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End of Year on the Web

end of year

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As 2012 is coming to a close I figured I’d write an end of year post in blogging and the changes for my Financial Website  THE Canadian Personal Finance Site (this is mostly for me to remember next year).

The year started pretty quietly, with a nice bit of income from Text Link Ads (the service not the concept) of about $70 a month, and a little bit of income from Adsense and other site advertising. The site continued to look like crap, but I kept thinking I’d get around to that, but circumstances forced my hand in that situation.

In June, Google decided to use another algorithm for doing Page Ranking, and with that new methodology came a smackdown to Page Rank Zero (again). This happened about 2 years ago, and it eventually came back after a long time (I think I was a Page Rank 5 before). I was doing unnatural linking to external sites and such.  I tried some initial silly things, asked for a reconsideration and was told that I had not done enough.

What are YOU looking at

During this time, I also noted some odd reading patterns and came up with Freakish Posts and Who Reads What? I have yet to come up with a fool-proof way to get a lot of readers other than getting mentioned in the mainline media (or even on a popular website).

I also managed to get past 2000 posts on my site, which was exciting, except that I more likely celebrated at my 2060th post. Still, I also deleted about 50 articles to appease the Google Overlords (I did not succeed). Hard to believe I have over 2000 posts. I suppose I should put them into an E-book format however that sounds like hard work. Something to celebrate the end of year.

As part of my clean-up to regain Page Rank, I found a helpful plug-in to find broken links, and boy did I have a lot of them. I cleaned up all of them, but it took a long time and it was quite messy. I believe I have sworn off hosting Blog Carnivals as well.

I finally got Back to Page Rank 4 after doing many things but the most important thing was to go with the Thesis WordPress Theme.

End of Year Achievements

These were the major fixes that seem to have fixed my page rank. This does mean I have given back about $840 a year in income from Text Link Ads, but luckily with my Page Rank returned the number of Guest Post Requests and Spam comments has sky-rocketed! (yes, that is sarcasm).

I am still spending a great deal of time wrestling with the Thesis theme, and since its update to 2.0 has been a real pain in my behind, that sounds like a challenge for 2013!

Happy New Year!

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