All Sux dot Com

A lot of people use longer keyword-saturated domains. Some of these are carry-overs from an earlier generation of web thought which suggested that search traffic was king. In todays world of branding, name recognition and new media, though, these keyword-rich domains simply don’t cut it anymore. Buy why?

For one thing, they are long, cumbersome, awkward and hard to remember at times. They also tell any web-savvy visitor that you are doing whatever you can to come up on searches - that your goal is traffic and that you’re ‘working the system’ to get it. To people like me at least that is a warning light, a red flag that you might have poor content you are simply trying to dress up with targetted Google-friendly keywords.

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So what happens when a blog goes ‘mostly silent’ for a while and the primary traffic comes from strange sources? Well, in this case my biggest hits these days are for ‘porn’ and ‘hate homeless’ - neither of which are things you’ll really find out about on this site. The ‘porn’ part comes from a few articles discussing porn on the internet and tagged with the category ‘porn’ on the site. The ‘hate homeless’ is in an article that has nothing to do with hating homeless, which I don’t. Strange, eh?

It turns out it is unofficial ‘rant week’ at Allsux.com! Today I noticed that someone had copied and pasted an entire article from WebUrbanist (a site I contribute to and edit for) and pasted it on their blog. This included all links and images associated with the original, without any changes whatsoever. Now, Google frowns heavily upon duplicate content on the web, and often penalizes one or both sites containing extensive duplicate content. With that in mind, I contacted the site owner as politely (but firmly)Â as possible to request its removal. If you are uniterested in reading this, I recommend strongly you stop reading this … now!

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The internet is filled to the brim with Google AdSense - it often seems like the stuff is on every page (a few small ads on this one included). The web is also full of bloggers blogging about blogs. However, one clever blogger has figured out a way to actually make a unique and highly specific niche out of these seemingly ubiquitous topics by blogging about Google AdSense.

What I find particularly interesting is that she is starting from absolute scratch and documenting the entire process. Many bloggers who are newer to the game talk big but are easily revealed if they are only not truly knowledgable.  This blogger actually (almost scientifically) describes each and every step along the way. Somehow, I find both the specificity of the blog’s content and the honesty of its author quite refreshing in a blogosphere full of blogs about making money.

In the interest of full disclosure: this blogger actually write a review of Allsux.com that (both for its depth and honesty) will earn the blog multiple incoming links! However, this post reflects my own opinions of that blog, and these multiple links are freely given. Fascinating endeavor, look forward to tracking it (ouch did I really just make that pun?).

With buzz in the air about a Google PageRank update in the works, now is the time to get some incoming links and boost your PR! It’s really pretty simple: write a post (100+ words) linking to Allsux.com and to one specific post you think is particularly terrible (or awesome). Leave a comment on this post. It will be moderated, so just specify ‘private’ if you don’t want it to show.

In return, I will write a post linking back to everyone who reviews this site with a short blurb about the site and its content. Bonus: it’s a fair bet (based on traffic, such as the recent 16,000+ hits from the Fark main page) that this site is actually PR5 in disguise, it just doesn’t show yet because we are pre-update. So, you’ve got a PR4 or maybe even a PR5 link - just for writing your mind! Don’t like the site? Feel free to trash it. Not sure where to start? Here is a handful of some of our most viewed and controversial posts.

Extra extra bonus: One lucky winner will get a second free blogroll link from a site that already has PR5 showing on it. This will go to the person with the most creative, interesting or funny post - whether or not it trashes or praises this site!

In this latest installment of the AllSux retrospective, I’m taking a look back at the site’s most controversial and popular posts! If you’ve been reading for a while you may or may not have seen these, but they are the ones that put the site on the map and brought in the readers it has today.

(5) This post about Ask, Google and Google-Sux got some attention mostly because I bashed a site, and its administrator came back at me guns blazing. However, their counterarguments got shut down pretty fast. In reality, I think it was the comments that drew more attention than the post.

(4) This post about the huge scandal about LiveLeak not being indexed by Google drew a lot of readership, though much of it was from a Spanish site I never was able to decipher!

(3) Of course, one of the biggest AllSux targets has been Digg.com - and this story that followed the huge Digg scandal was the most popular of them all. While other blogs (and major news sites like Wired) were confused, I stayed up all night and summarized what was going on.

(2) The Technorati experiment had a huge readership. I think that a lot of people are interested in the deeper consequences of using social networks, and this post struck a cord with folks.

(1) Of course the most visited page on AllSux is Allsux! That bodes well for this and my other (newer) blog, because it means that there are a lot of readers who want to see the lates and greatest, and don’t just show up to read a single post and leave. Thanks to you all - keep visiting, reading, and please leave comments! Also visit this new blog I’m helping develop: WebUrbanist.com.

An honorable mention goes to all of the articles on AllSux about Helium. Though none of these pages have individually made the top five, they have cumulatively done amazingly well. Why? Because other frustrated Helium writers keep finding them and sending me words of support as well as their own stories bout Helium.

Well, the Web Urbanist has some new stuff this week - and a lot of comments and traffic to boot. Why? Some of it has come from this neat archive and link list related to creative and interesting guerilla marketing campaigns. However, most of it has come from this piece (also with links and images) related to the Google Street View controversy and privacy issues. However, it is definitely worth checking out this post as well - a follow-up on the first which has amazing, clever, strange and surreal street art.

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Many weeks after the initial LiveLeak-not-indexed-by-Google scandal, the site still has a video up where an administrator complains to Google about not being indexed. As it turned out, the situation appeared to be LiveLeak’s fault. One would think they’d stop showing the video, unless it was a ploy all along to bring in more viewers, right? If they insist on showing an out-of-date video that makes them look like martyrs, LiveLeak should at least post a prominent link to an updated video that explains what really happened, right?

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