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A few years ago the giant forum we know today as Digitalpoint developed a mass link exchange program called the DP Co-op Advertising Network (aff). After signing up, you then add 3-5 links on every one of your pages, and this earns you more linking power (coop weight). The more weight you have, the more links to your site you receive from other members in the coop. You can choose up to 15 anchor texts and there are over 30,000,000 available links in the network today. Sites have been using it to rank #1 for “Debt” “credit cards” “bankruptcy” and “loans.” Such a simple method is allowing them to outrank massive authority sites like Wikipedia, but the main concern is how long will this gravy train last and when will Google do something about it?

After launching my weekly blog contest, it is finally time to announce the first Weekly Winner.

The $25 paypal goes to the homebiz resource bukiki blog for their entry. Please contact me as soon as you read this and I will gladly send over your money as well as your bonus.

Bonus Prize:
A kind fellow named Ethan Christ has sponsored the bukiki blog with a $50 adwords voucher. Enjoy all the free advertising!

Let me start off saying that if you do not use Google Webmaster Tools, you should start trying it out. It is a great tool that shows you near-instant updates of backlinks to your posts, how often Google views your blog, as well as any errors that the Google bot finds.

Utilizing the tools will help you keep your blog search engine friendly and clean. Now for the point of this article, Google normally has a “normal” and a “slower” option for how often it will crawl your page. If you write at least a few times a week you should keep this at “normal,” but if you have a slow webhost or another reason that you do not want Google visiting a lot you can set it to slow.

Well it looks like the Technorati favorites spammers that Darren and I posted about earlier have developed new ways to compete with the likes of Akismet…

Blog spammers have now made thousands of fake “proxy blogs” to be able to mass-friend one main blog to rank it in the most popular section on the Technorati homepage, ultimately sending the blogs lots of traffic and a few strong backlinks.

After sponsoring two contests earlier which yielded successful results, I am ready to run my own. Rather than running the occasional type of blog contest, I wanted to change things up a bit. I want to have a lot of winners rather than just one. I have developed a way to promote my blog while giving away money every week.

I have been busy updating my version of Wordpress to the newest release (2.3.2), and doing a lot of finishing touches on my new blog theme. Everything is finally ready and published. The new theme allows for much easier reading (white background, black text), gets rid of the dominant orange color scheme, provides additional advertising methods, and features the best information prominently. The new theme also features the updated logo/brand for my blog.When I started my blog last November, I told myself not to start monetizing for at least 30 days. Well today, 73 days later I have officially opened up some bargain advertising deals on my blog.

Back when I wrote the post on protecting yourself from content theft, I made a little itsy bitsy typo. I added an extra “>” to the code which ultimately broke my RSS feed. Thanks to an email I received I have fixed the problem. This inspired me to write a post making sure you validate your RSS feed every once in awhile.

Go to FeedValidator.org and make sure your RSS feed / feedburner link are validated properly, or you may be losing visitors. I had no idea my RSS was broken because it was still displaying properly for about 40% of the people, but I was losing 60% of my subscribers. By simply removing one little “>” I doubled my RSS traffic.