Hello All, I've just entered some new European SEO contest for ranking on top of Google for the keyword eurodipity . This is going to be really exciting because this is the first European tournament I've been competing in since last year's world seo championships.

Very soon I'll be able to give you some insides on what's going on with the competition but first I'll have to get my sites indexed and we'll see... read more..

Well, its this time of the year when we have to update our websites and plug in some new stuff so you don‘t get bored from seing the same thing over and over.

Today I finally updated the Content Management System with the latest version of SEO Website CMS and this post is actually more like a test rathen than some meaningful post. If I‘m correct this should work properly, but if I did some typo in the code it would be quite messy.

Please report any problems (if you find) to my email vjakimov [at] gmail [dot] com Thanks... read more..

As you may already know I‘m a big fan of the Domain Aftermarket and during the last few years I‘ve collected pretty good domain portfolio. Unfortunately not all domains are as good as they should be and this case is one of them.

Nearly six months ago I‘ve purchased the domain "usemortgages dot com" and I‘ve immediately developed DB Directory with some mortgage related stuff on it. A month later I‘ve noticed that all search engines are still trying to crawl non-existed/out-dated folders and they don‘t want to collect the new information. Google had very low crawling activity (within 1% of the total number content pages) and my site was not indexed on it (not showing any search results). I thought this was due to the large number of 404‘s (page not found) that was generated from the content switching, but this was not the case.

Eventually after more than 5 months of waiting I finally gave up and considered the domain as "blacklisted domain". This ment that I spent all that time for nothing.... read more..

By accident I just discovered that Dell gives free Next Day Shipping to anyone that complains about the change in shipping dates from the the purchase page to the real email shipping date that you receive after you pay for the new laptop/computer. In order to get the benefit you must call them and complain about it and then ask to cancel the order and on the cancellation department you must say that because of the date difference you won‘t need that laptop/computer since you need it for your vacation or birthday gift and you wish to cancel. You can say that if you have it earlier with a day or two you can keep the order. The sales rep will ask you if you wish to have free next day shipping upgrade and keep the order. Yep, that‘s what I did. I got the Free Next Day shipping from DELL.

Now let me explain the whole story and how I learned this.

Yesterday I was browsing the bensbargains.net looking for the next awesome tech deal and I stumbled across a great deal on 17" Dell Inspiron E1705 Core 2 Duo Notebook or $1373 - $624 off code WP5WG3JRQKRRC4 [Exp 8/15]. This laptop is merely the same with my Dell inspiron 9300 that I bought 3 years ago, and the idea of changing it made me really interested since I‘m afraid that due to my hardcore use my old laptop will fail soon.

I didn‘t think too much about it and ordered it online. The most important thing for me is that I needed that laptop urgently since I‘m going on vacation on August 30 and I need it to be delivered to my home/office before that date and if I get it later I wont need it. When I purchased the laptop from the dell homepage it said that the estimated shipping date is on August 23 and with 3-5 days standard shipping (free) was going to be ok. The problem arose when I received the Confirmation Email on which the date was changed to August 28 and the estimated arrival date to September 2-4 ? That really pissed me off since I‘m not going to be able to get it on time and I had to call DELL and figure a way out of this situation.... read more..

The last few weeks I‘ve been working like crazy from 8 AM to 12 PM every day (including the weekends). Actually during the weekend I work only from 12-12 so it not that bad, but still this constant problems are really making my hair go gray.

I recently got few big contracts and this kind‘a added up to the growing numer of current hosting clients that we have. That immediately resulted in constant headaches and extreme anger towards everything.

As you may know our company is growing quite well, but having more clients leads to quite more work and currently we barely handle the situation and very soon we‘ll start employing new people because we can‘t handle that thing any more if it continues to grow like that. My partner is even thinking of selling one of our divisions since we get too much headaches and is not really profitable (actually it is profitable but currently we feel that for the effort that we do its not that good and if we employ other people to do the support it will be quite interesting deal and quite profitable).

Now I also run few design jobs and one very large advertising campaign. This total mess made me so crazy that I‘m barely finding time to post few blogs here and there and that‘s immediately resulting in the decreased website visits since its not a secret that Google is monitoring all website activities including with the G toolbar (otherwise how they‘ll know about it?)..... read more..

Wow, I never actually knew that one day I will turn into bookworm especially when I hate so much reading books. Actually this is not really true, and I love reading “useful books” like technical and marketing textbooks. The thing I hate to read and I do acknowledge that I will never (maybe not ever) read is literature books and poetry. Yes poetry is good, helps you become a better person, but the fact is that reading literature won’t make your rich or at least wealthy enough and thus spending time on reading useful stuff is quite better at the end.

It is a fact and all people that know me are aware of it. In my entire life I didn’t read more than 10-15 literature books, but on the other hand I read at least one, two technical books weekly.

Last week I took a new step in my carrier and officially got involved with serious internet marketing issues. Until now I used to be passive marketer – build it and seo it, but now I’m going a bit more offensive and I’m getting involved with PPC (Pay-Per-Click) and other marketing that I previously kind’a stayed away from. The thing is that now I don’t have other options and I have to because my work requires it and in order to be proven useful I have to show the best of me and that’s why I’m reading all those marketing books lately..... read more..

About four years ago I bought my personal office computer. I didn‘t want to buy any brand assembled computer so I‘ve decided to assemble it myself from the best parts I could find on the market. I guess for a geek like me that‘s must-do thing and I got the biggest/phattest case I could find with the best CPU, Memory and etc. and this computer works so well that I still believe that was my best investment ever! Until now. Actually the computer is still working quite well, no problems except one very noisy fan that I driving me insane!

Yesterday I finally got pissed off so much that I opened the case to see what is making so much noises. I was really amazed to see that the CPU fan was not the problem, but the motherboard north bridge chipset fan was going berserk. That the problem was not replacing it but finding a replacement fan. As I already had the case open, I‘ve decided that its not bad idea to visit the local computer store and get myself new one and change it but that didn‘t happen exactly like that.... read more..

First I‘d like to say that this has nothing to do with the Sub-Directory Experiment that I‘m currently running, because this is only for directory type of websites. I‘ve noticed that nowadays only directory-directory websites are dying and the chances to get some actual visitors are quite low (we don‘t count the huge number of submitters who don‘t do anything else than submitting more and more listings) we are talking about actual people that visit those directories and use them. Isn‘t that the basic idea behind directories to be used as guides for Internet visitors?

Basically my SEO Experiment on Website Directories is made of two parts. The first part is to check how much PageRank will one directory get if I submit it in 1000 directories. I suppose that if I‘m lucky enough I‘ll get around 40%-50% acceptance rates and with about 400-500 backlinks I should be able to get pr 4 on that particular directory.

On the second directory I will do only blog posts, somewhere around 100-200, and I should get some good backlinks. I‘m assuming that those blog posts will be enough to boost me up to pr 4 and maybe even more (I‘m not sure about that but that‘s why it‘s experiment).... read more..

On top of all the problems that I had recently I’ve just learned that Google is taking serious considerations on websites with high bounce rates and this got me really worried because most of my websites are made in first-page-all content structure and most people don’t bother to click-thru the website as its not mandatory. This website structure generates massive amount of bounce-rates because by definition page bounce rate is the number of people that land on one page and exit from the same. This issue is very bad for my websites because when one person lands on the main/home page about 70% don’t go any further and that generates 70% bounce rate which is quite high.

The other issue that I’ve been observing for quite a while now is that some of my websites rank quite well for irrelevant keywords to my topic/theme and this also generates a lot of bounces since people leave the website quite quickly since they don’t find the content that they were looking for. That issue got really serious in our SEO News Blog where we started the weekly top paying AdSense keywords and due to the high quality of that website we ranked quite high for those keywords and immediately started receiving traffic for them which is 100% irrelevant to our targeted niche. Based on the Google Analytics issue we should lose our ranking for those keywords pretty quickly and more useful website will take our place, but what I’m most afraid is not to get the overall ranking for the relevant/targeted keywords punished because of this issue. I hope the Google engineers are smart enough to figure this out and protect webmasters like me.... read more..

Funny thing happened today, I‘ve almost lost few of my best domain names due to negligence. I guess I totally forgot about them, and when I changed my email accounts from Yahoo to Gmail, I didn‘t update my account information with my old Domain Name Registrar, so I didn‘t received (yes I did, but I don‘t check that email account anymore) for the "your domains area about to expire" notification. Fortunately for me, today I was discussing something with a friend at DP and I wanted to check the current PR for one of those domains and when I tried to open it I was not able! Wow .. WTF I thought my server was down, but my other websites were loading and only that one didn‘t. So I‘ve immediately suspected some DNS issue and opened GoDaddy to check if something happened there when I sow that they are on "PENDING" status and I was about to loose them

Man-O-Man, I‘ve spent so much time building those domains and loosing them would be so painful, so I quickly called my registrar and renewed them all....... read more..

I‘m currently at that point in my SEO career that I‘m really wondering where I‘m heading. Until now I’ve been so obsessed with Google and Google Search Ranking that I merely forgot about the other search engines and I have absolutely no idea where I’m ranking on Yahoo and MSN.

Yesterday I got really curious on the recent tendencies on where search engine traffic comes from and which search engine is the most popular one. The formula is very simple. Popular Search Engine = tons of traffic which on the other hand requires a lot of SEO Optimization in order to rank well and actually get your fair share of this traffic for your targeted keywords. The thing that really amazed me was my finding from Alexa – the website statistics company – showed up on the search engine reach on both Google, Yahoo and MSN/LIVE which totally made me fall of my chair.

As you can clearly see on the graphic above plotting the search reach tendancies for Google, Yahoo and MSN/LIVE for the last five years we can clearly note that there are some serious, somehow weird, changes that I wasn’t aware of. For example we all know that Google was becoming more and more popular from 2001 to 2006, but nobody knew that from the beginning of this year its loosing grounds to Microsoft Search. The thing is that Microsoft search is both MSN and Live as they are virtually the same search engine but with different names and we can clearly see that if we combine the daily reach of both MSN and LIVE it combines to 1.5 times the reach of Google and that’s really amazing amount of traffic.... read more..

There are many things that can make one man happy, but there is no better joy for a webmaster than being awarded with high PageRank for his homepage. Yes, that’s exactly what happened to me. Actually not exactly, but almost. My homepage was predicted to be PR5 which is really owesome and I’m so happy about it. To the people that don’t really understand what predicted pagerank is, it means that my website was nominated for receiving pagerank 5. I guess this is the closest I can translate it to non-webmasters.

It is even better because not only venetsian.com was predicted pr5 but also a number of other websites that I own and this will boost up with good pr the whole network which is so good.

So let’s share the secret how we did it.

Actually its not a secret because everyone knows that links are the most important ranking factor in all search engines and the more you got the better. Recently I started some serious blogging and directory submissions and this really proved to be powerful ranking booster. Keeping your websites up to date with fresh content in combination with good number of incoming links is the ultimate formula for online success. I’m posting almost every day and I paid for 1000 directory submissions. I guess from 1000 dir sub package I will get around 400-500 backlinks which is pretty much enough to boost my website from pr2 to pr5..... read more..

Most of the people around me know that I have the mania of buying new domains and planning to make websites and building my own Internet empire, but in reality I‘m kinda stuck with those projects and that‘s mainly due to the fact that I took too many challenges at the same time. In 2003 I‘ve decided to build my own Wrestling Empire and I started gathering very nice domain names for both wrestling news and wrestling merchandise stores. After almost four years of paying the domain names and hosting I didn‘t do merely anything except one good web-store that isn‘t really finished and that‘s so sad. My mother always tolled me that I‘m over-passionate and when I get hooked up one something I‘m like addict, but the moment I find something else I totally leave everything. I‘m very sad to say that she is quite right and that‘s so true.

Currently I own some very very nice domains on wrestling products and also some brands-stores that are quite marketable if not for products then for advertising and its so dumb of me not to do anything with them.

Recently I realized that one of the market niches for a client that screwed me up not paying his bill is really nice and brings a lot of money from highly paid advertising and that was also one of my dumb situations because I owned those domains for so long and didn‘t do anything with them and they were just sitting in cyberspace. In reality I was paying the bills and loosing money instead of making money and that is so silly...... read more..

Most of you know that I'm not really passionate environmentalist but I do support the idea for Environmental Protection of the species. Earlier this year as I was participating in the Global Warming Awareness 2007 SEO contest I found out that we can definitely get our voice heard and the Internet is the best medium to do so.

In my search of possible ways to contribute and in the same time earn some money (don't think I'll be contributing without any visible profit our of it) I began the development of one website dedicated to Environmentally Clean Renewable Energy - the use of Solar Panels. This website will broadcast news and other information on how people convert their power sources to renewable energy by implementing Solar Panel arrays and what are the benefits of going solar.. read more..

Ain�t that cool ah? Few hours ago my mom called me and said that she had important thing to congratulate me for and I was ahh?? What? Heh.. I merely forgot what I did last spring and now they award me for that ? Cool.

Last spring I was doing my Senior Thesis at the AUBG and I was supposed to do something simple, but with my mania of playing around with Search Engines I decided to try to make my own search engine following some very well know criteria for judging quality content aka ranking... read more..

First note that this article/blog is not intended to advertise nor DELL nor Microsoft! I�m just sharing some experiences that I had with my dell 9300 laptop and its OS - MS Windows XP Professional.

The story is the following: In August 2005 I bought my second dell laptop after the first one got stolen from my dormitory room in my university (for which I�m still pissed). For the short period that I owned it (about 8 months) I nearly felt in love with the hardware stability of dell laptops since I used a lot of PCs and they almost all the time had some "hardware issues". Even thou the Dell Inspiron 1200 with 4.3GHz, 512MB ram and 128mb "shared" video card was not exactly what I was "hoping" to get but for the small price of $1,300 USD that was the only thing I could afford at this time... read more..

I finally I had the time to put together a nice collection of photos on my new Photo Gallery so please be my guests and visit the link - Venetsian - the Visual Experience

In my gallery you can find some nice photos from major events in my life (since 2003). You can find it funny but those are all the photos that I have. (I�m not a major photo freak and I usually take pictures of others and that�s why I�m always missing from the picture.... read more..