Web Value Calculator

Web Site Outlook values Google at $2.41 billion, My Mall & News at somewhat less.

The Dog Barks

. . . but the caravan moves on.

- Persian proverb.

This Month's Search Words

The following words on search engines such as Google brought viewers to my web site.

lori drew
betty page
maxwell parrish
brittany holberg
mouse foot
ashley grills
britney spears meth-
windows 7 sucks
boys on the bus
iraniansex

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An ideosyncratic guide the the 100 best blogs.

My Blog: A Status Report

My Mall & News keeps surging in popularity. I'm now getting more than 2,000 hits each day, with a maximum of 968 per hour.

As of today, the year to date counts are as follows:

Pages 163986
Files 250693
Hits 381333

Here are some definitions:

Files: The number of files that have been requested (downloaded) from your site during the report period. Web sites contain a collection of computer files, which are sent by a remote computer (Web server) to the client (Web browser) as the client requests them. Files (the outgoing response to a request) include all viable Web file formats, such as HTML files (.html), graphics files(.gif, .jpg or .png), Adobe Acrobat files (.pdf), Macromedia Flash files(.swf), Microsoft Word files (.doc) ASP files (.asp), etc. The relationship between hits and files can be thought of as incoming requests and outgoing responses.

Hits: The total number of requests that were made to the site during thereport period. Any request made to the Web server is logged as a hit. The request can be for files, such as an HTML page, graphic image, audio file or CGI script, or for queries made by search engine spiders.

Pages (Also called Page Views): The number of pages viewed during thereport period. Hypertext mark-up files (.html or .htm) and files that generate HTMLdocuments (for example, .asp .cgi). are considered pages, with thedefinition of a page varying by server. BizLand's servers define as apage any file with one of the following extensions: ( * represents any character)Some people consider the pages total to be the number of pure hits. Inother words, it is a truer indication of the traffic your site receives.

Using the following site, my website grade is as follows:

http://www.websitegrader.com/

WebSite Grade For www.mymallandnews.com : 71/100 (December 14, 2007)A website grade of 71 for www.mymallandnews.com means that of thethousands of websites that have previously been submitted to the tool,our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 71% ofthem in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses aproprietary blend of over a dozen different variables, including searchengine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance,and others. The Google page rank is three.

The alternative website name has a grade of 86 percent and a page rank of 4.

WebSite Grade For mymallandnews.bizland.com : 86/100 (December 14, 2007)A website grade of 86 for mymallandnews.bizland.com means that of the thousands of websites that have previously been submitted to the tool,our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 86% ofthem in terms of its marketing effectiveness.

The phrase "my mall" consistently is number on in Google.Search

The bottom line is that My Mall & News is clearly an increasingly valuable site.

So what is the future of My Mall & News? I plan to continue doing what I like doing, bloggings about whatever interests or alarms me. However, on the about page, I'm planning to build separate page links to categories of information for your reading pleasure.

These are as follows:

Wellness: Health & Medicine
The Cattery: All About Cats
Plato's Sandbox: Education, Religion, Ideas
Crooks & Liars: Politics, Elections, Scandals
The Cutting Edge: Computers, Technology, Science

So there you have it. A slice of my often strange but seldom boring world.

Grading My Site

I did a makeover of my website today using a SEO tool called website grader. Here are the facts as of today and my comments:

WebSite Grade For www.mymallandnews.com : 63/100 (October 06, 2007)A website grade of 63 for www.mymallandnews.com means that of the thousands of websites that have previously been submitted to the tool, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 63% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over a dozen different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.

Not bad for an amateur site.

Google PageRank : 4

"Google PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves important weigh more heavily and help to make other pages important."

-From Google

The page rank doesn't seem to be stable. It seems to bounce between three and five. Somewhat mediocre. However, the term my mall is invariably the first line of the first page in Google searches.

Title : My Mall & News
Description : Portal for News, Commentary, and Shopping
Meta Keywords : my mall, mall, shopping, news, politics, opinion, commentary

By adding a meta description and keywords and also HTML headers (i.e. H1, H2, etc.), my ranking jumped about thirty percentage points. Although Google may not regard these meta words as significant, other search tools may.

Domain Expires Within A Year

The domain for this website is set to expire in less than a year (106 days). We would suggest renewing this domain with your registrar. Google and other search engines may penalize websites with domains that are set to expire soon. The reason for this is that many spam sites are often registered for short periods of time. Most registrars support paying upfront for several years and the cost is usually only about $10-$20 per year, so it is generally worth it.

Perhaps so. But this is done automatically about two weeks prior to expiration. I don't see much need to address this point.

Permanent Redirect Not Found

Search engines often regard www.mymallandnews.com and mymallandnews.com as two different websites unless you take specific measures to signal to them that they are the same site. The best way to handle this situation is to setup what is known as a permanent redirect (or a "301" redirect) from one of these sites to the other. This way, any links that are pointing to the secondary site benefit the primary site, from an SEO perspective. We could not detect a permanent redirect for this site, so it may be experiencing the negative effects of link fragmentation (some of the inbound links may point to www.mymallandnews.com and others to mymallandnews.com) For example, www.mymallandnews.com seems to have 556 inbound links whereas mymallandnews.com has 1,252 inbound links. By correctly configuring a permanent 301 redirect, the search rankings might improve as all inbound links are correctly counted for the website.

Another red-flagged item that confused me. I built a .htaccess file like this that seems to work, but the error still appears in the report:

redirect 301 /mymallandnews.bizland.com http://www.mymallandnews.com
redirect 301 /mymallandnews.com http://www.mymallandnews.com

Google Indexed Pages : 614

Measures the approximate number of pages on http://www.mymallandnews.com/ that have been stored in the Google index. The Google web crawler will visit the website periodically and look for new content and store it in its index. Generally, the more pages a website has within the Google cache, the better.

There are 0 pages from http://www.mymallandnews.com/ in the supplemental results area of Google. These pages will generally not rank on Google.com. A high number of supplemental pages may indicate a problem with the site.

Inbound Links

One of the most important measures for a website is how many other sites are linking to it. The more links the better.

Links Summary

Google : 10
Yahoo: 556

Not bad, I suppose, for a hobby site.

Technorati Ranking : 876,360

Technorati is a popular website ranking service. It measures the popularity of a given website as compared to all other sites that have been submitted to its system. This website currently has a Technorati ranking of 876,360.

del.icio.us bookmarks : 0

del.icio.us is a web-based bookmarking site. Delicious users save their bookmarks on the website so they can access them from any browser. A website that has many users bookmarking it is generally popular and will get more traffic. http://www.mymallandnews.com/ has about 0 bookmarks stored.

digg.com Submission Summary

The website www.mymallandnews.com has had 0 articles submitted to digg.com. These articles received a total of 0 diggs (votes) and 0 of these articles made it to the front page of digg.com.

None of this surprises me, as I didn't know anything about these sites before today. I expect that these numbers will improve within the next few months.

Readability Level : 9th Grade

This score measures the approximate level of education necessary to read and understand the web page content. In most cases, the content should be made to be simple so that a majority of the target audience can understand it.

This both surprises and pleases me. It surprises me because I dive into on occasion some difficult topics that of necessity uses advanced concepts. It pleases me because my goal above all is to communicate hard subejct as clearly as possible to the broadest possible audience. The ninth grade (one grade higher than my oldest boy) is a good target audience. I've always seen myself much more of a journalist than an academician.

The biggest change I made was to make the blog the splash page as I noticed that it was getting so many hits because it is dynamic. I've thought about getting a RSS feed, and perhaps I will do so in the future. But for now I think the collection of links that cover the range of ideology and the scope of the world works best for this site. The mall side continues to be anemic, although I continue to make money from Google.

So there you have it -- My Mall & News in its most recent incarnation. Perhaps some of the lessons I've learned can be helpful to you as you develop your blog or site.

My First Post

My Mall & News is now more than five years old. I'm currently getting between 900 and 1,400 hits each day. It is now marginally profitable.

At one time, I thought I could turn this website into another revenue stream. But that turned out to be pretty much wishful thinking. I get almost no money from My Mall, which consists entirely of ads from Commission Junction. The advertising revenue from Google's adsense is enough to cover my monthly server expenses, but that's about it.

However, this website has had great indirect value. It has allowed me to present my resume, get sustained employment, on occasion do independent contracting, and has put me in touch with people around the world who share my many interests.

This blog is an experiment. It is a way to present my view on topics of personal interest-- politics, technology, philosophy, literature, and popular culture. I originally thought that a bulletin board, such as those that ezboard produce, may be the way to go. I also thought about installing WordPress. I like my final decision of using blogger.com, as it is free and it is also integrated with the Google suite of products.

I'm a free speech absolutist, and I like nothing better than the thought and discourse of a vigorous exchange of ideas. I have no restrictions on those who care to respond to my posts. I only ask that you respect the free speech of others in the words you use.