LS Blogs, the blog directory and search engines very own blog.

One of the frequent tasks carried out here at LS Blogs is going through the queue removing unsuitable entries, or correcting mistakes in some cases.

Today, I found one entry that really put a smile on my face.

It was for a manual blog submission service, the type where you pay a company and they submit your blog to directories.

Well, you would assume that if they are submitting to directories for a living, they would be able to do a great job of their own submission for their own site.

Well, apparently not….

The description was as follows.

[NAME REMOVED FOR PRIVACY PURPOSES] Shop offer manual submission of your blog and RSS or Atom Feed to blog web directories, feed search engines, news services and web-based RSS aggregators at affordable price to improve your blog

But the kicker, was the url they entered……

http://Manual Blog Submission Service

Yes, you read that correctly they actually did put in

“http://Manual Blog Submission”

as the web address for their own site.

They must have realised their mistake afterwards so they submitted it again, with the correct url in this time.

But needless to say, BOTH submissions were in the wrong category completely - they did not even look for the right category to submit them into….

These people take other peoples money to submit to directories, and they cant even get put their own URL in correctly. Scary….

Needless to say, it went in the bin, along with the a couple of hundred of other bad submissions I found when looking today.

Some people go to great lengths to try to get in *multiple* submissions that are all pure spam, they must spend quite some time, but its all wasted when the delete and ban button gets pressed - and it also means that if they did submit a genuine entry along with the rest of the spam, they all go, even the genuine one…

I have been testing out a newer version of the bot that indexes all the feeds for the blogs listed in the directory, its taking some time to go through and iron out the problems, but it is proving worthwile.

It is throwing up a message each time a bad feed is found, which is enabling me to go and manually check that blog for a correct feed.

Many of the blogs have been parked, or changed to ‘invitation only’ or have been removed - so I have had a great clean up of the directory at the same time!

But as the dead ones are removed, many, many more feeds have been corrected, and are now being pulled in and indexed by the the blog directory.

I have to offer a apology to a few people at this time also, due to one of the tweaks made, the site started sending out the acceptance emails to some people when I was manually checking the blogs, and ‘re-accepting’ them with the corrected details.

This has now been corrected, sorry if you got a second acceptance email, you can ignore it!

After getting to the 8.5 thousand mark (the siteid) I need a little break so will resume checking the rest at a later time.

Finally, LS Blogs would like to wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year.

All the best!

Due to the sudden demise of Blogcharm, and the fact that blogcharm users appear to have lost their blogs, I will be deleting all blogcharm blogs from the directory - but not just yet.

I will wait a couple of weeks to give any users who have listings in the directory time to move to a new blog (if they are able to recover their posts from blogcharm) and to login to lsblogs to update their blog listing to the new address they choose.

Any that have not been updated after two weeks from now will be de-listed.

The search facility on LS Blogs has now been improved again, this improvement makes the search
a lot more useable. It is now returning results more often, and makes finding blogs, or content in blogs much easier than before.

This is just one of many improvements that will be implemented over time, hope you like it - it certainly seems to be working better for me when I use the search features.

LSBlogs would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas, and a happy new year.

Special thanks go to Ray who runs a eco friendly printing firm also does the eco friendly alocalprinter.com blog for his recent forum posting about the latest addition to google’s webmaster tools.

I would have missed that one for quite a while, what with christmas coming up

Anyways, I tried out the new features (google reporting issues with meta tags) and found that I did have some issues on site, and fingers crossed - they are now sorted out

They will need more work, as you can imagine with a large site like this with many tens of thousands of pages, there will be scope for improvement!

So, don’t forget if you have your site verified with google to pop over to your webmaster tools to see the new additions.

I know this post is technically a little early, as it is not 2008 yet, but back in 2006 a firm of analysts predicted that blogging would reach its peak in 2007.

Gartner predicted that during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million. Link to news article

Well its nearly the end of the year in question, and technorati is currently indexing over 112 million blogs, and new blogs are still being created - the queue here for submissions is still large, new submissions are still pouring in, so I dont see any sign of it levelling off..

If anything, blogging seems more popular than ever, as I am seeing a lot of talk about blogs in forums, there was even a tv show on UK tv the other night about sexual confession blogs written by annonymous women (Sex in the Naughties).

Has blogging reached its peak? Personally I dont think so, not yet..

I have manually cleaned out the link rot from the SEO/SEM category, thankfully the category was fairly clean, but it is a few pages shorter now due to dead blogs or never updated blogs being removed. A few were moved to more appropriate categories and some were updated as they had moved to new URL’s.

Also done a little change to the doctype, and the html to fix a couple of minor problems but that should not affect users of the site, other than making some foreign blogs easier to read on screen.

Queue is now at 5301 blogs..

I have not really spent much time yet on the search results, improving them has been on the ‘to-do’ list for quite a long time now, as they were returning many duplicate results.

I am experimenting (and learning) with the search feature at the moment, I have imlemented the first test, which seems a big improvement over the previous code, its no longer listing pages full of duplicate results now.

I will be tweaking the code as time permits, to further improve it.

The submission queue is now just under 5800 blogs, I have managed to remove many more dead blogs from the directory, and cleaned up a load of blogs that were never updated for a long time.

The old pagination was not scaling up very well in many categories (due to the amount of entries in them), it was simply showing page 1,2,3,4 right up to page 100 or more in a long line at the bottom of the screen.

I have rewritten it so it now shows First, Previous, Next and Last along with the a snipped selection of relevant page numbers.

It should make the navigation of the categories easier.

I have just done this on the pages that browse the categories for now, as long as it works fine for a while I will implement the same code in the search pages also.

Im still working slowly through sending out the newsletter previously mentioned, its not really a ‘newsletter’ as such, just a quick summary of a few things, and a little news, not a full blown marketing job so to speak

Only sent out a couple of thousand(ish) so far, had a couple more opt-outs, but also had some valuable feedback about a couple of minor problems which I have corrected and a few people have popped in to update the blog descriptions, urls or keywords.