photo credit: destinelee

Like most blogs, I wish I could attract thousands of readers, receive accolades about my unique and keen style of writing, all while impressing the girls and increasing the sum of my bank account. Obviously, that hasn’t happened - yet.

So I’ve been looking at various methods of drawing attention to my blog. I’ve considered conventional means such as participating in social networking sites to gain exposure. I’ve considered going online and begging for people to just visit once. I’ve considered a lot of different techniques.

Then today I ran across a website that says:

Every website needs traffic. How would you like to see your hit counter rocket along with a leg-up in the search engine rankings? Especially if your site is new you need to somehow make your site stand out in an ever-more crowded marketplace.

Why, this sounds just like me! So I looked into it further. It turns out that for a mere pittance of $3,700.00 per campaign, this company will utilize the controversial technique of “link baiting.” Link baiting is basically a technique where you go out and encourage other websites to link to yours (often by returning the favor), irregardless of whether or not your content has any similarity or relationship with the others. You can also submit your website repeatedly to the various search engines such as Google. The idea is to raise your website to the top of the search results page. All the search results falling below the top 10 or 20 results are generally ignored by the person doing the search.

Now, I can’t really blame “Ryan” - he is obviously catering to a perceived need and filling it. I’ll even do him a favor and provide a link to his page, just in case anyone wants to see first hand what it is I am talking about.

But personally, the whole practice bothers me. The original search engine concept was to provide a list of links that are the most relevant to the search terms used. Now all you get is a list of websites that managed to link their way to the top. So now I make it a habit to always view at least a few of the search results that fall below the top 10, just because it seems to be the fair thing to do.

Here’s the link the Ryan’s website: http://services.performancing.com/social/

I bit the bullet today and updated my blog to run on WordPress 2.5. For the most part, the process was painless. The updating process is still the same. All of my plug-ins seem to be working fine. The only glitch I have noticed so far is that some of my post tags got converted to random numbers, and some of the post titles got odd characters inserted, but they are only visible while editing or viewing entries from the administration dashboard. Odd… but fixable.