It’s been far too long since I gave my RSS reader any attention, and through it the blogs I’m subscribed to. Here are the highlights:
Andrew Whee has a post about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, a way to hire people to do tasks. Andrew suggests article submission as a possible use, but with sites like Directory Maximizer already providing good rates on that plus experienced submission, I wouldn’t recommend it. Traffic Exchange surfing might allow you to get more advertising for your dollar than a pro upgrade, but the terms and conditions say you can’t solicit users to join other sites. So they’d already need to be traffic exchange members. It’ll take some time to see how to best use this sort of service to cheaply outsource Internet marketing chores.
Rachel has a post detailing some of her experiences getting started with Yahoo! Search Marketing. I had similar problems when I gave them a try, so I’m glad to see I’m not the only one!
Andy Beard has a good article on the recent Google penalty to sites they feel are participating in link schemes designed to increase Page Rank. I’ve been disappointed with Google over and over in issues like this. Rather than try to fix their algorithm to discount suspect links, they apply arbitrary penalties to sites. Granted, penalties are easier to implement, but they’re not the right way to go about it.
And as a counterpoint, the post over at Dosh Dosh gives the argument that Google Page Rank doesn’t matter. I’ve often said that Page Rank is overrated, and here’s a great post that explains why.
Over at CashBulge is a post about a horrible hosting experience. This sort of post is a wakeup call to any blogger who picks hosting based on price. At the very least, go look at the hosting company’s support forum to see what sort of complaints are getting made by other customers. Reliable web hosting is critical for anyone doing business online.
That’s a quick look through what caught my eye in my RSS reader today. It was all a bit depressing actually, so here’s hoping my next run through the blogs I subscribe to turns up all happy posts!