When is a Wiki Not a Wiki?

Google’s new tool Side-Wiki looks like a great new addition to the plethora of new tools coming out that are essentially plug-ins to the browser. For most sites that are simply presentations of information of various kinds, this new tools just creates a comment bar on the side. Even though it is called “Side-Wiki” it is not a wikipedia page at all, but just a set of visitors commentary on the information in the site. Normally this would be considered a cool thing, there is only one problem with it: Anyone can post anything, and if the page is your sales page, and the poster is your direct competitor they can post slander and libel against you and direct your prospects to go to their sites all while hosting it on your site!

That is an outrage! Because now all that work you did to create traffic and improve your site, to create your product and drive traffic can be destroyed by just a few clicks from an enemy.

What do you do? Well, if you are smart you get a blocker for Side-Wiki. A good blocker needs to be able to sandbox your site without screwing up any of the links, existing anchors, or data – it needs to be able to create random redirection, and should be keyed so you can see that the redirection is yours and not put in by some hacker or other spam tool.

So how does Google’s Sidewiki work, look at the picture below and you can get  good idea:

It can get Evil

What is happening is that with the Sidewiki tool bar you are really running two browsers at once. The first, your regular browser, is looking at your sales page, or as you see in the picture, at the Google search screen. The other browser which is hosted on the left side is communicating directly with the Giant Google Corporation, and accessing the Massive Google Database, and posting the various comments from the database to the sidewiki application.

Then what happens is that your competitor or person who simply does not like you (represented by Dr. Evil in the picture) decides to write all kinds of bad things about you, your business practices, your products and services, and then offers the same product for less money elsewhere. This drives all of your business away!

And there is nothing you can do about that as long as your site is not blocking sidewiki, anyone who has downloaded the new Google toolbar has this capability to see the bad things others have written about your site, and you are hosting it, at least that is how it appears to them.

You need some way to block this! You need an Ultimate Side-Wiki Blocker.

There are a few on the net, but most of these are remotely hosted scripts. If you put one of these on your site you are bound to have problems if that remote host goes down, or gets hacked. It is a much safer bet to get a script you can install on your own site. These scripts will work in your blogs as well as your straight sites, landing pages, mini-sites etc.

Look into a Side-Wiki blocker, like the one I offer – even if you decide not to use it, it should be in your toolbox!

-DTM

The very Best Side Wiki Blocker on the net is the one I wrote, which you can get for free at the WordPress plugin site or from the link on the sidebar.  I have improved and updated the initial blockers offered on the web with a new one that includes the following options:

• Random length redirection key
• Ability to Add Special key_word to redirection key
• True random with date seed

So why would you want to Block Side-Wiki?  Well…

Your competitor can write horrible untrue things about you and your products and these will show up for all of your prospective customers when they visit your site if they happen to have Google Toolbar.  Worse, your competitor can steal your traffic, always undercutting your prices or features/benefits right there on the site you are paying for!

Google links from Side-Wiki might feed you link-love, but basically what this means is you are left wide open as if you were allowing full access to anyone to write anything about you, and you cannot do anything about it…

Oh yes you can!  Enter The Ultimate Side-Wiki Blocker.

This blocker sandboxes your site while preserving all of your own links and plugins, functions, scripts, etc.  And it does it better than any other script out there.  And if you are reading this at my site (www.achievemaster.com) and have sidewiki installed on your browser, then you are seeing it in action!

Get it today before someone says something awful about you!

David T. McKee

One of the new buzzwords in SEO and Internet Marketing these days is the term “Link Wheels”.  Link Wheels are pages that loosely speaking claim to have at least two important kinds of links.  Looking at the first picture (which I grabbed from a random Google image search) you can see that it shows “wheel links” in red, and “money links” in green.  You can see similar things in the other two link wheels examples.

The question that needs to be asked is this: Does this topology of linkages really do anything to boost traffic, or is it wishful thinking based on flawed understanding of how Google and other search engine spiders actually prowl the net and create that “elixir of traffic” known as Page Rank.

One of the explanations of why the wheel works is that the idea is that the spiders rotate around the wheels causing ranking to “flow” from site to site and ultimately to the central site.

Standard Link Wheel

Another Link Wheel

Big Link Wheel

That idea, however is not true.  Spiders are programs that go to a site, evaluate the content, gather all the links, compare those links to a database of links it already knows about, and then makes decisions about which links to traverse next, and what final evaluation to gie the sites and the links between them.

So, what we have here is an idea that in fact is quite meaningless. I’ll tell you why, but it requires a rudimentary understanding of directed graphs, which is what the internet is.

A directed graph is any set of nodes (web pages) and “edges” (links) where the edge has a directionality, which internet links have. There is a rather complex and in-depth mathematical discussion about the internet directed graph and how page rank is computed on it at Wikipedia (here).  In the final analysis there are some important things to understand about which links actually contribute traffic, SEO ranking, and finally page-rank to a site.

The bottom line is that link wheels are really no different than a host of other link topologies and any meaningful ranking you get from any topology is from the direct links to your main site.  Page rank is computed in more simplistic terms in a manner shown int the diagram labeled “link juice”.

Link Juice

Secondary links do not contribute directly to your page-rank, but do so only in a round-about way as they affect that site to which you are linked, and as a pathway for both the spider and the live-human visitor.  The problem with this logic is that the “spokes” are already heavily linked by tens of thousands of other pages, so you little extra link here really adds nothing in the way of getting a spider to rank you higher, and is also meaningless for the human – as they have presumable already read your article so a link to the same article on another site is not really going to be useful to them.

Add to that the sophistication of today’s spiders and their content comparisons, even those show “spin” their articles are going to have very little gain from these “spoke to spoke”linkages.

This spoke-to-spoke linkages in a link-wheel is supposed to be the “discovery” that makes the wheel so powerful.  It is not really is not that useful at all, and is a waste of your time if you are setting them up by hand.

Rank Sources

What really matters are the direct links and some other aspects that rank your site as illustrated with this picture labeled “Rank Sources”.

You might still make the argument that the spoke to spoke links help by distributing the content around and thereby cause the search spider to take that route and see the content – however the spider rates the link importance more due to the importance of the site it comes from.  What that means is that your juice comes from the spokes themselves, not the interconnectedness between those spokes.

The real juice comes from the importance of the site, the freshness and relevance of the content, the keywords in the content and the how often these keywords are searched for, and the number of times the web-site is visited and then clicked on directly from Google search page url.

The algorithm for page rank that is currently published over at Wikipedia has been highly modified in actual practice by Google with many proprietary filters and other formulas and has a host of additional controls that allows Google to penalize or ban certain practices from contributing to page rank – we can also assume therefore that there are formulas that contribute more than “normal” for practices they want to encourage.

With this in mind, I submit that Google is well aware of those who try to game the system by creating these wheels – but even if they are not, if last time their spider crawled the, and  your site was not there, and the next time it crawls the net and your new site is there with thousands of links to it, that is going to be a tip-off on what you are doing.

So a better solution to setting up you marketing pages is to concentrate on the spokes themselves – get linkages from powerful sites to you money site using great content, lots of comments on great blogs and forums, lots of feed aggregators, and add these over time.

That last point is important as to increase of page-rank and and avoidance of Google bans – build the links over time.  This way you do not suddenly appear full-fledged with thousands of links because that is a dead giveaway to Google and others that you are a marketer pushing a product.  This is a perception problem, it does not matter how good your product is, Google is notorious for penalizing this.  So build over time, and build multiple sites for multiple products – or different versions and bonus packages of the same product and eventually cross link them.  This looks more organic and will raise your SEO rankings in a more solid and long lasting manner.

David T. McKee

Purpose: it's out there somewhere...

I was recently having a discussion on the Warrior Forum about the difference between the meaning of the word Purpose and Goal.

It got me to thinking about how words can mean such different things to different people, especially when closely examined. To the persons I was having the discussion with, Goal was the over-arching “thing” to which our life strived for and purpose was how to get to that thing.

But that sounds completely backwards to me and to most people I know.  To me, goals are markers or sign-posts that you set on your way to some achievement, but purpose is what gives you the world-view you have and is what is behind the achievements that you choose to go after.  Strange how the concepts can be flipped – but also, I did not hear this person clearly say that whatever your ultimate “thing” is, that is what drives to choose the accomplishments that you want.

At any rate, here is the dictionary definition of Purpose:

–noun

1.	the reason for which something exists or is done, made, used, etc.

2.	an intended or desired result; end; aim; goal.

3.	determination; resoluteness.

4.	the subject in hand; the point at issue.

5.	practical result, effect, or advantage: to act to good purpose.

–verb (used with object)

6.	to set as an aim, intention, or goal for oneself.

7.	to intend; design.

8.	to resolve (to do something): He purposed to change his way of life radically.

We read about how important it is to crystallize our purpose statement so we have a firm grasp on what it is we are living for – to make life affirmations so that we end up knowing that when we get to the top of “ladder of success” we have placed that ladder on the correct wall.

–DTM

Time is a fluid you can never hold on to.

Time…

Many have tried to describe it, scientists still struggle reconciling it in the laboratory, Einstein found that it could not be separated from the very space around us, yet none of us really have a handle on what it is.

We say that time is money, time is life, memory is going  back in time…

Most of us would rather even not face the realities Time places in front if us, yet routinely we:

• Waste Time
• Kill Time
• Save Time
• Spend Time
• Run out of Time…

That last one is the kicker.  We all eventually run out of time, almost as if we are walking around with a count-down timer above our heads that one day, maybe even today, will reach zero… and then?

We look at pictures of ourselves or our kids and see how quickly they or we have changed, and as we get older each moment  becomes a smaller part of our total memory, making the time we have left seem like it is passing ever faster. We remember our grandparents telling us how much we have grown each time they saw us… to us it seemed silly until we saw our own kids or grand-kids grow so very fast.

No understanding of achievement or success would be complete without a fairly decent discussion of time and what we know and don’t know about it.  We need to understand how we can get the most out of every moment, as some sage said: “To squeeze every drop out of each moment.”

As the picture above demonstrates, time is something we are forced to spend, that we can never ultimately save, and that goes by at the same rate for every person (my apologies to Einstein here, as we are not talking about the Theory of Relativity).  So how can we use our time effectively?

You may have heard the analogy that compares life to a box.  The box holds a certain total volume – that is the sum total of your time.  Events, the things we do, the moments or hours we spend are spherical balls which we can place in our box, each taking up some portion of our total time.  Big events such as “a semester in college” might be compared to bowling balls.  Smaller events such as “a week at the beach” might be compared to a baseball.  Perhaps spending a day at work could be compared to a marble.

Eventually we fill our box, but wait!  There is still spaces between those bowling balls and base-balls and marbles.  There are moments between various tasks that may go wasted.  What about the time you spend in your car going to and from work, do you use that time for anything? Or do you just listen to music or scream at the person who just cut you off in traffic?  Could you get some books on disk or MP3, or a course in something like a new language or a success strategy?  Those moments could be compared to BB’s (those tiny little copper balls used in pellet guns).  You could still put a whole bunch of those in that box.

But can we go further?  What about all the spaces between the BB’s, and Marbles, and Baseballs, and Bowling Balls?  Are there little bits of moments that go wasted where you could write down ideas on a note-pad, or just hug your wife or child for no reason at all – but just to tell them you love them?  The analogy of the box goes on to say we can put grains of sand in the box, and then finally fill the box with water to fill in all the rest of the space.

So we too should try to observe how we utilize our time and then how we may fill those moments with things that help us squeeze the most out of it – even if that is just sitting at the beach, holding the hand of the one you love and listening to the waves pound the shore.  That is living.

Remember, those moments will never occur again, they exist only in your memory and the mind of God.  If you let them go by without ever using them, they will still be spent, but they will be empty and wasted.

How might we use our time most effectively?  Here are a few ideas you can try to help you recapture the moments that, up to now, you have been wasting:

As mentioned before, get a notepad and short pen/pencil that you can carry with you to capture ideas. This also helps you get those ideas down before they simply disappear, never to be heard from again…

Get some form of planner, whether it be a phone app, a Day-Timer, a software tool, etc. and use it to track what you are doing so you can keep your tasks “Top-Of-Mind” and get them done.

Learn how to prioritize your tasks, learn the four “Ds”: Do, Delay, Delegate, Dump and apply them to the four quadrants of the “Priority Matrix” (see my earlier post about the priority matrix here).

Spend some time thinking deeply about what is most important to you, what you would do if you only had one day left to live – because you do only have one day left to live – Today.  You “might” have tomorrow, but you are not guaranteed it, you might die tonight, you simply have no knowledge of how long you live, so if you live as if you only have a day, one day you will be right.  And you will have done the things that mattered most instead of dying with regret.

Time requires our careful management, and despite the fact it does not act like any other resource we have, we still must treat it with the utmost respect for it is the raw material all of our life is made from.

David T. McKee