From Russia with... um... Ulterior Motives?

Not much is happening here at TNB this week, so this will be a short post.

Rank - Niche Site I (aka, GPT) has reached #26 and #38 for two of its three keywords. The third keyword remains unranked. Until this week, all searches that have led people to GPT have been longtail keywords that are not particularly useful in terms of generating income. This week, for the first time, two people who were actually searching for relevant content visited my site. This is an indication that GPT is rising on both G and Yahoo. Hopefully this will translate into ever-increasing traffic.

Four backlinks have shown up for GPT on Alexa, a comment left on a relevant blog, and now several entries from the primary layer of the link wheel.  I'd like to start seeing some of my AMR links show up... to just at least reassure me that that was worth doing.

Niche Site II is now ranking at #64 for its main keyword. It is still unranked for its other two keywords. I still have not done much backlinking for this page, however, it has two backlinks, according to Alexa. I attribute this to having installed the Alexa toolbar. Both of the links are incidental blog posts, and it seems that as I visit them, Alexa is now watching, and recording those links. G and Y are unimpressed.

BTW - the Alexa rank of all three sites has been steadily rising. You and I know that is meaningless, but it is still fun to watch.

Income - Not much to report here. I made another 2 cents this week. The disturbing thing is that these are impression ads that are paying, and I am afraid that the entire income from the site is due to nothing more than the traffic created by me when I turn the computer on each morning. Again... nothing substantial will happen til we get on G's first page.

Russian Weirdness - Aside from the constant bombardment from Russian and Chinese spiders crawling my sites (which I have tried to throttled!) I have had a weird happening. I had a sudden spike here at TNB, all referrals from a particular web site. I went to that site to see what the deal was. It turned out that the site was some sort of Russian website that distributes bootleg movies. Apparently, this is what is known as "referrer spam", where the visitor to your site is not a visitor at all, but instead a bot that visits just long enough to be recorded in your stats. What is their intention? To have you click on their entry in the log and visit their page! These sites will be things like the bootleg movie site, porn, virus pages, and yep, I had several hits from something called Al Jizzera America. Which, I have to admit, REALLY pissed me off. Where are those Anonymous people? Where is the FBI? Why the hell is there an Al Jizzera America?

Bah!