads via arrows or other graphical gimmicks
- May not place misleading images alongside individual ads

Hmmm…. little snowmen lined up along the sponsored ads? Let’s take another look at the Adsense rules.

- Attracting attention to the ads? Check
- May be seen as “graphical gimmicks”? Check

Back when Google announced their new more definitive rules about using images near ads, I would have never suggested doing anything like this to improve you click through rates, but after seeing this, I may have to rethink that.

I definitely wouldn’t go as far the example above (even though Google is doing it). I’m pretty sure that if you did, your ads would stop showing and you’d get an email from the Adsense team telling you to remove the images immediately.

But if you’re using Adsense, and are struggling with improving your click through rates, there is definitely a lot of room for experimentation with images. Just be careful, and if you’re not sure, you can always send an email to Adsense asking whether or not something is ok to do.They probably would never reply, but at least if you got into trouble, you would be able to say, “hey, I sent an email asking first. See?”

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Watching TV might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of blogging, or being a successful blogger, but my friend Ben over at bloggingexperiment.com has written a great series of articles about becoming a better blogger, which are all based around popular TV shows.

The latest in his series is The Simpsons: Lessons on Blogging. Definitely worth a read, so check it out.

Then go on and check out the rest of the series:

• House: Lessons on Blogging
• The Office: Lessons on Blogging
• Prison Break: Lessons on Blogging
• The Sopranos Lessons on Blogging
• Heroes’ Lessons on Blogging

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Leo, the owner of Survival of the Feedest, and winner of the MyBlogLog ProBlogger Contest has written a post on his blog about how he won the MyBlogLog Contest. I must say, I knew that Leo was good, but after reading his post …, well, lets just say that there is a lot to learn about promoting your MBL community from his post. Yes, putting a call to action, (the word “Join”) on his profile picture was definitely one of the smarter tactics, but that was just one of many really smart tactics he used. His post is well written, and definitely worth a read.

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