Back from the dead!

I’m writing this post because I’m getting more and more comments about my lack of posting here.

Apologies to all 5 of my readers for not posting anything recently.

Here’s the dealio on what’s happening with me and what’s in store for future site direction, and updates.

PERSONAL…

I lost 50 pounds training for the Boston Marathon and have been on a health kick ever since.  I also decided to get my handsome self “out there” into the dating realm since I believe I need a more balanced life.  I work 2 other IT-related jobs which I can’t bring myself to quit despite not needing that income, because I like what I do there (helping people and being exposed to new technologies SQL stuff, VMWARE, server stuff, routers, firewalls etc…)

PICTURE 1- Swimming in the ocean during Hurricane Irene

PICTURE 2- Lazy beach day, 108 degrees!

I’m in best shape of my life now, at 40 years old, and the dating is going well, in case you’re wondering

END Personal stuff

BEGIN: Site and SEO stuff

Firstly, running a legit review site is something I take seriously, and while most people will tend to think of me as an authority on link building the facts are:

SEO is ever-changing, some types of links and link building methods don’t work anymore the way they used to.  In order for me to be someone you can rely on for VALID reviews, I need to keep my SEO knowledge-base up to snuff, so if I’m blasting links out all day long without revisiting and upgrading my seo skillset, without dissecting the Pandalization of some of my sites that got hit, then you are NOT well-served by me nor the reviews since they’re “suspect”, in my opinion anyway

The services being reviewed- some of the services I reviewed have added new functions, features, upgrades etc… which means they need to be revisited, re-tested in order to not have stale reviews on site (an example would be “Hey Dan XYZ service just added instant link wheels creation to their features set and they didn’t have this when you reviewed them X months ago”).

Site structures- people talk about building SEO-friendly site structure, architecture, plugins etc…  In many ways, SEO has gotten simpler and also more complicated post-Panda.

For example, there’s schools of thought that deem social signals and social presence as being a key to stickier, better rankings.  My thoughts on this are; if you put a little extra effort into making your sites, whether they’re mini-sites, macro-sites or whatever… into looking like legitimate fleshed-out sites, then go ahead and put that extra effort into “hedging your bets” SEO-wise, and leave nothing to chance, maybe even get the Facebook Fan page set up for each website you own, plus get a dedicated Twitter account,  get links from relevant sites, find guest blogging opportunities using manual methods, all the while using whatever services do the trick for you now.

Different viewpoints… Recently I hired some SEO guys to work on a site for me and it’s like sacrilege to me to do that because I always believed they charge way too much, but I now value my time more than my income, and you should too so I decided to see what the real “pros” do and how they think all the while keeping stuff I don’t have time to do outsourced to others from whom I can learn new things. Point being… they claim SEO is made over-complicated by SEO bloggers and forum dweebs looking for attention, while they’re Private Sector types who don’t get paid unless they see results for clients, and they deem site structure as unimportant so they’re not theorists at heart and deserve to be listened to.

So when it comes to stuff like this, I am open to all parties’ knowledge and am gleaning from that and from them and applying that knowledge to me and to the types of sites you, my 5 readers, might be building

REVIEWS-  I’m in the process of “locking down” what I see as properly built websites, pre-destined for favorable rankings, which goes back to site building, site structures, what’s needed, what’s not, keyword density factors, OBLs, conversions, etc…  Once I have this down pat, then I feel like my tests and reviews will be more worthy of your trust.

I’ve also decided that I won’t post any reviews until the testing is at least halfway to completely done (1 1/2-3 months of testings).  This means there will be less posting by me, but more valid reviews and tests, and it saves both you and me time.  When I review something but don’t come to a conclusion on it in the review, people tend to go out and get the service anyway and I feel partially responsible for that, which is why I’m going to be less of an attention whore by posting less, but better content for you.

There’s 5-6 Services currently being tested, with reviews coming out soon…

I will also be busy revamping old sites, and building new ones mostly for testing purposes… if they make money for me that’s great, but I really just like building sites and seeing how they react to the SEO done to them.  My aversion to “needing” these sites to make money is due to the fact that I don’t want the observer (me) to affect the experiments too much.

That’s Psych 101 stuff right there, “the observer always manages to affect the outcome of the experiments”.

Statistics 101 also taught me that there’s loopholes and flaws in most tests and the methodology behind tests, and this is even more of an issue when it comes to applying tests and experiments to the ever-changing SEO landscape, which DOES changes all the time, but with the core SEO concepts never really changing.

Hang tight, I’ll be posting again within the next 2 weeks.  Sometimes less is more

Thanks,

Dan