Last Friday Scott Trimble from Blog Solution released another product called RSS Evolution. I got to play around with it a little bit before it came out. It’s basically an executable RSS-static html converter. For those of you who have had the displeasure of playing around with previous RSS to HTML converters before such as HyperVRE you already understand that for how incredibly useful, quick, and easy they are not a single person has got them right. For some reason no one can manage to make one that freakin works! The few that manage to actually install correctly make sure to quickly crash. The small percentage remaining somehow manages to skew the templates to an incomprehensible mess of table cells.

The Google Patent talks explicitly about the freshness factor and it’s importance. More importantly it talks about staleness being a factor in the rankings. This concept is understood to be true for not only Google but Yahoo and MSN as well. It mentions that not all sites in a niche need to be updated consistantly. Some niches require more freshness while others require less. This naturally raises the question; how often should my site be updated for my niche? Too much and you could potentially hurt your rankings, too little and you will slowly loose the rank you worked so hard for.One particular site of mine raised this question for me. It’s a site that is 100% static and virtually never gets updated. It would exibit some strange qualities in the organics that none of my other sites would. It would rank in the top 10 for all of it’s terms then slowly as weeks would roll by it would eventually drop into the bottom 30. I naturally considered the freshness factor. So I made a slight change to the title and added one page of content, linked to on the main page. Within 48 hours the site dropped out of site in the rankings(100+ in Google, 70+ in Yahoo, and out of the top 300 in MSN). This fustrated me but instead of changing it back I stuck with it. A week later it rose back up to the top 10. I was like COOl. So I let it be and about 4 months down the road it started slowly dropping again. so I once again made a slight change to the title and added one page of content. Same exact thing happened. This forced me to further examine the pattern being displayed in an attempt to mimic it.

My friend Danimal from The Danimal Report pointed out to me the other day that some people have finally developed a search engine based on the released AOL Search data.

Here is some of the better ones I’ve found.

AOL Search Database - Allows you to search the entire database by keyword, user id, and website url. Also allows sorting by user id, keyword, date, and website url.

SEO Sleuth - Very clean setup. Allows you to search by keyword or domain name. Shows search referals, incoming keywords, and diversity ratio by domain name. Even breaks it down by hours of the day.

SEO BlackHat released a private blackhat forum this month. This will supposedly be a forum where the top black hatters post up their deepest darkest SEO secrets for the members, and where people can discuss new techniques openly. Sounds like a decent idea. Infact I think I had one of those kind of ideas before. I’m personally debating on whether or not to join.

The Advantages

1. I may learn something new that I can implement myself

Akismet has protected your site from 796 spam comments.

This was from a 24 hour period on Blue Hat SEO. So once again the topic of blog spam has come up. Blog spam is extremely popular, and just because I’m now a blogger myself doesn’t mean I have an excuse to suddenly become naive and pretend it’s not an EXTREMELY powerful and effective way to market. Search engines have been trying their little hearts out for the last couple years to make blog spam useless, but the facts are; They still love every single last link. As it stands now I still can’t come up with a faster way to get indexed than to put up links on 10,000 PR3+ blogs.