Well, I’m still writing my book. I haven’t had much time this last week to work on it. Work (the 9-5) has kept me busy. I’m maybe 1/4 of the way through and it’s going well.
I found a good resource at Amazon that explains Kindle publishing pretty well. You have to read a little but it’s really all right there:
I found some programs online where some guys were trying to sell a Microsoft Word Kindle eBook template but they wanted $95 for it. I guess I’m going to first try without buying it. I’m pretty good at Word and formatting – I even catch other people’s errors using Word… so maybe some of you out there would actually want to use it.
That’s all for today!
-Tony
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I just spent the better part of a day, it feels like, updating lots of WordPress websites that I have.
One of them got hacked. I have a Hostgator account (I have many) and one of them had always been giving me trouble and getting my websites sort of banned from Google saying that they were spreading malware. What happened (and kept happening for a while) was that the “.htaccess” files kept getting hacked. This would cause things to go crazy. I’d keep on fixing the files and I thought that the problem was the server.
I had Hostgator look through it today. At first, I was asking if I could get moved to another server or something. They instead ran some scripts looking for hacks and found one. They they fixed all the .htaccess files and got things running smoothly. My job, then, was to make sure all instances of WordPress were up to date. So I did that on that account and now on all the others. I updated plugins, too. Whew!
That makes me think I need to sell some of these sites! 
Also, I was thinking that Google ranked my sites lower because of the Penguin update but now I’m thinking that since I sort of have a network or little online empire of websites in a particular niche, that because a bunch of them were hacked, that is what was bringing my ranking down. I did see my rankings pop up after Penguin hit but then they went down again. This could very well be why. I have a lot of great sites with original content (like, a lot) – so when a number of them go down, that could have a big effect.
At least I know why rankings went down (time will tell). Also, I see that these other, supporting websites that I made do have an effect. I’m more of the mindset now that you want to keep the content that you create on your own websites instead of using blogging networks. So many of those articles are gone and don’t exist anymore. Only put content on websites that you control and I would say that includes some top sites like Squidoo, HubPages and a few others like that. They’re fine.
It feels good being updated. I’ll do a better job with that or maybe even try to outsource it. We’ll see if rankings come back up but I think they will!
Now to go watch a movie or something and chill out a bit.
-T
Popularity: 1% [?]
by Tony on April 25, 2012
Here’s the big news of the year so far in the SEO world:
Another step to reward high-quality sites (insidesearch.blogspot.com)
Yeah, I’ve seen some things change. My good sites are down and not so good sites are up. What the heck?
I’m betting that within a few days or maybe a couple weeks, things will rebound a bit. Spinning is definitely out, which is good if you ask me. What I’d like to see gone next is comment posting actually affecting PageRank and search engine results pages (SERPs). Why didn’t they clobber those sites? I’ve been fighting them for years.
What’s kind of cool is that exact keyword domain names seem to be thriving. I have a few of those and they’re near the top all of a sudden.
DON’T PANIC!
I think Google will roll out some tweaks and get things fixed in the coming days. I have even some things change since earlier this morning.
-T
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