Previously, every time someone has posed the question “Should I make my blog part of my business domain, on a subdomain, or as a different domain altogether?”, I have said “Put it on your main domain, this will allow you to share pagerank between your blog and your business”. What can I say, I really wish that circa June, 2007 I had known enough about my own advice to take it. :)
Steph of real estate software fame recently posted a link to a tool which will tell you your pagerank for different domains after the currently-in-progress PageRank update gets pushed to all the Google clusters. At present, it seems that Bingo Card Creator is a PR4, which is neither terrible nor anything to write home about after I’ve spent a good deal of time trying to build up some links for it. This blog, on the other hand, is PR5 — solely due to people deciding what is here has value and linking it from their blogs (and other content aggregators which are spiderable, such as Slashdot or the WordPress front page).
The difference between PR4 and PR5 is a whole lot of searches, particularly for low-competition niches like, well, Dolch sight words. I now get an absolutely insane number of people who search for my very favorite search terms and come *here* first, then follow the link to my actual product site. This is utterly insane not because of the magnitude, but because I know I must be losing a huge percentage of the potential traffic there. Ah well, lesson learned. Don’t let it happen to you!
After my first post today I apparently triggered some insidious bot lurking in a dark corner of the Interweb: within 45 seconds of bringing my blog back from the dead I got over 200 spam comment submissions, mostly to old posts. More distressingly, 180 of them sailed right past the spam filter. All of them were about gambling. As a result, to prevent me getting repetitive stress disorder from hitting the “mark as spam” button and keep this blog easy to comment on without requiring registration or anything intrusive, I’ve banned the following three words from comments: poker, casino, and gambling. I don’t anticipate anyone needing to use them, but if for some reason you do you may want to write c@sino or you’ll have your post discarded transparently.
Here’s something a wee bit off the beaten path for this blog: so lets say you’ve got a consistent cash cow, or at least a cash calf, of a program? Well, I’m a) just not a very spendy person and b) have no efficient method of spending dollars on physical goods and c) have hideous tax and exchange consequences if I ever turn dollars into yen. So basically my Bingo Card Creator earnings have sat in my US bank account and every month when I send home my transfer to my student loans I tack on the earnings. Which is saves me 7% a year, and 7% times my lifetime earnings from Bingo Card Creator can buy a whole muffin. ;) (I actually sort of pre-spent the money I saved from September: it gets me a Wii bit closer to a certain Christmas-present-for-me come December 12th, since I won’t have to transfer that amount of money home to my loans.)
