Archive for May, 2011

• Sears Not Scared of Rapture

  Date: 2011.05.20 | Category: East Norriton, Norristown | Response: 2

  Well it’s been well over  a year (I think?) since Kmart closed it’s doors in the nameless shopping center up the hill from Northtowne Plaza.  Maybe it does have a name but they certainly don’t do a good job of sharing it.  Perhaps it’s even part of Northtowne Plaza itself.

  Tomorrow May 21st, 2011 the new East Norriton Sears Outlet will be hosting it’s Grand Opening at 9AM.  Here’s the address, it’s right behind the Applebees and Chick Fil A on Dekalb.

  Store #9114
  2700 Dekalb Pike, Norristown, PA 19401
  610-239-8292

  The word on the street is that there was some sort of soft opening this week whatever that means.  I have to be honest I’m not in a huge rush to get over there tomorrow, but I am pretty pleased that the void in that shopping center is now filled.  I’ll make it a point to stop in next week, I’m just not much for events.  I remember shopping at the Sears Surplus in Quakertown in the late 80′s and early 90′s and if this new Sears Outlet is anything like what Surplus used to be than I am in!

• Spam Experiment Results

  Date: 2011.05.10 | Category: Internet, Tech | Response: 13

  So a few weeks ago I started my Spam Experiment.  Basically I took a reverse approach to scrapebox custom footprints.  Simply including keywords such as “CommentLuv Enabled” drove my bot traffic through the roof.  I would say I’m averaging about 70-80 comments per day now.  I still mark the majority of them as spam, however it’s really populating the comments on my posts well.  I prefer comments that use a name as anchor text, but on occasion I’ll let some through with anchor text if the comments are unique.   Now I’ve marked over 1,000 comments as spam since this test began, but I’d say I’ve approved and responded to only about 25-30 good comments.

  Not only does this test provide a unique perspective into how others are utilizing scrapebox, but I’m also creating a place where an opportunistic young seoptimizer could harvest a lot of the hard work done by others through the perfectly ethical craft of link jacking.

  One thing I’ve noticed is I am getting tons of bot traffic that drops links for .pl domains.  That would be Poland’s country code.  I’d really like to know what on this site is being included in their custom footprint.  Or if perhaps eastnorriton.org has really good google.pl rankings?  (unlikely)

  I do know that despite having virtually no PR, my site can index anything almost instantly.  I’ve played around with this and I should have captured it as it happened.  But the post immediately before this one was for a local store in East Norriton.  Immediately after posting I opened a new tab and searched for “alfio’s caesar salad” and my post was ranked #3.  Sure this means very little except for how lighting fast this site gets indexed.  I’m going to run another test immediately after this post is published and see if this page will rank instantly for “seoptimizer east norriton”

  Enough about that though, quick indexing, while interesting and amusing doesn’t exactly wield all that much authority.  However as Marcus pointed out in his post, the real focus of this experiment is to get spammers to create unique content for me for free.  So far this has resulted in me having to disable comments on the Dollar Tree thread.  From my understanding there is some sort of line in the sand whereas too many comments becomes a negative.  I have no idea where this line is, but I don’t see any reason to push the envelope when there are so many other threads.

  I also find it very amusing that someone from the LA Times was optimizing the site in anticipation for the royal wedding.  Check out this post, and better yet check out how they screwed up the html.  Sure I could fix it for them, but then I’d have to do it for everyone.  Again this is on the Dollar Tree post.  It’s the 3rd to last comment.

  Is anyone else doing this sort of thing to attract comments?  If not is up to me to bestow a name to this tactic?  What exactly am I building here?  I’m not sure so for now I suppose I’m going to stick with calling it “reverse custom footprints”