PageRank is a system used by Google to help measure the popularity of websites using a ranking of 1 to 10, and generally the higher your site’s PageRank, the more credibility Google assigns your website. A website with a PageRank of 2 likely has more backlinks from other sites, more daily visitors, and more valuable content in Google’s eyes than a website with a PageRank of 1.
Google generally updates its PageRank toolbar once every three or four months, and it looks like they’ve done a fresh update this week. The blogosphere is abuzz about PageRank going up or going down. Although it doesn’t play much of a role in how much traffic your site gets, webmasters can get very upset if their PageRank is lowered and very excited if it goes up, even by one point. Getting to a PageRank above four is quite difficult, and sites with PageRanks of ten can probably be counted on your two hands.
We’re happy to report that it looks like Contest Blogger’s PageRank went back up to a 5 again, after dipping to a 4 after the last update. We’re not quite sure why it went up again, although we do appreciate all of the Contest Blogger fans who have linked back to our homepage to tell their readers about our awesome forums. Our PageRank may go up or down in coming months, of course, but we’re glad to see that Google regards us as a trustworthy, authority website for finding contests, sweepstakes and free stuff.
Hey, have you linked back to Contest Blogger yet? If not, check out how you can win $100 by pointing a link to our homepage. We’re drawing our next $100 winner this week, so you still have time to get your name in the hat!
Hey Contest Blogger fans, don’t forget that we’re going to draw the next winner in our monthly $100 giveaway in just one week, on May 1. If you haven’t linked back to the Contest Blogger homepage yet to enter your name in the hat, you should do it soon!
Hey, does your website or blog have Google Sitelinks yet? Sitelinks are additional links to other pages in your site beneath the main search result for a specific keyword. No one but Google seems to really know all of the different factors that decide whether or not your site receives sitelinks, but it apparently has to do with things like how much authority Google gives your site, how many backlinks you have pointing to your site, how many daily visits you receive, and how good your site’s internal linking is.
We were happy to see that Contest Blogger recently received its first Google Sitelinks, which show up now if you do a search for “Contest Blogger.” Apparently we are doing something right, and it’s good to know that Google now considers us an “authority” site worthy of some sitelinks.
According to Google, the sitelinks process is completely automated through their algorithm, and you don’t get to choose which of your pages show up in the sitelinks. As for how you can get sitelinks for your website or blog, just keep building strong backlinks, increasing your daily visitors, and producing good content. The rest will come with time!
Hey, have you entered our monthly $100 giveaway yet?
Wanted to toss out a big Contest Blogger Kudos to Christina Laun, who recently put together a great post called “The Freeloaders Toolbelt” all about the best freebies sites across the web. It looks like a lot of work went into the post, and yes, Contest Blogger is listed there as well! :)
Go check it out if you get a chance and bookmark the post (like I have). Looks like there are enough “free stuff” resources there to keep you busy for a long time.
The Freeloaders Toolbelt is really a nice bit of linkbait and should get plenty of attention and backlinks. Which goes to show you: putting in some extra work to create a great resource for your readers is a super way to make your site more popular and attract lots of new visitors.
Hey, congrats to Stacey Moore, the first Contest Blogger $100 monthly giveaway winner!
We chose Stacey randomly using Random.org, and all she did to enter the contest was link back to the Contest Blogger homepage on her blog. It’s super easy to do, and if you want to get your name on the monthly giveaway list, you can go check out this page to see how to enter.
And remember: once you’ve linked back to Contest Blogger, your name will be entered in the monthly $100 giveaway forever! Just one link will get you endless chances to win $100 every month from Contest Blogger.
Congrats again to Stacey, and thanks to all of the Contest Blogger forum members and RSS subscribers who visit our site every day. We can’t wait to give away another $100 on May 1!
Finally! As many of you know, one of our favorite things to do here on Contest Blogger is give cool stuff to our loyal readers . . . and it’s almost time to do just that! In a week, on April 1, we’re going to draw the name of the first winner in our monthly $100 giveaway. Hey, have you tossed your name in the hat yet, dude?
Entering is super easy: all you have to do is link back to one of our network sites, Contest Blogger, Romance Tracker or Advertising Blogger, from your website. If you link to all three, you get three entries on the list.
Every month, we’ll draw the name of one lucky winner who will immediately get $100 cash sent to their PayPal account. And here’s the really cool part: as long as your links stay up, your name will stay on the monthly giveaway list. That means that you have a permanent chance to win $100 every month just from a single link!
Sounds pretty cool, huh? Before you forget, why not take a minute and enter the monthly $100 giveaway? It could be the best decision you make all month!
A few months ago the team that brought you Contest Blogger branched out with a new network site, Advertising Blogger. Advertising Blogger is dedicated to blogging about the coolest internet advertising deals, and it has seen some pretty good early growth. Our RSS feed reader numbers are approaching 100, we’ve been featured on some of the Blogosphere’s most popular sites, and our daily visits are growing quickly.
Today we’re really excited to announce that we’ve turned the Advertising Blogger homepage into an interactive forum, much like the homepage of Contest Blogger. The Advertising Blogger Forum makes buying and selling advertising for your blog even easier. It’s completely free to list your blog’s advertising options in categories such as banner ads, text link ads, or paid reviews. And as the Advertising Blogger Forum’s daily visitors grow, your blog’s advertising options will stay there for everyone to see.
We hope you’ll go check out the new Advertising Blogger Forum and list your blog’s advertising options there if you get a chance. It could end up being just what you needed to make a few extra bucks from your blog!
What can I say? Most of the awesome contests we run here on the Contest Blogger Blog end up being a huge success with tons of entries, but we can’t put our recent advertising contest in that category. We wanted to give some 125×125 homepage button ads away to three lucky winners, but the contest is drawing to a close and we have a whopping two entrants.
That pathetic number makes it much easier for us to announce that we’ve sold out our banner ad spots on the Contest Blogger Forum, anyway. One of the contest perameters was that we would leave the winners’ banners up until we sold them, so it looks like neither of our entries will be getting a free banner out of the deal. Bummer.
Still, we aren’t heartless. Here’s a shoutout to our two entrants, Contestu and Blogodise. Thanks for the backlinks, dudes, and I hope you aren’t too upset.
But hey, want to know about a Contest Blogger contest that’s totally kicking some butt? Then go check out our $100 Link and Win Contest, which is getting more entries than we can shake a stick at. We’re drawing our first winner on April 1, so enter when you get a chance, dude!
Today was a pretty exciting, busy, hectic, panicky and—in the end—fulfilling day for Contest Blogger, dudes and dudettes! For weeks we had been looking forward to the release of the new version of Simple:Press, which is the plugin that we use to run the Contest Blogger Forum, and it finally became available for download this morning.
First things first: Simple:Press is, without a doubt, the most amazing WordPress plugin ever, and its creator, Andy, deserves a lot of praise for putting it together. If you’re looking for a simple and fun way to add a forum to your blog, then go download Simple:Press right away, dude. We sent Andy a small tip today to let him buy a beer on us, but he deserves a lot more for making such a cool plugin available to the public for free.
Anyway, we downloaded the new version of Simple:Press and installed it on Contest Blogger, and everything was going pretty cool. The new version lets you put your own icons next to forums and groups, so we spent most of the morning designing and uploading .png files (dude, go check them out, they’re rad).
Then disaster hit in the early afternoon, when I decided to go and change the default homepage I had set in my WordPress admin panel and Contest Blogger totally crashed. And, of course, I couldn’t log back into the admin anymore, either.
Yah, a big bummer, and my apologies to anyone who tried to access the Contest Blogger Forum while it was down for a few hours. Long story short: thank God for my wife, who convinced me to calm down and take a deep breath to figure out how to fix things. And a huge thanks to BlueHost, my hosting service, who helped us get things up and running again. They have totally awesome customer service, and I’d recommend them to anyone.
First lesson learned: don’t go screwing around with stuff in your WordPress Admin Panel that you don’t fully understand yet. Second lesson learned: no matter how bad things seem to get, calm yourself down and you’ll probably be able to come up with a way to fix it.
Yah, I’ll shut up already. Go check out the upgraded Contest Blogger Forum if you haven’t yet, dude.
Contest Blogger has decided to start selling advertising on our site again, and to kick things off we’re going to do what we love best: give away free stuff to our readers. The Contest Blogger Forum gets around 80,000 page views a month, and we’re going to give three lucky winners their own free 125×125 banner ad to slap on every single forum page.
Whether you have a contest to show off or a blog or website that needs more traffic, these banners are a great way to generate a lot of interest and entries. Contest Blogger usually has a great click through rate, so you can be sure that a big 125×125 banner on our site is going to get you some massive traffic. We sell the banners for $100 a month, so you’ll be winning some pretty valuable advertising, dude.
To enter, all you have to do is tell your readers about our contest and link back to the Contest Blogger Forum homepage. Then drop us a line and tell us you want an entry. We’ll draw the three winners on March 17, but we do ask that you design your own 125×125 banner. Your banner will remain for one month or until we sell the spot to someone else, whichever one comes first, dude!
But hey, if you don’t want to wait until March 17 to get some advertising on Contest Blogger, you could always buy some advertising right now! We sell 125×125 banners for $100 a month, forum post links for $50 a month, and paid reviews for $100 a pop. Any one of them will be great publicity for your contest or blog.
